May 24 is the 144th day of the year (145th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 221 days remaining until the end of the year.
Jayne Mansfield (born Vera Jayne Palmer; April 19, 1933 – June 29, 1967) was an American film, television and theater actress. In February 1955, she became one of the early Playmates. Keeping her first husband's last name, Mansfield worked in Hollywood and on Broadway. A leading sex symbol during the late 1950s, she was one of the original blonde bombshells. Mansfield starred in several popular Hollywood films which emphasized her platinum-blonde hair, hourglass figure and cleavage-revealing costumes. 20th Century Fox signed a six-year contact with Mansfield to replace Marilyn Monroe as their resident blonde sex symbol. Throughout her career, she was compared by the media to Monroe and another sex symbol, Mamie Van Doren. Mansfield was a Playboy Playmate of the Month and appeared in several issues of the magazine.
Although many people have never seen her movies, Jayne Mansfield remains, long after her death, one of the most recognizable icons of 1950s celebrity culture. Her statuesque figure (she claimed dimensions of 40-21-35), her unique sashaying walk, and her breathy baby talk made history. "From 1955 until the early 1960s, Mansfield reigned as Hollywood's gaudiest, boldest D-cupped B-grade actress" and was known as "the working man's Monroe".
Martin Gabel (June 19, 1912 – May 22, 1986) was an American actor, film director and film producer.
Gabel was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Ruth (née Herzog) and Israel Gabel, who was a jeweler. He married Arlene Francis on May 14, 1946, and they had a son named Peter Gabel, former president of New College of California.
Gabel's most noted work was as narrator and host of the May 8, 1945 CBS radio broadcast of Norman Corwin's epic dramatic poem On a Note of Triumph, a commemoration of the fall of the Nazi regime in Germany and the end of World War II in Europe. The broadcast was so popular that the CBS, NBC, Blue and Mutual networks broadcast a second live production of the program on May 13. The Columbia Masterworks record label subsequently published an album of the May 13 production. The production became the title focus of the Academy Award-winning short film A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin in 2005, the 60th anniversary year of the broadcast.
Gabel won the 1961 Tony Award for Best Supporting or Featured Actor (Dramatic) for Big Fish, Little Fish; he was also noted for his performances in the Broadway productions of Baker Street, in which he played Professor Moriarty; The Rivalry, in which he played Stephen A. Douglas. One of the original members of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, Gabel played Javert in the radio adaptation of Les Misérables, and he portrayed Cassius in the company's modern-dress production of Julius Caesar (1937).
Clinton Richard Dawkins, FRS, FRSL (born 26 March 1941), known as Richard Dawkins, is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford's Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008.
Dawkins came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centered view of evolution and introduced the term meme. In 1982 he introduced an influential concept into evolutionary biology, presented in his book The Extended Phenotype, that the phenotypic effects of a gene are not necessarily limited to an organism's body, but can stretch far into the environment, including the bodies of other organisms.
Dawkins is an atheist, a vice president of the British Humanist Association, and a supporter of the Brights movement. He is well known for his criticism of creationism and intelligent design. In his 1986 book The Blind Watchmaker, he argued against the watchmaker analogy, an argument for the existence of a supernatural creator based upon the complexity of living organisms. Instead, he described evolutionary processes as analogous to a blind watchmaker. He has since written several popular science books, and makes regular television and radio appearances, predominantly discussing these topics. In his 2006 book The God Delusion, Dawkins contends that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that religious faith is a delusion—"a fixed false belief." As of January 2010 the English-language version has sold more than two million copies and had been translated into 31 languages.
Webster Griffin Tarpley (born 1946) is an American historian, author, journalist, lecturer, and critic of US foreign and domestic policy. Tarpley maintains that the September 11 attacks were engineered by a rogue network of the military-industrial complex and intelligence agencies as a false flag operation. His writings and speeches describe a model of terror operations by a rogue network in the military/intelligence sector working with moles in the private sector and in corporate media, and locates such contemporary false flag operations in a historical context stretching back in the English speaking world to at least the Gunpowder Plot in England in 1605.
Tarpley was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1946. He received a BA degree summa cum laude in English and Italian from Princeton University in 1966. While a student at Princeton he became a member of Phi Beta Kappa, and was a Fulbright Scholar at University of Turin in Italy. Tarpley also obtained a MA degree in humanities from Skidmore College. As well as a Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America in History.