Saturday, November 6, 2010

nacreous \NEY-kree-uhs\, adjective:

Resembling nacre (mother-of-pearl); lustrous; pearly.

Nacreous is the adjectival form of nacre, a "type of shellfish that yields mother-of-pearl." The word may ultimately derive from the Arabic nakara, "to hollow out," in reference to the shape of the mollusk shell.

vote smurfing

Getting around a website's "one person one vote" logic by voting from multiple computers. See ballot stuffing and meth smurfing.

The only way you could have gotten so many thumbs up on your urbandictionary entry was from vote smurfing.

Trivia

What are emergency shutdown buttons routinely labeled on control panels in nuclear power plants around the world?

SCRAM.

History

• Jefferson Davis: was elected president of the Confederate States of America (he'd already been serving as president under the provisional constitution), one year to the day after Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States of America (1861)
• college football: Rutgers beat Princeton in the first intercollegiate game (1869)
• October Revolution: the Bolshevik uprising began in St. Petersburg; the October/November discrepancy is due to Russian Old Style dates (1917)
• Meet the Press: the Sunday morning talk show debuted; it is the longest-running TV program in the world (1947)
• Australia: voted to keep Queen Elizabeth as its head of state (1999)

Birthdays

• James Naismith (1861-1939): inventor of basketball
• Mike Nichols (79): multiple award-winning director of stage and screen
• Glenn Frey (62): rock musician, The Eagles; plus, musician Arturo Sandoval (61)
• Maria Shriver (55): newscaster and author
• Kelly Rutherford (42): Gossip Girl's Lily van der Woodsen; also, actors Sally Field (64), Lori Singer (53), Lance Kerwin (50), Peter DeLuise (44), Ethan Hawke (40), Thandie Newton and Rebecca Romijn (both 38), Zoe McLellan (36) and Emma Stone (22)
• Ana Ivanović (23): tennis player