NewMexiKen

Today is the birthday

… of Efrem Zimbalist Jr. Inspector Lewis Erskine and Stuart Bailey is 90.

… of Dick Clark. America’s oldest teenager is 78.

… of G. Gordon Liddy, 77.

… of movie director Ridley Scott. He’s 70. Three nominations for the best director Oscar. Can you name the films?

… of David Mamet. The playwright is 60. Two Oscar nomintations for writing, Wag the Dog and The Verdict.

[Mamet], whose father was a labor lawyer and loved to argue for the sake of arguing. Mamet said, “In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously.” Mamet has gone on to write a series of plays about con men, salesmen, thieves, and liars in plays such as American Buffalo (1975) and Glengarry Glen Ross (1984), which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama. His newest play, November, is scheduled to open on Broadway this January (2008).

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

… of Mandy Patinkin. Inigo Montoya is 55.

… of Jeannie Kendall, of The Kendalls. She’s 53. Heaven’s Just a Sin Away, one of NewMexiKen’s favorites.

… of Bo Jackson, 45.

… of Ben Stiller. He’s 42.

… of Sandra Oh. The actress (Sideways, Arli$$, Grey’s Anatomy) is 37.

Oliver Winchester was born on this date in 1810. A clothing manufacturer, Winchester bought a small failing division of Smith & Wesson in 1850, the division that made a rudimentary repeating rifle. In 1860, an engineer working for Winchester, Benjamin Tyler Henry, developed the first successful repeating rifle. It was improved upon and became known as the Winchester in 1866.

It was on this date in 1835 that Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born.

He’s best known to us today for his novels about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, but in his own lifetime his best-selling books were his travel books such as Roughing It (1872), A Tramp Abroad (1880), and Life on the Mississippi (1883).

The above from The Writer’s Almanac last year, which had quite a bit about Twain. The following is from The Writer’s Almanac for this year.

Mark Twain wrote, “It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened.”

And Winston Churchill was born on this date in 1874.

Churchillian quotes:

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”

“A fanatic is one who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.”

“He has all of the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

“I am fond of pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.”

“Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.”

Vin Scully is 80 today. Scully started doing Dodger’s broadcasts in Brooklyn in 1950. His current contract runs through the 2008 season.

Diane Ladd is 65. Ladd has appeared in more than 100 films and television programs and has been nominated for the best supporting actress Oscar three times including her portrayal of Flo in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.

Garry Shandling is 58.

Don Cheadle is 43. Cheadle was, of course, nominated for the best actor Oscar for his performance in Hotel Rwanda.

Louisa May Alcott was born on this date in 1832. Garrison Keillor has this interesting background on The Writer’s Almanac back in 2003.

It’s the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1832), but brought up in Concord, Massachusetts, among the Transcendentalists, of which her father was one. She’s remembered now for Little Women (1869), which she found tedious to write. In her journal she wrote, “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.” She much preferred writing lurid, Gothic stories, about women who sold their souls to the devil, and governesses who looked sweet and innocent by day but who ruined the souls of little children by night. She published these stories under several different pen names. Her publishers offered her more money if she would agree to publish under her own name, but she could not bring herself to embarrass her father and his colleague, Ralph Waldo Emerson. She wrote to a friend, “To have had Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one’s life is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety.”

The Library of Congress’s Today in History has a lot about Alcott.