It's a happy 26th birthday to Canadian-born hockey enthusiast Elisha Cuthbert, who has survived a cougar on 24 and making House of Wax with Paris Hilton, and manages to stand a bit apart from her peer set, if chiefly because I have such fond memories of 2004's The Girl Next Door, an exceptional, funny and well-colored high school flick that died an unfortunate box office death. Last summer's Captivity was eye-gougingly terrible, but... well, not her fault. There's more culpability with The Quiet, on which Cuthbert took an associate producer credit. Move fast, Elisha — the Maxim fanboy window closes pretty definitively in a couple years, after the 24 big screen treatment.


It's also a 23rd birthday for Kaley Cuoco, who played the boy-crazy girl who drove TV dad John Ritter to distraction on 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, a show that always made me modestly uncomfortable for the barely concealed glee it seemed to take in brightly colored, flippant sexualization. Then again, maybe that was really the entire point. Something about that preening presentation and the half-hour laffer format don't usually work for me, though.