Happy birthday, Thomas Huxley

It is the birthday of English biologist Thomas Huxley (1825), who became a well-known advocate of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, earning him the nickname Darwin's Bulldog. He was self-trained and did early study on invertebrates, contributing to the wider understanding of relationships between various groups. Later, he studied vertebrates, including humans and apes. His study of contemporary birds and small dinosaurs led him to the theory that the birds evolved from dinosaurs. He advocated energetically for scientific education. Famously he debated with Anglican Bishop Samuel Wilberforce about humans being descended from apes. Other scientists also participated in the debate, too, but the Wilberforce-Huxley exchange was said to be the most heated. Huxley's grandson was author Aldous Huxley.

Happy birthday, William Inge

It is the birthday of writer William Inge (1913), whose drama Picnic (1953) won a Pulitzer Prize. The story is set on Labor Day in a small Midwestern town and concerns the loves and yearnings of several college-aged men and women. The characters were inspired by people who stayed at his mother's boarding house when he was a child. Despite its remarkable run on Broadway, its selection as best play by the New York Drama Critics Circle and its adaptation as a successful Hollywood movie, Inge never felt he fulfilled his original intentions with Picnic, so he reworked it. The result was Summer Brave, which was produced on Broadway in 1975, after his death. Inge also won an Oscar for his screenplay, Splendor in the Grass (1961). Among his best known plays are Come Back, Little Sheba (1950), Bus Stop (1955), and The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957). Inge wrote two novels, Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff (1970) and My Son is a Splendid Driver (1971).    

Happy birthday, lyricist Lorenz Hart

It is the birthday of Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart (1895), who teamed with composer Richard Rodgers, wrote songs that have become standards, including Mountain Greenery (1926), With a Song in My Heart (1929), The Lady is a Tramp (1937), Where or When (1937), My Funny Valentine (1937), Falling in Love with Love (1938), and Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered (1940). One of the most popular songs the team wrote was Blue Moon (1935). Hart wrote four sets of lyrics before it finally was successful. Under contract with MGM, he and Rodgers wrote the song for a 1934 movie called Hollywood Party but it was never recorded. Hart rewrote the lyrics twice more for other MGM movies. It was cut once and, with more new lyrics, flopped. Finally, as Blue Moon, it was released commercially and licensed to a radio program, Hollywood Hotel, as a theme song. After that it was featured in seven more MGM films and covered by numerous recording artists. Here is Nat King Cole's version.

Happy birthday, Joseph Heller

It is the birthday of writer Joseph Heller, (1923), whose satirical novel Catch-22 (1961) skewered bureaucratic inefficiency and absurd circular reasoning, and became an idiomatic English-language phrase representing a no-win situation. The novel was set during World War II and concerned a fictional bomber squad stationed off the coast of Italy and conducting bombing raids. The Catch-22 of the title referred to a non-existent military rule applied to justify bureaucratic actions. One key instance was a pilot who sought to be excluded from flying the missions because it was too dangerous and anybody who flew them would be crazy to do so. However, Catch-22 said that if the pilot was concerned for his own safety that proved he was rational and, therefore, was not too crazy to fly missions. At first, Heller called his book Catch 18, because the number 18 had special meaning in Judaism, which at first played a larger role in the novel. His agent thought it would be confused with Mila 18, Leon Uris's 1961 novel. Catch-11 was suggested but seemed to conflict with the 1960 movie Ocean's Eleven. Catch-17 wouldn't work because of the World War II movie Stalag 17 (1953). The publisher didn't think Catch-14 was a funny number. Catch-22, it was. It had a duplicated digit like 11 and the 2 represented the déja vu events in the book.