By Marie Reader
TODAY’S ALMANAC
Question of the Day
Where did the dollar sign ($) for U.S. currency originate?
The American colonists used both the British pound and the Spanish dollar as monetary units. The Spanish dollar, or piece of eight, predominated, as it was the international standard during the 17th and 18th centuries. It also was the prototype for the 1785 American silver dollar. There are several theories about the origin of the dollar sign, but the Treasury Department believes that the Spanish P (for piastre, or piece of eight) gradually came to be overlaid with an S, resulting in a close equivalent of the dollar sign. The symbol was widely used before the adoption of the U.S. dollar.
Advice of the Day
To remove a wart, tape the inside of a banana peel over it and leave overnight. Repeat for one to two weeks.
Home Hint of the Day
To get rid of bugs in houseplants, push a clove of garlic into the plant’s soil. If the garlic sprouts and grows, just cut it back.
Word of the Day
Nebulaphobia
Fear of fog or humidity
Puzzle of the Day
What word is that to which if you add a syllable, it will make it shorter?
Short
Born
- Rudyard Kipling (author) –
- Bert Parks (television personality) –
- Bo Diddley (guitarist) –
- Del Shannon (singer) –
- Mike Nesmith (musician, member of The Monkees) –
- Davy Jones (musician; member of The Monkees) –
- Matt Lauer (journalist) –
- Tiger Woods (golfer) –
- Eliza Dushku (actress) –
- Kristin Kreuk (actress) –
- LeBron James (basketball player) –
Died
- Amelia Bloomer (social reformer who introduced BLOOMERS) –
- Richard Rodgers (composer) –
- Artie Shaw (jazz clarinetist and bandleader) –
- Barbara Walters (broadcast journalist ) –
Events
- Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft were married–
- U.S. president Rutherford B. Hayes married Lucy Webb–
- U.S. and Mexico signed the Gadsden Purchase Treaty–
- First photo of Earth’s curvature exhibited, in Cleveland, Ohio–
- The Arroyo Seco Parkway, California’s first freeway, officially opened. It connected Los Angeles and Pasadena–
- The Roy Rogers Show made its TV debut–
- Figure skater David Pelletier wed skating partner Jamie Salé–
- Samoa skipped this day in order to move from the eastern to the western side of the International Date Line–
Weather
- Great Cold Wave hit the East : -13 degrees F, New York City; -15 degrees F, Boston, Massachusetts; and -43 degrees F, New Hampshire–
- The temperature in Lewisburg, West Virginia, dropped to -37F.–
- Bloomfield, Vermont, set a record low temperature for New England with -50 degrees F–
- Forty-eight degrees below zero F in Mazama and Winthrop, Washington–
- Las Vegas was blanketed with 1.3 inches of snow–
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