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On the 13th of November

… in 1789, Benjamin Franklin wrote, “In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Franklin died the following year.

… in 1940, the Disney film Fantasia premiered.

… in 1977, the comic strip “Li’l Abner” ended. The strip, by Al Capp, had begun in 1934. It was immensely popular, part of pop culture in the way The Simpsons, for example, are today. There were comic books, a radio show, music, stage productions and more. And, of course, Sadie Hawkins Day, when the girls could ask out the boys.

… in 1982, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington was dedicated.

Joe Mantegna is 63 today, Chris Noth is 56, Oscar-winner Whoopi Goldberg is 55 (birth name Caryn Elaine Johnson), Vinny Testaverde is 47, and Jimmy Kimmel is 43.

One of America’s oldest recent high school graduates, Taylor McKessie is 30 today. That’s actress Monique Coleman of High School Musical.

Louis Brandeis was born on November 13, 1856. He served on the Supreme Court from 1916-1939.

For Brandeis, law was a device to shape social, economic, and political affairs. Law had to operate on the basis of two key assumptions: that the individual was the basic force in society and that the individual had limited capabilities. Brandeis did not seek to coddle the individual; rather, he sought to stretch individual potential to its limit.

Oyez

And, as celebrated by Google, today is the 160th anniversary of the birth of Robert Louis Stevenson.

One rainy summer afternoon, Stevenson painted a map of an imaginary island to entertain his new stepson, and in a single month, he wrote his first great novel, Treasure Island (1883). It’s been in print for 127 years.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Robert Louis Stevenson’s 160th birthday.

Today is the birthday

… of Wallace Shawn. The actor-playwright is 67. Inconceivable!

He’s the son of the former New Yorker editor William Shawn, and he’s become well known as a character actor in Hollywood movies such as The Princess Bride (1987) and Clueless (1995) [and Toy Story]. Most people don’t know that he’s also an avant-garde playwright. When he got out of college, a lot of his friends took jobs writing for his father’s magazine, but Shawn supported his playwriting by working as a photocopy clerk. He then got the idea of selling stock in himself, and managed to raise $2,500 from investors, which helped him write his first plays. To this day, he sends all those early investors a small annual check. His early plays were not successes. During his first play, the audience actually shouted for the actors to shut up. But he finally had a breakthrough when he wrote and starred in the movie My Dinner with Andre (1981), which consists entirely of Shawn and the theater director Andre Gregory talking over dinner, but it became a cult classic.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media (2007)

… of Brian Hyland. The Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini singer is 65.

… of Al Michaels. Do you believe in miracles? He’s 67.

… of Booker T. Jones. The organist is 66. According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

Between 1963 and 1968, Booker T. and the MGs appeared on more than 600 Stax/Volt recordings, including classics by such artists as Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor and William Bell. As a result of Stax’s affiliation with Atlantic Records, the group also worked with Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Albert King. Moreover, Booker T. and the MGs were a successful recording group in their own right, cutting ten albums and fourteen instrumental hits, including “Green Onions,” “Hang ‘Em High,” “Time Is Tight” and “Soul-Limbo.”

… of Neil Young. He’s 65. Again, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

Neil Young is one of rock and roll’s greatest songwriters and performers. In a career that extends back to his mid-Sixties roots as a coffeehouse folkie in his native Canada, this principled and unpredictable maverick has pursued an often winding course across the rock and roll landscape. He’s been a cult hero, a chart-topping rock star, and all things in-between, remaining true to his restless muse all the while. At various times, Young has delved into folk, country, garage-rock and grunge. His biggest album, Harvest (1972) , apotheosized the laid-back singer/songwriter genre he helped invent. By contrast, Rust Never Sleeps (1979), Young’s second-best seller, was a loud, brawling masterpiece whose title track, an homage to Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, contained the oft-quoted line “Better to burn out than it is to rust.”

… of journalist and author Tracy Kidder, also 65.

His second book was about 1970s engineers racing to design new computers, a compelling book that one reviewer said “involves binary arithmetic, Boolean algebra, and a grasp of the difference between a System Cache and an Instruction Processor.” That book, The Soul of New Machine (1981), won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.

He wrote a book about constructing a house. And he wrote one about a fifth-grade teacher and her class; for his research he sat in the classroom for 178 of the 180 days of the school year — one day he was sick, and one day he played hooky — and took 10,000 pages of notes. He wrote about relationships at a nursing home in Northampton, Massachusetts, in Old Friends (1993), and about Dr. Paul Farmer, “a Man Who Would Cure the World” in Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003).

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

… of Megan Mullally. She’s 52.

… of Nadia Elena Comăneci. The perfect 10 is 49.

… of Samuel Peralta “Sammy” Sosa, 42.

… of Anne Hathaway, all of 28.

Oscar winner Grace Kelly was born 81 years ago today. Her oscar was for best performance by an actress in The Country Girl (1954).

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born on this date in 1815.

Oh, wait, it is a holiday.

Three-time Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio is 36 today.

Calista Flockhart, Mrs. Harrison Ford, is 46. (He’s 68.)

Demi Moore is 48.

Stanley Tucci is 50.

Jonathan Winters is 85.

The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922.

George Patton was born on November 11, 1885. From his New York Times obituary in 1945:

Gen. George Smith Patton Jr. was one of the most brilliant soldiers in American history. Audacious, unorthodox and inspiring, he led his troops to great victories in North Africa, Sicily and on the Western Front. Nazi generals admitted that of all American field commanders he was the one they most feared. To Americans he was a worthy successor of such hardbitten cavalrymen as Philip Sheridan, J. E. B. Stuart and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

His great soldierly qualities were matched by one of the most colorful personalities of his period. About him countless legends clustered–some true, some untrue, but all testifying to the firm hold he had upon the imaginations of his men. He went into action with two pearl-handled revolvers in holsters on his hips. He was the master of an unprintable brand of eloquence, yet at times he coined phrases that will live in the American Army’s traditions.

“We shall attack and attack until we are exhausted, and then we shall attack again,” he told his troops before the initial landings in North Africa, thereby summarizing the military creed that won victory after victory along the long road that led from Casablanca to the heart of Germany.