Today in History (April 24th):
1581: Birthdays: French Roman Catholic St. Vincent de Paul.
1704: The Boston News-Letter became the first American newspaper to be published on a regular basis.
1800: The U.S. Congress established the Library of Congress.
1815: Birthdays: English novelist Anthony Trollope.
1877: U.S. troops moved out of New Orleans, ending the North’s military occupation of the South following the Civil War.
1898: Spain declared war on the United States, beginning the Spanish-American War.
1904: Birthdays: U.S. artist Willem de Kooning.
1905: Birthdays: U.S. poet laureate Robert Penn Warren.
1934: Birthdays: Actor Shirley MacLaine.
1936: Birthdays: Actor Jill Ireland.
1940: Birthdays: Writer Sue Grafton.
1942: Birthdays: Singer, actor, director Barbra Streisand; Former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley.
1953: Birthdays: Actor Eric Bogosian.
1955: Birthdays: Actor Michael O’Keefe.
1964: Birthdays: Actro Cedric the Entertainer, born Cedric Antonio Kyles.
1981: IBM introduced its first personal computer.
1982: Birthdays: Singer Kelly Clarkson.
1986: The duchess of Windsor, Wallis Warfield Simpson, for whom England’s King Edward VIII gave up his throne, died in Paris at age 89.
1987: Genetically altered bacteria, designed to prevent frost damage, were sprayed on a California strawberry field in the first test of this biotechnology in nature.
1991: U.N. peacekeeping forces were deployed along the Kuwait-Iraq border. Freddie Stowers, a World War I corporal, was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor to become the first African-American to receive the highest medal for valor in combat.
1995: The Unabomber struck with a mail bomb that killed Gilbert Murray, president of the California Forestry Association, in Sacramento.
1996: The Palestinian National Council voted to drop its official commitment to the destruction of Israel.
1997: With ratification by the U.S. Senate, the United States became the 75th country to approve the Chemical Weapons Convention.
2003: North Korea announced it had nuclear weapons and had begun making bomb-grade plutonium.
2004: Greek Cypriot voters overwhelmingly rejected a U.N. plan for the reunification of the divided Mediterranean island.
2005: Benedict XVI was installed in Rome as the 265th Roman Catholic pope, promising to continue the policies of John Paul II.
2006: Three coordinated bomb blasts shattered part of the Egyptian resort town of Dahab, killing 30 people and injuring more than 115 others.
2007: Toyota overtook General Motors as No. 1 in global vehicle sales from January to March, largely because of increased demand for fuel-efficient cars.
2008: Iraq’s largest Sunni bloc, known as Tawafiq, rejoined Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s Cabinet after a yearlong boycott.
2009: At least 140 people were killed and 240 injured in a series of bombings in Baghdad over a two-day period. The South African ruling party, the African National Congress, won the country’s elections with 67 percent of the vote. Jacob Zuma became president.
2011: Upset over U.S. drone attacks against insurgents in their territory, Pakistanis staged a sit-in to block supplies for NATO forces in Afghanistan.
2012, Mitt Romney won Republican presidential primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
Quotes
“One who condones evils is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.” – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., civil-rights leader (1929-1968)
“Everyone has a talent. What is rare is the courage to nurture it in solitude and to follow the talent to the dark places where it leads.” – Erica Jong
“Co-existence
or no existence.”
– Piet Hein, poet and scientist (1905-1996)
Anthony Trollope (1815-1882) English writer:
“As to that leisure evening of life, I must say that I do not want it. I can conceive of no contentment of which toil is not to be the immediate parent.”
“Don’t let love interfere with your appetite. It never does with mine.”
“He must have known me if he had seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognize me by my face.”
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“I hold that gentleman to be the best-dressed whose dress no one observes.”
“Love is like any other luxury. You have no right to it unless you can afford it.”
“Marvelous is the power which can be exercised, almost unconsciously, over a company, or an individual, or even upon a crowd by one person gifted with good temper, good digestion, good intellects, and good looks.”
“No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about himself.”
“Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early.”
“The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade.”
“The satirist who writes nothing but satire should write but little – or it will seem that his satire springs rather from his own caustic nature than from the sins of the world in which he lives.”
“They are best dressed, whose dress no one observes.”
cormorant
PRONUNCIATION: (KOR-mur-unt; -muh-rant
MEANING: (noun)
1. Any species of Phalacrocorax, a genus of sea birds having a sac under the beak; the shag. Cormorants devour fish voraciously, and have become the emblem of gluttony. They are generally black, and hence are called sea ravens, and coalgeese.
2. A gluttonous, greedy, or rapacious person.
ETYMOLOGY: Cormorant comes from Old French cormareng, “raven of the sea,” from corb, “raven” (from Latin corvus) + marenc, “of the sea” (from Latin marinus, from mare, “sea”).
USAGE: “Characterizing himself as ‘a library cormorant,’ Bud’s appetite for books and other forms of reading material knew no bounds”
fillip
PRONUNCIATION: (FIL-ip)
http://wordsmith.org/words/fillip.mp3
MEANING:
(noun)
1. A stimulus.
2. A snap made by pressing a fingertip against the thumb and suddenly releasing it.
(verb tr.)
1. To stimulate or to incite to action.
2. To make a snap by a fingertip against the thumb.
ETYMOLOGY: Apparently of onomatopoeic origin. Earliest documented use: 1530.
USAGE: “Intel splashed out $884 million … to give its efforts in the embedded-chip market a fillip.” – Space Invaders; The Economist (London, UK); Jan 7, 2012.
Explore “fillip” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=fillip
flathat
PRONUNCIATION: (FLAT-hat)
http://wordsmith.org/words/flathat.mp3
MEANING: (verb intr.), To fly close to the ground.
ETYMOLOGY: From the allusion to a plane flying so low as to flatten a hat on someone’s head. Earliest documented use: 1940.
USAGE: “Those impromptu flights often took him only feet above the beach on Cumberland Island where he’d practice ‘touch-and-go’s and flathatting.” – Scott Keepfer; Record Still Stands After 75 Years; The Greenville News (South Carolina); Jun 24, 2007.
Explore “flathat” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=flat-hat
elan
PRONUNCIATION: (ay-LAHN*) *this syllable is nasal in French
http://wordsmith.org/words/elan.mp3
MEANING: noun: A combination of energy, enthusiasm, and style.
ETYMOLOGY: From French élan (enthusiasm), from élancer (to dart), from lancer (to throw), from Latin lancea (lance). Earliest documented use: 1880.
USAGE: “‘Margaret Whitlam was seldom afraid to speak her mind and she spoke it with elan and wit,’ John Robertson said.” Labor Party Forever Indebted to Margaret Whitlam; AAP (Australia); Mar 17, 2012.
Explore “elan” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=elan