Tuesday, June 29, 2010

yaw \YAW\, verb:

1. To move unsteadily; weave.

2. To deviate temporarily from a straight course, as a ship.

3. (Of a vehicle) to have a motion about the vertical axis.

Yaw migrates to English from the Old Norse jaga, "to drive, chase.".

drive-by friending

• The sending of a friend request on Facebook or other social networking site without including any information on who you are or how you know the recipient.

There were twenty mutual friends listed, but I never heard the name before and they didn't include a note identifying themselves. So I rejected it as a drive-by friending.

Trivia

What Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet was granted a conditional appointment to West Point, but had to leave after failing the grammar and math sections of the entrance exam?

• Carl Sandburg, in 1899.

History

• Globe Theatre: London theatre that showcased Shakespeare's plays burned down; it was reconstructed in 1997 (1613)
• Townshend Acts: were passed by the British Parliament, imposing import duties on paper, tea and other items shipped to America; they led to the Boston Massacre (1767)
• Furman v. Georgia: the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that capital punishment could constitute "cruel and unusual punishment" (1972)
• Atlantis: space shuttle docked with Russian space station Mir; together they formed the largest man-made satellite to orbit Earth (1995)
• iPhone: went on sale in the US amid enormous buzz (2007)

Berfdays, yo!

• Nicole Scherzinger (32): lead singer of Pussycat Dolls, exotic beauty
• George Goethals (1858-1928): civil engineer, supervised construction of the Panama Canal
• George Ellery Hale (1868-1938): astronomer who invented the Hale telescope
• James Van Der Zee (1886-1983): photographer, captured scenes of Harlem life
• Stokely Carmichael (1941-1998): civil rights activist
• Dan Dierdorf (61): football hall-of-famer; baseball hall-of-famer Harmon Killebrew (74) shares this birth date
• Don Dokken (57): rocker