Today in History (May 22nd):
334 B.C.: Alexander the Great defeated Persian King Darius III at Granicus, Turkey.
1813: Birthdays: German composer Richard Wagner.
1859: Birthdays: Scottish writer Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes.
1868: Seven members of the Reno gang stole $98,000 from a railway car at Marshfield, Ind. It was the original Great Train Robbery.
1902: Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Fame member Al Simmons.
1906: The Wright Brothers patented the airplane.
1907: Birthdays: Actor Laurence Olivier.
1910: Birthdays: Game show announcer Johnny Olson.
1914: Birthdays: Pioneering jazz musician Sun Ra (born Herman Blount).
1922: Birthdays: Critic Judith Crist.
1924: The discovery of the body of Bobby Franks, 13, of Chicago led to the arrest and conviction of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb. They were sentenced to 99 years in prison for the so-called thrill killing. Birthdays: French singer Charles Aznavour.
1928: Birthdays: Entrepreneur T. Boone Pickens, Jr.
1930: Birthdays: Activist Harvey Milk.
1934: Birthdays: Pianist/composer Peter Nero.
1938: Birthdays: Actor Richard Benjamin.
1939: Birthdays: Actor Paul Winfield.
1940: Birthdays: Journalist Bernard Shaw; Actor Michael Sarrazin.
1942: Birthdays: Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski.
1943: Birthdays: Northern Irish political activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Betty Williams.
1946: Birthdays: Soccer legend George Best.
1950: Birthdays: British songwriter Bernie Taupin.
1970: Birthdays: Model/actor Naomi Campbell.
1972: Richard Nixon became the first U.S president to visit Moscow.
1978: Birthdays: Actor Ginnifer Goodwin.
1982: Birthdays: Olympic champion skater Apolo Anton Ohno.
1987: A tornado flattened Saragosa, Texas, population 185, killing 29 residents and injuring 121. Birthdays: Tennis player Novak Djokovic.
1992: Johnny Carson ended his nearly 30-year career as host of The Tonight Show with what NBC said was the highest-rated late-night TV show.
1993: France, Britain, Russia, Spain and the United States approved a policy calling for a negotiated settlement of the war in Bosnia but the Muslim president of Bosnia rejected the plan.
1998: Voters in Ireland and Northern Ireland approved a peace plan for violence-torn Ulster.
2002: Authorities in Birmingham, Ala., convicted a fourth suspect in a 1963 church bombing that killed four black girls. Bobby Frank Cherry, 71, a former Ku Klux Klansman, was sentenced to life in prison.
2003: NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft orbiting Mars took a unique photo of Earth, the first from another planet, showing Earth as a tiny world in the vast darkness of space. Annika Sorenstam became the first woman in 59 years to compete in a PGA event but her 5-over-par 145 through two rounds of the Bank of America Colonial tournament failed to make the cut.
2004: Prince Felipe of Asturias, heir to the Spanish throne, married television newscaster Letizia Ortiz in a Roman Catholic ceremony in Madrid.
2008: A Texas appeals court ruled that state authorities acted improperly when they seized 400 minors at a compound owned by a polygamist church group. The court said the state lacked credible proof the children were in imminent danger of sexual or physical abuse.
2009: General Motors struck a deal with union workers in which GM would finance half of a $20 billion retiree health benefit obligation with company stock.
2011: The deadliest tornado to strike the United States in half a century sliced into the heart of Joplin, Mo., on a vicious 6-mile sweep, three quarters of a mile wide, packing 200 mph winds, destroying nearly one-third of the city and claiming more than 160 lives.
2012: Wisconsin U.S. Rep Paul Ryan, who would become Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney’s running mate, said, I think he is going to beat Barack Obama and I think we are going to save this country.
Quotes
“We are on the cusp of this time where I can say, ‘I speak as a citizen of the world’ without others saying, ‘God, what a nut.'” – Lawrence Lessig, professor and activist (b. 1961)
“You can learn more about human nature by reading the Bible than by living in New York.” – William Lyon Phelps
“Why shouldn’t truth be stranger than fiction? Fiction, after all, has to make sense.” – Mark Twain
“Only the good doubt their own goodness, which is what makes them good in the first place. The bad know they are good, but the good know nothing. They spend their lives forgiving others, but they can’t forgive themselves.” – Paul Auster, novelist and poet (b. 1947)
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) Scottish writer:
“A client is to me a mere unit, a factor in a problem.”
“A long shot, Watson, a very long shot!”
“A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber-room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it.”
Pain during intercourse is very uncomfortable and painful for women and it is also cialis without prescriptions canada very common. In case you are experiencing symptoms of impotence or ED, is buy viagra prescription the state when a male cannot sustain an erection even after sexual stimulation. This is why Finpecia is considered as an effective therapy cialis tadalafil uk for prostate cancer cells. These associate nations cricket should be appreciated by ICC for their performance on World Cup http://seanamic.com/caley-and-umbilicals-international-to-offer-integrated-intervention-systems/ tadalafil online canada matches.
“As a rule, said Holmes, the more bizarre a thing is the less mysterious it proves to be. It is your commonplace, featureless crimes which are really puzzling, just as a commonplace face is the most difficult to identify.”
“From a drop of water a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.”
“How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?”
“I can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb-nails, or the great issues that may hang from a boot-lace.”
“It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.”
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.”
“It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
“Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius.”
“My mind rebels at stagnation. Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. But I abhor the dull routine of existence. I crave for mental exaltation.”
jeremiad
PRONUNCIATION: (je-reh-MI-aed)
MEANING: (noun), An extended lamentation; a long, drawn-out complaining tirade, often accompanied by a prophecy or insinuation of imminent doom.
ETYMOLOGY: From Jeremiah + -ad (as in “Iliad”) in reference to the Lamentations of Jeremiah in the Old Testament. Jeremiah comes from Late Latin “Ieremias,” borrowed from Hebrew yirmeyahu “Yahweh has established,” based on yirm “he has established” + yah(u), a shortening of “Yahweh.” “Yirm” is an old preterit of rama “to establish, cast” based on the root *rmy. Yahweh “God, The Lord” is based on the root *hwy, which meant “to be or become,” perhaps originally meaning “he who brings into being.” Shortenings of “Yahweh” occur in many Hebrew names: Matthew is from mattayyah from *mattan-yah “gift of Yahweh;” Elijah is from Hebrew oeliyahu “my God (is) Yahweh;” John, Jean, Johann, Giovanni, and Ivan are all from yohanan “Yahweh has been gracious,” Joshua is from yehoshua’ “Yahweh (is) salvation” (*shua’ = “salvantion”), and “Jesus,” Hebrew yeshua’, is a shortening of yehoshua’ “Joshua.”
USAGE: “Every time I ask you to clean the garage all I hear is a jeremiad on how much easier your sister’s lot is than yours!”
chartreuse
PRONUNCIATION: (shahr-TROOZ, -TROOS)
http://wordsmith.org/words/chartreuse.mp3
MEANING:
(noun)
1. A light, yellowish green.
2. An aromatic, usually yellow or green liqueur, originally made by Carthusian monks in Grenoble, France.
(adjective), Having a light, yellowish green color.
ETYMOLOGY: From mountain to monastery to drink to color — that’s the circuitous route for this word’s origin. La Grande Chartreuse, a monastery got its name after the Chartreuse Mountains. The liqueur got its name because it was first made by the monks in the monastery. Finally, the color got its name from the liqueur. Earliest documented use: 1806.
USAGE:
“The tree crowns were packed together like puffballs and shimmered with every hue, tint, and shade of green: chartreuse, emerald, lime, aquamarine, teal, bottle, olive, jade.” – Douglas Preston; The El Dorado Machine; The New Yorker; May 6, 2013.
“I must have been 7 or 8, squatting on the summer-hot pavement with my sister, scrawling disappearing messages on the concrete with snapped leaves of an ice plant, when it occurred to me that people could agree on the name of a thing, in this case, a color — the green of the translucent fluid that oozed from the leaf, which we determined was chartreuse — while seeing it very differently. I understood that when my sister agreed on the name chartreuse, she might, in fact, be seeing what I call red or yellow or blue. I began to see language less as a bridge between people than as a threadbare rope tossed from one edge of a precipice to open hands at another.” – Allison Hoover Bartlett; An Ear For Color: Exploring the Curious World of Synesthesia, Where Senses Merge in Mysterious Ways; The Washington Post; Jan 22, 2002.
Explore “chartreuse” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=chartreuse
tyro or tiro
PRONUNCIATION: (TY-roh)
http://wordsmith.org/words/tyro.mp3
MEANING: noun: One who is beginning to learn something.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin tiro (young soldier, recruit). Earliest documented use: 1611.
USAGE:
“It seems as if the latest young tyro is in contact with his inner old fogey.” – Donald Clarke; Shadow Lands; The Irish Times (Dublin); Apr 22, 2011.
“So what’s a digital-media tyro like you doing at a fusty old-media company?” – Interview: Jim Lanzone; Adweek (New York); May 2, 2011.
Explore “tyro” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=tyro
brass ring
PRONUNCIATION: (brass ring)
http://wordsmith.org/words/brass_ring.mp3
MEANING: noun: A prize or an opportunity for a prize, especially a prestigious one.
ETYMOLOGY: From the former practice of trying to get a brass ring while riding a carousel. Earliest documented use: late 19th century. A brass ring is quite different from a brass-collar.
NOTES: In earlier times, merry-go-rounds had an added attraction. While the ride was in progress, riders were to try to pick a ring from a dispenser. Whoever managed to get a ring, typically made of brass, could redeem it for a free ride. Now that the popularity of carousels has declined, perhaps they can add the brass ring challenge to roller coasters, with personal injury lawyers conveniently placed at the end of the ride.
USAGE: “Imogen Cooper is more about the music than about grasping for the brass ring of stardom.” – Rob Hubbard; English Pianist Cooper; Pioneer Press (St. Paul, Minnesota); Mar 4, 2012.
Explore “brass ring” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=brass+ring