Leapers & More

According to The Atlantic magazine, in 2016 there were 187,000 Americans who celebrated birthdays on February 29th. Leap year babies are also known as leapers or leaplings. Here are folks born on this day: Antonio Sabato Jr., Ja Rule, Tony Robbins, Jimmy Dorsey, Gioachino Rossini and the late Dinah Shore.

I’m not a fan of horror movies that kill off a number of attractive young people, so I assume I added Countdown (2019) to my watch list because it had grown very short. It owes a lot to franchises such as Scream and Final Destination. It does add a new wrinkle, an app that predicts the length of a person’s life. When a young nurse downloads it and discovers she doesn’t have long to live, she fights like hell to discover the origin of the terror. Will she survive or will the ending set up a second installment? It’s middle of the road horror, strictly for fans of the genre. It was a sleeper hit at the box office, returning $47 million worldwide against a budget of just $6.5 million. That should guarantee writer/director Justin Dec more work. He had previously been at the helm of only shorts. 13,000+ users at IMDb have rated Countdown, forging to a consensus of 5.3 on a scale of ten. Here’s the star, Elizabeth Lail, in character:

Some stories bring tears to the eyes. Here’s one from foxnews.com, edited by yours truly: Anna-Mary Barnett’s son, Jerry, was five in 1965 when a babysitter she didn’t know well disappeared with him. She was a teenage mom at the time. A few years later he wound up in foster care in Delaware, abandoned by his kidnapper. His last name was listed as Thomas. For years his birth mom has asked agencies for help in finding him, to no avail. Jerry’s son, Damon, took a DNA test for a website and discovered he had a cousin — and grandmother in Kentucky, and the miraculous reunion took place. Here are mother and son:

There’s wasn’t much sun today and there were snow flurries in the air as I was breaking down the floating book shop. My thanks to the lovely woman who over-compensated me for audio books by Nora Roberts and Nicholas Sparks, and to the woman who bought a cook book; and to the two gentlemen who each purchased a book in Russian; and to whoever downloaded Vito’s Day to Kindle.

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