What’s My Name?

This Day in History - April 18 Birthdays

The five self-describing historical figures below were all born on April 18. Can you name them and place their birth years in chronological order? (Hint: the five people are in alphabetical order by surname.) Answers below.

• “I've been reviewing music, all types, since the 1960s, for many publications, but mostly for The Village Voice, where I worked for 37 years. I don’t know anything about music, which ought to be a damaging admission but isn’t... The fact is that pop writers in general shy away from such arcana as key signature and beats to the measure... I used to confide my worries about this to friends in the record industry, who reassured me. They didn’t know anything about music either. The technical stuff didn’t matter, I was told. You just gotta dig it.”
• “I was a defense lawyer who took on several high profile cases in the early 20th century, one so infamous I was eventually portrayed, under a different name, by Spencer Tracy! To keep the jury focussed as my summations went on and on, I devised the trick of lighting a cigar that had been previously pierced by some piano wire. The jury rubes were so amazed that the ashes stayed on the cigar that they never stopped listening!”
• “My big break was getting added to the cast of SCTV in their third season and creating hosers Bob & Doug McKenzie because the show was now on CBC and they wanted more Canadian content. This caught fire and we even put them in a movie. After SCTV ended, I was busy with movie roles in Ghostbusters, Spaceballs, and Honey, I Shrunk The Kids. I stopped to raise my kids and haven’t managed to get back to it yet, but it might happen soon.”
• “I was the host of the Tonight Show for about 35 minutes until Jay Leno decided that 10pm wasn‘t his best timeslot. Before, I had followed David Letterman in hosting NBC’s Late Night show for sixteen years, and afterwards I hosted my own show on TBS for another eleven years. Not bad for the weird-looking guy nobody thought would ever last!”
• “I was born in Budapest and made my way through London to the USA composing film scores, nearly a hundred of them. Hitchcock and I and David Selznick fought constantly over my score to Spellbound, which won me an Oscar. And yet the theme I am most famous for was not even noticable when first heard in cinemas: a four-note bass line underlying some terrifying music in the opening scene of The Killers was re-worked and brought to the fore by another composer to become the familiar theme to the TV show Dragnet! My score for Ben-Hur, featuring themes for each character, was one of the longest ever composed and won me another Oscar.”

318 tables at the end of Day Six (Saturday), 36.2% of the 2018 total.
In 2025, there were 696½ tables to this point at the fall regional in Whistler.
In October 2023 here, there were 380½ tables to this point.
In April 2022 here, there were 374 tables to this point.
For full details, check out the Table Counts page!

Bridge clubs and tournaments throughout the ACBL are struggling with returning to live play, so comparing this tournament’s attendance to one before the pandemic is not really fair. We'll hope to get around 60% of the 2018 attendance, making the target number 571 tables this time — but perhaps we will be pleasantly surprised!

(The clues are above).

• Clarence Darrow (1857 - 1938) was the American defense attorney who took on several high-profile cases in the early 20th century.
• Miklós Rózsa (1907 - 1995) was the Hungarian-born film score composer whose background theme in the bass for the movie The Killers became the four-note introduction to Dragnet.
• Robert Christgau (born 1942) is an American music critic and one of the first to write about rock and roll and other modern styles.
• Rick Moranis (born 1953) is the SCTV add-on who became famous as “hoser” Bob McKenzie, and appeared in many major films in the 1980s and 1990s before leaving to raise his children.
• Conan O’Brien (born 1963) was the host of the Tonight Show until Jay Leno decided 10pm wasn't for him, but had longer tenure than anyone in late night before and after.

The German sub-headline at the top of the page, “Diamanten Brechen Bei Diesem Turnier Immer Stark...” translates to “Diamonds are always breaking badly at this tournament,” which was the desperate and infamous excuse given to the Committee by a pair accused of cheating in an European tournament two decades ago. Dummy had looked into a defender’s hand and then signalled to declarer in several obvious ways that his screenmate had three trumps. Declarer read the signal and made the anti-percentage play needed to make the slam, defending his strategy with several poor excuses leading up to this bizarre final argument, which made the Committee’s decision easy!   Back to top.