February 14 has a very special place in our hearts at WHYY because it is the birthday of three of our favorite people around here. Let’s all wish a very happy birthday to Terry, Dave and Marty!

(For those of you who may not know Marty Moss-Coane, she’s the wonderful host of our local news show, Radio Times.)

A few weeks ago, our guest host and veteran local reporter, Dave Davies, interviewed Pennsylvanian Republican State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe, prime sponsor of the state’s voter ID law, which is now under court challenge.

Here’s an update from Dave:

When I asked Metcalfe if he believed that in-person voter fraud was really occurring in the state, he said it was, and cited the case of another legislator who’d said in floor debate that his vote had been stolen by someone who went to his polling location and voted in his place.

After the interview I called the lawmaker Metcalfe mentioned, State Rep. Bernie O’Neill. It eventually emerged that his vote hadn’t been stolen, and he’d felt pressured into exaggerating his story by Republicans anxious to get the voter ID law passed.

You can read more on Dave’s blog here and then here. And you can listen to the Fresh Air interview with Metcalfe and read the clarification posted on NPR.

Here’s a gem from behind-the-scenes at Fresh Air. I’ve been reading The Cop Who Would Be King: The Honorable Frank Rizzo, on loan from Fresh Air contributor and veteran local reporter Dave Davies, and learning a lot about the way politics worked in Philadelphia decades ago. When he showed me this Philadelphia Inquirer photo of the former police commissioner and mayor this morning, I couldn’t resist sharing.

Can you spot Dave in this photo from 1987?

Just a little shout out to Dave Davies who is doing an excellent job guest hosting this week while Terry is on vacation. Above: the other Dave Davies.

(Source: dedicatedfollowerofrock)

Happy Birthday Terry Gross, Dave Davies, and Marty Moss-Coane!!!!

Groomsmen Cake (by RainieAnne)

It’s like a paradox. I’m a fighter but yet, I’m so fearful. I don’t fight back and I don’t tell anyone. I don’t confront it. So I lived with those periods for 30-some years but I remember too, that when I drank heavily, when my emotions were not as stable, I would cry, sob and the pain — it felt good. I felt embarrassed but it felt good because I released some of those memories or that poison that was in my stomach.

— In a new autobiography, The Big Fight, Sugar Ray Leonard details his own struggles with rage, addiction, sexual abuse and depression. Leonard talks with Fresh Air’s Dave Davies about how he battled these obstacles and went from a shy kid growing up around Washington, D.C., to a hugely successful boxer.

Audio is now up for Dave Davies’ interview with Marc Kaufman about astrobiology and the search for life in the universe. Enjoy!

2/14: Happy Birthday Terry Gross! Happy Birthday Dave Davies! (photo of Carl Kasell taken at Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me a few years ago)

Six people — five men and a woman — approached a whitewashed house in the postcard-pretty village of Jenins in eastern Switzerland. Glancing cautiously up and down the narrow, darkened street, two members of the team walked to the door while the others hung back. They knew that no one was home. The owner was a few miles away, just across the border in Liechtenstein. One of the men pulled out a leather pouch and extracted a slender piece of metal. He slipped the metal into the lock and gently wiggled it deeper into the mechanism.

— When Real Life Imitates Dan Brown: Douglas Frantz, describing a CIA break-in to a home filled with nuclear moles, in Fallout:The True Story of the CIA’s Secret War on Nuclear Trafficking. He’s on the show today, explaining why he thinks that the United States should have acted to breakup an international nuke network much sooner — and when they did, it was too little, too late.

Ryan Gosling On Blue Valentine’s initial NC-17 rating: “I was very confused. It seems like I don’t really understand this rating system. I was told it’s because my character performs oral sex on his wife, and I thought, ‘There’s plenty of movies with men receiving oral sex from women with R ratings.’ It seemed like a double standard.”

Client 9 filmmaker Alex Gibney on the subject of his film, Eliot Spitzer: “It’s hard to imagine that he didn’t think he would get caught in some way. He knew very clearly that he had some very, very powerful enemies who wanted him to fall — and [paying for sex] was courting danger in the most extreme way possible.”

jimmypage:

Young Michael Caine, the height of late-1960s cool.

Actor Michael Caine on Fresh Air.

Dave Davies, rocking the Bride of Frankenstein head wear.

Author Mark Feldstein, on how White House operatives discussed assassinating journalist Jack Anderson for his investigative reporting about scandals surrounding President Nixon:  “They actually conducted surveillance. They followed him from his work to his house. They staked out his house. They looked at it for vulnerabilities … [and dicussed] how they could plant poison in his aspirin bottle. They talked about how they could spike his drink and they talked about smearing LSD on his steering wheel so that he would absorb it through his skin and die in a hallucination-crazed auto crash.” (Photo: AP Photo)