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.