Man Celebrates 96th Birthday by Accidentally Eating Rat Cake

Do you like cake? Are you one of those people who never got over childhood birthday parties and the sweet, smoky smell of snuffed candles mingling with buttercream icing? If you murmured "yes" to your computer, then the next sentence you read will horrify you and quite possibly turn you into a PIE person. An old…
Here's the Thing About Having a Birthday On or Near Christmas
In 1985, my father ate Christmas dinner at the Waffle House. That's because I was born a week ahead of schedule, on December 24. But being born is pretty much the one time a Christmas baby gets to overshadow the omnipresent holiday and, consequently, I am completely befuddled by birthdays as a cultural institution.
Sunday Sign-Off: Lily Tomlin Turns 74
Lily Tomlin turns 74 today, and though we might watch a hilarious clip of Lily Tomlin giving Martin Sheen the business on the West Wing, or of Lily Tomlin giving Candice Bergen the business on Murphy Brown, or of Lily Tomlin giving Keith Carradine the eye business in Nashville, this bit from A Prairie Home Companion…
Why Not Celebrate Your 45th Birthday With a 45-Person Gang Bang?
On my 19th birthday, I spent several hours driving aimlessly around Albuquerque in a blue 1982 Dodge Ram listening to Jimmy Eat World on a Discman before I got lost in the South Valley and stopped to buy cigarettes, which I proceeded smoked so greedily that I threw up in a gravel parking lot. I was a virgin. The…
Why Is It So Hard to Celebrate Your Birthday With Black Barbie?
It took Mattel decades to introduce and widely distribute black Barbies, and the company still advertises its line with dolls as blue-eyed and flaxen-haired as a neo-Nazi child (see above.) Now, Harlem mother Karen Braithwaite is leading a group of 14 Harlem moms and thousands of others who have signed a Change.org…
A Whopping 80% of Centenarians Are Women
80% of the 53,364 people age 100 and older are women, according to the 2010 Census. Is it because women can deal with age-related diseases better than men, as some studies suggest? Maybe not, because men who do survive to 100 function better than women; the Census found that men were more likely to be living with…
Google's latest doodle celebrates the 197th birthday of world's first computer programmer Lady Ada Lovelace.
This Is the Worst Birthday Card You Could Possibly Buy a 13-Year-Old Girl
Is there a special soon-to-be teenage girl in your life? You could celebrate her coming of age by buying her something from our "budding feminists" gift guide. OR, conversely, you could give her this card to remind her that she lives in a culture where women are judged harshly on the value of their body even before…
The Best Part About Living to 107 Is the Fancy Birthday Party
Juliana Koo is about to be 107, which means that she was born when Russia's last emperor was mucking his way through a war with the Japanese and Theodore Roosevelt's mustache was the U.S. president. On Sunday, according to the New York Times, her family threw her a preemptive 107th birthday party at the Pierre Hotel…
Guess Who's 40 And Aging Gracefully: Happy Birthday, Title IX!
One could argue that it started with Little League. In 1950, a 12-year-old girl named Kathryn Johnston asked her mother to cut off her braids, adopted the nickname "Tubby" and pretended to be a boy in order to go out for the Corning King's Dairy team in upstate New York. She made the cut, and eventually confessed to…
