Beethoven's Fifth Symphony begins with three eighth notes (E) and one half note (G below that). It sounds like dit-dit-dit-daaaaaaaah, Morse Code for the letter vee, and in WWII the allies took it to symbolize (Allied) Victory.
There is a story to the effect that Beethoven characterized this opening phrase with the words ``das Schicksal klopft an die Tür'' (`fate knocks at the door').
NH \ / 2 \___/ / \ / \ === O / / HO
Learn more at its entry in WebElements and its entry at Chemicool.
Hey you! Yeah, I'm talkin' to you! It ain't ``Via Della Rosa'' okay? It's Via Dolorosa! Jesus, some people...
I have found the old abbreviations v.a. and v.n. used in one work that was (in a certain manner of accounting such things) relatively recent: the New Cassell's German Dictionary, copyright 1958 and 1960. The use of those old abbreviations evidently reflects the conservative and derivative nature of translation dictionaries. This particular dictionary traces its genealogy through a sequence of revisions and re-editings going back to a New German Dictionary by Elizabeth Weir published in 1889. That might have been a first edition or not, and Miss Weir may have been the first editor or not -- the publisher's records were destroyed by fire in 1941 -- but she acknowledged ``the well-known dictionaries of Lucas, Flügel, Hilpert, and Köhler,'' all long forgotten by 1958. (For other examples of such dictionary bloodlines, see the discussion of Greek and Persian translation dictionaries in the Pakistan entry.)
The 1960 New Cassell's has a list of 228 abbreviations, and it is interesting to observe that three of those abbreviations are elucidated with terms other than the words they abbreviate. Okay, Max -- so maybe it's not so interesting to observe, but after I went to all the trouble to check, you better believe I'm gonna mention it to somebody! The three abbreviations are Semp. (``sewing''), v.a. (`transitive verb'), and v.n. (`intransitive verb'). Presumably it was not considered practical in that revision to replace (i.e., to reset the type for) every occurrence of the obsolete abbreviations. (Nouns are indicated by s., expanded in the key as ``substantive.'')
In chapter 8 of Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, our hero begins work as an assistant to the master of miserable Dotheboys Hall. Here the master explains his pedagogical method:
`This is the first class in English spelling and philosophy, Nickleby,' said Squeers, beckoning Nicholas to stand beside him. `We'll get up a Latin one, and hand that over to you. Now, then, where's the first boy?'
`Please, sir, he's cleaning the back-parlour window,' said the temporary head of the philosophical class.
`So he is, to be sure,' rejoined Squeers. `We go upon the practical mode of teaching, Nickleby; the regular education system. C-l-e-a-n, clean, verb active, to make bright, to scour. W-i-n, win, d-e-r, der, winder, a casement. When the boy knows this out of book, he goes and does it. It's just the same principle as the use of the globes. Where's the second boy?'
`Please, sir, he's weeding the garden,' replied a small voice.
`To be sure,' said Squeers, by no means disconcerted. `So he is. B-o-t, bot, t-i-n, tin, bottin, n-e-y, ney, bottinney, noun substantive, a knowledge of plants. When he has learned that bottinney means a knowledge of plants, he goes and knows 'em. That's our system, Nickleby: what do you think of it?'
`It's very useful one, at any rate,' answered Nicholas.
Officially it's become the ``United States Department of Veterans Affairs,'' but for everyone I know it is ingrained habit to expand the VA in ``VA hospital'' as ``Veterans Administration.'' VA hospitals closely associated with a nearby university are not so bad.
The Villanova Center for Information Law and Policy serves a page of Virginia state government links. USACityLink.com has a page with some city and town links for the state.
Gertrude Stein's people came from Baltimore (as you recall from the S.O.S. entry). Everybody remembers her comment about Oakland, but in Everybody's Autobiography, she recalled
... And then they asked me what I thought of Virginia and I said I thought it was uninhabited, and they all of them wrote about that did I mean spirits of others or did I mean something else and I meant nothing but that it was uninhabited.
The rest of America had been very much inhabited much more than I expected, roads and country were inhabited the country looked and was inhabited but not in Virginia no not Virginia.
I guess she would have agreed that reporters can be pretty dim sometimes.
For information about central headquartering issues of the Roman Catholic Church, see the USN&WR and 1999 entries. Some time in the coming centuries, we also plan to add information about Avignon.
There also exist ways of measuring dynamic VA and ambient VA. Ambient VA is VA across the whole visual field and includes ``peripheral vision,'' as opposed to focal VA (a/k/a central VA), which is VA at the center of the visual field. Ambient VA and dynamic VA are related, since depend on areas of the retina where most of the light receptors are rods rather than cones, and provide signals that are processed in the midbrain rather than higher cortical areas. Generally speaking, these are more primitive and robust parts of VA, operating at much lower light intensities but giving no color information. Another general contrast is that focal VA has more to do with shape, while ambient and dyanamic VA has more to do with direction and position.
Some there are who do not like the usage ``volts ay cee,'' because the expansion ``volts alternating current'' seems contradictory. It is not contradictory, and the usage is reasonable.
It's interesting that in Latin, special forms arose for some combinations
of the prepositional phrases corresponding to English
with + pres. pron. In Spanish, the first and
second person singular forms of this phrase also have contracted forms (which
are used exclusively): conmigo, contigo (instead of the forms
con mi, con ti that would be constructed regularly).
The militia of the Commonwealth of Virginia shall consist of all able-bodied citizens of this Commonwealth and all other able-bodied persons resident in this Commonwealth who have declared their intention to become citizens of the United States, who are at least sixteen years of age and, except as hereinafter provided, not more than fifty-five years of age. The militia shall be divided into four classes, the National Guard, which includes the Army National Guard and the Air National Guard, the Virginia State Defense Force, the naval militia, and the unorganized militia.
The mission of the state defense force is to support the Virginia National Guard.
In Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, during a dinner party in chapter VI, one conversation turns to the navy. The following exchange is between Edmund Bertram and Mary Crawford. After the death of their mother, Mary and her brother Henry had been adopted by her uncle Admiral Crawford and his wife.
``Do you know anything of my cousin's captain?'' said Edmund; ``Captain Marshall? You have a large acquaintance in the navy, I conclude?''
``Among admirals, large enough; but,'' with an air of grandeur, ``we know very little of the inferior ranks. Post-captains may be very good sort of men, but they do not belong to us. Of various admirals I could tell you a great deal: of them and their flags, and the gradation of their pay, and their bickerings and jealousies. But, in general, I can assure you that they are all passed over, and all very ill used. Certainly, my home at my uncle's brought me acquainted with a circle of admirals. Of Rears and Vices I saw enough. Now do not be suspecting me of a pun, I entreat.''
The word admiral looks like it's derived from the Latin admirari, but the relationship is only accidental. Admiral is derived from the Arabic amir. (This is usually written, or perhaps we can say translated, `emir' in English, but a straightforward translation is `commander.' In Arabic, amara is `command, order.') Amir typically was part of a phrase like amir-al-ma (`emir of the water') or amir-al-muminin (`emir of the faithful'). The use of the definite article al in this way is parallel to the use of definite articles in, for example, German, Ancient Greek, and Hebrew (see USA). Because of the frequent collocation, Christian writers took amiral for a noun and Latinized it variously as amiralis, amirallus, amiralius, or amirarius.
Some words that begin with adm- in Latin begin with am- in French. An awareness of this fact, and the existence of Latin admirari, `to wonder at,' evidently led to forms of the word beginning in adm-, like the English word admiral. In Spanish, which has a great many loans from Arabic in which the definite article has been kept as a prefix, the initial am- became alm-, yielding almirante, which you might parse as containing `the-commander-th'.'
One might also wonder (okay: I wondered) whether valetudinarian was not sometimes a synonym of hypochondriac. For an example, Jane Austen describes eponymous Emma's father as ``having been a valetudinarian all his life, without activity of mind or body, [so] he was a much older man in ways than in years....'' At that point in the novel, he has not yet been described as being in poor health of any kind, so much as being overcareful of his health. Further on: ``His spirits required support. He was a nervous man, easily depressed....'' So one might suppose that he was merely a hypochondriac of some sort. But it seems the word was not used in this way, so Austen could use it in the confidence that her readers would not even temporarily draw that inference. On the other hand, the bar for valetudinarian-level frailty was not set so especially high. Emma's father would not contemplate walking the half mile to Mr. Weston's, but he got around his own house without assistance. Since a person's own self-perceived weakness was apparently taken as sufficient evidence, it may look like hypochondria to us. Sometimes it looked like hypochondria then, but that condition was not covered by the term: it was false valetudinarianism. For example, in Rhoda Broughton's Belinda (1883), a suspected case of what might have been called hypochondria (that word is old) is described as ``valetudinarian fancies.'' There was also this:
``You are implying,'' he says, with deliberate anger, ``as you have frequently and offensively implied before, that I am a malade imaginaire.''
A related issue is the broad degree of physical infirmity implied by the term valetudinarian. This was referred to explicitly by William Godwin. He distinguished the ``delicate valetudinarian'' [Things As They Are (1794)], and averred [St. Leon (1799)] that ``[i]n many cases [but not all] it is reasonable to bid a valetudinarian take care of himself.''
Here's a pointless (because ambiguous) but amusing (so what the hell) further example: In chapter 10 of George Meredith's The Egoist (1879), Sir Willoughby (the egoist of the title) happens to introduce the term that describes himself by way of anecdote:
... he turned to Clara and related one of the after-dinner anecdotes of Dr. Corney; and another, with a vast deal of human nature in it, concerning a valetudinarian gentleman, whose wife chanced to be desperately ill, and he went to the physicians assembled in consultation outside the sick-room, imploring them by all he valued, and in tears, to save the poor patient for him, saying: ``She is everything to me, everything, and if she dies I am compelled to run the risks of marrying again; I must marry again; for she has accustomed me so to the little attentions of a wife, that in truth I can't, I can't lose her! She must be saved!'' And the loving husband of any devoted wife wrung his hands.
``Now, there, Clara, there you have the Egoist,'' added Sir Willoughby. ...
Hey, not everyone can be valedictorian. Valetudinarian is something anyone can aim for.
I didn't just make up this entry out of hole cloth, hue no. I got the idea from a comment following up a blog entry. In November 2006, ``Casey'' reported having ``recently read a student essay wherein the student claimed to be the `Valid Victiorian' of his graduation class.''
Oh: VALUE MEAL!
Why does sign let tering slid ear ounds omuch?
The definition above is in the words of the original formulator, a shameless self-promoter (i.e., a businessman) named Yossi Vardi. He himself calls it the Vardi paradox, which is crass. ``Value'' is easier to remember anyway.
In Evil Sisters: The Threat of Female Sexuality and The Cult of Manhood, (Knopf, 1996), Bram Dijkstra argues that female vampirism is the governing Jungian archetype of the modern West. The reason is probably that his name is Bram. People with that name are predisposed to become obsessed with vampires (Exhibit B: Bram Stoker). If Dijkstra's childhood playmates had called him Abe (or perhaps the Dutch equivalent?), he wouldn't have gotten so bent out of shape. Then again, he teaches comp lit at UCSD, so he has a vested interest in finding major significance in the subject of his study. So, indeed, do most authors.
I'm particularly proud of the way the analysis of Dijkstra's claims, above, dove gracefully and directly into ad hominem attack, without the traditional double-joiner or absurd back-flipping fig-leaf of reasoned objection.
Latin (here I mean the ancient language) had a large number of abstract nouns ending in -tas. These became -tad/-dad nouns in Spanish (as mentioned in the D-ION-Z-A entry). The Latin -tas nouns evolved separately into -te nouns in Old French, taken over into Middle English and generally spelled with -ty in Modern English. Thus Spanish libertad, Modern French liberté, and English liberty.
The word French naïveté, spelled with a variable allotment of diacriticals in English, is a recent borrowing. The earliest example that the OED2 lists is from Dryden in the seventeenth century. The word is also spelled naivety in English. The Modern French word is derived from an Old French word naivete. That word in turn stems not directly from a Latin root but naif. Naif (Mod. Fr. female form naïve) comes from Latin nativus. The abstract -tas noun related to this, nativitas, yielded Middle English/Old French nativite in the usual way, with English nativity parallel to Spanish natividad. (When I get a chance, I'll try to see when and how navidad arose.)
The Preface begins thus:
When Robert Vann died in October 1940, his death merited only passing notice in national publications, if indeed it was noted at all. For white America, Robert Lee Vann never really existed. The man who built the Pittsburgh Courier into the nation's leading black weekly, with a circulation of a quarter million and an influence that touched every black community in the country, was not even mentioned in a 1937 work partly devoted to the press in Pittsburgh, published when Vann and the Courier were at the height of their power. Nor did the Dictionary of American Biography supplement of 1940 include ...
I figured I'd look into the coverage thing, since online databases make it much easier now than when Buni wrote. The Los Angeles Times gave Vann a couple of column inches on October 25, at the top of page 7:
PITTSBURGH, Oct. 24 (AP)-- Robert L. Vann, 61, prominent Negro publicist and for many years editor and publisher of the Pittsburgh Courier, died tonight. A native of Ahoskie, N.C., Vann for many years was a factor in politics of this community and of the nation. Numbered among President Roosevelt's most militant supporters in earlier days, he came out against a third term and gave his support to Wendell L. Wilkie.
The Washington Post published four grafs; from comparing these with the LAT's two, it appears that both probably both printed bits of the AP item largely verbatim. Among the interesting differences: the Post used ``colored'' instead of ``Negro.'' It's hard to remember that far back, but ``colored'' was considered a more polite word (hence ``NAACP'' instead of the palindromically attractive NAAN). WP also used the possibly less confusing ``his community.'' The New York Times reworked the first graf and published six grafs in total, perhaps including most of the information in the AP item.
Of course, one of the principal charms of traditional standards of measurement is that they are not standardized. They have local flavor (and flavour too). They are multicultural. For a variety of vara values, see the vara entry in Russ Rowlett's dictionary of units of measurement.
The original VAWA was part of a larger crime bill that made gun possession illegal for anyone under a restraining order. Since restraining orders can continue to be issued without evidence or finding of violent history or potential on the part of the person restrained, there is a prima facie case that this law violates the fifth (due process) and second (bear arms) amendments to the US constitution. The restraining-order gun provision was originally ruled unconstitutional by a federal district court judge in 1999. It was argued before a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in June 2000. This panel ruled (by 2-1) that the Second Amendment was an individual right. (This has been a major point of contention, and the panel's finding was a major victory fot the NRA crowd. In the district court the Government claimed that it was ``well settled'' that the Second Amendment creates a right held by the states and does not protect an individual right to bear arms.) On the other hand, the panel held unanimously that the prohibition against gun possession during a restraining order was a reasonable restriction on that right, ``though barely so.''
In practice, there are two main types. One kind uses vertical blades that function as airfoils. Torque is generated by the azimuthal component of lift on the fins. The other kind uses drag: the wind is ``caught'' in cups or other structures designed to have greater drag resistance motion in one direction than in the opposite direction.
The experience at UB (home of the SBF alpha chapter) with that OS was none too happy, and by the end of 1996, all ordinary user accounts were on Unix machines.
At one time, obstetricians felt that a Caesarean section so weakened the tissues surrounding the placenta that all subsequent deliveries should be by C-section as well. During the 1980's or so, that attitude changed and most now feel that VBAC is safe ``if some additional precautions are taken.'' The reason for the precautions is that in 1% of cases, attempted VBAC leads to uterine rupture and hemorrhage. A C-section must then be carried out immediately, since decreased oxygen supply to the fetus risks brain damage and death. In many such cases the mother afterwards requires a hysterectomy.
Considering that in the US today about 20% of live births are by C-section, VBAC is a frequent issue.
There's a mailing list called ICAN that's ``[f]or people who wish to discuss cesarean section in a supportive environment. It is open to people who have experienced c-section, parents who wish to avoid a c-section, people who wish to have a VBAC ..., or professionals wishing to contribute. Trained counselors will be available to answer questions and facilitate list discussions.'' Subscription information for ICAN at PAML and Sabrina's Pregnancy Page.
You know, I must have been sleeping when I added the last three entries. Just in case I'm sleeping now, I'll leave them in.
See, for example, Su-Huai Wei, David B. Laks, Alex Zunger: ``Dependence of the optical properties of semiconductor alloys on the degree of long-range order,'' Applied Physics Letters 62, #16, p.1937 (19 April 1993). [See also Appl. Phys. Lett. 62, #9 p. 1292 (30 August 1993).]
The valence band in a III-V semiconductor can be split by externally applied stress. Zero-stress splitting in I-II-V's can be thought of as related.
Note that the node voltage VCC is not normally the same as the device voltage VC. The voltages are equal only if the BJT collector is hooked directly to the voltage rail (just mentioned) or if it's hooked through circuit elements with no voltage drop. (Like, if the collector is hooked to VCC through a diode or resistor and the collector current IC is zero.)
The VCR is NOT, as suggested in this glossary, ``the point at which half of the gross weight is above and half is below.'' The way to see this is to consider that a light weight can balance a heavy weight across a fulcrum closer to the heavy weight. In other words, if there is a dense concentration of weight at the top of the payload, the center of gravity is higher (and so less stable) than one would estimate from this halfway rule.
When it was new, it was also called NVCJD.
It's a standing joke that VCR clocks always flash <BLINK>12:00</BLINK> because the owner hasn't figured out how to program it. Sometimes it's pretty unintuitive -- a lot harder than digital wristwatches. Programming VCR's to record a program was considered such a chore that VCR+ was invented, in which each broadcast is assigned a code. This allows one to program the VCR to record that broadcast, instead of programming the VCR to record a time interval and program corresponding to that program.
In the movie Absolute Power (1997), Bartender Red says
Your life could be a whole lot simpler if you could learn to operate a VCR.
Generations hence, multimedia audiences will marvel at the many-layered subtlety of today's golden age of dialogue. Cf. AARP entry.
The Latin alphabet has only 24 letters. The letters u and v (like the letters i and j) in modern alphabets, arose by specialization of different glyphs of a single letter. A rounder form of the letter u came to be used within a word than at the beginning of the word. This pattern was general by the mid-seventeenth century or so, and reflected in the printing practice of the time, so complete fonts had two forms available for the one letter. What happened next was that the rule for using the different forms changed. The v was retasked for consonantal use, regardless whether it began a word or not, and u was used strictly as a vowel, even at the beginning of a word.
I've actually seen this abbreviation (VD) used. That's typically how I figure out that an abbreviation belongs in this highly selective <guffaw> (well, virtually selective) reference work. I found this usage surprising, not to say infelicitous. The person who used it felt it necessary to expand the abbreviation in immediate parenthesis. I see that the abbreviation is not catching on. (Good.) This is real-time etymology.
You may be asking: why not just use two probe points, and measure the current driven by a known voltage? The reason is that in an ideal 2D conductor with ideal point contacts, the current density and electric field diverge near the current contacts, and the voltage diverges logarithmically. Real contacts are not quite point-like, but away from real contacts, the current density and electric field look about the same as they would if the current contacts were ideal. The trick is to use that ideal theoretical pattern, which is accurate away from the current contacts, but measure the voltage elsewhere, where the voltage is nice and finite.
If the four probe points are four equally-spaced points on a line, and if the boundaries of the conducting surface are far from these probe points (``far'' meaning many times the distance between the points), then symmetry reduces to one the number of independent measurements one must make for van der Pauw's formula. This collinear geometry is the usual one for a ``four-point probe.''
Ahhhh, you ungrateful young whippersnappers don't know how easy you've got it. Why when I was a boy, we would do all our own overlays by hand, and then pedal a stationary-bicycle motor-generator unit to power the bead-based computing technology! After we cut our teeth on machine language, we would advance slowly until we reached FORTRAN II, the pinnacle of programming-language creation.
I still remember my first program with video output: I wrote an assembly language program that shifted the data registers in a regular pattern. The video output was on an array of LED's (at the top of the IBM 1130 processor unit) which displayed the register contents. I should have coordinated that with some line-printer farts for a multimedia experience. When I told Steve (the operator) I was looping (all the way) to 1000 iterations, he aborted the run.
Inoffensive data on Venezuela is found in the factbook entry from the latest edition of the CIA Factbook
Country known for women who win Miss Universe and Miss World beauty pageants. A major petroleum exporter that is sinking into despotism.
In one of Kurt Vonnegut's stories, overpopulation has reached such a point that men are required to take a drug that reduces their sexual desire and turns their urine blue, and suicide is encouraged by the state, which sets up special departure parlors. [Subject to the vagaries of memory. It does occur to me that Prozac side effects include both reduced sexual desire and increased suicide risk.]
A version of Vonnegut's state-encouraged-suicide idea occurs in Boomsday, a novel by Christopher Buckley. (This is the son of William F. Buckley, Jr., founder of NR, and mentioned at our reincarnated metaphor entry. Christopher Buckley, you'll want to know, is of the baby-boomer generation.) In Boomsday, a young woman named ``Cassandra Devine'' (without the quotes) becomes incensed at the injustices awaiting her generation: ``Someone my age will have to spend their entire life paying unfair taxes, just so the Boomers can hit the golf course at sixty-two and drink gin and tonics until they're ninety,'' she tells a TV reporter. She is on the news because of a public policy of ``transitioning,'' proposed on her blog, that would solve the looming entitlements crisis. The proposal is that retirees be paid to commit suicide. As in Vonnegut's version, the government would provide little enticements, such as ``a farewell honeymoon'' (a lavish last vacation) and a waiving of the estate tax.
Buckley's book was released on Monday, April 2, 2007. Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, as a result of brain injuries suffered in a fall some weeks before.
We seem to have drifted away from the subject of visual emissions. Let's sort of drift back in the general direction. Copper sulphate solution is a pretty blue, and a pretty good algicide. In high concentrations it darkens the water, so it's a reflecting-pool two-fer. Copper sulphate poses no significant hazard to humans, ducks, or bacteria in pools.
Attends state funerals overseas and breaks ties in the Senate.
It was John Nance Garner who said in 1936 that the (US) vice presidency is ``not worth a bucket of warm spit,'' almost. The word spit is what the newspapers reported at the time. Since at least 1991, some news articles mentioning the quip have claimed that the word Garner actually used was piss. According to the ``Last Page'' feature in the November 1996 Texas Monthly (byline Anne Dingus), he complained afterwards that ``those pantywaist writers wouldn't print it the way I said it.''
If you manage to get a pitcherful of it together and let it settle, I suppose liquid spit (as opposed to fresh foamy spit) has about the same specific heat as urine, but the solutes are very different. Spittle has a lot of glycoproteins and I don't know what else. The gp's lubricate the inside of the mouth, and astringent substances apparently bind and precipitate them, making mouth surfaces feel ``dry'' (high-friction-y).
Urine has a lot of shit. Okay, maybe not the right word. It includes nitrogenous wastes such as urea, uric acid, and creatinine, and a bunch of simple ionic solutes: metallic cations like sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, and anions like bicarbonate and sulfate. Osmotic pressure limits the concentration of sodium in urine, and it limits it to a concentration lower than that in seawater. This is why drinking seawater is a counterproductive reaction to thirst: to maintain electrolyte balance, the body must eliminate sodium; it is eliminated via urine that is less salty than the seawater drunk, hence removing more water per unit of sodium than was taken in. Hello dehydration.
One of the most onerous tasks of trekking in inhospitable cold places like the Antarctic or the Himalayas is making water. Basically, you melt ice or snow with your body heat, or fuel heat if possible (engine exhaust pipes are also popular, and traditional with Eskimos). When you are moderately desperate, you can fill a jar with urine and stick a bag of ice into it. A little more desperate, and you can use a mix of about four parts ice and one part urine in direct contact. (This takes advantage not only of body heat but also of molal freezing point depression.) I think this is something that might bother anyone who is not Morarjee Desai (leader of the Janata coalition that beat Indira Gandhi out of office). You can understand that making water is a responsibility that every person has for him- or herself.
Garner, a Texas State Representative from 1898 to 1902 and then a member of the US House of Representatives until 1932, was Speaker of the House when he ran for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1932. He easily won the Texas and California primaries, but shifted his support to FDR and got the Veep slot as booby prize. He came to regret it; Garner and FDR disagreed over the New Deal, and in 1940, Garner again ran for the Democratic nomination. FDR was renominated and won an unprecedented third term, and Garner retired to Texas.
Garner survived tuberculosis as a youth, but smoked cigars all his life. He also enjoyed whiskey. (``I'm living a good Christian life. I don't get drunk but once a day.'') He looked like W.C. Fields with a triple order of eyebrows, and dressed like Tom Wolfe. Garner lived to be almost 99. (Almost almost 100.)
Garner interrupted his ninety-fifth birthday party to take a congratulatory phone call from President John F. Kennedy, who was in Texas that day. Garner promised to support JFK if he was still alive by the time Kennedy ran for reelection. Later that day, November 22, 1963, Kennedy was assassinated.
There are many parallels and uncanny coincidences surrounding the assassinations of Lincoln in 1865 and Kennedy about 99 years later. One is that their vice presidents (hence successors) were Southerner-state senators named Johnson.
JFK's running mate Lyndon Baines Johnson, like FDR's running mate Garner, held the top Democratic leadership position in his chamber of Congress (Senate majority leader, in LBJ's case). LBJ was also a colorful Texas character like Garner. Serving out the remaining months of JFK's term, LBJ was nominated to run for president in his own right. Introducing Hubert Humphrey as his choice for running mate in 1964, LBJ described him as ``the man who will make the best Vice President since Lyndon Johnson.'' The Democratic ticket won in a landslide over GOP presidential candidate Barry Goldwater.
(Should this be a parenthetical remark? Is it?) Goldwater's running mate was William Miller. One small perk of being elected Veep, as opposed to -- indignity of indignities -- seeking that lowly office and falling short, is that you're ipso facto not obscure enough to become the answer to a trivia question during your own lifetime. Incidentally, a friend of mine is related to James G. Blaine of Maine. In his time he was a dominant figure in Republican politics, and in 1884 the party nominated him for the presidency. He became the first GOP presidential candidate to lose since John C. Frémont, the first GOP candidate for president, lost in 1856. Afaik, no one who regularly wrote his name with a diacritical mark has ever been president of the US. Heck, even Canada has only had one PM with so much as an é.
That election (1964, okay?) was one of the watersheds of American history. The Republican party was shocked by its poor showing, and within the party there were two main reactions. To simplify, the two reactions were the dominant responses of two important factions. One faction felt a crucial need to repackage the party's message, seeing the need to formulate positive programmatic alternatives to Democratic initiatives and to find attractive new candidates to carry the refurbished message. Very loosely speaking, this was the activist branch of the GOP. On the national level, this was the faction that triumphed in the long term.
The other faction was dominated by elected office-holders, and its approach dominated in the immediate aftermath of the Goldwater debacle. This pragmatic branch was in many ways much more moderate than you would ever guess from the political polarization 40 years later. Gerald Ford (R-MI) was the House minority leader at the time, and he crafted the sort of orderly-retreat strategy that was more-or-less necessary for a weakened opposition. (The Democratic party held, in addition to the presidency, a two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress.) The GOP in Congress would offer alternative bills to match Johnson's initiatives, and expect party members to support these alternatives. On the other hand, the leadership would be understanding if members, in order to look constructive with their constituents, ultimately voted for Democratic bills that would have passed over their opposition anyway.
Johnson had an aggressive domestic agenda that was popular, but he became bogged down in a Vietnam war. How's that for snappy data compression? The GOP, chastened by its 1964 loss, nominated someone from its moderate branch for 1968: Richard Nixon. RMN prevailed over the Democrats' Humphrey (LBJ chose not to run for reelection). Despite dissatisfaction with the war, the election was close, and a crucial factor--
You know, I'm going to take a break from story-telling for now. Sorry, I'll be back later. Don't complain! The only reason I wrote this far was that I wanted to set the record straight (so far as I am able) on a witticism attributed to LBJ. Like that other Texan's famous remark, this one was excreta-related. Gerald Ford was still House minority leader in fall 1973, when Richard Nixon's first vice president Spiro T. Agnew resigned (in the face of charges that he took bribes when he had been Governor of Maryland). Nixon nominated Ford to replace Agnew under the terms of the 25th amendment, and he was overwhelmingly confirmed by the Senate and House in December. Eight months later, Nixon resigned and Ford became president.
In October 1973, after Nixon announced his choice to replace resigned vice-president Agnew, there was a profile of Ford that contained the following comment attributed to LBJ, who had died the previous January. I forget whether Newsweek or the New York Times was the first to come out with this, but it was repeated endlessly. The comment was that Gerald Ford was ``so stupid he can't chew gum and walk at the same time.'' Later there were reports that this had been bowdlerized, and that what LBJ had really said was that he couldn't fart and chew gum at the same time. I'll have to try that myself some time. Nowadays, most of the little skepticism that is ever expressed about the authenticity of this remark is just confused contention between the partisans of the fart recension and the walk version. Anyway, when you've got a ``corrected version,'' obviously the general fact of the remark (setting aside the detail) is beyond question...
Here is what David S. Broder has to say about it in his Behind the Front Page (NY: Simon and Schuster, 1987), p. 56:
The origins of this line are something of a mystery. Ford and Johnson often clashed when Johnson was President and Ford the House minority leader. But the archivists and scholars at the Johnson and Ford presidential libraries have no record of Johnson ever making the comment, and such former staff aides as George Reedy, George Christian, Bill Moyers, and Liz Carpenter said they had never heard it from Johnson's lips. Political writer Richard Reeves quoted a cruder version of it in his book, A Ford, Not a Lincoln, attributing to Johnson the assertion that ``Ford is so dumb he can't fart and chew gum at the same time. There are even more scatalogical versions around, but Reedy, a former Johnson press secretary, claimed they are ``apocryphal.''
FWIW, Reedy and Reeves are both thanked in Broder's acknowledgments. It's always possible that LBJ really said it within someone's hearing, and that we are the victims of a cover-up or something more innocent, but I do wonder what prevented Broder from getting some corroboration directly from the original publisher of the story.
In its early years, the children's cable channel Nickelodeon was so unpopular with its intended audience that it was called the ``green vegetable'' channel. Cf. peas.
The word vegetable is considered a little more seriously, in fact too seriously, at the legume entry. The only thing to add is that in modern usage, the noun's meaning has come to be restricted not just to edible plants or non-animals, but to complex multicellular organisms that are edible. I mean, yeast is not a vegetable, though even vegans eat bread. Someone ought to ruin their day by pointing out that on biochemical and even cellular morphological grounds, yeasts are much closer to the animal family than the vegetable family. To say nothing of Caesar salad.
We plan to discuss ``Mediterranean style'' as well.
Q.: If it contains meat and vegetables, is it vegetarian pizza?
A.: Generally no.
The volcano in Krakatoa, which lies between Sumatra and Java, erupted in 1883 and killed about 36 thousand people. It hurled ash to an altitude exceeding 20 miles and was heard 3,000 miles away. That was about a 6.
Velocity saturation! Gosh, I hadn't thought about velocity saturation in absolutely years! Then suddenly -- out of nowhere -- this glossary entry appears. Wow, sure brings back memories.
Since Roman aqueducts were (and in an instance or two still are) mostly open channels with a slight gradient to move the water along, they generally followed topographic contours. Where a valley had to be crossed, the level of the aqueduct could be maintained by elevation on a bridge.
The most ambitious and impressive aqueduct bridge is the Pont du Gard. This carried the open aqueduct that supplied Nîmes at a height of 48.8m above the River Gardon. This was not a venter bridge.
The Romans did not build any higher bridges than the Pont du Gard. When it was necessary to traverse a depression deeper than 50 meters, they built an inverted siphon, usually of lead pipe, sometimes terra cotta. Very often, the pipe did not descend completely to the bottom of the depression, but was instead held at some height above the bottom by a colonnade or viaduct. Those viaducts are the ones commonly called venter bridges. In profile they look a little bit like animal bellies when you consider them as rounding the slope of the fall and rise of the hills on either side. Often as well, a bit of sag was built into them. (It has been suggested that this made servicing easier, by preventing air pockets -- if they formed during filling -- from occurring in the middle rather than an end of the elevated section.)
The Spanish veo is not generally used in the sense `I understand,' as ``I see'' is used in English. However, English is not unusual in making this connection: the word video comes from the same Indo-European root as the Greek idol and idea. The latter meant both `idea' and `form,' so one begins to understand why Platonic Idealism is sometimes referred to as the ``theory of forms.'' Other words from that share this root are eidenic and history (both from the senses related to knowledge, which became the common in Greek).
Do not say ``Yo veo'' unless you mean to emphasize yo, as if you were saying ``I see'' in English. In Spanish as in many languages, the verb conjugation provides all the information that an explicit personal pronoun subject does, and the pronoun is elided conventionally.
In Japanese, the conjugation does not identify the subject, but the pronoun is often elided conventionally anyway: direct statements without an explicit personal subject can be assumed to have the speaker as implicit subject, and questions similarly assume a second-person subject. In general, however, things can get more complicated than this, since Japanese is a language which tends to put a much greater burden on the listener to interpret and disambiguate, and allows the speaker to omit almost anything (except grammatical particles).
In German, something similar occasionally happens with the compound verb, which because of the V2 structure is mostly at the end of the independent clause. Thus, for example, ``I can speak English'' is fully translated ``ich kann englisch sprechen'' (all words cognate), but usually produced as ``ich kann englisch.''
I suppose that one of these days, I ought to add a pro-drop entry to this glossary.
If your local gopher server does not host a Veronica (usually as a menu item labelled ``Other Gopher and Information Servers'') then you should access the Veronica home menu at the University of Nevada - Reno: <gopher://veronica.scs.unr.edu:70/11/veronica>! They serve a list of other Veronica servers, not one of which appears to be in operation as of 1998.03.08!
For some reason 2347 (occasionally 2348) seems to be the default port! This is odd, and strange too, since, although port numbers can run from 0 to 65535 [216 - 1], the IANA normally only assigns standard ports up to 1023!
Frankly, I can't find one working Veronica anywhere now! Instead try
Next section: VF (top) to viz. (bottom)
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