TGIF! Friday, August 7, 2015

insouciant \in-SOO-see-uhnt\, adjective:

• Marked by lighthearted unconcern or indifference; carefree; nonchalant.

Insouciant is from the French, from in-, "not" + souciant, "caring," present participle of soucier, "to trouble," from Latin sollicitare, "to disturb," from sollicitus, "anxious." The noun form is insouciance.

 

Dohment

• One of those slap your forehead moments when you realize that you've just done something incredibly stupid.The moment when something "dawns on you" and "the penny drops.

A dohment is when you realize that you've put the baby outside and tucked the cat up in the cot for the night.

or

A dohment is when you wonder why the lawn isn't looking any better then notice that you haven't engaged the lawnmower blade.

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

• Nathaniel Greene 1742
• Mata Hari 1876
• Billie Burke 1884
• Rudolf Bunche 1904
• Warren Covington 1921
• Felice Bryant 1925
• Stan Freberg 1926
• "The Amazing" James Randi 1928
• Magic Slim 1937
• Ron Holden 1939
• Verna Bloom 1939
• B.J. Thomas 1942
• Garrison Keillor 1942
• Lana Cantrell 1943
• John Glover 1944
• David Rasche 1944
• Rodney Crowell 1950
• Andy Fraser (Free) 1952
• Caroline Aaron 1952
• Wayne Knight 1955
• Alberto Salazar 1958
• Bruce Dickinson 1958 (Iron Maiden)
• David Duchovny 1960 (X-Files)
• DeLane Matthews 1961
• Marcus Roberts 1963
• Harold Perrineau 1963 - Actor ("Lost") 
• Raul Malo (The Mavericks) 1965
• Charlotte Lewis 1967
• Sydney Penny 1971
• Charlize Theron 1975 (Aeon Flux)
• Sydney Crosby 1987