Happy birthday to

[sam]

Every day I check whose birthday it is, so you don't have to. Back on my home planet, I then often choose someone to commemorate with a book cover or a visit to the pub. It's my version of a Google Doodle.

Today's is a cut and paste from Wikipedia which would make excellent material for a sitcom, followed by a rummage around YouTube.

Lucy Brocadelli
13 December 1476 – 15 November 1544



In 1495 Lucy went to Rome and joined a group of Dominican tertiaries who were living in community. The next year she was sent to Viterbo to establish a new convent and there she found she was frequently the object of unwanted attention. It was there, on 25 February 1496, that she is reported to have received the stigmata. Lucy did her best to hide these marks, and was frequently in spiritual ecstasy. The house had a steady stream of visitors who came to speak to Lucy, and, often, just to stare at her. Even the other sisters were concerned about her, and at one point called in the local bishop who watched Lucy go through the drama of the Passion for twelve hours straight.



Clicky
Here's another

[sam]

Shirley Jackson
December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965

"It could be you"



I prefer Van the Man belting it out, but their sweet set in the great outdoors almost looks like it could have been filmed in my front garden. Also, as I'm getting hairy again (covid ain't over for all of us), I feel a certain camaraderie with the band.

[sam]

Gustave Eiffel
15 December 1832 – 27 December 1923



This could have been the Koechlin-Nouguier Tower instead? That rolls off the tongue about as well as An American Werewolf in Paris.

[sam]

Jane Austen
16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817

It is a truth universally acknowledged that you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need.

[Peter]

And me - and Beethoven and Noel Coward (in no particular order).

[sam]

And me - and Beethoven and Noel Coward (in no particular order).

I saw Beethoven, but am a stickler for documentary proof.
https://youtu.be/c8gf7tGE34c Might actually might end up on my ipod (I'm so retro)

https://youtu.be/xMStXY8EO6U {insert segue, I'm too lazy tonight} https://youtu.be/6AachcaylsY

[Peter]

Peter Beethoven - nice juxtaposition!  What's the reference in the Randy Newman?  Is it "May All Your Christmases Be White"?  Whatever, it's a great song and performance from a terrific writer and musician, so thanks for that!

[sam]

What's the reference in the Randy Newman?

Just 'America'. These also came to mind:
https://youtu.be/HCRGrnhdNQE
https://youtu.be/R5mAuPg1ZZw
https://youtu.be/KcADqxnQA_4 (though that's a bit parochial)

Now you've got me diving headlong into his oeuvre, which is a word I seldom use in polite company. This is perhaps my favourite. Mind the tonal shift.
https://youtu.be/Z3D44KEOJpM

It's always nice to share Randy.

[Peter]

My pleasure!  I don't actually have any of his stuff, except in my head - which is where most of my musical history resides!  Dixie Flyer - another New Orleans train song, though shorter than Steve Goodman's, of course!  The two that come first to my mind are Mama told Me Not to Come, which I first heard by Three Dog Night, and Louisiana 1927, which Martin Simpson used to do round the clubs when he was trying to get out of Scunthorpe.  Then there's You've Got A Friend In Me and Short People.  Definitely going to have to have a you tube night with Randy then get down the second hand sounds shop - we still have one in Rochdale!  Good stuff, Sam, I sort of think of Randy as a more accessible type of Tom Lehrer.

[sam]

Then there's You've Got A Friend In Me and Short People.

My 5'2" mother never developed a full appreciation for lines like "You've got to pick 'em up just to say hello".

I sort of think of Randy as a more accessible type of Tom Lehrer.

Alas I started this thread too late for Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky.

Today's featured birthday is
Émilie du Châtelet
17 December 1706 – 10 September 1749

The imagined book cover I made for her:


"Let us be certain of who we want to be."

Honorable(?) mention goes to
William Safire
December 17, 1929 – September 27, 2009



Safire wrote the On Language column in The New York Times, well worth newspaper ink on your hands.

He was also a speechwriter for the Nixon administration, which probably explains why he is currently serving 50,000 years in purgatory. Being the creator of Vice Henchman Spiro Agnew's famous phrase "nattering nabobs of negativism" tacked on an additional 10,000 years.

Far be it for me to suggest that he was the only one not cheering when Apollo 11 was a success.

Safire prepared a speech called "In Event of Moon Disaster" for President Nixon to deliver on television if the Apollo 11 astronauts were stranded on the Moon. According to the plans, Mission Control would "close down communications" with the LEM and a clergyman would have commended their souls to "the deepest of the deep" in a public ritual likened to burial at sea... The last line of the prepared text contained an allusion to Rupert Brooke's First World War poem "The Soldier". [It was included] in a list of "The Greatest Doomsday Speeches Never Made".

[sam]

I just watched one of my favourite videos again

https://youtu.be/0xK5YHU2-jY

and made a mental note to plug it into a future post. Suddenly a forbidden thought intruded: why not post it unadorned with any connection to a birthday person whatsoever? I concluded that it's theoretically possible. But I just couldn't do it. Fortunately Roger came to the rescue.

Roger L'Estrange
17 December 1616 – 11 December 1704

an English pamphleteer, author, courtier, and press censor.

Note the title of the song.

[Peter]

"Alas I started this thread too late for Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky."

Same day as my maternal Grandfather!

[Wowbagger]

December 16th is also Zoltan Kodaly's birthday. He would have been 140 yesterday - a few months younger than my paternal grandmother, although her birthday was 31st January.

[T42]

The intermezzo from Háry János was the first music I ever heard through stereo headphones.

[sam]

That cat needs cleaning around the edges

Who can forget the Spielberg blockbuster Tobermory, about a cat taught to talk:

‘One does not usually discuss these matters in public,’ said Tobermory frigidly. ‘From a slight observation of your ways since you’ve been in this house I should imagine you’d find it inconvenient if I were to shift the conversation to your own little affairs.’

PS. It's Hector's b'day too.

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"The cat is the perfect subject for a Saki story, and there is something catlike about many of his young protagonists: aloof, urbane, poised, louche, and yet underneath it all there is a feral streak. So it comes as little surprise that Saki wrote a wonderful cat story, ‘Tobermory’, about a cat that is taught to talk. The result is one of Saki’s best stories – and one of the funniest stories in the English language (as well as one of the best cat stories)."

[Peter]

Also my Dad's.  He's 110 today, although he's been elsewhere, cosmically speaking for 71 of those years.  Also my niece.  Loads of my family are/were winter babies!

[bobb]

Keith Richards, if he were still alive would be 79 today.

[sam]

And the nominative determinism award goes to:
Mary Livermore
December 19, 1820 – May 23, 1905
who wrote Thirty Years Too Late, published in 1847 as a prize temperance tale.


A Very Sober Woman

Loads of my family are/were winter babies!

My older sister's is the 23rd. She hated being so close to Christmas, probably feeling she was shortchanged in the presents dept.

[sam]

Having not grown up with The Railway Children, the name

Jenny Agutter
born 20 December 1952

didn't mean anything to me until I saw her getting naughty with Naughton in An American Werewolf in London.


"The shower works."

According to David Naughton, there were twice as many people as usual on set on the day that he and Agutter filmed their shower scene. The actor recalls, “There were people I’d never seen before – and they were all Jenny Agutter fans.”

I've just googled 'werewolf sex', and can confirm there are a lot of frisky wolfman fans, too.

[sam]

Werner von Trapp
21 December 1915 - 11 October 2007



Quiz: Which one was he in that clickable pic clip?

(click to show/hide)

None of them.

Werner was naturalized while serving in the U.S. armed forces during World War II, and became a farmer.

[sam]

Claudia Alta "Lady Bird" Johnson
December 22, 1912 – July 11, 2007



Former First Lady of the United States. If you want to know who really killed JFK, look no further. She didn't actually bloody her own hands, of course. Nor did she tell her husband LBJ what she was up to.

Tired of hearing the vice president's constant bitching about playing second fiddle, she hired a guy who hired a guy, which culminated in that dreadful day for the republic.



There she is on the right, Lyndon's left, just below his swearing hand. Though personally mortified at the death of another woman's husband, it was her job to stand by her own man, wherever that took her in the moral universe.

She settled into her new role comfortably.

As First Lady, Mrs. Johnson broke new ground by interacting directly with Congress, employing her own press secretary, and making a solo electioneering tour. She was an advocate for beautifying the nation's cities and highways ("Where flowers bloom, so does hope").

Alas, Lyndon would only be a one term president, not including the portion where his boss got his head almost blown off. "Tricky Dick" Nixon and partner in crime Thelma would come next, but it's not her birthday.


First Wives Club, date unknown. Ladybird is either in hell, in heaven if God was a co-conspirator, or holding the camera. From the left, Rosalynn "not quite Playmate material" Carter, Barbara "beautiful mind" Bush, Betty Ford in the Center ["hic"], Nancy "Mommie" Reagan, and of course the devil herself.



Fun fact: Coccinellidae are known as ladybugs in North America.

[sam]

Rayner Unwin
23 December 1925 – 23 November 2000

As a young boy, Unwin served as a test reader for the firm, as his father believed that children were the best judges of what made good children's books. He was paid one shilling for each written report, which as Unwin later remarked was "good money in those days".

Most notable among the reviews he wrote for his father was his 1936 report, aged 10, for the J. R. R. Tolkien book The Hobbit. "Not a very good piece of literary criticism," he later said of the report, "but in those happy days, no second opinion was needed; if I said it was good enough to publish, it was published."

Not sure nepotism in service to literature is what Graham Nash had in mind when he wrote that; it's just the first thing that popped into my head.

Rayner Unwin entered publishing himself around 1951, and was offered the manuscript for The Lord of the Rings. He thought it ought to be published as well, and writing to his father with the figures, he said he thought they might lose a thousand pounds. Sir Stanley wrote back, saying "If you think this to be a work of genius, then you may lose a thousand pounds."

Colourful obit of an era here.

[sam]

Julie Bondeli
4 December 1731 – 8 August 1778



Hosted a salon which became the center of intellectual life in Bern. Which about 250 years later would host a Tibits. Whose London location would become a victim of Covid and high rents. I miss Tibits <Sob>. I miss London! <pull yourself together man>.

Howard Hughes
December 24, 1905 – April 5, 1976



Never thought I'd grow up to be Howard Hughes. Thanks Covid.

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Just something I tweeted very early on. I'm immunocompromised, so was extremely careful in the  early days of the pandemic. Now it's mostly just making sure I wear a proper mask when necessary. And avoiding unnecessary trips to the city <SOB>.

[Adam]

Having not grown up with The Railway Children, the name

Jenny Agutter
born 20 December 1952

didn't mean anything to me until I saw her getting naughty with Naughton in An American Werewolf in London.

You also missed out in not seeing her in "Walkabout".

[IanDG]

....and Ian Fraser Kilminster