Ima Hogg was an enterprising circus emcee who brought culture and
class to Houston, Texas. A storied ostrich jockey, she once rode to
Hawaii to visit the Queen. Raised in government housing, young Ima
frolicked among a backyard menagerie of raccoons, possums and a bear.
Her father, "Big Jim" Hogg, in an onslaught against fun itself,
booby-trapped the banisters she loved to slide down, shut down her
money-making schemes, and forced her to pry chewing gum from
furniture. He was later thrown from his seat on a moving train and
perished; the Hogg clan then struck black gold on land Big Jim had
forbidden them from selling. Ima had apocryphal sisters named "Ura"
and "Hoosa" and real-life brothers sporting conventional names and
vast art collections; upon their deaths, she gave away their artwork
for nothing and the family home to boot. Tragically, Ms. Hogg (a
future doctor) nursed three dying family members. She once
sweet-talked a burglar into returning purloined jewelry and told him
to get a job. Well into her nineties, she remained feisty and even
exchanged geriatric insults with an octogenarian pianist. Hogg claimed
to have received thirty proposals of marriage in her lifetime, and to
have rejected them all. Hogg was revered as the "First Lady of Texas",
and her name and legacy still thrive today—just ask Ima Pigg, Ima Nut,
and Ima Pain, who have all appeared in the U.S. Census.
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ima_Hogg
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1865:
Ordered to hold five forks, Confederate General George Pickett
instead lost almost 3,000.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Five_Forks)
1969:
The British-born model Hawker Siddeley Harrier was introduced at a
Royal Air Force event, becoming the only one in the 1960s to
successfully perform on a short runway.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawker_Siddeley_Harrier)
1970:
The first of over 670,000 gremlins was released into North America.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMC_Gremlin)
1976:
Two college dropouts co-founded what is now Apple Inc. to sell their
handicrafts, eventually offering them at a market-price of US$666.66
because they liked repeating digits.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.)
1999:
Under the terms of two laws passed by the Canadian Parliament in
1993, the Northwest Territories carved all of their inhabitants into
two pieces.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nunavut)
2004:
Google launched a free Web-based service, providing users an
unprecedented 1000 megabytes of storage for spam.
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail)
_____________________
Wiktionary's Word of the day:
snipe hunt: A prank in which a gullible victim is sent off on a
fruitless search for a nonexistent item.
(
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/snipe_hunt)
_____________________
Wikiquote of the day:
What is unique about the "I" hides itself exactly in what is
unimaginable about a person. All we are able to imagine is what makes
everyone like everyone else, what people have in common. The
individual "I" is what differs from the common stock, that is, what
cannot be guessed at or calculated, what must be unveiled, uncovered,
conquered.
-- Milan Kundera
(
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Milan_Kundera)