Daily Content Archive
(as of Saturday, December 5, 2020)Word of the Day | |||||||
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loup-garou
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Article of the Day | |
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ScrollsA scroll is a roll of paper, parchment, or papyrus that can be unwound for writing upon or reading. A popular format for recording texts prior to the development of codices, scrolls fell out of common use by the Middle Ages. However, some Hebrew scribes still copy scrolls of the Torah by hand, adhering to extremely strict guidelines used since antiquity. If a copy differs from the original by a single letter, the entire scroll can be invalidated. How many letters are contained in a Torah scroll? More... |
This Day in History | |
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Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin Debuts in US (1926)Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, based on the real-life 1905 uprising aboard the Russian battleship Potemkin, is a seminal film in cinematic history. Eisenstein deliberately wrote the silent film as a revolutionary propaganda piece and used it to test his theories of "montage," a form of movie collage consisting of a series of short shots edited into a sequence intended to effect emotional or intellectual responses. What is the film's most famous montage sequence? More... |
Today's Birthday | |
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Christina Rossetti (1830)Christina Rossetti was one of England's most important female poets of the Victorian era. It is little wonder that she became a poet, given her lineage. Her great-grandfather was a poet, her grandfather was a writer and scholar, and her father was the famous poet and scholar Gabriele Rossetti. Her three siblings followed similar paths. Religious themes dominate her poems, which run the gamut from romantic to devotional to children's poetry. What popular Christmas carol did she pen? More... |
Quotation of the Day | |
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I have always a sacred veneration for any one I observe to be a little out of repair in his person, as supposing him either a poet or a philosopher; because the richest minerals are ever found under the most ragged and withered surface of the earth. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) |
Idiom of the Day | |
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it is what it is— The situation, circumstance, or outcome has already happened or been decided or established, so it must be accepted even if it is undesirable. More... |
Today's Holiday | |
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Sinterklaas (St. Nicholas's Eve) (2022)Very little is known about St. Nicholas's life, except that in the fourth century he was the bishop of Myra in what is now Turkey. On the eve of December 6 in the Netherlands, St. Nicholas, or Sinterklaas, rides into town on a white horse, dressed in his red bishop's robes and preceded by "Black Peter," a figure in Moorish costume who rewards the good children with candy and gifts. St. Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, and churches dedicated to him are often built so they can be seen off the coast as landmarks. More... |