Hell

Jeff Bezos is 60 today.

Marta Peterdy-Wolf

British singer Rod Stewart is 79 today.

Buffalo Bill died on this day 107 years ago, aged 70. He was an American soldier, bison hunter, and showman. One of the most famous and well-known figures of the American Old West, Cody started his legend when he was only 23. Shortly thereafter he started performing in shows that displayed cowboy themes and episodes from the frontier and Indian Wars. He founded Buffalo Bill's Wild West in 1883, taking his large company on tours in the United States and, beginning in 1887, in Great Britain and continental Europe. Buffalo Bill started working at the age of 11, after his father's death, and became a rider for the Pony Express at age 15. During the American Civil War, he served the Union from 1863 to the end of the war in 1865. Later he served as a civilian scout for the U.S. Army during the Indian Wars. While he was initially awarded the Medal of Honor in 1872 for his actions in the Indian Wars, he was among 910 recipients to have the award rescinded in 1917.

American actor J. K. Simmons is 69 today.

Napoleon III died on this day 151 years ago, aged 64. He was the first president of France from 1848 to 1852, and the last monarch of France as Emperor of the French from 1852 until he was deposed in absentia on 4 September 1870. He was born in Paris as the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and his wife, Hortense de Beauharnais. Napoleon I was Louis Napoleon's paternal uncle, and one of his cousins was the disputed Napoleon II. Louis Napoleon was the first and only president of the French Second Republic, elected in 1848. He seized power by force in 1851 when he could not constitutionally be reelected. He later proclaimed himself Emperor of the French and founded the Second Empire, reigning until the defeat of the French Army and his capture by Prussia and its allies at the Battle of Sedan in 1870.

56th Prime Minister of Japan Junichiro Koizumi is 82 today.

American animator, director, producer, screenwriter and voice actor Art Clokey died on this day 13 years ago, aged 88. He he was pioneer in the popularization of stop-motion clay animation, best known as the creator of the character Gumby and the original voice of Gumby's sidekick, Pokey. Clokey's career began in 1953 with a film experiment called Gumbasia, which was influenced by his professor, Slavko Vorkapich, at the University of Southern California. Clokey and his wife Ruth subsequently came up with the clay character Gumby and his horse Pokey, who first appeared in the Howdy Doody Show and later got their own series The Adventures of Gumby, from which they became a familiar presence on American television. The characters enjoyed a renewal of interest in the 1980s when American actor and comedian Eddie Murphy parodied Gumby in a skit on Saturday Night Live.

January 22nd

Roberta Flack

American actor Jeremy Renner is 53 today.

Nikola Tesla died on this day 81 years ago, aged 86. He was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist. He is best-known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system. Attempting to develop inventions he could patent and market, Tesla conducted a range of experiments with mechanical oscillators/generators, electrical discharge tubes, and early X-ray imaging. He also built a wirelessly controlled boat, one of the first ever exhibited. Tesla became well known as an inventor and demonstrated his achievements to celebrities and wealthy patrons at his lab, and was noted for his showmanship at public lectures. Throughout the 1890s, Tesla pursued his ideas for wireless lighting and worldwide wireless electric power distribution in his high-voltage, high-frequency power experiments in New York and Colorado Springs. In 1893, he made pronouncements on the possibility of wireless communication with his devices. Tesla tried to put these ideas to practical use in his unfinished Wardenclyffe Tower project, an intercontinental wireless communication and power transmitter, but ran out of funding before he could complete it.

I want to join

American rapper Polo G is 25 today.

Sidney Poitier died on this day 2 years ago, aged 94. – Poitier’s family lived in the Bahamas, but he was born in Miami, Florida, while they were visiting, which granted him US citizenship. – Poitier gained stardom for his leading roles in films such as The Defiant Ones (1958) for which he made history becoming the first African American to receive an Academy Award for Best Actor nomination. – In 1964, he won the Academy and the Golden Globe for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field (1963), making him the first Black actor to win an Academy Award for Best Actor. – He continued to break ground in three successful 1967 films which dealt with issues of race and race relations: To Sir, with Love; Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night, the latter of which earned him Golden Globe and BAFTA Award nominations. – Poitier was granted a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II in 1974. – In 2009, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama. – From 1997 to 2007, he was the Bahamian Ambassador to Japan.

American actor Robert Duvall is 93 today.

Calvin Coolidge died on this day 91 years ago, aged 60. He was an American attorney and politician who served as the 30th president of the United States from 1923 to 1929. During his presidency, he restored public confidence in the White House after the many scandals of the Harding administration. He signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which granted U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans, and oversaw a period of rapid and expansive economic growth known as the "Roaring Twenties", leaving office with considerable popularity.

Noam Chomsky

January 22nd

January 11

Derek Draper

22nd Governor-General of Australia William Deane is 93 today.

American nuclear physicist Harold Brown died on this day 5 years ago, aged 91. He served as the United States Secretary of Defense from 1977 to 1981, under President Jimmy Carter. Previously, in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations, he held the posts of Director of Defense Research and Engineering (1961–1965) and United States Secretary of the Air Force (1965–1969). A child prodigy, Brown graduated from the Bronx High School of Science at age 15, and earned a Ph.D. in physics from Columbia University at age 21. As Secretary of Defense, he set the groundwork for the Camp David Accords, took part in strategic arms negotiations with the Soviet Union , and supported, unsuccessfully, ratification of the SALT II treaty.

Former US Secretary of the Treasury W Michael Blumenthal is 98 today.