ON THIS DAY IN SPACE: Buzz Aldrin (left) turns 82!
ON THIS DAY: Marcus “Buff” Bagwell turns 42! Buff had quite the career:
- He was The Handsome Stranger, a masked Chippendale’s dancer/gigolo in Global Championship Wrestling
- He moved on to become an American Male in WCW, which as best as I can tell is a pair of Color Me Badd inspired gigolos
- Joining the New World Order, he formed another tag team — Vicious and Delicious
- Then I don’t know, he hung around being “The Stuff” and a b-level NWO member for years. He had a top hat!
- He may go down in history as the only wrestler to ever have a My Mother On A Pole match
And he’s certainly tied with a number of other performers with Shortest Stint in the WWF, with his single match in 2001.
Happy birthday, Buff! I hope you don’t mind that we always changed your character in N64 games to a guy named Daterape. I think it was justified.
ON THIS DAY: Happy birthday to a real couple of Nixons:
37th President of the United States Richard Milhous Nixon (b. 1913)
16 Year MLB veteran Otis Junior Nixon Jr. (b. 1959)
ON THIS DAY: The War on Poverty turns 48! We’re gonna GET YOU, Poverty! One of these days. We’re kind of busy trying to avoid CLASS WARFARE and hurting any billionaires.
Source: youtube.com
ON THIS DAY: Baseball Hall of Famer (and Necro Butcher lookalike) Bruce Sutter turns 59! Don’t worry about making fun of his ragamuffin appearance, he’s clearly okay with it. And now he looks like Necro’s dad.
ON THIS DAY: In 1941, Franklin Delano Roosevelt delivers his “Four Freedoms” speech to a joint session of congress.
Above, Norman Rockwell’s quartet of paintings inspired by FDR. If you listen to the clip linked above, it really sounds like the speech opens with “In times like these, it is immature — and incidentally, uncool”. Roosevelt actually says “untrue”. Sometimes the truth is uncool!
ON THIS DAY: Earl Scruggs turns 88!
An supremely talented musician, one wonders if Scruggs’s conscience is weighed down by how many deadly rural car chases have been scored to his songbook.
Source: youtube.com
ON THIS DAY: Zebulon Pike was born 233 years ago!
I’ve never learned anything about Pike, besides that he has a Peak.
And his first name is Zebulon, which is great.
I learned about Nebulon and his Celestial Mind Control Movement first. I like to imagine his appearance is based on Pike’s.
ALSO ON THIS DAY: Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant and filmed it as part of a smear campaign against alternating current.
I like to think that he chose January 4 in honor of the birth of fellow Science Jerk Isaac Newton.
And if it makes anyone feel better, Topsy the Elephant was a MURDERER, not some innocent elephant like Dumbo’s mom. So everyone involved with this was a jerk.
Source: youtube.com
ON THIS DAY
(Well technically it’s still THIS DAY on the west coast) Douglas Wolk is celebrating a birthday.
A few years back I had just started podcasting with the Funnybook Babylon crew and started posting silly recaps of DC’s Countdown to Final Crisis on our blog. I wasn’t doing it for any reason other than to blow off some steam after reading a truly horrible comic, but people seemed to like them, including Douglas. Here was an honest to goodness writer saying nice things about something I did!
Since then I’ve actually been paid to write by some people. I did a pretty terrible job of writing in 2011, though I’m hoping to turn that around. Some of the opportunities I’ve had — like writing for Savage Critics, something else I need to turn around in 2012 — have come thanks to Douglas’s support. So thanks! And Happy Birthday.
