Trivia of the Day 21 May 2012

May 21, 1881:
American Red Cross founded

In Washington, D.C., humanitarians Clara Barton and Adolphus Solomons
found the American National Red Cross, an organization established to
provide humanitarian aid to victims of wars and natural disasters in
congruence with the International Red Cross.

May 21, 1901
Canadian cruises Commonwealth in Canoe

Victoria BC - John Claus Voss sails west in his Nootka Indian canoe, the
Tilikum; reaches England Sept. 2, 1904, after taking three years, three
months and 12 days to navigate the 65,000 km, via Australia and New
Zealand; Tilikum on display at Thunderbird Park in Victoria.

May 21, 1927:
Lindbergh lands in Paris

American pilot Charles A. Lindbergh lands at Le Bourget Field in Paris,
successfully completing the first solo, nonstop transatlantic flight and
the first ever nonstop flight between New York to Paris. His
single-engine monoplane, The Spirit of St. Louis, had lifted off from
Roosevelt Field in New York 33 1/2 hours before.

May 21, 1932:
Earhart completes transatlantic flight

Five years to the day that American aviator Charles Lindbergh became the
first pilot to accomplish a solo, nonstop flight across the Atlantic
Ocean, femaleaviator Amelia Earhart becomes the first pilot to repeat
the feat, landing her plane in Ireland after flying across the North
Atlantic. Earhart traveled over 2,000 miles from Newfoundland in just
under 15 hours.

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May 21, 2012
Word of the Day

malediction\mal-uh-DIK-shun\

noun

: curse, execration

The two old women began casting aspersions and heaping maledictions upon
one another.

"Culture may have been the principal instrument of our transfiguration,
and we could now only curse the few beneficiaries of the founder of
civil society with Caliban's malediction addressed to Prospero in The
Tempest: 'The red plague ride you / For learning me your language!'" —
From Robert Wokler's 2012 book Rousseau, the Age of Enlightenment, and
Their Legacies

"Malediction," which at one time could also refer to slander or to the
condition of being reviled or slandered, derives (via Middle English and
Late Latin) from the Latin verb "maledicere," meaning "to speak evil of"
or "to curse." "Maledicere," in turn, was formed by combining the Latin
words "male," meaning "badly," and "dicere," "to speak" or "to say." You
may recognize both of those component parts, as each has made a
significant contribution to the English language. "Male" is the ancestor
of such words as "malady," "malevolent," and "malign"; "dicere" gives us
"contradict," "dictate," "diction," "edict" and "prediction," just to
name a few.

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Question of the Day

Which country ws divided into East and West between the 1940s and 1990s?

Yesterdays Question

The Left Bank generally refers to the Left Bank of the Seine in which city?

Answer

Paris