Today in History (December 8th):
Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary
1542: Birthdays: Mary, Queen of Scots.
1609: Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the second public library in Europe, opened.
1626: Christina, Queen of Sweden.
1765: Birthdays: Eli Whitney (1765—1825, Westboro, MA): Inventor of the cotton gin. Graduated Yale in 1792. When he was staying as tutor at Mulberry Grove, the plantation of Mrs. Nathanael Greene, Whitney was encouraged by Mrs. Greene and visiting cotton planters to try to find some device by which the fiber of short-staple cotton could be rapidly separated from the seed. Whitney, whose creative mechanical bent had been evident from boyhood, completed his model gin early in 1793, after about 10 days of work, and by April had built an improved one. With Phineas Miller, Mrs. Greene’s plantation manager (and later her husband), he formed a partnership to manufacture gins at New Haven. He was unable to make enough gins to meet the demand, and although the partners received a patent in 1794, others copied his model and soon many gins were in use. After much litigation the partners received (1807) a favorable decision to protect their patent, but Congress in 1812 denied Whitney’s petition for its renewal. His invention, which had immense economic and social effects, brought great wealth to many others, but little to Whitney himself. In 1798 he built a firearms factory near New Haven. The muskets his workmen made by methods comparable to those of modern mass industrial production were the first to have standardized, interchangeable parts.
1854: Pope Pius IX proclaimed the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.
1861: Birthdays: William C. Durant, Founder General Motors; Aristide Maillol, sculptor.
1865: Birthdays: Jean Sibelius, Finnish composer.
1886: Delegates from 25 unions founded the American Federation of Labor, forerunner of the modern AFL-CIO, in Columbus, Ohio. Birthdays: Diego Rivera, Mexican muralist.
1894: Birthdays: James Thurber, Humorist and artist.
1911: Birthdays: Lee J. Cobb, Actor.
1925: Birthdays: Sammy Davis Jr., Entertainer, Singer, Actor.
1930: Birthdays: Actor Maximilian Schell.
1933: Birthdays: Comedian Flip Wilson.
1936: Birthdays: David Carradine, Actor.
1937: Birthdays: Actor James MacArthur.
1939: Birthdays: Irish flutist James Galway.
1941: The United States, Britain and Australia declared war on Japan.
1943: Birthdays: Jim Morrison, Rock musician.
1947: Birthdays: Rock musician Gregg Allman.
1949: The Chinese Nationalist government, defeated by the Communists, retreated from the mainland to the island of Formosa (Taiwan).
1953: Birthdays: Kim Basinger, Actor.
1961: Birthdays: Political commentator Ann Coulter.
1964: Birthdays: Teri Hatcher, Actor.
1966: Birthdays: Sinead O’Connor, Irish Singer, Songwriter.
1976: Birthdays: Actor Dominic Monaghan.
1978: Deaths: Former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.
1980: Former Beatle John Lennon was shot to death by a deranged fan outside his apartment building in New York City.
1982: Birthdays: Rap artist Nicki Minaj.
1986: U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz told the House Foreign Affairs Committee the transfer of Iran arms money to the Nicaraguan Contras was illegal.
1987: U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev signed the first treaty between the two superpowers to reduce their massive nuclear arsenals.
1991: The Soviet Union ceased to exist when the republics of Russia, Byelorussia (now known as Belarus) and Ukraine signed an agreement creating the Commonwealth of Independent States.
1993: U.S. President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free Trade Agreement.
1997: Jenny Shipley was sworn in as the first woman prime minister of New Zealand.
2002: Iraq said all its chemical and biological weapons programs ended in 1991 and that the country had never reached the assembly or testing stage for nuclear weapons.
2004: International Business Machines Corp. reported it was selling its personal computer business to Chinese rival Lenovo Group for $1.25 billion in cash and stock.
2005: A suicide bomber detonated explosives on a crowded bus in Baghdad, killing at least 30 people and wounding 27 others. A Southwest Airlines jetliner overshot a runway at Chicago’s Midway International Airport in a snowstorm, crashing through a fence into a city street. A 6-year-old boy in a car hit by the plane was killed and at least 11 others were hurt.
The medicine at first overnight cialis tadalafil causes more release of nitric oxide on excitement. It is whole body acidity purchase cheap levitra davidfraymusic.com with the medical name as the metabolic acidosis. The success rate of this medication viagra 100mg pills is satisfactory. It is instilled as nasal drops and can be used as online cialis davidfraymusic.com body pack or face pack. 2007: Dozens of dead and injured seabirds coated in black goo were the most visible victims of a 58,000-gallon oil spill in San Francisco Bay that fouled miles of coastline. The spill was caused when a South Korea-bound container ship hit a tower supporting the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge in dense fog. Afghanistan was in official mourning after a suicide bombing at a school in the north killed at least 52 people and injured 102 others. The dead included 18 children.
2008: The suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States and four co-defendants told a military judge at Guantanamo Bay that they want to confess to all charges of murder and war crimes.
2009: An apparently coordinated series of car bombs destroyed several government buildings in Baghdad, killing at least 121 people and wounding 499 others.
2010: A prison fire south of Santiago, Chile, killed at least 81 people and injured a dozen others. The San Miguel fire reportedly broke out after a fight between inmates. In an escalating cyberbattle, hundreds of Internet activists, using copy overload and other tactics, brought down the Swedish government’s website for several hours and attacked a number of businesses, including Amazon.com and MasterCard, seen as enemies of WikiLeaks and its co-founder, Julian Assange, arrested on a sex charge.
2011: 70 patients and three employees died in a fire at the AMRI Hospital in Kolkata, India. Walmart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, said it was investigating whether some of its employees violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, a U.S. law banning bribery overseas.
Quotes
“The mind has exactly the same power as the hands; not merely to grasp the world, but to change it.” – Colin Wilson
“Rebellion without truth is like spring in a bleak, arid desert.” – Kahlil Gibran
“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
“Life is a comedy for those who think… and a tragedy for those who feel.” – Horace Walpole, 1770
“I was irrevocably betrothed to laughter, the sound of which has always seemed to me to be the most civilized music in the world.” – Peter Ustinov
“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.” – Saki, pen name for Hector Hugh Munro
James Thurber (1894–1961) US humorist:
“All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.”
“He knows all about art, but he doesn’t know what he likes.”
“Human Dignity has gleamed only now and then and here and there, in lonely splendor, throughout the ages, a hope of the better men, never an achievement of the majority.”
“I hate women because they always know where things are.”
“I loathe the expression ‘What makes him tick.’ It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.”
“I used to wake up at 4 A.M. and start sneezing, sometimes for five hours. I tried to find out what sort of allergy I had but finally came to the conclusion that it must be an allergy to consciousness.”
“It had only one fault. It was kind of lousy.”
“It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.”
“Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.”
“The only rules comedy can tolerate are those of taste, and the only limitations those of libel.”
lief
PRONUNCIATION: (leef)
MEANING: (adverb), Willingly; gladly; readily.
(adjective)
1. Dear, beloved.
2. Willing.
ETYMOLOGY: From Old English leof. A most useful word, now, alas, all but extinct. Want and love are overworked and misused to fill the hole left in the language when this word faded in 17c.
USAGE: “Given a choice, Katherine indicated that she’d as lief be killed by an atom bomb as by a hand grenade or a flame thrower.”
babel
PRONUNCIATION: (BAB-uhl, BAY-buhl)
http://wordsmith.org/words/babel.mp3
MEANING: noun:
1. A confused mixture of noises or voices.
2. A scene of noise or confusion.
ETYMOLOGY: From Hebrew Babhel (Babylon). In the Old Testament (Genesis 11:4-9), people united in an attempt to build a city with a tower that reached the heavens.This displeased god who halted the project by confounding people’s speech so they wouldn’t understand one another. Earliest documented use: before 1382.
USAGE: “While an excited babel of Spanish, German, Japanese, and Hindi emanated from the dozens of television news crews in the street, the response to Charles and Camilla’s I dos among locals was mostly We Don’t.” – Glenda Cooper; In Windsor, a Royal Pain; The Washington Post; Apr 10, 2005.
Explore “babel” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=babel