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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.

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

Joe Mantegna is 60 today, Chris Noth is 53, Oscar-winner Whoopi Goldberg is 52, Vinny Testaverde is 44, and Jimmy Kimmel is 40.

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

Today is the birthday

… of Wallace Shawn. The actor-playwright is 64. 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). 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

… of Brian Hyland. The Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini singer is 64.

… of Booker T. Jones. The organist is 63. 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 62. 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 62.

… of Megan Mullally. She’s 49.

… of Nadia Comaneci. The perfect 10 is 46.

… of Anne Hathaway, all of 25.

Oscar winner Grace Kelly was born 78 years ago today. Her oscar was for best performance by an actress in The Country Girl (1954).

Three-time Oscar nominee Leonardo DiCaprio is 33.

Calista Flockhart is 43.

Demi Moore is 45.

Jonathan Winters is 82. “If God had really intended man to fly, He’d make it easier to get to the airport.”

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

He was captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and was forced to work in a Dresden factory producing vitamin-enriched malt syrup for pregnant women. He slept in a meat locker three stories underground, and that was the only reason he survived the firebombing on the night of February 13, 1945, when British and American bombers ignited a firestorm that killed almost all the city’s inhabitants in two hours. When they walked outside, Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners were just about the only living people in the city. They were then forced by the Germans to help clean up the bodies.

Vonnegut spent the next two decades writing science fiction, but he knew he wanted to write about his experiences in Dresden, and finally did in his novel Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), about a man named Billy Pilgrim who believes that he experiences the events of his life out of order, including his service during World War II, the firebombing of Dresden, and his kidnapping by aliens. He decides there is no such thing as time, and everything has already happened, so there’s really nothing to worry about.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

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.