Sunday, August 7, 2011

nervure \NUR-vyoor\, noun:

• A vein, as of a leaf or the wing of an insect.

Nervure is French for "rib."

chiptease

• When you buy a bag of chips thinking that it will be full of chips but when you open the bag it's barely full.

I bought a bag of chips out of the vending machine and there was only 5 chips in the bag, what a Chiptease!

Trivia

In the popular Margaret Mitchell novel Gone with the Wind, how many children did Scarlett O’Hara have?

• Three—each with a different husband. The first was a son, Wade; the second, a daughter, Ella; the third, a daughter, Bonnie. The first two children were eliminated from the 1939 movie.

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 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 (69): country/pop singer, "Raindrops Keep Fallin' On My Head"; also, musicians Bruce Dickinson (53) and Marcus Roberts (48)
• Garrison Keillor (69): writer/host of A Prairie Home Companion
• David Duchovny (51): actor, The X-Files, Californication; also, performers Stan Freberg (85), Wayne Knight (56), Harold Perrineau (48) and Charlize Theron (36)
• Jimmy Wales (45): founder of Wikipedia
• Sidney Crosby (24): center for Pittsburgh Penguins; runners Abebe Bikila (1932-1973) and Alberto Salazar (53) share this birth date

Read more: http://www.answers.com/