Tuesday, March 16, 2010

edacious (i-DAY-shuhs)adjective:

• Devouring; voracious.

EtymologyFrom Latin edere (to eat). Ultimately from the Indo-European root ed- (to eat, to bite) that has given other words such as edible, comestible, obese, etch, fret, and postprandial.

pre-hab

• Where people go to avoid a future addiction.

Britney's kids now in pre-hab.
Trivia

At what speed did Michael J. Fox, as Marty McFly, have to drive to activate the time machine in Doc Emmett Brown’s DeLorean in the 1985 film Back to the Future?

• 88 miles per hour.

History

• Samoset: Native American man made a sudden appearance among the Pilgrims at Plymouth Colony, greeting them in English (1622)
• West Point: the US Military Academy was established; graduates include US presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower(1802)
• Robert Goddard: physicist launched the first liquid fuel rocket, in Auburn, Massachusetts; "Nell" the rocket traveled 2.5 seconds and landed in a cabbage field (1926)
• My Lai massacre: US soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in the Vietnam village of My Lai (1968)

Berfdays

• James Madison (1751-1836):Founding Father and fourth POTUS; the shah of Iran, Reza Shah Pahlevi (1878-1944) was also born on this date
• Georg Simon Ohm (1789-1854): German physicist who formulated Ohm's law of electrical resistance
• Maxim Gorky (1868-1936): writer of short stories and novels
• Bernardo Bertolucci (70): director, The Last Emperor
• Jerry Jeff Walker (68): country singer, "Mr. Bojangles"; musicians Ray Benson (59), Nancy Wilson (56), Flavor Flav (51), Patty Griffin (46) and Wolfgang Van Halen (19) share this birth date
• Victor Garber (61): actor, Alias, Eli Stone; also, actors Jerry Lewis (84), Erik Estrada (61), Kate Nelligan (59), Isabelle Huppert (55), Lauren Graham (43), Judah Friedlander (41), Alan Tudyk (39), Tim Kang (37) and Brooke Burns (32)