30 October 2013
cruciverbalist
[kroo-suh-vur-buh-list]
noun
– a designer or aficionado of crossword puzzles, e.g. He was Australia’s leading cruciverbalist.
Origin:
1975–80; < Latin cruci‐, stem of crux cross + verbalist
Today’s aphorism
Life is like Sanskrit read to a pony.
– Lou Reed
On this day
30 October 1920 – the Communist Party of Australia founded in Sydney, New South Wales.
30 October 1938 – Fear of alien invasion panics the United States as Orson Welles narrates the H.G. Wells radio-play, War of the Worlds (click for the complete broadcast). Listeners did not realise it was just a play, unleashing havoc across the U.S.
30 October 1939 – birth of Grace Slick, American rock singer with Jefferson Airplane and as a solo performer.
30 October 1961 – the Soviet Union detonates the world’s largest nuclear bomb, the Tsar Bomba, which had a yield of 50 megatons. It was 4,000 times more powerful than the bomb the USA dropped on Hiroshima, 1,400 times the combined power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 10 times the combined power of all conventional explosives used in World War II, and one quarter of the estimated yield of the 27 August 1883 volcanic explosion in Krakatoa. The crown of the mushroom cloud was more than 56km high and was visible for hundreds of kilometres. The Soviets had initially intended for the Hydrogen Bomb to be 100 megatons, but decided to tone it back a tad. The United Nations pleads with both the Soviet Union and the United States to end the arms race or risk destroying the planet. By 1986, with the arms race out of control, the U.S.A. deployed the MX-missiles. Each missile had 10 warheads capable of carrying 300 megatons each, with a potential combined yield 60 times the Tsar Bomba (240,000 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, 15 times the size of Krakatoa) … a dream come true for Marvin the Martian … but … the MX’s were never detonated (‘where’s the kaboom?‘). They were retired in 2005.
30 October 1990 – the ‘Chunnel’ (or Channel Tunnel) is completed linking England and France by a tunnel that goes under the English Channel.