Today in History (June 29th):
1613: The Globe Theatre in London burned down.
1853: The U.S. Senate ratified the $10 million Gadsden Purchase from Mexico, adding more than 29,000 square miles to the territories of Arizona and New Mexico and completing the modern geographical boundaries of the contiguous 48 states.
1861: Birthdays: William Mayo, co-founder of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.
1868: Birthdays: Astronomer George Ellery Hale, founder of the Yerkes and Mount Palomar observatories.
1900: Birthdays: French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
1901: Birthdays: Actor/singer Nelson Eddy.
1908: Birthdays: Composer/arranger Leroy Anderson.
1910: Birthdays: Broadway songwriter Frank Loesser.
1911: Birthdays: Composer/conductor Bernard Herrmann.
1919: Birthdays: Actor Slim Pickens.
1933: Fatty Arbuckle, the silent film comedian and one of Hollywood’s most beloved personalities until a manslaughter charge ruined his career, died while preparing a comeback. He was 46.
1936: Birthdays: Baseball Hall of Fame member Harmon Killebrew.
1941: Isabella Peron took office as president of Argentina, succeeding her husband. Birthdays: Black power advocate Stokely Carmichael.
1943: Birthdays: Singer Little Eva — Eva Narcissus Boyd.
1944: Birthdays: Actor Gary Busey.
1946: Two years before Israel became a nation, British authorities arrested more than 2,700 Jewish Zionists in an effort to stop terrorism in Palestine. Birthdays: Swiss fashion designer Egon von Furstenberg.
1947: Birthdays: Comedian Richard Lewis.
1948: Birthdays: Actor and former U.S. Rep. Fred Grandy, R-Iowa.
1961: Birthdays: Actor Sharon Lawrence.
1970: The last U.S. troops were withdrawn from Cambodia into South Vietnam.
1972: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment, as then administered by individual states, was unconstitutional.
1976: Birthdays: Actor Bret McKenzie.
1992: Doctors in Pittsburgh reported the world’s first transplant of a baboon liver into a human patient. The recipient, a 35-year-old man, survived three months.
1994: In a taped interview on British TV, Prince Charles admitted he had been unfaithful to his estranged wife, Princess Diana.
1995: The U.S. shuttle Atlantis docked with the Russian space station Mir.
2003: Hollywood legend Katherine Hepburn died at the age of 96 after a six-decade career in which she won a record four Oscars in the Best Actress category.
2006: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled U.S. President George W. Bush didn’t have authority, under military law or the Geneva Conventions to set up military tribunals for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
2007: The American bald eagle, declared endangered in 1967, was flourishing and no longer imperiled, the U.S. Interior Department announced.
2009: Bernard Madoff, architect of a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme, was sentenced to 150 years in prison.
2010: The leading candidate for governor in the violence-torn Mexican state of Tamaulipas, Rodolfo Torre, and four others were ambushed and killed.
2011: Greek lawmakers approved some of the toughest economic measures in the nation’s modern history in a five-year austerity plan that included tax increases and job cuts. Observers said the severe budget could be critical to the future of the euro.
2012: Thousands of people at a rally in Cairo demanded that the military transfer full power to new Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, who told the crowd, There is no power above people power.
Quotes
“I believe that sex is one of the most beautiful, natural, wholesome things that money can buy.” – Steve Martin
“Whoever degrades another degrades me.” – Walt Whitman
“I don’t hate my enemies. After all, I made ’em.” – Red Skelton, comedian (1913-1997)
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“A belief which leaves no place for doubt is not a belief; it is a superstition.” – Jose Bergamin, author (1895-1983)
Antoine de Saint-Exupery (1900-1944) French writer-adventurer:
“A chief is a man who assumes responsibility. He says “I was beaten,” he does not say “My men were beaten”.”
“A civilization is a heritage of beliefs, customs, and knowledge slowly accumulated in the course of centuries, elements difficult at times to justify by logic, but justifying themselves as paths when they lead somewhere, since they open up for man his inner distance.”
“A civilization is built on what is required of men, not on that which is provided for them.”
“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
“A pile of rocks ceases to be a rock when somebody contemplates it with the idea of a cathedral in mind.”
“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”
“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret; it is only with the heart that one can see rightly, what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
“Charity never humiliated him who profited from it, nor ever bound him by the chains of gratitude, since it was not to him but to God that the gift was made.”
“Each man must look to himself to teach him the meaning of life. It is not something discovered: it is something molded.”
monomania
PRONUNCIATION: (mon-uh-MAY-nee-uh; -nyuh)
MEANING: (noun)
1. Pathological obsession with a single subject or idea.
2. Excessive concentration of interest upon one particular subject or idea.
USAGE: “Jenn’s monomania regarding the popular television program was such that all other activities, including work, were shoved aside once the new season began.”
scatology
PRONUNCIATION: (skuh-TOL-uh-jee)
http://wordsmith.org/words/scatology.mp3
MEANING: (noun)
1. The scientific study of excrement.
2. An obsession with excrement or excretion.
3. Language or literature dealing with excretory matters in a prurient or humorous manner.
ETYMOLOGY: From Greek skato-, combing form of skor (dung). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sker- (excrement) that is also the source of dreck and scoria.
USAGE: “One fund will be left empty, while the second will contain a steaming pile of what, at the risk of descending into scatology, can only be described as two-year Greek government notes.” – Mark Gilbert; Hedge-Fund Guy Seduces Buffett to Safeguard Bonus; BusinessWeek (New York); Jan 14, 2010.
Explore “scatology” in the Visual Thesaurus.
http://visualthesaurus.com/?w1=scatology
rhubarb
PRONUNCIATION: (ROO-bahrb)
http://wordsmith.org/words/rhubarb.mp3
MEANING: (noun), A heated dispute; brawl.
ETYMOLOGY: The origin of the plant name rhubarb is from Greek rha (perhaps from Rha, an ancient name of the river Volga on whose bank rhubarb was grown) + barbaros (foreign), but why the word developed this slang sense is unknown. We do know that this usage was popularized in baseball. The Oxford English Dictionary has the first citation from 1943:
“Mr ‘Red’ Barber,.. who has been announcing the games of the Brooklyn Dodgers, has used the term ‘rhubarb’ to describe an argument, or a mix-up, on the field of play.” (NY Herald Tribune)
It’s unconfirmed whether the word has any connection with hey rube, the term for a circus brawl, or its theatrical use: when the noise of background conversation is to be simulated, a group of actors is asked to repeat the word rhubarb.
USAGE: “People should get their domestic rhubarbs, verbal fisticuffs, and emotional jugular-snatching completely out of the way before they show up for a house tour.” – Richard Ford; Independence Day; Alfred A. Knopf; 1995.