A Face Only a Mother Could Love

Happy birthday to one of the NBA’s greatest defenders and rebounders of all time and probably it’s most unusual former player: Dennis Rodman. I loved “The Worm” back when he was just playing basketball and not going insane. I was enthralled with how hard he played and the abandon that he showed chasing down loose balls. I used to try and play as hard as he did. *Sigh*

Too bad he’s a little unstable… He really has an interesting back story. I have a couple of articles from Sports Illustrated, one from his days as a Detroit Piston and another from the time he’d just joined the San Antonio Spurs. They show a very different Dennis Rodman than the current version. He turns 46 today. His hoop bio is available at NBA.com’s Hoopedia.

Happy 57th birthday to Stevie Wonder, and happy 41st (!) birthday to Darius Rucker, the lead singer for Hootie and the Blowfish.

In other music-related birthday news, Ritchie Valens of “La Bamba” fame would have been 66 today if he hadn’t died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. Valens was 17 when he died along with Buddy Holly and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson on February 3, 1959. That day is known as “The Day the Music Died,” and is said to have inspired Don McLean’s song “American Pie.” The biggest trivia nugget out of all of this is that I actually know where Clear Lake, Iowa is, and I’ve been to it. Multiple times.

DYK? Four-hundred years ago today, the Jamestown colony was founded and the domination of Anglo-Saxons on the North American continent began.

P.S. - Happy Mother's Day.