Today in History (May 11th):
1854: Birthdays: Ottmar Mergenthaler, inventor of the Linotype typesetting machine.
1858: Minnesota became the 32nd state in the United States.
1862: The Confederate navy destroyed its iron-clad vessel Merrimac to prevent it from falling into the hands of advancing Union forces.
1888: Birthdays: Irving Berlin (1888-1989), American songwriter, b. Russia. Berlin’s surname was originally Baline. Of his nearly 1,000 songs, Alexander’s Ragtime Band (1911) was his first outstanding hit. In 1918, while he was in the army, he wrote, produced, and acted in Yip, Yip, Yaphank, which he rewrote in 1942 as This Is the Army. Berlin wrote songs for several of the Ziegfeld Follies and the Music Box Revue (1921-24) as well as the Broadway musicals As Thousands Cheer (1933), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), Miss Liberty (1949), Call Me Madam (1950), and Mr. President (1962). He was the composer of numerous film scores, and several of his stage musicals were filmed. Among his best-known songs are “God Bless America,””Easter Parade,””White Christmas,” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
1892: Birthdays: Dame Margaret Rutherford (1892-1972), actress, Born: 5/11/1892, Birthplace: London, England. Rutherford’s film career began in her middle years, and she soon built a reputation for playing the brainy spinster and the dotty British eccentric. Perhaps best known as the medium Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit (1946) and as the formidable Miss Jane Marple in the films Murder, She Said (1961), Murder at the Gallop (1963), Murder Most Foul (1964), and Murder Ahoy (1964), Rutherford also won an Oscar for her role in The VIPs (1963). Died: 5/22/1972
1894: The Pullman Strike began. Birthdays: Martha Graham (1894-1991), modern dancer, choreographer, Born: 5/11/1894, Birthplace: Allegheny, Pennsylvania. Pioneering dancer and choreographer who is credited with establishing the principals of modern dance. She danced with the Denishawn troupe (1919-23) and formed her own studio in New York City in 1926. Her angular and highly demanding dances include Primitive Mysteries (1931), Appalachian Spring (1944), and Rite of Spring (1984). She was married to choreographer Erick Hawkins from 1948 to 1954. Died: 4/1/1991
1904: Birthdays: Salvador Dali (1904-89), Spanish surrealist painter. At first influenced by futurism, in 1924 Dali came under the influence of Italian Chirico. By 1929 he had become a leader of surrealism. His precise style enhanced the nightmare effect of his paintings. Among his best-known works is Persistence of Memory (1931; Mus. of Modern Art, New York City). In 1940 Dali emigrated to the United States. He wrote The Secret Life of Salvador Dali (1942). Dali has also made surrealist ventures in films (e.g., Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien andalou, 1928), advertising, and the ballet. The Salvador Dali Museum, St. Petersburg, Fla., is devoted entirely to his works.
1910: Glacier National Park in Montana was created by an act of Congress.
1911: Birthdays: Comic actor Phil Silvers; Comic actor Winstead Sheffield Doodles Weaver.
1916: Birthdays: Camilo José Cela (1916-2002), Spanish novelist, short-story writer, and poet, b. Iria Flavia. Among the writers to emerge after the Spanish civil war, he won critical acclaim with the novel La familia de Pascual Duarte (1942, tr. The Family of Pascual Duarte, 1964). Its brutal realism and crudeness of language are characteristic of Cela’s style. These attributes are also evident in La colmena (1951; tr. The Hive, 1953), a powerful work detailing three days among the poor of Madrid. Cela was an extremely prolific author, but comparatively few of his works have been translated into English. These include the novels Mrs. Caldwell habla a su hijo (1953; tr. Mrs. Caldwell Speaks to Her Son, 1968), San Camilo, 1936 (1969, tr. 1991), and the autobiographical Mazurca para dos muertos (1988; tr. Mazurka for Two Dead Men, 1992). Cela is also noted for his vivid travel books, especially Viaje a la Alcarría (1948, tr. Journey to the Alcarria, 1964 and 1990), and for such nonfiction works as Diccionario secreto (1974), a compilation of colorful Spanish vulgarities, and De genes, dioses y tiranos (1981, tr. Of Genes, Gods and Tyrants, 1987), an examination of genetics and ethics. In all, he wrote 14 novels and 60 other volumes. Among Spain’s most celebrated 20th-century writers, Cela won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1989 and Spain’s highest literary award, the Cervantes Prize, in 1995.
1918: Birthdays: Richard Phillips Feynman, (1918-88), American Nobel laureate physicist, b. New York City, B.S. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1939, Ph.D. Princeton, 1942. From 1942 to 1945 he worked on the development of the atomic bomb. He taught (1945-50) at Cornell and became professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology in 1950. The Feynman diagram, proposed by him in 1949, shows the track of a particle in space and time and provides a clear means of describing particle interactions. Feynman also made significant contributions to the theories of superfluidity and quarks. In 1957 he and Murray Gell-Mann proposed the theory of weak nuclear force. Feynman shared the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics with Shinichiro Tomonaga and J. S. Schwinger for work leading to the establishment of the modern theory of quantum electrodynamics. He wrote the influential Feynman Lectures on Physics (commemorative issue, 3 vol., 1990), Feynman Lectures on Gravitation (1994), and Feynman Lectures on Computation (1996).
1920: Birthdays: Actor Denver Pyle.
1924: Karl Benz and Gottlieb merged their companies, forming Mercedes-Benz.
1927: Birthdays: Actor Bernard Fox; Satirist Mort Sahl.
1928: The first regularly scheduled television programs were begun by station WGY in Schenectady, N.Y.
1933: Birthdays: Louis Farrakhan (1933-), African-American religious leader, b. New York City, as Louis Eugene Walcott. A former calypso singer known as “The Charmer,” he joined the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims) in 1955, eventually becoming minister of the Harlem Temple after Malcolm X broke with the religious group. After Elijah Muhammad died and his son steered the Black Muslims toward Sunni Islamic practice, Farrakhan founded (1977) a reorganized Nation of Islam that adhered to the elder Muhammad’s teachings. Often denounced as anti-Semitic and antiwhite, Farrakhan has stridently criticized white Americans while emphasizing African-American self-improvement. In 1995 he was one of the chief organizers of the Million Man March, a day of renewal for African-American men in Washington, D.C. In 2000, Farrakhan publicly reconciled with W. Deen Mohammed, Elijah’s son. In 2006, Farrakhan, suffering from illness, gave the day-to-day responsibilities for running the Nation of Islam to its executive board.
1935: Birthdays: Actor Doug McClure.
1941: Birthdays: Rock ‘n’ roll Hall of Fame member Eric Burdon.
1946: Birthdays: Artificial heart developer Dr. Robert Jarvik.
1949: Siam changed its name to Thailand.
1952: Birthdays: Writer Mike Lupica.
1953: Shortly after 4 p.m., a horrific tornado hit drought-stricken Waco, Texas, killing 114 people and burying some downtown streets under five feet of rubble.
1960: Israeli agents captured Nazi Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.
1963: Birthdays: Natasha Richardson (1963-2009), actress, Born: 5/11/1963, Birthplace: London, England, Died: 3/18/2009. The daughter of actress Vanessa Redgrave and director Tony Richardson, Natasha Richardson has played leading roles on stage, TV, and film, including Shakespearean roles at London’s Old Vic. She won acclaim for her stage performance in Chekhov ‘s Three Sisters (1985), acting in ensemble with her mother and her aunt Lynn Redgrave. In 1993 she played the title role in the Tony-winning Anna Christie. She won a Tony for her 1998 performance as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. Her films include A Month in the Country (1987), The Handmaid’s Tale (1990), Nell (1994) and The Parent Trap (1998). She joined her mother and aunt once again in the 2005 movie The White Countess. She died tragically from a head injury that she sustained in a fall during a ski lesson. Richardson was married to actor Liam Neeson.
1969: In one of the more infamous and bloody battles of the Vietnam War, U.S. troops seized Dong Ap Bia mountain, commonly known as Hamburger Hill.
1973: Charges against Daniel Ellsberg for his role in the Pentagon Papers case were dismissed.
1981: Reggae performer Bob Marley died of cancer in Miami at the age of 36.
1987: Emmanuel Vitria died in Marseilles in southern France at age 67, 18 years after receiving a transplanted human heart. He was the longest-surviving heart transplant patient.
1994: Joseph Hazelwood, captain of the Exxon Valdez, told a federal court in Anchorage, Alaska, he’d had three vodka drinks just hours before the tanker ran aground, spilling 11 million gallons of oil into Prince William Sound in 1989.
1996: A ValuJet airliner crashed in the Florida Everglades, killing 110 people. Eight people died while climbing Mount Everest, a series of events related in Into Thin Air.
1997: IBM’s supercomputer, Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov, the reigning world champion, in a six game chess match (2 for blue, 1 for Kasparov, and 3 ties).
1998: India conducted the first of five underground nuclear tests.
2003: 91% of Lithuanian voters opted to join the European Union, the first former Soviet nation to do so. The New York Times devoted four pages to a story documenting major inaccuracies and deceptions by one of its reporters, Jayson Blair, in a scandal that cost the newspaper’s two top editors their jobs. More than 50 Democratic members of the Texas House of Representatives crossed into Oklahoma to leave the House without a quorum and block action on a redistricting bill unfavorable to their party.
2006: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told students in Indonesia that Israel was an evil regime that would soon be annihilated.
2008: 23 people were killed when tornadoes swept across rural Missouri and Oklahoma.
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2010: In discussing sexual-abuse scandals, Pope Benedict XVI said the Roman Catholic Church was undergoing its greatest persecution because of sin in the church. He called the situation frightening.
2011: Yemeni security forces and government loyalists fired on protesters in Sanaa, killing at least 13 people. Scores of others among the more than 1,000 demonstrators were reported wounded.
2012: A man yelled, Go to hell, you killed my brother and threw a shoe at confessed mass killer Anders Breivik in a Norwegian courtroom. Breivik had confessed to killing 77 people in a bombing in Oslo and shooting rampage at nearby Utoya Island in July of 2011.
Quotes
“Some of us are becoming the men we wanted to marry.” – Glori Steinhem
“The trouble with heart disease is that the first symptom is often hard to deal with – sudden death.” – Michael Phelps
“What a pitiable thing it is that our civilization can do no better for us than to make us slaves to indoor life, so that we have to go and take artificial exercise in order to preserve our health.” – George Wharton James, journalist, author, and speaker (1858-1923)
Martha Graham (1894-1991) U.S. choreographer, dancer:
“‘Age’ is the acceptance of a term of years. But maturity is the glory of years.”
“America does not concern itself now with Impressionism. We own no involved philosophy. The psyche of the land is to be found in its movement. It is to be felt as a dramatic force of energy and vitality. We move; we do not stand still. We have not yet arrived at the stock-taking stage.”
“Dance is the hidden language of the soul.”
“Every dance is a kind of fever chart, a graph of the heart.”
“Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.”
“First we have to believe, and then we believe.”
“Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.”
“I did not want to be a tree, a flower or a wave. In a dancer’s body, we as audience must see ourselves, not the imitated behavior of everyday actions, not the phenomenon of nature, not exotic creatures from another planet, but something of the miracle that is a human being.”
“Learn by practice.”
“Misery is a communicable disease.”
“Nothing is more revealing than movement.”
exiguous
PRONUNCIATION: (ig-ZIG-yoo-us
MEANING: (adjective), Extremely scanty; meager.
ENTOMOLOGY: Exiguous comes from Latin exiguus, “strictly weighed; too strictly weighed,” hence “scanty, meager,” from exigere, “to determine; to decide; to weigh.”
USAGE: “Janice worked as a waitress in an effort to supplement her exiguous income working at a big box retailer, although neither employer was sympathetic to the other’s schedule.”
philtrum
PRONUNCIATION: (FIL-truhm)
http://wordsmith.org/words/philtrum.mp3
MEANING: (noun), The vertical groove below the nose and above the upper lip.
NOTES: The line of the upper lip is known as Cupid’s bow for its resemblance to the shape of a bow. While the ancients thought the groove above the upper lip had something to do with love, modern doctors have found that a smooth philtrum is one of the symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin philtrum (love potion, groove under the nose), from Greek philtron (love potion, groove under the nose). Earliest documented use: 1609.
USAGE: “John Ryan Fitzpatrick flexed his index finger under his nose and across his philtrum.” – Jeff Hicks; Troubles at The Glen; Waterloo Region Record (Canada); Aug 7, 2010.