Okay, I’m going to level with you folks, this headline was slightly misleading. The letter in question wasn’t written to THE Chris Farley, the famous fat dead comedian (whose poster I had on my wall for about 10 years), just a guy who happened to be named Chris Farley. Still, today is Henry Rollins’s 51st birthday, and Henry Rollins is awesome, and this letter is also awesome, ergo I REGRET NOTHING. The story goes, back in 1995, Rollins had to cancel a gig in Maryland due to rain. A couple jokers, Farley and Ken Meekins, sent Rollins an email from the contact form on his website, including some name-calling: “We put stuff like ‘Why did you have to cancel the show? Were you home eating soup with your mommy?’ I think we may have called him a ‘punk-ass bitch.’”

As we all know, the only person who might cancel a stormy show over soup is Glenn Danzig. And while Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig have been depicted as gay lovers in a comic book, there are a lot of things they don’t have in common. The following is Rollins’s even-handed but menacing response, sent via snail-mail to Farley and Meekins’ address, and addressed to the fake name they provided:

BOB. HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED. THE PROMOTER SETH HOROWITZ WAS NOT PREPARED FOR THE WEATHER EVEN WHEN HE PROMISED HE WOULD BE. BY THE TIME IT WAS FOR HELMET TO GO ON, THE POWER GENERATORS WERE SUBMERGED IN WATER. THE STAGE WAS MOSTLY METAL AND THE RISK OF BANDS & CREWS GETTING FRIED.
SETH REALLY BLEW IT FOR US. WE WERE THERE ALL DAY INTO THE NIGHT WAITING TO PLAY. IT WAS THE LAST SHOW OF THE TOUR WITH SAUSAGE & HELMET AND WE WERE ALL LOOKING FORWARD TO HITTING IT. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN #80 FOR THE YEAR.
TO LEAVE THAT PLACE W/O PLAYING SUCKED.
NEXT TIME YOU SEE ME, CALL ME WHAT YOU CALLED ME IN YOUR LETTER AND WE’LL SEE HOW IT GOES.

— HENRY ROLLINS

Yes, Henry Rollins writes in all caps. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? Anyway, long story short, Henry Rollins f*cking rules. Happy 51st, Henry, please don’t tear my arms off like a daddy long legs. Though let it be known, if I had to choose a way to go, that would probably be it.

[see the actual letter at LettersofNote]

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Completing the you’re-f*cking-old trifecta, J. Lo is in talks to play Carmen Sandiego, Dippin Dots (ice cream of the future) filed for bankruptcy, and today Ralph Macchio turned 50. Also? Karate Kid came out 27 years ago. You’re dying one second at a time! Cue montage! On the plus side, Ralph Macchio still looks pretty good. This was taken this year:

I don’t know what his anti-aging secret is, but I assume it’s the karate.

On Saturday, one of Hollywood’s most beloved child actors reminded the rest of us how old we are, as Jonathan Lipnicki celebrated his 21st birthday. Lipnicki, of course, played the adorably precocious Ray Boyd in 1997’s Jerry Maguire, telling the titular character (Tom Cruise) random facts like how much the human head weighs and that bees can smell fear. We believe it was also the last time that Renee Zellweger was able to open her eyes.

Hold on, I hate to be the party pooper, Jon… but it looks like someone misspelled your name on your cake. Oh man, that’s gotta be pretty embarrassing. Oh well, at least it’s not as depressing as Kirk Cameron’s birthday party, right? And besides, you’re a huge star and have appeared in… an episode of “Monk” since 2005. Yikes. Well, at least you have a movie coming out this year with… Edward Furlong. I guess we all have to start again somewhere.

In the meantime, let’s celebrate Jon’s milestone by watching him grow up all over again.

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Charles Bronson died in 2003, but today is his birthday, and in his honor, Roger Ebert posted a nice piece about his experiences with the man on his blog.  I’d sincerely urge you to read

Inexplicably, that sets Bronson talking “I’ve been trying to make it with girls for as long as I can remember,” he says. “I remember my first time. I was five and a half years old, and she was six. This was in 1928 or 1929. It happened at about the worst time in my life. We had been thrown out of our house . . .”

The house was in Ehrenfeld, known as Scooptown, and it was a company house owned by the Pennsylvania Coal and Coke Company. When the miners went out on strike, they were evicted from their homes, and the Buchinsky family went to live in the basement of a house occupied by another miner and his eight children. “This would have been the summer before I started school,” Bronson says. “I remember my father had shaved us all bald to avoid lice. Times were poor. I wore hand-me-downs. And because the kids just older than me in the family were girls, sometimes I had to wear my sisters’ hand-me-downs. I remember going to school in a dress. And my socks, when I got home sometimes I’d have to take them off and give them to my brother to wear into the mines.

“But, anyway, this was a Fourth of July picnic, and there was this girl, six years old. I gave her some strawberry pop. I gave her the pop because I didn’t want it; I had taken up chewing tobacco and I liked that better. I didn’t start smoking until I was nine. But I gave her the pop, and then we . . . hell, I never lost my virginity. I never had any virginity.” [via Ebert]

That’s right, Charles Bronson had it tougher than the boy named Sue, was having sex and chewing tobacco at age five, and was smoking by age nine.  I think my testicles just crawled back inside my abdomen to do puberty all over again, maybe this time it will take.  “I was five, and I had a mouth full of chaw. I spit a hunk of it out to go down on her, and I tell ya, it was the sweetest little six-year-old p*ssy I ever seen, before or since.  Smelled just like the fish I’d catch with my bare hands.  I remember it well because she kept complaining about my stubble…”

(German ad for Meatballs, which, according to Google Translate, translates literally to “Baby Bacon and Fleischklosschen.”  Thanks, makes perfect sense now.)

As you no doubt already learned from your Microsoft Outlook alerts, today is Bill Murray’s 60th birthday (he’s a Virgo!).  What you may not know is that 40 years ago today, he was caught at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport carrying 20 grand worth of pot bricks (enough to build a very fine weed house).

Blow out the candles on Bill Murray’s pot cake, 1970 Chicago Tribune article:

William Murray, 20, of 1930 Elmwood Dr., Wilmette, was standing in line waiting to board a plane for Denver at O’Hare International Airport yesterday when he jokingly told another passenger that he was carrying two bombs in his luggage.  A ticket agent didn’t think it was funny and called United States marshals.  They searched his luggage in vain for the two bombs but did find five bricks of marijuana, weighing two pounds each and valued at $20,000.  Chicago vice detectives had been waiting at the airport to arrest Murray because they had received a tip.  He was charged with possession of marijuana and will appear in Narcotics Court today. [via TheSmokingGun]

“No, no, officer, you have it all wrong.  What I said was, ‘This weed I’m carrying is the BOMB.’ I have some bomb-ass weed in my suitcase, you see.”

I like how they say he got arrested because he was joking about bombs, and then as a throwaway aside at the end, “Oh, and at the time, the cops were already waiting to arrest him because someone narc’d him out.”  BOOSH.  Double arrested.  Anyway, Murray, who had been a pre-med student at Regis University in Denver, was sentenced to five years probation.  He also quit school, starting him on the downward path toward a life of crime and poverty that continues to this very day.

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