Today in History (April 30th):
1492: Christopher Columbus was granted a commission for exploration by Spain.
1777: Birthdays: German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.
1789: George Washington was inaugurated as the first president of the United States.
1803: The United States more than doubled its land area with the Louisiana Purchase. It obtained all French territory west of the Mississippi River for $15 million.
1812: Louisiana entered the union as the 18th U.S. state.
1870: Birthdays: Hungarian composer Franz Lehar, who wrote the operetta The Merry Widow.
1908: Birthdays: Actor Eve Arden.
1926: Birthdays: Actor Cloris Leachman.
1927: Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford became the first movie personalities to leave their footprints in concrete at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
1933: Birthdays: Singer Willie Nelson.
1938: Birthdays: Actor Gary Collins.
1939: Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first U.S. president to appear on television when he was shown on opening day at the New York World’s Fair.
1940: Birthdays: Actor Burt Young.
1944: Birthdays: Actor Jill Clayburgh.
1943: Birthdays: Singer Bobby Vee.
1945: The burned body of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was found in a bunker in the ruins of Berlin. Also that day, Soviet troops captured the Reichstag building in Berlin.
1946: Birthdays: Sweden’s King Carl Gustaf XVI; U.S. Olympic champion swimmer Don Schollander.
1948: 21 countries of the Western Hemisphere formed the Organization of American States. Birthdays: Actor Perry King.
1954: Birthdays: Film director Jane Campion (The Piano).
1959: Birthdays: Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
1961: Birthdays: Basketball Hall of Fame member Isiah Thomas.
1967: Muhammad Ali was stripped of his world heavyweight boxing championship title after he refused to be drafted into the U.S. military.
1970: U.S. President Richard Nixon announced he was sending U.S. troops into Cambodia to destroy the sanctuaries from which communist forces from North Vietnam were sending men and supplies into South Vietnam.
1975: South Vietnam unconditionally surrendered to North Vietnam. The communists occupied Saigon and renamed it Ho Chi Minh City.
1982: Birthdays: Actor Kirsten Dunst.
1990: U.S. educator Frank Reed was freed after a 3 1/2-year ordeal as hostage of extremists in Lebanon, becoming the second abducted American freed in Beirut in just more than a week. Political talks between Roman Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists in Northern Ireland opened for the first time in 15 years.
1993: Monica Seles, the world’s No. 1 women’s tennis player, was stabbed in the back by a self-described fan of No. 2-ranked Steffi Graf during a match in Germany.
1995: U.S. President Bill Clinton announced the suspension of U.S. trade with Iran to protest funding of terrorism.
1998: A grand jury indicted Webster Hubbell and his wife on tax-evasion charges, Hubbell, a close friend and associate of U.S. President Bill Clinton, accused Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr of having him indicted so he would lie about the president. The U.S. Senate approved the applications of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland to join NATO.
2002: The United States sent 1,000 more troops to eastern Afghanistan along the Pakistan border to prevent Taliban and al-Qaida forces from regrouping.
2003: Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said his government wouldn’t support the proposed road map peace plan until Palestinians stopped anti-Israel violence. But he said he favored creation of a Palestinian state.
2005: The bodies of 113 people, nearly all women and children, were found in a mass grave in southern Iraq.
2006: Israeli Prime Minister-designate Ehud Olmert denounced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as a psychopath in a newspaper interview, and compared him to Adolf Hitler. Rebel factions in Sudan rejected a peace agreement in the Darfur conflict. Officials estimated the bloody fighting had killed at least 180,000 people and driven more than 2 million from their homes.
2009: Chrysler filed for bankruptcy protection in a key move of a restructuring plan backed by the Obama administration. The U.S. automaker lost $16.8 billion in 2008.
2010: Data indicated the U.S. economy expanded 3.2 percent during the first quarter, with consumer spending growing at an annual rate of 3.6 percent. The report helped send the Dow Jones industrial average past the 11,000 mark for the first time since September 2008.
2011: A NATO airstrike in Tripoli killed Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi’s youngest son and three of his grandchildren but Gadhafi and his wife escaped injury. The massive cleanup following a record outbreak of tornadoes in the southern United States got under way as the death toll rose to at least 340, with 249 people killed in Alabama.
2012: Israel began construction of a wall that would be 23 feet high and less than a mile long on its border with Lebanon. Security officials said the concrete wall would protect residents in the Matulla area from sniper fire from nearby Lebanese villages.
Quotes
“In a completely rational society, the best of us would be teachers and the rest of us would have to settle for something less, because passing civilization along from one generation to the next ought to be the highest honor and the highest responsibility anyone could have.” – Lee Iacocca, automobile executive (b. 1924)
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“Bad habits are like a comfortable bed, easy to get into but hard to get out of. ” – Anonymous
“That sorrow which is the harbinger of joy is preferable to the joy which is followed by sorrow.” – Saadi, poet (c.1213-1291) [Gulistan]
“The essential thing is not knowledge, but character.” – Joseph LeConte, 1869-1901
“He who has imagination without learning, has wings and no feet.” – Vince Lombardi, 1913-1970
Catherine the Great (1729-1796) czarina of Russia:
“For to tempt and to be tempted are things very nearly allied… whenever feeling has anything to do in the matter, no sooner is it excited than we have already gone vastly farther than we are aware of.”
“I praise loudly. I blame softly.”
“I shall be an autocrat, that’s my trade; and the good Lord will forgive me, that’s his.”
“I am one of the people who love the why of things”
“If Russians knew how to read, they would write me off”
benevolent
PRONUNCIATION: (buh-NEV-uh-luhnt)
MEANING: (adjective)
1. Characterized by or suggestive of doing good.
2. Of, concerned with, or organized for the benefit of charity.
ETYMOLOGY: Middle English, from Old French, from Latin benevolens, benevolent- : bene, well + volens, present participle of velle, to wish.
USAGE: “While all initially hoped that the new boss would be more benevolent than the previous one, he turned out to be considerably nastier and cold-blooded.”
gam
PRONUNCIATION: (gam)
http://wordsmith.org/words/gam.mp3
MEANING:
(noun)
1. A leg, especially a woman’s attractive leg.
2. A school of whales.
3. A social visit, especially between whalers or ship crews.
(verb tr., intr.), 4. To hold such a visit; to spend time talking.
ETYMOLOGY:
For 1: Probably from Polari, from Italian gamba (leg), from Latin gamba (leg). Polari is a jargon used among actors, circus performers, etc. in the UK. Earliest documented use: 1789.
For 2-4: Perhaps a dialectal variant of game. Earliest documented use: 1850.
USAGE:
“They didn’t call her ‘The Girl With the Million Dollar Legs’ for nothing: the actress Betty Grable insured her gams for $500,000 each.” – Celebrities and Their Insured Body Parts; Calgary Sun (Canada); Nov 3, 2009.
“If the captain wanted to turn his vessel around in mid-sea to follow a gam of whales for a few miles, he could do so.” – Art Maier; Adventure Afloat; The Washington Post; Feb 6, 1994.
Explore “gam” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=gam
nestor
PRONUNCIATION: (NES-tuhr)
http://wordsmith.org/words/nestor.mp3
MEANING: (noun), A wise old man.
ETYMOLOGY: From Nestor, king of Pylos, who was the oldest and wisest of the Greeks and served as a counselor in the Trojan War. Earliest documented use: around 1510.
USAGE: “Roland Shaw was not only an oil man; he was the Nestor of the oil business, there when the first donkey nodded.” – Bruce Anderson; The Long-Life Cocktail; The Spectator (London, UK); Nov 19, 2011.
Explore “nestor” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=nestor