July 23rd

Daniel Radcliffe is 22 today.

Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy is 75. Ginsburg (78) and Scalia (75 in March) are older; Breyer will be 73 next month.

Actor Ronny Cox is 73. Cox, a Cloudcroft, New Mexico, native, is perhaps most famous as Lt. Andrew Bogomil of the Beverly Hills Police Department, but he has more than 120 credits listed at IMDB.

Don Imus is 71 today.

Woody Harrelson is 50. Harrelson was nominated for best actor for The People vs. Larry Flynt and won one Emmy for playing Woody on Cheers.

Saul Hudson is 46. He’s better known as Slash of Guns N’ Roses.

Oscar-winner Philip Seymour Hoffman is 44.

Alison Krauss is 40. (Get to see her in a few weeks.)

Raymond Chandler was born on July 23rd in 1888.

His parents were Irish, and after his father left the family, his mom moved them back to Ireland, and he grew up there and in England. He moved back to America and settled in California.

He wrote pulp fiction about the city of Los Angeles and a detective there named Philip Marlowe. Chandler’s first novel was The Big Sleep (1939), which sold well and was made into a movie in 1946 with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall — William Faulkner co-wrote the screenplay. Chandler wrote seven more novels featuring Philip Marlowe, who became the quintessential “hard-boiled” private eye, tough and street-smart and full of wise cracks. In Farewell, My Lovely (1940), Marlowe says: “I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun.”

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor (2010)

The Ford Motor Company sold its first automobile 108 years ago today.

And the Detroit “12th Street Riot” began on July 23rd in 1967. Before it was over 43 were dead, 342 injured and 1,400 buildings burned.