Robert Diggs, better known by his stage names RZA and Bobby Digital, is an American music producer, multi-instrumentalist, author, rapper, actor, director, composer and screenwriter. A prominent figure in hip-hop, RZA is a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan and its de facto leader. He is a cousin of GZA and late band-mate Ol’ Dirty Bastard. RZA has produced almost all of Wu-Tang Clan’s albums as well as many Wu-Tang solo and affiliate projects. In addition to the Wu-Tang Clan and his solo releases, RZA was also a founding member of the horrorcore hip-hop group Gravediggaz where he used the name the RZArector. He has acted in numerous movies and TV series, including Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999), Coffee and Cigarettes (2003) and American Gangster (2007). He has also written, arranged and/or produced music for more than 40 film soundtracks. RZA directed, co-wrote and starred in The Man with the Iron Fists (2012). He was born on July 5, 1969.
GZA – No. 909
Gary Grice, better known by his stage names GZA and the Genius, is an American rapper and songwriter. A founding member of the hip-hop group, the Wu-Tang Clan, GZA is known as the group’s “spiritual head,” being both the oldest and the first within the group to receive a record deal. He has appeared on his fellow Clan members’ solo projects, and has maintained a successful solo career since the release of his critically acclaimed solo album Liquid Swords (1995). An analysis of GZA’s lyrics found that he has the second-largest vocabulary in hip-hop music, behind Aesop Rock. GZA was born on August 22, 1966.
Awesome Baby – No. 908
Awesome Baby is the unholy combination of a baby’s head on the body of an octopus—plus the baby has a mohawk, a Fu Manchu mustache and sunglasses. It’s difficult to explain exactly how this character arose in my household, but I can say that it was created piecemeal over many days by my two-year-old daughter Ramona. My wife Heidi and I regularly draw pictures for Ramona at her request, often on her Fisher-Price magnetic doodler. We have drawn countless sea creatures, including octopuses and squids, as well as human babies and many other things. At some point, and in some order, my daughter became very interested in mustaches, sunglasses and different hairstyles. Eventually, her combined requests consistently guided us to create the monstrous creature she refers to as Awesome Baby, who is mostly orange (pronounced “ohn-mo” by Ramona, despite her linguistic advances). She loves him so much.
Update: Heidi posted pen-and-ink illustrations of Awesome Baby and Baby Margot on her Tumblr blog.
Baby Margot – No. 907
Margot is my two-year-old daughter Ramona’s favorite baby doll. This 9.5-inch Babi Corolle doll was a gift from my dad. As a Corolle product, the doll’s given (slave) name is Miss Grenadine’s Heart. She has a soft body and wears a sewn-on raspberry-colored dress with an embroidered heart and a lavender collar. She also wears sewn-on lavender shoes and a raspberry-colored cap. Her face is vanilla-scented, which I have come to believe teaches children cannibalism, because it smells delicious. Also, Ramona conceives of “Margot” as a type of person, rather than a specific individual. Hooded cartoon characters, other dolls, and sometimes even humans fall into the category of “Margot” and are differentiated by their color (e.g., Blue Margot, Pink Margot). But this is the original Margot.
Margaret Hamilton – No. 906
Margaret Hamilton is a computer scientist, systems engineer and business owner. She was Director of the Software Engineering Division of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, which developed on-board flight software for the Apollo space program. In 1969, in a critical moment of the Apollo 11 mission, Hamilton’s team’s work prevented an abort of landing on the moon. She was 32 years old when the Apollo Lunar Module landed on the moon while running her code. She designed software robust enough to handle buffer overflows and cycle-stealing, which was instrumental in the success of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Hamilton is also credited with coining the term “software engineering.” In 1986, she became the founder and CEO of Hamilton Technologies, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The company was developed around the Universal Systems Language, based on her paradigm of Development Before the Fact (DBTF) for systems and software design. Hamilton was born on August 17, 1936.
Del the Funky Homosapien – No. 905
Teren Delvon Jones, better known as Del the Funky Homosapien, is an American underground hip-hop artist from Oakland, California. In 1991, with the help of his cousin Ice Cube, Del released his first solo album, I Wish My Brother George Was Here, at the age of 18. In 2000, Del released his fourth solo album, Both Sides of the Brain, as well as the rap space-opera Deltron 3030, which was a collaborative work with artists Dan the Automator and Kid Koala. Del also collaborated with virtual trip-hop group Gorillaz on two songs on their debut album, including the hit “Clint Eastwood.” Since 2008, Del has released seven albums, including last year’s free LP Iller Than Most (2014). He was born on August 12, 1972.
Green Lantern – No. 904
Green Lantern is the name of a number of fictional superheroes appearing in American comic books published by DC Comics. They fight evil with the aid of rings that grant them a variety of extraordinary powers. The first Green Lantern character, Alan Scott, was created in 1940 during the initial popularity of superheroes. Alan Scott usually fought common criminals in New York City with the aid of his magic ring. In 1959, to capitalize on the booming popularity of science fiction, the Green Lantern character was reinvented as Hal Jordan, an officer for an interstellar law enforcement agency known as the Green Lantern Corps. Additional members of this agency, all of whom call themselves Green Lanterns, were introduced over time.
Mata Hari – No. 903
Margaretha MacLeod, better known by the stage name Mata Hari, was a Frisian exotic dancer and courtesan who was convicted of being a spy and executed by firing squad in France under charges of espionage for Germany during World War I. The idea of an exotic dancer working as a lethal double agent using her powers of seduction to extract military secrets from her many lovers made Mata Hari an enduring archetype of the femme fatale. Her life inspired multiple films, including Mata Hari (1931) starring Greta Garbo, which further popularized the Mata Hari legend. Mata Hari was born on August 7, 1876 and died on October 15, 1917.
Elliott Smith – No. 902
Elliott Smith was an American singer-songwriter and musician. His primary instrument was the guitar, though he was also proficient with piano, clarinet, bass guitar, drums and harmonica. Smith lived much of his adult life in Portland, Oregon, and began his solo career in 1994. He rose to mainstream prominence when his song “Miss Misery“—included in the soundtrack for the film Good Will Hunting (1997)—was nominated for an Oscar in 1998. Smith suffered from depression, alcoholism and drug dependence, and these topics often appear in his lyrics. At age 34, he died in Los Angeles from two stab wounds to the chest, likely self-inflicted. At the time of his death, he was working on his sixth studio album, From a Basement on the Hill, which was posthumously completed and released in 2004. Smith was born on August 6, 1969 and died on October 21, 2003.
My wife Heidi, a native Oregonian, is a big Elliott Smith fan. I also have a great appreciation for his music, but I think she loves him more. My favorite Smith song is “Needle in the Hay.” In unrelated news, yesterday our daughter Ramona turned two years old. We had a little family pizza party, with vegetarian pizza and two candles stuck into homemade strawberry shortcake (though we substituted chocolate brownie mini flax muffins for the shortcake). It was the best.
Louis Armstrong – No. 901
Louis Armstrong, nicknamed Satchmo or Pops, was an American jazz trumpeter, singer and one of the pivotal and most influential figures in jazz music. Coming to prominence in the 1920s, Armstrong was a foundational influence in jazz, shifting the focus of the music from collective improvisation to solo performance. With his instantly recognizable gravelly voice, Armstrong was an influential singer, perhaps most famous for “What a Wonderful World.” Renowned for his charismatic stage presence and voice almost as much as for his trumpet-playing, Armstrong’s influence extends well beyond jazz music. Armstrong was one of the first truly popular African-American entertainers whose skin color was secondary to his music in an America that was severely racially divided. An active musician for over 50 years, he recorded numerous albums, including two with Ella Fitzgerald. Armstrong was born on August 4, 1901 and died on July 6, 1971.
Note: Interestingly, Louis Armstrong has a major tennis stadium named in his honor. Louis Armstrong Stadium, located in New York City’s Flushing Meadows Corona Park, is one of the U.S. Open venues. Armstrong lived nearby until his death. This year’s U.S. Open begins on August 31.
Don Hertzfeldt – No. 900
Don Hertzfeldt is an American writer, animator and independent filmmaker. He is the creator of many animated films, including World of Tomorrow (2015), It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012), The Meaning of Life (2005) and the Academy Award-nominated Rejected (2000). His films have received over 200 awards and have been presented around the world. Seven of Hertzfeldt’s films have competed at the Sundance Film Festival, a festival record. He is also the only filmmaker to have won the Sundance Film Festival’s Grand Jury Prize for Short Film twice. Hertzfeldt primarily supports his work through self-distribution and has refused all advertising work. He lives in Austin, Texas, and was born on August 1, 1976.
The 8-bit representation I have selected for Don Hertzfeldt is the fluffy guy from his short Rejected (you know, the “My anus is bleeding!” character). I wouldn’t celebrate my 900th pixel art character of this project (and Hertzfeldt’s birthday) any other way. If you haven’t yet done so, you should definitely rent World of Tomorrow for $3.99 from Vimeo On Demand; it’s only 16 minutes long. I watched World of Tomorrow almost every day in April. It’s that good. Hertzfeldt also recently launched a Kickstarter campaign to release a limited edition collection of his works on Blu-ray, so you can pick that up too until August 15.
Winnie-the-Pooh – No. 911
Winnie-the-Pooh, also called Pooh Bear, is a fictional anthropomorphic teddy bear created by English author A. A. Milne. The first collection of stories about the character was the book Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). This was followed by The House at Pooh Corner (1928) and two children’s verse books. All four volumes were illustrated by E. H. Shepard. In the 1940s, Agnes Brush created the first plush dolls with Pooh in his red shirt. Rights to Winnie-the-Pooh were first licensed to Walt Disney in 1961. Disney has released numerous animated productions starring Pooh and related characters, including theatrical featurettes, television series, and direct-to-video films, as well as theatrical feature-length films.
A stuffed Pooh Bear from my 1980s childhood is one of my daughter’s favorite toys. She also believes that old Pooh and Baby Margot are some kind of inseparable team. It’s sweet. I am often reminded of the final passage of On the Road by Jack Kerouac: “So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, and all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out, and don’t you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all the rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.”