Friday, October 15, 2010

smithereens \smith-uh-REENZ\, noun:

• Small pieces; bits.

Smithereens is an alteration of the Irish smidirin, "fragment."

ha

• awknowledgement of someones comment or joke, but indicating it wasn't funny.

John: I love girls that wear their PJs all day long, it's like they are ready to jump in bed at a moments notice.

Jack: ha

Trivia

When it comes to American literary classics, who wrote The Scarlet Letter? How about The Purloined Letter?

• Scarlet, Nathaniel Hawthorne; Purloined, Edgar Allan Poe.

History

• Gregorian calendar: was adopted by Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain; the Julian calendar ended the previous day, October 4, and the intervening 10 days were deleted (1582)
• Abraham Lincoln: was encouraged to grow a beard in a letter he received from 11-year-old Grace Bedell (1860)
• The Great Dictator: Charlie Chaplin's scathing satirical film attack on Nazi Germany was released (1940)
• I Love Lucy: one of television history's most popular sitcoms debuted (1951)
• Department of Transportation: was signed into existence by LBJ (1966)
• sound barrier: was broken on land for the first time, by RAF pilot Andy Green in Black Rock Desert in Nevada, 50 years and a day after it was broken in the air by Chuck Yeager (1997)

Birthdays

• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900): German philosopher who wrote about the Übermensch, or superman; plus philosopher/historian Michel Foucault (1926-1984) and historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917-2007)
• John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006): economist
• Mario Puzo (1920-1999): novelist, The Godfather; also, writers Virgil (70-19 BCE), Allan Ramsay (1686-1758), Mikhail Yurevich Lermontov (1814-1841 OS), Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-1885), P.G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) and C. P. Snow (1905-1980)
• Jim Palmer (65): three-time winner of the Cy Young Award
• Emeril Lagasse (51): celebrity chef
• Sarah Ferguson (51): one-time member of the British Royal Family
• Keyshia Cole (29): R&B singer and songwriter, The Way it Is; plus, musicians Barry McGuire (75), Don Stevenson (69), Richard Carpenter (64) and Tito Jackson (57)
• Tanya Roberts (55) actress, Charlie's Angels, That 70's Show, hottie