born 28 February 1970

Bruno Mercere, birthplace unspecified, French sound mixer

Cecilia Carrizo, Buenos Aires, Argentina, singer

Daniel Handler, San Francisco, California, writer

Emilio Santos, birthplace unspecified, Venezuelan porn star

Hernán Jiménez, Buenos Aires, Argentina

Hollywood Yates, Phoenix, Arizona, American Gladiator

Jeremy Morgan, Santa Monica, California, picture car coordinator

Leticia Trejo, Laredo, Texas, actress

Mariusz Glabinski, Kraków, Poland, sound designer

Robert Alan Dilts, Morristown, New Jersey, writer

Sayed Najem, birthplace unspecified, Lebanese stuntman

Stanislav Penc, birthplace unspecified, Czech peace activist

Tangi Miller, Miami, Florida, actress

Tim Miller, birthplace unspecified, American Inferno artist

Mister Lemony Snicket is our main man today. I have never read his work, but it always seemed like the kind of thing I’d get around to someday, if I ever had a kid. Well, here we are.

One issue that this raises is, does one have to read all thirteen books in the Series of Unfortunate Events triskaidekalogy to feel that one is fully on board? If not, how does one choose where to begin or end? My mother read me all seven books in the Chronicles of Narnia; though a little baggy in parts, each part ultimately had something to do with the whole. I guess I’ll have to research how true that is in this case; thirteen novels seems like more of a commitment than I’m willing to make.

On a semi-related subject, Daniel Handler plays accordion on the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs. I once had a girlfriend who gave me the first and third installments only of that recording. The two-thirds that I possess is a fantastic record. Someday I hope to listen to love songs twenty four through forty six.

But I’m not in any hurry. I savor especially those books, songs, and movies I’ve not seen or heard yet, but that I’m reasonably certain I’m going to like. Places I’ve never been, too. Thinking of those as yet unmet destinations is like a happy memory in reverse.

born 27 February 1970

Georg Söring, Hamburg, West Germany, film editor/short filmmaker

István Gyurity, birthplace unspecified, Hungarian actor

Julia Parker, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, actress

Kent Desormeaux, Maurice, Louisiana, three-time Kentucky Derby champion jockey

Patricia Petibon, Montargis, France, soprano

Rob Adams, St. Louis, Missouri, actor

Robert Quinn, birthplace unspecified, Irish director

Sava Lolov, birthplace unspecified, French actor

Wendy Eley, Dothan, Alabama, gospel programming producer

Today’s one of those cases where I have to choose not to reward a staggeringly successful person, so I can herald another deserving individual. In this case, that’s Kent Desormeaux, by any standard the leading horse-rider of our time. He was already in his sport’s Hall of Fame by the age of 34, if that gives you any idea. Still, to be that great, a jockey must have had to lose a lot of races, so today will be no different in that regard.

His resume is impressive, and includes stints as assistant director on two of the great Neil Jordan pictures, The Crying Game and Breakfast on Pluto. But the reason I’m acknowledging Robert Quinn as today’s Buaiteoir Inniu is for co-writing and directing Cré na Cille (Graveyard Clay), a feature film entirely performed in the Irish language. I’d love to know what my hero Flann O’Brien would make of the existence of such a production in the 21^st century.

born 26 February 1970

Bényi Ildikó, Hernádvécse, Hungary, TV anchorwoman

Brent King, Charlotte, North Carolina, actor/short filmmaker

Carina N. Wise, Dresden, East Germany, actress

Cathrine Lindahl, Härnösand, Sweden, accountant/Olympic curler

Christian Keiber, Wilmington, North Carolina, actor

Derek Anthony, Cleveland Heights, Ohio, actor

Gürol Güngör, Ankara, Turkey, actor

Heather Grimes, Lowell, Massachusetts, actress

Katie O’Neill, Los Angeles, California, juvenile actress

Leina Cochrane, Culver City, California, production assistant

Linda Brava, Helsinki, Finland, violinist/model/race car driver/ciderer

Meeno Peluce, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, child star/high school teacher/photographer

I was going to hold off on posting until it became clear which medal Cathrine Lindahl had won today: gold or silver. Pretty cool fortieth birthday present, either way. (By the way: Vancouver, I very much like the design of this year’s prize medallions. It looks like some kind of fine-dining dessert crumpet. A far sight better than Turin’s surpassingly ungainly giant washers.)

There’s a lot to like in this gang. The three umlauts of Gürol Güngör, which I strongly urge anyone who reads this to name their metal band. The 3,516 words of Linda Brava’s outlandishly TMI-ful “Mini Biography”. The sad but plucky roster of roles portrayed by Derek Anthony, who parlayed a walk-on as “Dying Black Man” in a year 2000 “Angel” episode into a far more impressive-sounding part – “Imposing Demon” – on “Buffy” three years later. But ultimately the best impression belongs to the list's most famous individual.

If a network aired it from about 1978 to 1985, it’s a reasonably sure bet Today’s Winner guest starred on it. Meeno Peluce was about as successful a male child TV star as that era produced, just slightly off the pace of Gary Coleman or Ricky Schroeder. The fact that as an actor he faded conclusively from view before high school doesn’t make his accomplishment any less impressive.

But that alone would not be enough to win my approval. It’s a little unclear how his teens and early twenties unfolded, but if Wikipedia is to be believed, he spent several years in the late 1990s as a well-regarded social studies teacher at Hollywood High School. (By the way, a meaty, well-researched non-fiction book on the history of Hollywood High would make for a phenomenal read. Stuyvesant too for that matter.) Pivoting from there, Meeno since seems to have made a full-time career of his photography, which is on the whole pretty damned outstanding. His Snoop Dogg and Mary J. Blige shots are especially fine.

For a variety of reasons, serious photographer may be the single dopest second act a successful child actor has ever had. So, well-done Meeno. Regards to your sister as well.

born 25 February 1970

Beatriz Rico, Aviles, Spain, Iberian bombshell

Bettina Perut, Rome, Italy, Chilean documentarian

Deanna Ross, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, extra

Erich Silva, New York, New York, American in Swedish film industry

Evan Mather, New Orleans, Louisiana, animator/landscape architect

Gaia De Laurentiis, Rome, Italy, actress

Heather Simms, Hartford, Connecticut, actress

Julie Hesmondhalgh, Accrington, England, actress

Libby Tanner, Melbourne, Australia, TV actress/mother of a boy named Tadhg

Luis Moreno, Maracaibo, Venezuela, editor

Marcus Ball, county of Orange, California, production assistant

Oliver Seefeldt, Berlin, East Germany, dancer

Pablo Marcovsky, Buenos Aires, Argentina, journalist

Rebecca Lowman, Springfield, Illinois, actress

Roman Wyden, Brig, Switzerland, producer

Steven Nevius, Los Angeles, California, editor/short filmmaker

Taylor Grant, Phoenix, Arizona, children’s TV writer

Theresa Lee, Hong Kong, actress

Toshio “Bull” Kajino, birthplace unspecified, Japanese sound editor/video game composer

Vlasto Maric, Vladimirovac, Yugoslavia, painter

Werner Van Peppen, The Hague, The Netherlands, sound person

The IMDb has reconfigured its searching mechanism as of this week. I can no longer seamlessly query a list of all the people born in 1970 and have it appear on one page. This bums me out a bit, as it messes with my routine. Now I have to plug in a single day or range of days. When the list comes back, it defaults to being racked on the basis of the STARmeter. The STARmeter, in turn, turns out to be this screwy algorithm which attempts to rank the relevance of careers-to-date, kind of like I’m doing on this blog.

I’d be very curious how the mad scientists in the programming department justify the STARmeter product. It may be of marginal use when it comes to known moneymaking Hollywood quantities. But for the vast majority of persons represented on the site, it boils down to a kind of voodoo astrology – thus earning its name, albeit not in the manner they intended.

Alternately, I can rank my results by birth date and death date (irrelevant to my purposes) or by height (irrelevant to practically anybody’s purposes, but fun to know anyway). Only eight out of twenty-one of today’s freshly minted quadragenarians have a listed height at all. Libby Tanner is an optimistic 5’2½”; Marcus Ball, an optimistic 6’ even. The funniest thing about it is that when you rank the people by height, the title of the page becomes “Shortest People Born On 25 February 1970.”

In the middle of both packs is Today’s Winner, Deanna Ross, 5’8”. The reason? Just that if this were a newspaper and I were a newspaperman, I could refer to her as a “Tuscaloosa extra”. Now that right there is a job title Tom Waits or William Faulkner would have taken at least three cups of coffee to come up with.

born 24 February 1970

Bjarte Hjelmeland, Bergen, Norway, actor

George Nakas, birthplace unspecified, Swedish actor

Jason Watt, London, England, Danish race car driver

Jeff Garcia, Gilroy, California, NFL quarterback

John Johnson, Chicago, Illinois, extra

Jonathan Ward, Elkridge, Maryland, actor

Mildred Roethof, Utrecht, The Netherlands, TV documentarian

Monica Staggs, Boulder, Colorado, stuntwoman

Raji James, London, England, actor

Raúl Alemán, Caracas, Venezuela, composer

Ungela Brockman, Los Angeles, California, actress

Vanessa Le Page, Toronto, Ontario, cake designer

Damn, it’s good to have such a cute baby.

Here’s how I picture things going with Today’s Winner:

Mother: “Here she is mama! Isn’t little Angela adorable!”

Grandmother (unimpressed): “Angela? More like Un-gela!”

born 23 February 1970

Costel Cascaval, birthplace unspecified, Romanian actor

Lisa Arbuckle, state of Iowa, third assistant director

Marie-Josée Croze, Montreal, Quebec, actress

Mike Baronas, Waltham, Massachusetts, Italian horror enthusiast

Niecy Nash, Palmdale, California, actress

Paul Anthony Stewart, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, actor

Rita Stock, Lisbon, Portugal, actress

Russell Darling, St. Johns, Arizona, computer graphics supervisor

Shôko Aida, Higashimurayama, Japan, actress

Steven Scott Austin, birthplace unspecified, American low-budget buttkicker

Szonja Jakovits, Cambridge, Massachusetts, second assistant director

Valerio Bevilacqua, born in Italy, American bit player

Vit Janacek, Nové Mesto na Morave, Czechoslovakia, writer/director

Wojciech Kulinski, birthplace unspecified, Polish actor

We have a clear Winner today. It’s the Canadian who played the French speech pathologist in The Diving Bell And The Butterfly. That was a movie that I really liked, and the person I saw it with really hated. It’s always amusing when that happens. Sometimes it’s a huge schism-causer, a dealbreaker. Other times, such as this one, it only reaffirms that you are one person, and the other person is another, with wholly different tastes. It’s like the time I took my grandmother to see O Brother Where Art Thou. Guaranteed to repulse anyone who actually remembers the thirties. Happy birthday Grandma (yesterday): love you!

born 22 February 1970

Craig Warnock, Hammersmith, England, child actor

Erol Ünsalan, Munich, West Germany, actor

Jamie Caliri, Buffalo, New York, cinematographer/title designer

Joe Holt, Tachikawa, Japan, American actor

Michael Rodrick, Jersey City, New Jersey, actor

Phil Grieg, Nelson, New Zealand, digital intermediate technologist

Thanks to Craig Warnock, if at any point during her childhood, our daughter should shout out the warning

“MOM! DAD! It’s EVIL! Don’t touch it!”

there is no possible way I will touch whatever evil thing she is on about.

born 21 February 1970

Danya Devon, San Antonio, Texas, actress/anchorwoman

J.R. Hudson, La Mesa, California, jobs too various to enumerate

Jason Schmidt, birthplace unspecified, youthful Bostonian

Judy Brooke, Leeds, England, TV actress

Marinas Bouras, born in Greece, Danish actress

Michael Slater, Wagga Wagga, Australia, actor

Paul Diomede, Jersey City, New Jersey, actor

Sharlyn Brooner, birthplace unspecified, American actress

Svea Timander, Berlin, East Germany, actress

Tai-hyung Lim, Seoul, South Korea, director

Today’s Prize, of a delicious calzone, goes to Paul Diomede. He’s one of these actors who belongs to the unofficial Brotherhood of Big-and-Small Screen Goombahs and Mooks. “Sopranos” bit part? Check. Spike Lee movie? Check. Multiple “Law & Order” appearances? Check. Guys like this can hang around the margins of the business for decades.

Bonus points for his uncredited role in Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. Funny story about that film: I saw it in the theater the first weekend it played. On the print they were showing, none of the multiple scenes involving the Haitian sno-cone vendor had subtitles. So there were these interminable stretches, containing a good deal of actual plot exposition, which for all the audience knew were intended to be penetrable only to speakers of the French language. I held this against Jarmusch for years afterward, until at some point I came to realize that it had been an innocent laboratory processing mistake.

born 20 February 1970

Alain Deloin, birthplace unspecified, French porn star

Wait a minute. Stop right there.

There, Mesdames et Messieurs, is today's overwhelming favorite. That has got to be the single Greatest Highbrow Porn Moniker in cinematic history. (If you are at all puzzled as to why, here is some further reading for you.)

Also turning forty today:

Cal Rein, Traralgon, Australia, actor

Chandler Vinar, Minneapolis, Minnesota, set dressing gangboss

Dawn Landon, Dallas, Texas, actress

Hana Sevcíková, Prague, Czechoslovakia, actress

Julia Franck, Berlin, East Germany, novelist

Kerri Hoskins, Deer Park, Illinois, video game recurring character portrayer

Natacha Lindinger, Paris, France, actress

Per Jørgen Østby, Sarpsborg, Norway, producer

Shawn Woods, Los Angeles, California, actor

Stan Mak, Winnipeg, Manitoba, boom operator (IF you know what I mean)

Stuart Miles, birthplace unspecified, British drag queen/children’s TV host (there’ll always be an England)

Alain Deloin invites all today's children to join him in a filthy and degrading tape-recorded Francophone ménage-a-douze.

PLEASE BRACE YOURSELF FOR AN ABRUPT CHANGE IN TONE. THANKS.

Wait, here’s one more:

Karen Schmeer (died 29 January 2010), Portland, Oregon, documentary editor

What a dire situation. What a loss. Here we have an excellent example of the accomplished contributors to the moving picture arts who are lurking just outside the frame I’ve established. Today Karen Schmeer should have celebrated her fortieth birthday; but her birth date must only have been added to the Internet Movie Database yesterday. Certainly, earlier this week, her filmography must have been there, but devoid of her date of birth; when I prepared the first part of this post on Wednesday, her name was nowhere to be found.

It was Karen Schmeer’s terrifying fate to be killed by the hit-and-run driver of a getaway car of a trio of pharmacy thieves on the Upper West Side. She was crossing upper Broadway with an armload of groceries. The agent of her doom was a late-model Dodge Avenger, with a man named David McKie at the wheel. Transported from the scene by an ambulance, she died at the hospital later that night.

I spent a lot of time in January 2010 in the hospital where Karen Schmeer died, because it’s the same hospital where my daughter was born. What a cringemaking thing it is to see “2010” as the year of someone’s death, this early. I’m still dating checks “2009” for crying out loud. I don’t know; for all kinds of reasons, though a stranger, this death cuts close to the bone for me.

More than anything, I think it’s because I’m so grateful for her work. She edited Fast Cheap and Out of Control; Mr. Death: The Rise And Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.; and The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. It will be interesting to see how Errol Morris’s output progresses from here. She really elevated his art. Knowing what she worked on with Morris, I’m going to make it a point to track down other projects of hers.

In Karen Schmeer’s honor, there will be no actual Winner today. Instead I will encourage you to imagine an uncanny Errol Morris-style documentary, concerning a loose affiliation of inept drugstore shoplifters, and the brilliant film editor whose life’s ribbon they would haphazardly consign to the cutting-room floor of the universe.

born 19 February 1970

Bellamy Young, Asheville, North Carolina, actress

Danny de Munk, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, actor/singer

Darren Gibson, Rotorua, New Zealand, construction foreman

Dwight D. Smith, Muncie, Indiana, TV producer

Hiroko Kasahara, Tokyo, Japan, voice talent

Joe “The Creep” Arnold, Houston, Texas, property master

Nnegest Likké, Oakland, California, writer/director

Valisa Tate, Kalamazoo, Michigan, model

Today’s Winner? Nnegest Likké. Why? Well, for starters, obviously the name is, uh, superlative? Not sure how it’s pronounced…hard ‘g’ or soft? Lick-ee or lick-aaay?

The real reason I’m inclined to support her is that her debut feature as a writer/director finds itself ensconced in this charming little nook of the IMDb. Surely Phat Girlz can’t even be the third-worst film ever to star Academy Award Nominee Mo’Nique! How can it possibly be the 79^th-worst movie of ALL TIME?

Hang in there Nnegest. You deserve encouragement. Just as your leading lady has skyrocketed to respectability, so too can you. Just, please: if a studio ever wants to finance Phat Girlz 2, by all means take the money, but let somebody else write and direct the picture.

born 18 February 1970

Akai Draco, Bethesda, Maryland, actor

Amy McKee, Scottsdale, Arizona, casting associate

Andrew Leavold, Perth, Australia, video store proprietor

Björn Herbert Fritz Robeerto Kegel Casapietra, Genoa, Italy, actor

Diana Mórová, Bratislava, Czechoslovakia, actress

Junko Iwao, Beppu, Japan, voice talent

Kathleen Widden, Queens, New York, Macy’s Fourth of July Fireworks Spectacular talent manager

Khris Kaneff, Germantown, Pennsylvania, storyboard artist

Laure Marsac, Paris, France, actress

Lolo García, birthplace unspecified, Spanish child actor

Raine Maida, Weston, Ontario, musician

Shanna Gold, Baltimore, Maryland, costumer

Susan Egan, Seal Beach, California, actress

Tammy McIntosh, Perth, Australia, actress

Tyler Green, Springfield, Ohio, major league pitcher

The fact that hers is the most accomplished of the fifteen careers-in-progress before us today is only a small part of what qualifies Susan Egan to be Today’s Winner. Here’s the main thing: I’m reasonably certain that she is the only one of these individuals ever to have shared a stage with my wife.

born 17 February 1970

Bret Culp, Dunnville, Ontario, visual effects supervisor

Dominic Purcell, Wallasey, England, Australian actor

Hiroaki Samura, birthplace unspecified, Japanese writer

Jonathan Brown, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, son of the inventor of the Steadicam

Ken Rance, Minneapolis, Minnesota, writer

Kia Jam, birthplace unspecified, American producer

Krisztina Bíró, Budapest, Hungary, actress

Marcos Bernstein, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, writer/director

Mari Posti, Helsinki, Finland, actress

Mathieu Lauffray, Paris, France, concept designer

Matt Wallin, Los Angeles, California, digital compositor/Cremaster cycle expositor

Paul Whitthorne, Tucson, Arizona, actor

Stephen Salvati, birthplace unspecified, Irish Ph.D/black belt/Dracula enthusiast

Theodor Halacu-Nicon, Constantza, Romania, director

Tim Mahoney, Omaha, Nebraska, musician

Wojciech Socha, Koszalin, Poland, TV actor

Zeddy Lawrence, London, England, writer/parrot owner

I never watched the Fox network’s “Prison Break”; furthermore I was shocked to see that the autumn-to-spring TV season had so collapsed as a concept that “Prison Break” may still actually be on the air…? It’s hard to tell. Dominic Purcell, a star of that show, even though he’s forty today, seems to have the best shot at future stardom of this group. He could be a late-blooming Angry George Clooney of the 010’s if he plays his cards just right.

Big props to Garrett Brown for inventing the Steadicam, and for having a son instead of a daughter to lug that thing around for a second generation. (As a digression within a digression, the NBA slam dunk contest has gotten so boring that watching last week’s show the only enjoyment I got, practically, was watching the Steadicam operator, who moves and dresses like a beatnik StaPuft Marshmallow Man. He’s been a favorite around my house for years, but he’s now pushing maximum density.)

Some other favorites today include this Irish mountebank, and this friend of Matthew Barney. The entire concept of a behind-the-scenes making-of documentary about the Cremaster cycle seems misguided, but I’m glad somebody tried.

The champ today is Marcos Bernstein. I don’t know if he’ll ever get the chance to go Hollywood, but I’m intrigued that his directorial debut is a Rear Window remake with Fernanda Montenegro in the Jimmy Stewart role. I predict that bodes well.

born 16 February 1970

Alicia Río, La Capita, Mexico, porn star

Bruno Follet, birthplace unspecified, French film editor

John S. Dorsey, Ventura, California, production manager

Kevin Allison, Cincinnati, Ohio, actor

Michael Cavadias, Santa Cruz, California, actor

Nailea Norvind, Mexico City, actress

Philip R. Garrett, Springfield, Ohio, lecturer/special effects guy/and then some

Rachel Reenstra, Saugatuck, Michigan, actress

Saskia Linssen, Venlo, The Netherlands, Playboy playmate

Scott Yaphe, Montreal, Quebec, actor

Tarita Virtue, Port of Spain, Trinidad, actress

Wiebe van der Vliet, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, film and sound editor

Yuma Nakamura, Tokyo, Japan, actress

I like this guy, just because his resume seems to suggest that he intends to try his hand at every possible job related to making a movie before he’s through.

Be that as it may, I’m making Today’s Winner the versatile Tarita Virtue. Here is every single role she’s ever played, in chronological order:

Real Estate Agent

Dancer

International Traveler

Sexy Traveler

Bar Trivia Contestant

Awards Ceremony [sic]

Beautiful Woman

Doctor

Beautiful Bikini Girl

Model

VIP Guest

Hot Nurse

Fan

Herself

Gorgeous Actress

Alisha (only character she’s played who rates a name)

Brazilian Drug Lord’s Girlfriend

Hot Woman On Treadmill

Hot woman on treadmill indeed.