Friday, May 8, 2015

Birthday posts made difficult

Whenever I couldn't think of anything to blog about, I'd go to IMDb and look at the list of people born on this day. To wit, I would go to a link like http://www.imdb.com/date/05-08/births, where it would give a nice more-or-less text list (well, each name is a link to the person's IMDb page) of people born on the given day; I think everybody can figure out what part to edit to get whatever given day one is looking up.

Unfortunately, I had to keep that bookmarked because the original IMDb link that had given a nice text list was screwed up already back in February 2010. But now even the sort of page I described above is gone. I hadn't looked up birthdays since doing a post on Gregory Ratoff two and a half weeks ago, and in the meantime things have changed. Even the link I mentioned above leads to Most popular people born on May 8, with only 50 people on a page. Also, on the default page, sorted by "Starmeter" (whatever the hell that is), there's no mention of the year of birth. To get that, you have to click on the "Birth Date" link at the top. Even then, you can still onlyi get 50 names on a page.

You can, however, sort by height, because that's just so important. Yes, I know there is one movie out there with the cast listed in order of height, The Bed-Sitting Room, but really. There doesn't seem to be any convenient way to get to, say, people born on this day in the 1930s, who are going to be somewhere in the middle of the list of all people born on this day.

Are the simple, non-bloated text list pages available anywhere on the IMDb site? If not, damn you IMDb.

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