World Quality Day, so make it a good one
Birthdays for musician Neil Young (1945), author Naomi Wolf (1962), figure skater Tonya Harding (1970), actor Anne Hathaway (1982) and actor Ryan Gosling (1980)
Born in Ontario, Canada to parents Thomas, a paper mill salesman, and Donna, a secretary, Ryan Gosling grew up in a Mormon household.
“I wasn’t really Mormon, my parents were,” he told Belief Net. “My mom was really cool. She said, ‘This is an option, but this isn’t the only option. This is an idea, but this isn’t the only idea. You have to find your own truth.’ I never really could identify with it. There’s good things about going to church. [Being Mormon] socialized me at a young age. You have to pray in public, shake a lot of hands, talk in public, sing in church, stuff like that. It has definitely stayed with me.”
Gosling was bullied in school and often got into fights, landing him the nickname “Trouble,” according to The Guardian. He was suspended from school in the first grade after he brought steak knives to school and threw them at his classmates after watching the movie First Blood.
Eventually, his mom began home-schooling him after his parents divorced when he was 13.
“I was literally raised by my mother and my sister,” Gosling told The Independent. “And I just feel like I wouldn’t know how to think any other way. My sister was my best friend and my hero growing up.”
Anniversary of:
• the birthdays of artist Auguste Rodin (1840), founder of modern China Sun Yat-sen (1866) actress Grace Kelly (1929)
• Leon Trotsky being expelled from the Soviet Communist Party, paving the way for Joseph Stalin to consolidate complete power (1927)
• the first known photo of so-called Loch Ness Monster being taken by Hugh Gray (1933)
• Cyclone Bhola becoming the deadliest cyclone ever recorded after killing up to 500,000 in modern-day Bangladesh (1970)
