Sunday, November 14, 2010

emend \ih-MEND\, verb:

1. To free from faults or errors; correct.

2. To edit or change a text.

Emend comes from the Latin emendare, "to free from fault."

bacontarian

• A person who claims to be a true vegetarian but knowingly supplements their diet with small amounts of bacon, bacon bits, and bacon fat.

My friend Sagar, a true Bacontarian, claims to be a true vegetarian but also eats meals where bacon is added.

Trivia

Which is the only one of the ten major categories in the Dewey Decimal System that doesn’t include at least one book by the prolific Isaac Asimov?

• Philosophy, the category for which books are numbered in the 100s under the Dewey Decimal System (DDS). But Asimov does have a video in the category, Humanism: Making Bigger Circles, which was given the DDS designation 144.

History

• Moby Dick: the famous Herman Melville novel was published (1851)
• Nellie Bly: New York journalist began her around-the-world-in-72-days trip, beating the time of Phileas Fogg, the hero of Jules Verne's novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1889)
• Coventry: central England city was largely reduced to rubble by Nazi air raids (1940)
• Apollo 12: second successful manned mission to the moon was launched (1969)
• Sedna: this trans-Neptunian object and very far-away dwarf planet candidate was discovered (2003)

Birthdays

• Robert Fulton (1765-1815): inventor and engineer who made a better steamboat
• Claude Monet (1840-1926): Impressionist painter of Water Lilies

• Astrid Lindgren (1907-2002): author of Pippi Longstocking; also, writers William Steig (1907-2003) and P.J. O'Rourke (63)
• Boutros Boutros-Ghali (88): sixth UN Secretary-General
• Prince Charles (62): heir to the throne of Great Britain; world leaders Hussein I (1935-1999) and Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) share this birth date
• Yanni (56): keyboardist/composer; other composers born today include Aaron Copland (1900-1990) and Wendy Carlos (71)
• Curt Schilling (44): one of baseball history's best postseason pitchers
• Josh Duhamel (38): actor, Transformers; also, actors McLean Stevenson (1927-1996), Laura San Giacomo and D.B. Sweeney (both 49) and Patrick Warburton (46)