Today's Birthdays

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Buster Keaton (1895)
Keaton was one of silent cinema's greatest actors and filmmakers. The considerable acrobatic skills and deadpan expression that characterized his comedic style emerged from his days in vaudeville and set a standard for entertaining audiences around the world. He is remembered mainly for his roles in silent films such as The General.

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Vladimir Putin (1952)
Putin has been Russia's president since December of 1999. A former KGB agent, he has sought to re-assert the influence of Russia on the world stage and quell the separatist movement in Chechnya. The Putin administration has also put several Russian oligarchs on trial in an effort to contain and reverse the damage to the economy caused by insider capitalism, leading to debate over whether the administration is reformist or autocratic. Putin is a 6th degree black belt in Judo.

Giuseppe Verdi (1813)
Verdi's highly romantic and nationalistic operas were widely popular during his lifetime and are considered masterpieces today. Some of his themes have even transcended the boundaries of the genre and taken root in popular culture. Verdi had a penchant for drama and a gift for melody, but critics have accused his works of being overly simple in chromatic texture and shamelessly melodramatic. A great admirer of Shakespeare, Verdi based three of his operas on the Bard's plays.

Expand your appreciation of music. Turn on your classical music radio station today.

Henry Heinz (1844)
Heinz was a pioneer in the American food industry in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He founded the HJ Heinz Company in 1888, offering "57 varieties" of packaged foods. The company became noted for its fair treatment of workers, and Heinz lobbied the US Congress to introduce laws to improve sanitation within the industry at a time when writers such as Upton Sinclair were discussing the issue.

Henry Heinz - sounds a thoroughly good kind of bloke He should be celebrated with relish (there is no groaning smiley )

Aleister Crowley (1875)
Crowley was a 20th century English occultist who developed a religious philosophy called Thelema. As a young adult, he was a member of the influential Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, an occult fraternity, but later turned toward Buddhism and Yoga. While on vacation in Cairo, Egypt, Crowley had a mystical experience involving a voice that dictated The Book of the Law, relating Thelemic religious philosophy. According to Crowley, the voice claimed to be that of Aiwass (or Aiwaz) "the minister of Hoor-paar-kraat," or Horus, the god of force and fire, child of Isis and Osiris and self-appointed conquering lord of the New Aeon, announced through his chosen scribe "the prince-priest the Beast."

Margaret Thatcher (1925)
The first female Prime Minister of Great Britain, Thatcher served longer than any other British PM in the 20th century. She was noted for policies which dismantled many aspects of Britain's postwar welfare state and privatized many state-run industries. By 1990, interest rates had risen to 15%, undermining her core voting base and contributing, along with internal party disputes over the poll tax and European integration, to her 1992 retirement.

King James II of England (1633)
King James II of England and VII of Scotland was the last Catholic monarch to rule over England, Scotland, and Ireland. His reign, from 1685 to 1688, culminated with the Glorious Revolution, in which Protestants deposed him in favor of Mary II and William of Orange. The belief that James was the legitimate ruler became known as Jacobitism, and Jacobites thereafter attempted to restore the Stuart line to the thrones of England and Scotland.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844)
Nietzsche was a German philosopher whose critiques of contemporary culture, religion, and philosophy centered on a basic question regarding the foundation of values and morality. He passionately rejected Western bourgeois civilization and regarded Christian civilization as decadent; in place of its "slave morality," he looked to the superman, the creator of a new heroic morality that would consciously affirm life and the life values.

Impeachgod (1992)

Impeachgod is an atheist who in the past has been interested in astronomy and holography. He is an Asian-Ukrainian whose real name means "Dragon" in Chinese.

Arthur Miller (1915)
Miller was an American playwright whose plays are concerned with morality and the pressures exerted on people by family and society. One of his most famous works is The Crucible, a parable about the United States in the McCarthy era. His Death of a Salesman won the Pulitzer Prize, three Tony Awards, and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. From 1956 to 1961, Miller was married to Marilyn Monroe.

First Commercial Transistor Radio (1954)
Despite being primitive by today's standards, the transistor radio remains the single most popular communications device in the world. There are approximately 7 billion compact, portable transistor radios worldwide. They became popular in the 1960s when prices of some models fell below $10 as markets became flooded with radios from Hong Kong. The battery-operated radios are especially handy during electrical outages.

Chuck Berry (1926)
Berry was one of the most innovative musicians of the 1950s and is considered one of the fathers of rock and roll. His distinctive blues-derived guitar style, combined with upbeat tempos and teenager-focused lyrics, helped define rock music for decades. Berry was part of the first group to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame when it opened in 1986, and he received Kennedy Center Honors in 2000.

SamuraiSaxen (1986)
SamuraiSaxen is from Mexico and joined WP five weeks ago. She was a very bright child, and started school before she was four years old. She is occasionally irritable, but often patient. She is normally very quite and daydreams a lot. She likes spiders.

Guru Nanak Dev (1469)
Nanak was the founder of the Sikh religion and the first of the Ten Gurus of Sikhism. According to tradition, he made four great journeys to all parts of India, Arabia, and Persia. Nanak proclaimed monotheism, the provisional nature of organized religion, and direct realization of God through religious exercises and meditation; he opposed idolatry, ritual, an organized priesthood, and the caste system.

Snoop Dogg and Tom Petty were both born today.