March 1 in GenX history: ‘Poker!? I hardly know her!’ …

March 1 — OTD in GenX history, if you play your cards right …

If you’re heading to a casino to celebrate a birthday, make sure Phil Ivey (1976) isn’t sitting at your poker table. Ivey turns 45 today, and with 10 World Series of Poker bracelets and 31 final tables, he’s considered one of the best players in the world. And to think, it all started with friendly games with co-workers at a telemarketing firm where he worked in the late ’90s.

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Andrew Breibart (1969) passed away of a heart attack OTD in 2012. His death capped a relatively short media career in which he’d helped launch Huffington Post and The Drudge Report. Known as a conservative media figure, he began his political life as a liberal until, he cited, the confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas in 1991. He went on to found Breitbart.com/.tv site in 2007. It initially contained links to stories by AP, Reuters, AFP, Fox News, PR Newswire, and U.S. Newswire, adding commentary later. Breitbart will be praised by conservatives and condemned by liberals, but observers such as Nick Gillespie wrote for CNN that Breitbart’s media legacy benefits “ the conservatives at Drudge, the liberals at HuffPo, the leftists at DailyKos, the libertarians at Reason. It’s all of us and Breitbart helped create and grow a series of do-it-yourself demonstration projects through which we can all speak more loudly and more fully.”

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“Iran’s so far away.” Especially given the news cycle at the time, that may be how a lot of us first heard the quintessential ’80s song “I Ran So Far Away” by Flock of Seagulls, which dropped OTD in 1982. They recorded the song after hearing one similar at Eric’s Club, a watering hole they frequented in Liverpool, and also were inspired by a poster they saw there of a couple running away from a flying saucer. The song tells the standard story we’ve all heard about a man who’s “running away” from his feelings for a woman … until they both get abducted by aliens.