Friday, April 3, 2009

longueur \long-GUR\, noun:

• A dull and tedious passage in a book, play, musical composition, or the like.

Longueur is from French (where it means "length"), ultimately deriving from Latin longus, "long," which is also the source of English long.

flat out

• To be extremely busy.

Jane: It's lunch time. You want to go grab a bite to eat?

Kate: Thanks, but I can't right now - I'm flat out...

Trivia

Between them, how many children were born to showman P. T. Barnum’s famous Siamese twins, Chang and Eng? How many of their children were twins?

• They fathered 21 children, none of them twins. Eng had 11 children; Chang, 10. The brothers were born in Siam (now Thailand), conjoined at the breast, giving rise to the term Siamese twins. They married two sisters and lived in North Carolina.

Today in History:

• Jesse James: outlaw met his end, shot in the back by a member of his own gang (1882)
• Marshall Plan: President Truman signed over some $13 billion in aid for post-war Europe (1948)
• TV Guide: was published for the first time, with the infant Desi Arnaz, Jr., on the cover (1953)
• Unabomber: mail-order anti-technology terrorist Theodore Kaczynski was arrested in his cabin outside Lincoln, Montana (1996)

Today's Birthdays:

• Pierre-Fidele Bretonneau (1778-1862): epidemiologist who performed the first successful tracheotomy
• Washington Irving (1783-1859): author, "Rip Van Winkle"
• Gus Grissom (1926-1967): astronaut who, along with Roger Chaffee and Ed White, was killed in the Apollo 1 fire
• Helmut Kohl (79): former German chancellor; Italian PM Alcide De Gasperi (1881-1954) shared this birth date
• Wayne Newton (67): Las Vegas singer, "Danke Schoen"; Vegas club singer Tony Orlando (65) also celebrates his birthday today
• Alec Baldwin (51): 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy; also, actors Doris Day (85), Marlon Brando (1924-2004), Eric Braeden (68), Marsha Mason (67), David Hyde Pierce (50), Eddie Murphy (48), Jennie Garth (37) and Amanda Bynes (23)