Saturday, March 8, 2008

 

Spotlight: What do Arthur, Night Shift, Tough Guys, The Spy Who Loved Me, You've Got Mail and Grace is Gone have in common? Carole Bayer Sager. Sager is the songwriter who wrote the lyrics to those and dozens of other hit songs, starting with The Mindbenders' "A Groovy Kind of Love" in 1966. Her lyrics have won an Oscar, a Grammy and two Golden Globe awards, and she's still going strong. Happy birthday to Carole Bayer Sager, who turns 61 today.

Quote: "Nobody does it better/Makes me feel sad for the rest." — Carole Bayer Sager, theme from The Spy Who Loved Me

Question of the Day: Who invented MTV?
Mike Nesmith (guitarist for The Monkees) is sometimes called "the stepfather of MTV" because he produced a half-hour pilot for a music video show to be called Pop Clips. More

Word of the day: commencement
The start or beginning. Also: a graduation ceremony.
The speeches at the commencement were very inspiring to the students. (© eSpindle Learning)

Holiday: International Women's Day

Today's History:

The Nelson Pillar After the Bomb

• Gnadenhutten massacre: nearly 100 Native Americans were murdered by militiamen during the American Revolution (1782)
• FBI: 9 men from the US Secret Service were moved to the Justice Department, forming the Bureau of Investigation — later to become the FBI (1909)
• The Nelson Pillar: Dublin's granite column topped with a statue of British hero Lord Nelson was destroyed by an IRA bomb (1966)

Today's Birthdays:

Lynn Redgrave

• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (1841-1935): Supreme Court justice known as "the Great Dissenter"
• Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932): author of The Wind in the Willows
• Otto Hahn (1879-1968): Nobel Prize-winning chemist and physicist
• Jim Bouton (69): baseball player who wrote Ball Four
• Lynn Redgrave (65): actor, Shine, The Jane Austen Book Club; other actors born on this date include Alan Hale, Jr. (1918-1990), Aidan Quinn (49), Freddie Prinze, Jr. (32) and James Van Der Beek (31)