Today in History (November 14th):
1666: The first blood transfusion took place in London. Blood from one dog was transfused into another.
1765: Birthdays: Robert Fulton, inventor of the steamboat.
1832: The first horse-drawn streetcar made its appearance in New York City.
1840: Birthdays: French Impressionist painter Claude Monet.
1889: Newspaper reporter Nellie Bly set off to break the fictional record of voyaging around the world in 80 days set by Jules Verne’s character Phileas Fogg. She made the trip in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds. Birthdays: Indian statesman Jawaharlal Nehru.
1900: Birthdays: U.S. composer Aaron Copland.
1901: Birthdays: Singer Morton Downey.
1904: Birthdays: Actor/singer Dick Powell.
1907: Birthdays: Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren.
1908: Birthdays: U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis.
1919: Birthdays: Singer Johnny Desmond.
1921: Birthdays: Actor Brian Keith.
1922: Birthdays: Former U.N. Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali; Actor Veronica Lake.
1926: The NBC radio network made its debut.
1927: Birthdays: Actor McLean Stevenson.
1930: Birthdays: Astronaut Edward White, killed in the 1967 Apollo I launch pad fire.
1935: Birthdays: King Hussein of Jordan.
1940: German planes bombed Coventry, England, destroying or damaging 69,000 buildings.
1947: Birthdays: Writer P.J. O’Rourke; Musician Buckwheat Zydeco.
1948: Birthdays: Prince Charles, heir to the British throne.
1954: Birthdays: Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice; New Age singer/songwriter Yanni.
1961: Birthdays: Actor D.B. Sweeney.
1962: Birthdays: Actor Laura San Giacomo.
1964: Birthdays: Actor Patrick Warburton; Television newscaster Bill Hemmer.
1972: For the first time in its 76-year history, the Dow Jones industrial average closed at more than 1,000.
1984: Former Israeli Defense Minister Ariel Sharon went to court in New York with a $50 million libel suit against Time magazine. He lost after a two-month trial.
1986: The White House acknowledged the CIA role in secretly shipping weapons to Iran.
1988: The PLO proclaimed an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, endorsing a renunciation of terrorism and an implicit recognition of Israel.
1990: A gunman in Dunedin, New Zealand, killed 12 neighbors and was killed by police in the nation’s worst mass slaying.
1991: U.S. and British officials accused two Libyan agents in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 in which 270 people died.
1993: Residents of Puerto Rico voted in favor of continuing their U.S. commonwealth status.
1994: The 31-mile Chunnel Tunnel under the English Channel opened to passenger traffic between England and France.
2003: An Alabama jury ordered Exxon Mobil to pay the state $11.8 billion in damages relating to gas royalties for offshore drilling projects. The jury also awarded compensatory damages of $63.6 million.
2005: Private U.S. donations to victims of Hurricane Katrina were reported to be near the $2.7 billion mark in 11 weeks, close to the record $2.8 billion said to have gone to Sept. 11, 2001, charities.
2009: NASA scientists report finding at least 26 gallons of water on the moon after studying results of their L-cross satellite mission, demonstrating what they called the possibility of sustaining life there. Former U.S. Rep. William Jefferson of Louisiana, 62, a nine-term Democratic congressman, was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison for bribery and racketeering.
2010: The death toll from Haiti’s cholera epidemic reached 917, rising by 121 in two days, the health ministry said. An auction of imprisoned swindler Bernie Madoff’s possessions in New York brought in about $2 million for the victims of his $65 billion Ponzi scheme.
2011: The U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge by 26 states to President Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare reform law. Egyptian activists threatened a new revolution if the ruling military junta did not withdraw a proposal to remove parliamentary oversight of the military.
Quotes
“Managing senior programmers is like herding cats.” – Dave Platt
“Cats are smarter than dogs. You can’t get eight cats to pull a sled through snow.” – Jeff Valdez
“There is no snooze button for a cat that wants breakfast.” – Anonymous
“Thousands of years ago, cats were worshipped as gods. Cats have never forgotten this.” – Anonymous
“In a cat’s eye, all things belong to cats.” – English proverb
“As every cat owner knows, nobody owns a cat.” – Ellen Perry Berkeley
“One cat just leads to another.” – Ernest Hemingway
“Dogs come when they’re called; cats take a message and get back to you later.” – Mary Bly
“Cats are rather delicate creatures and they are subject to a good many ailments, but I never heard of one who suffered from insomnia.” – Joseph Wood Krutch
It is advised to increase the pfizer viagra without prescription amount of carbo’s at this time as it could be to blame! That’s right. Here, we want to tell you about a very useful and effective super foods provide longer and harder erections overnight cialis tadalafil to make intercourse as extremely lovable activity. Treatments Encompassing broad range of ailments like sleep apnea, venous diseases, fatty liver disease, depression, migraines, dyslipidemias and joint diseases have a higher incidence in obese women population. levitra uk Exercises like aerobics or viagra online overnight videoleadspro.com resistance workouts improve blood flow and the condition of narrowed blood vessels. “People that hate cats, will come back as mice in their next life.” – Faith Resnick
“I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior.” – Hippolyte Taine
“There are many intelligent species in the universe. They are all owned by cats.” – Anonymous
“There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life: music and cats.” – Albert Schweitzer
The cat has too much spirit to have no heart.” – Ernest Menaul
“No heaven will not ever Heaven be; Unless my cats are there to welcome me.” – Anonymous
“Time spent with cats is never wasted.” – Colette
“Some people say that cats are sneaky, evil, and cruel. True, and they have many other fine qualities as well.” – Missy Dizick
“You will always be lucky if you know how to make friends with strange cats.” – Colonial American proverb
“Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.” – Joseph Wood Krutch
“Cats aren’t clean, they’re just covered with cat spit.” – John S. Nichols
“The smallest feline is a masterpiece.” – Leonardo Da Vinci
“Cat’s motto: No matter what you’ve done wrong, always try to make it look like the dog did it.” – Anonymous
“Women and cats will do as they please and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.” – Robert A. Heinlein
“Life itself, the phenomenon of life, the gift of life, is so breathtakingly serious.” – Boris Pasternak, Russian author
“To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” – Voltaire, philosopher (1694-1778)
Claude Monet (1840-1926) French landscape painter:
“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.”
“For me, a landscape does not exist in its own right, since its appearance changes at every moment; but the surrounding atmosphere brings it to life – the light and the air which vary continually. For me, it is only the surrounding atmosphere which gives subjects their true value.”
“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”
“People discuss my art and pretend to understand as if it were necessary to understand, when it’s simply necessary to love.”
kulturkampf
PRONUNCIATION: (kool-TOOR-kahmpf)
MEANING: noun: A cultural conflict, especially one religious in nature.
ETYMOLOGY: From German Kulturkampf, from Kultur (culture) + Kampf (conflict). Earliest documented use: 1879.
NOTES: The original Kulturkampf took place in the 1880s between the German government and the Roman Catholic Church over control of education, laws related to marriage, etc.
USAGE: “Rabbi Michael Melchior: ‘The settlers have succeeded in making [the withdrawal] a story of Judaism versus emptiness. They have turned it into a Kulturkampf.'” – Waiting for a Miracle; The Economist (London, UK); Aug 15, 2005.
pseudophake
PRONUNCIATION: (S(Y)U-deh-feyk
MEANING: noun: A person who has had the natural lenses of his/her eyes replaced with artificial ones.
ETYMOLOGY: This piece of medical jargon is a back-formation from the adjective “pseudophakic,” meaning “pertaining to artificial lenses.” In the past, the only treatment for cataracts was to remove the opaque lens, leaving the eye “aphakic” (“without a lens”) which subsequently condemned the sufferer to wearing bottle-bottom spectacles. But today the function of the lens can be (partially) restored with a plastic replacement. The condition of being pseudophakic is “pseudophakia.” As some small but bizarre compensation, pseudophakia allows us to see ultraviolet light. Our natural lenses are completely opaque to ultraviolet, whereas the replacement lenses let these short wavelengths pass through and stimulate the light receptors at the back of the eye. From the Greek pseudes “false,” from pseudein “to lie,” combined with phakos, “lentil” because of the similarity in shape between a lens and the seed of the lentil plant. The same story underlies the English word “lens,” which is just Latin lens, meaning “lentil,” pressed into different service. Our word “lentil” comes from the Latin diminutive lenticula, “small lentil.”
USAGE: “I’m sorry to have to say this, but Grandpa has been living the life of a complete pseudophake for five years.”
syzygy
PRONUNCIATION: (SIZ-uh-jee)
http://wordsmith.org/words/syzygy.mp3
MEANING: noun:
1. An alignment of three objects, for example, sun, moon, and earth during an eclipse.
2. A pair of related things.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin syzygia, from Greek syzygia (union, pair). Ultimately from the Indo-European root yeug- (to join), which is also the ancestor of junction, yoke, yoga, adjust, juxtapose, rejoinder, jugular, andjunta. Earliest documented use: 1656.
NOTES: One could hyperpolysyllabically contrive a longer word having four Ys,but syzygy nicely lines up three of them organically in just six letters.
USAGE: “‘To me it’s two dots that connect,’ Douglas Coupland says, ‘I don’t know if there’s going to be a third one so it makes a syzygy.'” – John Barber; Douglas Coupland; The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Canada); Oct 2, 2009.
Explore “syzygy” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=syzygy
in situ
PRONUNCIATION: (in SY-too, SEE-, -tyoo, -choo)
http://wordsmith.org/words/in_situ.mp3
MEANING: adverb: In the original place.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin in situ (in place). The word is used in medicine to indicate a condition in a localized state, not spread beyond. First recorded use: 1740.
USAGE: “The sound engineers came to record the nuns in situ.” – Louette Harding; Sing out, Sisters: How a Closed Order of Benedictine Nuns Recorded an Album; Daily Mail (London, UK); Oct 9, 2010.
Explore “in situ” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=in+situ