May 29th

Today, May 29th, is my birthday (hence the title). It's a birthday I share with several famous people. Patrick Henry, for example, was born on May 29th. He's significant to me because he coined the phrase "Give me liberty, or give me death!!", which is celebrated often by Libertarians and people who believe in the Constitution (oddly enough, Henry opposed the Constitution). The great comedian Bob Hope also shares a birthday with me (or I share one with him...he did come first).

But the list isn't all heroes and sunshine. John Hinckley, Jr. was also born on May 29th. On the Wikipedia page of today's birthdays it lists Hinckley, then a comma and the phrase "American attempted assassin". Not only a creep for attempting to assassinate Reagan, but a failure to boot. Biologist Paul Ehrlich has been beating his "bat-shit crazy" environmental drum since the late 1960's. He's made more failed "doomsday" predictions than Harold Camping, and his fear mongering is a major reason that we can't have a rational debate about climate change to this day. Many people mention John F. Kennedy on the short list of great presidents in our country's history. I'm not one of those people (I covered some of my disliking of Kennedy and his "great" speech in a previous blog entry here).

There are some other cool people that I share a birthday with. Daniel Tosh (of Tosh.0 fame), Al Unser, Sr. (race car driver), John Archer (the magician who fooled Penn and Teller on their "Fool Us" show in England), LaToya Jackson (crazy person) and Stacy Keach (actor) are on the list. I used to hope that sharing a birthday with Eric Davis (one of my favorite baseball players ever) meant that I could one day be a Major League baseball player. But the truth is that all I share in common with any of the people on this list is parents who were horny in August the year before we were born. It doesn't mean anything, but it is a fun way to look at history.

To celebrate today, I'm gonna eat some South Park themed cupcakes and take a trip with my wife and son to The Stoogeum (Three Stooges Museum) and eat lunch at the Jon's Bar & Grill in Philadelphia (which is also the birthplace of Larry from the Three Stooges). Maybe it's not as significant as the Space Shuttle Discovery docking with the International Space Station in 1999 (the first ever by a shuttle with the ISS, took place on May 29th), but it will be to me.

And for everyone who says Happy Birthday to me today (thank you by the way), I want to leave you with this story that Penn Jillette told that involves the phrase. See if your idea of "Happy Birthday" doesn't change after this: