Saturday, August 7, 2010

mojo \MOH-joh\, noun:

1. Personal magnetism; charm.

2. The art or practice of casting magic spells; magic; voodoo.

3. An object, as an amulet or charm, that is believed to carry a magic spell.

4. Good luck or favor concerning an event or individual.

Mojo comes from moco, "witchcraft," a word in the Gullah dialect. The Gullah are African-Americans who now live in parts of South Carolina and Florida and preserved a greater amount of their African heritage. They speak a creole that uniquely incorporates a great deal of African grammar and loanwords.

mantor

• A man to whom you as a man aspire towards. The Ideal man.

Tom Selleck is my mantor.

Trivia

What TV sex therapist, as a teenager, served as a sniper for the Israeli underground?

• German-born Ruth Westheimer, popularly known as Dr. Ruth. Orphaned during the Holocaust, she moved to the British Mandate of Palestine after World War II and was trained as a sniper by the Haganah paramilitary defense force.

History

• Purple Heart: the military decoration was instituted by George Washington (1782)
• Ulysses: a US appeals court ruled that the James Joyce novel was not obscene and therefore should not be banned (1934)
• Kon-Tiki: the balsa wood raft made it across the Pacific, crashing at the end on a reef in the Tuomotu Islands; this demonstrated that pre-Columbian South Americans could have reached and settled Polynesia (1947)
• Gulf of Tonkin resolution: US Congress authorized President Lyndon B. Johnson to use military force in Vietnam (1964)
• Lynne Cox: swims the frigid Bering Strait, becoming the first person to swim from the US to the to the Soviet Union (1987)
• Twin Towers: Philippe Petit walked a tightrope between the towers of New York's World Trade Center (1974)
• US embassy bombings: simultaneous al-Qaeda attacks in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed over 200 people and wounded thousands (1998)

Birthdays

• Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga (1533-1594): soldier and poet, La Araucana
• Mata Hari (1876-1917): dancer/spy
• Louis Leakey (1903-1972): paleoanthropologist
• B.J. Thomas (68): country/pop singer, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head"; also, musicians Bruce Dickinson (52) and Marcus Roberts (47)
• Garrison Keillor (68): writer/host of A Prairie Home Companion
• David Duchovny (50): actor, The X-Files, Californication; also, performers Stan Freberg (84), Wayne Knight (55), Harold Perrineau (47) and Charlize Theron (35)
• Jimmy Wales (44): founder of Wikipedia
• 
  Sidney Crosby (23): center for Pittsburgh Penguins; runners Abebe Bikila (1932-1973) and Alberto Salazar (52) share this birth date