Monday, August 26, 2013

helter-skelter \HEL-ter-SKEL-ter\, adverb:

1. in headlong and disorderly haste: The children ran helter-skelter all over the house.
2. in a haphazard manner; without regard for order: Clothes were scattered helter-skelter about the room.

adjective:

1. carelessly hurried; confused: They ran in a mad, helter-skelter fashion for the exits.
2. disorderly; haphazard: Books and papers were scattered on the desk in a helter-skelter manner.

noun:

1. tumultuous disorder; confusion.

The origin of helter-skelter is unknown, though it is perhaps onomatopoetic. It entered English in the late 1500s and employs a reduplicated rhyme similar to the words hurry-scurry and harum-scarum. 

Clean Pinch

• That which occurs when you wipe after evacuating ones bowels only to find that there is no excrement on the paper.

I just took a dump and guess what? Clean Pinch!!!

Trivia

What 2-inch-long ocean creature is one of the noisiest animals on earth?

• The pistol shrimp, which makes a noise that can reach up to 218 decibels—30 decibels higher than the sound made by the blue whale. It does this by snapping its oversized pincer to fire off a 60-mile-an-hour blast of water that creates a low-pressure bubble with an internal temperature that is hotter than the sun. The bubble quickly bursts, emitting a high-decibel boom that stuns the tiny shrimp’s prey and provides it with food.
  

History

• Battle of Crécy: longbows helped the heavily outnumbered English defeat the French, marking the decline of chivalry and the rise of England as a world power (1346)
• 19th Amendment: women's suffrage became the law of the land in the US (1920)
• Donoghue v Stevenson: woman found a snail in her ginger beer; this case became a cornerstone of British law in the field of negligence (1928)
• MLB on TV: the first Major League Baseball game was televised from Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, New York; the Cincinnati Reds and the Brooklyn Dodgers split a doubleheader (1939)
• Pope John Paul I: Italian cardinal dubbed the Smiling Pope assumed the papacy; he died 33 days later (1978)

Birthdays

• Lee Deforest 1873
• Christopher Isherwood 1904
• Albert Sabine 1906
• Mother Teresa (Agnesë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu) 1910
• Jim Davis 1915
• Ronnie Graham 1919
• Georgia Gibbs 1920
• Ben Bradlee 1921
• Irving R. Levine 1922
• Jan Clayton 1925
• Ben J. Wattenberg 1933
• Tommy Heinsohn 1934
• Geraldine Ferraro 1935
• Don Bowman 1937
• Bill White 1939
• Vic Dana 1942
• Swede Savage 1946
  
• Valerie Simpson 1948
• Bob Cowsill (The Cowsills) 1949
• Michael Jeter 1952
• Brett Cullen 1956
• Alex Trevino 1957
• John O'Neill 1957
• Jet Black (The Stranglers) 1958
• Branford Marsalis 1960
• Jimmy Olander (Diamond Rio) 1961
• Chris Burke 1965
• Shirley Manson (Garbage) 1966
• Adrian Young (No Doubt) 1969
• Melissa McCarthy 1971
• David Grubka 1972
• Chris Pine 1980 (Captain Kirk)
• Macaulay Culkin 1980