One of the recent memes doing the rounds of LiveJournal and other blog networks involved listing the births, deaths and events which share your birthday. I forget the exact rules, but never mind. Here (sourced from Wikipedia) is a selection of famous people who share my birthdate, although none were born in the same year…
Pietro Mascagni (composer – 1863)
Eli Wallach (actor – 1915)
Noam Chomsky (political commentator, linguistics pioneer – 1928)
Ellen Burstyn (actor – 1932)
Tom Waits (singer, songwriter, actor – 1949)
Jamie Clapham (footballer – 1975)
John Terry (footballer – 1980)
Now Jamie Clapham might not be as celebrated in his specialist field than the others in the list, but I’ve included him for the simple fact that, like me, he was born on 7 December in Lincoln.
Historical events? Well, the bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941 is pretty notable, but laughably insignificant in comparison to the 1971 blaze at the Montreux Casino. Caused by a flare fired by an audience member at a Frank Zappa concert, the event inspired the song “Smoke on the Water”. However, all of this triviality is eclipsed by the events of 7 December 2003, when the Conservative Party of Canada was officially recognized after the merger of the Canadian Alliance and Progressive Conservative Party of Canada (okay, which jumped up little political brown-noser thought it was worth adding *that* to Wikipedia?)
Deaths? Well, nothing particularly exciting… the biggest name is William Bligh (1817), inventor of the two-section chocolate-coated coconut confectionary (and hapless sea captain). You probably haven’t heard of composer Adrian Willaert (1562) but he was pretty important in the development of the Italian Renaissance madrigal. Lovely hands, too.
You know what? I’m going to do something to change history on my birthday and then kill myself exactly a year later. The 7 December page on Wikipedia is going to look pretty damned impressive, I can tell you…