Today is the birthday
… of Abe Vigoda. Fish on Barney Miller and Sal Tessio of The Godfather is 89.
… of Steven Hill. Adam Schiff, my favorite D.A. on Law and Order, is 88.
… of Dominic Chianese. Uncle Junior on The Sopranos is 79.
… of Edward James Olmos, 63.
… of Apple’s Steve Jobs, hitting the double-nickel today.
[Jobs] dropped out of college after a semester, went to India in search of spiritual enlightenment, returned a devout Buddhist, experimented with LSD, and then got a job with a video game maker, where he was in charge of designing circuit board for one of the company’s games.
He co-founded Apple Computers, and in a commercial during the Super Bowl in January 1984 he unveiled the Macintosh. The commercial was filled with allusions to George Orwell’s 1984. The Macintosh was the first small computer to catch on with the public that used a graphical user interface, or GUI (sometimes pronounced “gooey”). In the past, computers were run by text-based interfaces, which meant that a person had to type in textual commands or text labels to navigate their computers. But with a graphical user interface, people could simply click on icons instead of typing in hard-to-remember, precise text commands.
The graphic user interface revolutionized computers, and it’s on almost all computers today. It’s on a whole lot of other devices as well, like fancy vending machines and digital household appliances and photocopying machines and airport check-in kiosks. And graphical user interface is what’s used with iPods, another of Apple’s wildly successful products.
Jobs once said, “I would trade all of my technology for an afternoon with Socrates.”
Eddie Murray, the Baseball Hall of Fame inductee, and Paula Zahn, the broadcaster, are each half of 108 today.
Chester Nimitz, Admiral of the Fleet, was born on this date in 1885. This from his obituary in 1966:
When Admiral Nimitz took over the Pacific Fleet on Dec. 31, 1941, many of its ships lay at the bottom of Pearl Harbor, sunk by the Japanese in the surprise attack of Dec. 7 on Hawaii.
Without haste–Admiral Nimitz always proceeded with care–he directed the deployment of such carriers and cruises as were left, to hold the line until that moment perhaps two years away, when new battleships could be ready.
With Adm. Ernest King, chief of naval operations, President Roosevelt and the Navy’s other strategy planners, Admiral Nimitz had to undergo the anguish of being unable to answer the cry of soldiers trapped on Bataan:
“Where’s the fleet?”
When the new battleships, cruisers, carriers and destroyers did arrive, Admiral Nimitz and the Navy cleared the seas of Japanese warships in a series of spectacular naval battles.
Eight months after announcing on New Year’s Day that 1945 would be a sad year for the Japanese, Admiral Nimitz sat at a table on the deck of the U.S.S. Missouri on Sept. 2 to sign the Japanese capitulation.
Baseball great Honus Wagner was born on this date in 1874.
One of the Hall of Fame’s five original inductees in 1936, Honus Wagner combined rare offensive and defensive excellence throughout a 21-year career. Despite his awkward appearance – stocky, barrel-chested and bow-legged – the longtime Pirates shortstop broke into the big leagues by hitting .344 in 1897 with Louisville, the first of 17 consecutive seasons of hitting over .300, including eight as the National League batting champion. Wagner compiled a lifetime average of .329, and the Flying Dutchman also stole 722 bases, while leading the league in thefts on five occasions.
Winslow Homer was born on this date in 1836. The painting is his “Coming Storm” (1901). Click for larger version.
From the late 1850s until his death in 1910, Winslow Homer produced a body of work distinguished by its thoughtful expression and its independence from artistic conventions. A man of multiple talents, Homer excelled equally in the arts of illustration, oil painting, and watercolor. Many of his works—depictions of children at play and in school, of farm girls attending to their work, hunters and their prey—have become classic images of nineteenth-century American life. Others speak to more universal themes such as the primal relationship of man to nature.
Source: The National Gallery of Art, which has a fine online Winslow Homer exhibit.