Rocky Balboa opens tomorrow — the sixth film in Sylvester Stallone’s series about the rugged Philadelphia boxer with the broken nose. Thirty (count ’em) years have passed since the original Rocky won the Academy Award for best picture and best director of 1976. A few random Rocky notes:
Joseph Barbera, creator of Scooby-Doo and Fred Flintstone, has died at age 95. His partner Joseph Hanna died in 2001, and Hanna-Barbera is now part of Time-Warner.
Google Earth has just announced a new gadget that “tracks” the travels of Santa Claus over the days leading up to Christmas Eve. The downer is that you must download both Google Earth and the Santa-tracking program (though they’re free), but on the upside, you get a flyby of Santa’s workshop at the North Pole and a peek at whimsical presents hidden around the world. It’s a nice gesture.
Strange but true (and wonderful): the world’s tallest man, a 54-year-old Mongolian herdsman, saved two dolphins at a Chinese aquarium by reaching into their stomachs and pulling out wayward chunks of plastic. The BBC reports that Bao Xishun is 2.36 meters, or 7 feet 8.95 inches, tall. Here’s a further story (with a fine photo) from CBS News.
Milton Bradley, creator of The Game of Life and founder of the Milton Bradley Company, maker of Yahtzee and Chutes and Ladders. Who knew he was born way back in 1836? Or that Abraham Lincoln nearly broke his heart?
Jeane Kirkpatrick, a conservative bulldog for Ronald Reagan at the United Nations, has died at age 80.
December 6th is a special day at Who2.com: it’s the only day of the year on which nobody in our database was born. That’s 2843 famous people (and counting) and none of them born on December 6th.The 6th has been the lone holdout for a couple of years now. Even February 29 is well represented by rapper Ja Rule and Mother Ann Lee of the Shakers, among others.
Animation pioneer Walt Disney died 40 years ago, but were he still living he’d be 105 today. Disney was born the same year as jazz great Louis Armstrong and chemist Linus Pauling. They both outlived him, but they were all outlasted by romance novelist Barbara Cartland, also of the class of ’01, who lived to the ripe old age of 100.Happy birthday, Walt!
Daniel Craig, the latest actor to play superspy James Bond, seems to be getting rave reviews for Casino Royale — even in China.
Among the results of last night’s American general elections: Ted Kennedy was elected to an eighth term as a senator from Massachusetts, and West Virginia’s Senator Robert Byrd was elected to a ninth term. (It’s a bittersweet year for Byrd: his wife, Erma Ora Byrd, passed away this spring after 68 years of marriage.)
We’ve recently added profiles of Broadway star Mary Martin and her son, Dallas star Larry Hagman. Research on both profiles showed confusing factoids: Martin’s birthdate was variously reported as December 1, 10, or 11, and Hagman’s birth name was widely reported to be “Hageman.”Religion and Broadway Editor Hans Holznagel went on the case. His report:
That’s the title on this fascinating New York Times obituary of someone we’d never heard of before. You can read the full obituary here. (Registration is required, but it’s free. The obit remains free only for seven days, though.)
Religion and Broadway editor Hans Holznagel has just completed a new profile of Mary Martin, one of the brightest stars of the American stage in the 1950s. She created the title role of Peter Pan on Broadway in 1954, and of Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music in 1959.
Helen Mirren is winning deserved salutes as Queen Elizabeth II in the new film The Queen (now coming to a theater near you). God save the Queen and DCI Tennison anyway.
The sad death of Cory Lidle in a plane crash has reminded many baseball fans of the 1979 death of another Yankee, Thurman Munson, in a single-plane crash. Lidle was still a Yankee newcomer, having joined the team this summer. Munson was a baseball player of the old school, mustachioed, burly and competitive, and he was also the first Yankee to be designated team captain since the legendary Lou Gehrig in the 1930s.
Vivien, Jessica, Charlie and Matt: These are some of the early popularity leaders in our new Who2 First Name Index.
What to say about disgraced congressman and political bombshell Mark Foley? He’s already become the story of the week and possibly the story of the 2006 U.S. elections, somehow trumping Iraq, the economy, new revelations about 9/11, and everything else.
Among this week’s new profiles on Who2:Conquistador Hernando De SotoFirefly actress Gina TorresNew Japanese PM Shinzo AbeGnarly poet Charles BukowskiGnarly witch trial victim Bridget BishopTerrorist chief Ayman al-Zawahiri
Iva Toguri D’Aquino, who was convicted of being the “seductress of the shortwave,” Tokyo Rose, has died at age 90.
Japan’s new prime minister, Shinzo Abe, is the country’s youngest PM since World War II. He’s still 52, mind you, but that counts for young in the slow-moving world of Japanese politics. He’s a charmer, and the job is in his blood: his granddad, Nobusuke Kishi, was prime minister of Japan from 1957-60. Add your own “Honest Abe” joke here.
Rock legends The Who seem to be getting great reviews on their new tour. The latest come from Boston.
Patricia Kennedy Lawford, sister to political heavyweights and former wife to a movie star, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 82 and her death was attributed to pneumonia.
Ann Richards has died of esophogeal cancer at age 73.Richards made a famously feisty keynote address at the Democratic convention in 1988, telling listeners that Republican candidate George Bush was “born with a silver foot in his mouth.” She was elected governor of Texas two years later, serving from 1991-95.
Remembering the stern everyman actor Glenn Ford, who has died in Beverly Hills at age 90.
Pete Townshend has been teasing us for two years with his claims that the next album from The Who would be titled Who2.But it was too good to last. Now Pete says that it was all a gag.
John Mark Karr did not kill JonBenet Ramsey. That was the announcement made on 28 August 2006 by Boulder County District Attorney Mary Lacy.Despite the DA’s earlier suspicions, and despite Karr’s claim to reporters that he “was with JonBenet when she died,” Karr’s DNA did not match with DNA found at the scene of the crime.
The International Astronomical Union has stripped Pluto of its status as a planet. Pluto fails to meet the IAU’s new guidelines for planets, mainly because its orbit overlaps with Neptune’s. Suddenly our solar system has only eight official planets.
Joe Rosenthal, the photographer who took the famous photo of Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, has died at age 94.
We’ve added two profiles in the sad and increasingly strange case of JonBenet Ramsey: one of the victim herself, and one of her alleged killer, John Mark Karr. His arrest in Thailand, and his apparent confession that he was “with JonBenet when she died,” have added a bizarre note to what was already a very confusing story. Our JonBenet profile has links to some of the most detailed historical sites about the case, while the Karr profile focuses on news outlets in Colorado and elsewhere that are providing steady updates.
Cuban leader Fidel Castro is still in the hospital but expected to recover, according to his sister. He handed the reins of power temporarily to his brother Raul before surgery this week.Fidel Castro has been in power for 47 years, since 1959. How long is that?
It looks as if we finally have a date for the release of The Who’s new album, titled (remarkably) Who2. Pete Townshend says in this interview that October 23 is the magic day.
A recent letter from a reader in Maine questioned our birth date for director John Ford. We had 1895, but after some detailed review we now think the reader was right: Ford was born in 1894.Ford himself, it seems, liked to claim 1895 as his date of birth. That being the case, it’s no surprise that many sources online and off list his birth date as 1895. But the case for 1894 has been pretty well settled in the last two decades by some thoughtful biographers.
A new Superman film opens this week in U.S. theaters: Superman Returns, starring newcomer Brandon Routh as the Man of Steel.However, Who2 tech guru Mike Duffy points out a superhero movie that never got made and still looks great: Grayson. It’s one fan’s heroic take on Batman’s “faithful ward,” Dick Grayson.
Our friends at Answers.com asked us to look into the real age of Curtis Jackson, AKA 50 Cent. We have his birth year as 1975, while many other sources say 1976.
Now that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have had their baby, let’s put an end to the tabloid naming of celebrity couples — in this case, Brangelina.The absurd trend started with Bennifer for Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck, and reached its artistic peak with TomKat for Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes. Brangelina is just grasping at straws.
We’ve had some trouble pinning down the birth date of Latina superstar Shakira. Many good sources list her as February 9, 1977, but other sources, just as good, have her as February 2, 1977.
Who2 adopted a brand new look on April 2nd. We hope you like it.This is our first redesign in over two years, and it accomplishes several important tasks for us. We finally have one standard template for all of our profiles, loops, and related pages. This will help readers understand and use Who2 more easily.We’ve chosen new colors and a new, more readable typeface. Headlines are now in a more attractive (we might even say stylish) sans-serif typeface.
A Who2 user writes:”I was looking at a profile of an actor… the name is irrelevant. In the “vital statistics” category you list birthday, birthplace, and DEATH. The actor is very much alive, as the death section did not have a date under it.
An alert reader recently suggested that we had Susan Lucci’s birth year wrong.Lucci, who has played Erica Kane on TV’s All My Children for the last three decades, once said in an interview in Cigar Aficionado that she enjoys being mysterious about how old she is, so we knew we’d have our work cut out for us.
Who do you believe: Stevie Wonder or his mother?A few weeks back we profiled Stevie Wonder, the old-school musical giant whose latest album, A Time To Love, won six Grammy nominations. There was one sticking point: his name. The Stevie Wonder stage name is no mystery — he got it when he signed with Motown as a child whiz kid and began performing as Little Stevie Wonder. (A few years later he dropped the “Little,” but the Wonder stuck.)