Sunday, January 31, 2010

penchant \PEN-chunt\, noun:

• Inclination; decided taste; a strong liking.

Penchant comes from the present participle of French pencher, "to incline, to bend," from (assumed) Late Latin pendicare, "to lean," from Latin pendere, "to weigh."

that's a good question

• A phrase usually indicating that the speaker has absolutely no idea how to answer said question. Often used to stall for time.

Photography teacher walking in on students who should be at pep rally: What are you doing here?

Sreya: That's a good question!

Trivia
In the world of medicine, what is the Alice in Wonderland Syndrome?

• An ailment whose sufferers have a distorted sense of time and space and believe their body, or parts of their body, have changed in size or shape. The name, of course, was inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

History

• Guy Fawkes: was hanged for his part in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and kill the king of England (1606)
• first US Social Security check: the sum of $22.54 was received by Ida May Fuller, who had paid three years of payroll taxes; she lived to 100, collecting a total of $22,888.92 from Social Security (1940)
• Great Flood of 1953: tidal surgekilled thousands and affected shorelines in the UK and the Netherlands
• Explorer I: the US launched its first Earth satellite, whose mission was to detect cosmic rays (1958)
• McDonald's: first opened in the Soviet Union, in Moscow (1990)

Berfdays

• André-Jacques Garnerin (1769-1823): parachutist; plus, balloonist Charles Green (1785-1870)
• Benjamin Hooks (85): civil rights leader
• Ernie Banks (79): MLB hall-of-famer; second-baseman Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) and pitcher Nolan Ryan (63) share this birth date
• Kenzaburo Oe (75): Nobel Prize-winning author; also, writers Zane Grey (1872-1939), John O'Hara (1905-1970), Thomas Merton (1915-1968) and Norman Mailer (1923-2007)
• Beatrix (72): queen of the Netherlands
• Minnie Driver (40): actor, on screens now inMotherhood; also, actors Jessica Walter (69), Anthony LaPaglia (51), and Portia de Rossi (37)
• Justin Timberlake (29): Grammy-winning pop singer; also, musicians Franz Schubert (1797-1828), Philip Glass (73), Charlie Musselwhite (66) and Johnny Rotten (54)