May 25

It's slightly odd to be talking about this now, but anyway - the local newspaper used to have a feature, on the same page with the horoscopes - about which famous person you shared a birthday with. And every year, I got Mike Myers. It was very irritating - I wasn't overly fond of Mr Myers's brand of humour, so it wasn't something I'd brag about.

But now we have Wikipedia, and its tendency to make lists of everything, and so I find that the writers of that newspaper feature simply lacked imagination. From the May 25 page, a selection of the cool people with birthdays on that date:

• Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton - he of "the pen is mightier than the sword", and the infamous "it was a dark and stormy night" opening line which inspired two contests.
• Igor Sikorsky - pioneer of the modern helicopter.
• Sir Ian McKellen - famous actor how can you not have heard of him.
• Frank Oz - the puppeteer who plays Miss Piggy (and other characters) on The Muppet Show.
• Stan Sakai - creator of Usagi Yojimbo.
• Frank Klepacki - I admit I jumped when I saw this, because he composed several tracks for the Command & Conquer series of video games, including Hell March 2.

Also, May 25 is Geek Pride Day, because in 1977, that was the day the (real) first Star Wars film was released. Take that, newspaper section written by an underpaid journalist!