5 July 2013

madcap

[mad-kap]
adjective
1. wildly or heedlessly impulsive; reckless; rash: a madcap scheme.
noun
2. a madcap person.
Origin:
1580–90; mad + cap1

Today’s quote

Tramp squares with rebellious treading!
Up heads! As proud peaks be seen!
In the second flood we are spreading
Every city on earth will be clean.

Vladimir Mayakovsky – “Our March” (1917); translation from C. M. Bowra (ed.) A Book of Russian Verse (London: Macmillan, 1943) p. 125.

On this day

5 July 1989 – Former US Marine and white-house aide, Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North given a three-year suspended sentence, two years probation, $150,000 in fines and 1,200 hours of community service after being convicted of ‘accepting an illegal gratuity’, ‘aiding and abetting in the obstruction of a congressional inquiry’ and ordering the destruction of documents during his role in the Iran-Contra affair (a political scandal during the Reagan administration in which the US government was selling weapons via intermediaries to Iran, a nation that was blacklisted from receiving weapons. The profits were channeled through Nicaraguan terrorist groups, the Contras, which were violently opposing Nicaragua’s ruling left-wing Sandinista Junta of National Reconstruction).