[Vhfcn-l] Monday musings

[Gary Thewlis]

The reason women don't play football is because 11 of them would never wear
the same outfit in public.

Phyllis Diller

 

If you make every game a life-and-death thing, you're going to have
problems. You'll be dead a lot.      

Dean Smith

 

The incompetent with nothing to do can still make a mess of it.

Laurence J. Peter

 

Never confuse movement with action.

Ernest Hemingway

 

He is indebted to his memory for his jests and to his imagination for his
facts.

Richard Brinsley Sheridan

 

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel from
coast to coast without seeing anything.

Charles Kuralt

 

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Stars and garters

 

The phrase stars and garters refers collectively to honors and awards.

 

There are some weird ones in the UK, not least those, like OBE and MBE, that
mark a person's achievements by raising them to a status in an empire that
no longer exists. Perhaps the oddest-sounding is the Order of the Garter,
the highest order of English knighthood, which was founded by Edward III
around 1344. Since most of the honors of knighthood and the like come with a
medal in the shape of a star, the phrase stars and garters appeared in the
early eighteenth century as a collective reference to all these medals,
honors and decorations and - by a figurative extension - to the group of
people that hold them. The earliest example of this metaphoric sense is in
Alexander Pope's The Rape of the Lock, around 1712: "While Peers, and Dukes,
and all their sweeping train, And Garters, Stars, and Coronets appear". More
than a century later, Charles Dickens used it in Bleak House (1853): "His
remote impressions of the robes and coronets, the stars and garters, that
sparkle through the surface-dust of Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers", as did
Anthony Trollope 20 years later still, in Phineas Redux: "Though the country
were ruined, the party should be supported. Hitherto the party had been
supported, and had latterly enjoyed almost its share of stars and Garters".
Star and Garter is also the name of many British pubs.

 

The phrase "Oh, my stars and garters!" appeared at the beginning of the
nineteenth century as a humorous expression of astonishment. There's no
evidence that directly links the two, but it's hardly possible that the
exclamation is other than a jocular conflation of stars and garters with
older exclamations such as thank your lucky stars! and my stars! A nice
example is in The Book of Snobs by William Makepeace Thackeray, published in
1848: "And, O stars and garters! how she would start if she heard that she -
she, as solemn as Minerva - she, as chaste as Diana (without that heathen
goddess's unladylike propensity for field-sports) - that she too was a
Snob!" Edward Bulwer-Lytton had put it in the mouth of a character in his
novel Night and Morning in 1841: "The man, after satisfying himself that his
time was not yet come, was turning back to the fire, when a head popped
itself out of the window, and a voice cried, 'Stars and garters! Will - so
that's you!' ".

 

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The U.S. Naval Observatory declares American time.

 

FDR was the most superstitious president -- he traveled continually but
never left on a Friday. He also wouldn't sit at the same table that held
thirteen other people.

 

By the time FDR's mother died, in 1941, FDR had presided over at least eight
annual budgets of the largest fiscal entity on earth. Yet during her
lifetime, Sara Delano Roosevelt did not entrust her son with managing the
family's money because she did not think her son up to the task.

 

The most common first name for a president is James or some variation of it.
(In order: James Madison, James Monroe, James Polk, James Buchanan, James
Garfield, Jimmy Carter)

 

When Abraham Lincoln's funeral procession passed Ford's Theatre, where
Lincoln had been shot, one of the cornices fell off the building. 

 

When John Wilkes Booth leaped onto the stage after shooting the President,
he tripped -- on the American flag.

 

Abe Lincoln's mother died when the family dairy cow ate poisonous mushrooms
and Ms. Lincoln drank the milk.