born 2 August 1970

Angélica Rivera, Mexico City, actress

Caitlin McCarthy, Tampa, Florida, writer

Chainey Umphrey, Albuquerque, New Mexico, gymnast

Christopher Papastefanou, Göteborg, Sweden, actor

Daniel P. Shea, Lawrence, Massachusetts, short filmmaker

Elijah Alexander (died 24 March 2010), Fort Worth, Texas, NFL football player

James David Wall, Phoenix, Arizona, cinematographer

Jun Senoue, Matsushima, Japan, video game sound designer/composer

Kevin Smith, Red Bank, New Jersey, writer/director

Leo McHale, Scottsdale, Arizona, soap opera actor

Paisley Shaw, Vancouver, British Columbia, location manager

Tony Amonte, Hingham, Massachusetts, hockey player

Here’s my Kevin Smith rant:

I refuse to watch this man’s films. Every time I try, I can’t get past the uninventive invective, the digressive regression, the sticky residue of too much junk food. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy cursing, I don’t mind a shaggy dog story, and I could stand to lay off the snacks myself. But these movies – in my admittedly limited experience of bits and pieces of them – are like a form of junior high school overlaid on adulthood: torture, in other words.

I attended the star-studded premiere of Dogma at the New York Film Festival, in whatever year that was. I remember a few flashes of the scene: Salma Hayek’s dainty waist and immaculate cleavage; the protestors from the Catholic League out front (why bother?); the presence of all the film’s stars, except the one it would have been really great to see: Carlin.

What I remember most vividly was how natural, charming, and on his game Smith was during the question and answer session. The same could not be said for the movie, to put it charitably. People apparently people enjoy the Q&As enough that he’s done one in Carnegie Hall. That’s the basis of my grudging acknowledgement of Today’s Winner. Not the movies. This man needs to stop making movies and never resume.