Today would have been Daniel Pearl’s 43rd birthday had it not been for a very nasty deed done to him.

As always, there are Daniel Pearl music days celebrated all over the world in his memory.   Among the dozens of events, composer Steve Reich’s Daniel Variations premiered this week in London.

And tonight in the U.S., HBO preimeres The Journalist and the Jihadi, about the lives of Pearl and the man behind his murder, Omar  Sheikh.   The New York Times ran a review of the documentary today and in it, this rather surprising filmi reference:

Mr. Pearl was not The Quiet American, but there is a Graham Greene moment in the film. Mr. Sheikh cockily chose a phony e-mail address, nobadmashee@yahoo.com. In the film Mr. Pearl’s close friend, Asra Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, says that badmash is an Urdu word for troublemaker, and when she saw it in Bashir’s e-mail address after Mr. Pearl’s disappearance, she knew instantly it was a trick.

“If he had watched enough Bollywood movies,” Ms. Nomani says ruefully, “he would have figured that out.”

And then, there’s all the ruckus in India as Brangelina run amok in an auto, in preparation for A Mighty Heart.