Monday, March 8, 2010

languor \LANG-guhr; LANG-uhr\, noun:

1. Mental or physical weariness or fatigue.
2. Listless indolence, especially the indolence of one who is satiated by a life of luxury or pleasure.
3. A heaviness or oppressive stillness of the air.

Languor is from Latin languor, from languere, "to be faint or weak." The adjective form is languorous.

Midnight Munchies

• The emptiness you feel in your stomach in the middle of the night, usually while watching commercials for pizza or Burger King.

Guy #1: Hey what did you do last night?

Guy #2: Ughh man, I was watching this movie on TV, and then a Burger King commercial came on for the Whopper JR. I realized I totally had the midnight munchies and I just had to get 50 of them things.

Trivia

In the 2000 movie Miss Congeniality, which state did Sandra Bullock represent in her role as an FBI undercover agent posing as a beauty pageant contestant?

• New Jersey.

History

• Gnadenhutten massacre: nearly 100 Native American converts to Christianity were murdered by militiamen during the American Revolution in revenge for raids carried out by other Native Americans (1782)
• New York Stock Exchange: the world's largest stock exchange by dollar volume received its constitution and its name (1817)
• FBI: 9 men from the US Secret Service were moved to the Justice Department, forming the Bureau of Investigation — later to become the FBI (1909)
• February Revolution: broke out in Russia — February 23 in the Julian calendar; it brought an end to the reign of Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanov dynasty (1917)
• cloture: the US Senate voted in a method of bringing endless debates — filibusters — to an end (1917)
• Nelson Pillar: Dublin's granite column topped with a statue of Lord Nelson, the British hero of the Battle of Trafalgar, was destroyed by an IRA bomb (1966)

Berfdays

• Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.(1841-1935): Supreme Court justice known as "the Great Dissenter"
• Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932): author of The Wind in the Willows
• Otto Hahn (1879-1968): Nobel Prize-winning chemist and physicist; Nobel Prize-winner Edward Calvin Kendall (1886-1972) shared this birth date
• Jim Bouton (71): baseball player who wrote Ball Four
• Aidan Quinn (51): actor, Songcatcher, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; other actors born on this date include Claire Trevor (1909-2000), Alan Hale, Jr. (1918-1990), Cyd Charisse (1922-2008), Sue Ann Langdon (74), Lynn Redgrave (67), Camryn Manheim (49), Andrea Parker (40), Freddie Prinze, Jr. (34) and James Van Der Beek (33)
• Mickey Dolenz (65): drummer and singer with The Monkees; also, musicians Randy Meisner (64), and Bob, Clint and Dave Moffatt (all 26)