Today in History (April 6th):
648 BC: The ancient Greeks made the first documentation of a solar eclipse.
1483: Birthdays: Italian painter Raphael.
1814: Napoleon was exiled to Elba.
1823: Birthdays: Newspaper editor Joseph Medill.
1830: The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints was founded in a log cabin in Fayette, N.Y.
1851: Portland, Ore., was founded.
1866: Birthdays: Journalist Lincoln Steffens.
1868: Mormon Church leader Brigham Young married his 27th, and last, wife.
1884: Birthdays: Actor Walter Huston.
1892: Birthdays: Radio commentator Lowell Thomas.
1896: The first modern Olympics formally opened at Athens, Greece. The Olympics had last been staged 1,500 years earlier.
1903: Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Fame member Gordon Mickey Cochrane.
1909: Robert E. Peary and Matthew Henson reached the North Pole.
1917: The United States declared war on Germany, propelling America into World War I.
1928: Birthdays: Geneticist James Watson.
1929: Birthdays: Musician Andre Previn.
1931: Nine black youths accused of raping two white women went on trial in Scottsboro, Ala. All were convicted in a hasty trial but by 1950 were free by parole, appeal or escape.
1937: Birthdays: Country singer Merle Haggard; Actor Billy Dee Williams.
1938: Du Pont researchers Roy Plunkett and Jack Rebok created the chemical compound that was later marketed as Teflon.
1941: Birthdays: Drag racing legend Don The Snake Prudhomme.
1942: Birthdays: Producer/director Barry Levinson.
1947: The first Tony Awards, honoring distinguished work in the theater, were presented in New York City. Birthdays: Actor John Ratzenberger.
1952: Birthdays: Actor Marilu Henner.
1963: Birthdays: Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa.
1968: Federal troops and National Guardsmen were deployed in Chicago, Washington and Detroit, as rioting continued over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
1973: American League baseball teams used a designated hitter for first time.
1975: Birthdays: Actor Zach Braff.
1976: Birthdays: Actor Candace Cameron Bure.
1991: Iraq’s Parliament accepted a permanent cease-fire in the Gulf War.
1992: Science fiction patriarch Isaac Asimov, 72, died after a lengthy illness.
1994: The presidents of the African nations of Rwanda and Burundi were killed in a plane crash in Kigali. The incident triggered bloody fighting between the Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups that left hundreds of thousands of people dead. Justice Harry A. Blackmun, who had served on the U.S. Supreme Court since 1970, announced his retirement.
1998: U.S. health officials announced that tamoxifen, a synthetic hormone, prevented breast cancer in women at high risk.
2001: A federal jury in Los Angeles convicted an Algerian man on charges stemming from his arrest at the U.S.-Canadian border in December 1999. Prosecutors said Ahmen Ressam was planning to set off explosions during the millennium celebrations.
2003: U.N. officials said they had reports that at least 966 people had been killed three days earlier in a dozen Congolese villages in an area rich in minerals.
2004: The University of Connecticut became the first school to win both the NCAA Division I men’s and women’s college basketball championships the same year.
2005: Prince Rainier III of Monaco, one of Europe’s longest-reigning monarchs, died from multiple organ failure at the age of 81. He was succeeded by Prince Albert, one of three children he had with his wife, U.S. movie star Grace Kelly.
2006: A translation of the so-called Gospel of Judas was released 18 centuries after it was written and 30 years after its discovery in Egypt.
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2007: A U.N.-sponsored scientific panel endorsed by 120 countries warned of dire consequences unless worldwide buildup in greenhouse gases was cut back and predicted the possibility of 50 million environmental refugees by 2010.
2008: American Airlines grounded all 300 of its MD-80 jetliners after an FAA review found faulty wiring in nine of them. Over the next five days, American canceled some 3,300 flights, disrupting travel of more than 100,000 passengers.
2009: A powerful earthquake struck central Italy’s Abruzzo region, killing more than 200 people and smashing the city of L’Aquila. Officials said the 6.3-magnitude quake, followed by more than 400 aftershocks, left about 55,000 homeless and damaged historic buildings in the area. Japan, the world’s second largest economy, said it would spend nearly $100 billion in stimulus measures to bolster a faltering economic system.
2011: Washington Gov. Chris Gregoire signed a bill saying the state will acknowledge same-sex marriages in other states as domestic partnerships.
2012: The U.S. economy added 120,000 jobs in March, pushing the unemployment rate down to 8.2 percent, the U.S. Labor Department said. However, not only did the gain fall short of the 203,000 new jobs forecast, it was the lowest addition since November.
Quotes
“Once we assuage our conscience by calling something a “necessary evil”, it begins to look more and more necessary and less and less evil.” – Sydney J. Harris, journalist (1917-1986)
“A fixed idea is like the iron rod which sculptors put in their statues. It impales and sustains.” – Hippolyte Taine, critic and historian (1828-1893)
James D. Watson (1928- ) American geneticist:
“Biology has at least 50 more interesting years.”
“One could not be a successful scientist without realizing that, in contrast to the popular conception supported by newspapers and mothers of scientists, a goodly number of scientists are not only narrow-minded and dull, but also just stupid.”
“Take young researchers, put them together in virtual seclusion, give them an unprecedented degree of freedom and turn up the pressure by fostering competitiveness.”
“Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles”
piebald
PRONUNCIATION: (PI-bald)
MEANING: (adjective), Having patches of different colors, particularly black and white spots. Used most frequently in reference to animals.
ETYMOLOGY: From “pie,” a derivative of Latin pica “magpie” + “bald” from “balled” in the sense of having been made look like a ball. Few words in English are more misleading than “piebald” (“magpie” being one that does). The qualitative noun is “piebaldness” and the adverb would be “piebaldly,” were there a use for it. This adjective may itself be used as a noun to refer to a piebald horse or other animal as well as a verb meaning “acquiring patches of different colors.” The word can also be used as a metaphor, mainly in the sense of a patchwork.
USAGE: “We have such a piebald array of attitudes on our team, it is difficult to complete tasks on time.”
obdurate
PRONUNCIATION: (OB-doo-rit, -dyoo-)
http://wordsmith.org/words/obdurate.mp3
MEANING: (adjective)
1. Stubborn: not easily moved.
2. Hard-hearted: resistant to emotions.
ETYMOLOGY: From Latin obdurare (to harden), from durus (hard). Ultimately from the Indo-European root deru- (to be firm) that’s the source of such other words as truth, trust, betroth, tree, endure, druid, during, durable, duress, trow, and indurate.
USAGE: “The White Paper outlines no strategy to end government’s obdurate resistance to proper pricing of passenger services.” – Raghu Dayal; Whither is Fled, Railways’ Visionary Gleam? The Economic Times (New Delhi, India); Feb 23, 2010.
Explore “obdurate” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=obdurate
maudlin
PRONUNCIATION: (MAWD-lin)
http://wordsmith.org/words/maudlin.mp3
MEANING: (adjective), Overly sentimental.
ETYMOLOGY: After Mary Magdalene, a Biblical character who was a follower of Jesus. In medieval art she was depicted as a penitent weeping for her sins (she washed the feet of Jesus with her tears) and her name became synonymous with tearful sentimentality. The name Magdalene means “of Magdala” in Greek and is derived after a town on the Sea of Galilee. The name Magdala, in turn, means tower in Aramaic. So here we have a word coined after a person, who was named after a place, which was named after a thing. In an allusion to her earlier life, Mary Magdalene’s name has sprouted another eponym, magdalene, meaning a reformed prostitute.
USAGE: “In this maudlin melodrama, all that was missing were the violins.” – Jeannette Layne-Clark; Minister on Stage; Daily Nation (Barbados); Mar 20, 2005.