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

_______________________________ 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)