The Haircut wins one

Mitt scores his first victory, so much like a groundhog's shadow, more weeks without a clear front runner.

Here is your Today in History -

January 16, 1547 -
Ivan IV was crowned Tsar of Russia. . He is better known by his nickname: Ivan the Terrible. He was the first king of Russia to call himself a Caesar, probably in the hopes that Shakespeare would write a play about him. He couldn’t pronounce Caesar, however, so he simply called himself "zar," and subsequent arguments over whether that should be spelled czar, tsar, zar, or tzar became so heated that they eventually resulted in Russian History.






January 16, 1942 -
Raising money for the war, actress Carol Lombard and her mother are killed along with a score of others in a Las Vegas airplane crash.





January 16, 1987 -
President Leon Cordero, no relation, of Ecuador is kidnapped by followers of Gen. Frank Vargas, held in a Quito prison for a 1986 coup attempt. Vargas is free and so was the President. Lesson: crime pays.


January 16, 1991 -
Operation Desert Storm commences as Baghdad is pummelled live on CNN. Targeted with smartbombs are "command and control facilities" and Saddam Hussein himself. We seem to miss both, but do manage to kill about 100,000 Iraqi soldiers in the surreal bombardments that follow.






---WORD OF THE WEEK---
Given the general mood of parts of the country, this week’s word is "impeachment." Persian traders arrived in ancient Roman ports with a fruit no Roman citizen had ever seen before, and the wildly popular fruit was simply called a "Persian"—in Latin, a "persicum." Later, when France was invented by a lot of Romans who’d been chased out of Rome by the Germans who’d been squeezed out of Germany by the Hungarians who’d... well, anyway, they translated "persicum" into "peche," which sounded Frencher. The English subsequently pronounced "peche" as "peach" just to get a rise out of the French. That’s where we get "peach." Now here’s the tricky part: prior to being decapitated at the outset of the French Revolution, King Louis XVI (pronounced "zivvy") was seized by a mob of wild-eyed, tricote-wearing Frenchmen, who stripped the king, pinned him down, and jammed half a dozen "peches" up his royal rectum. In his classic 1790 treatise, "Reflections on the Chopping Off of People’s Heads," British statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke observed that, "prior to having his head so elegantly disassociated from his shoulders, the late French king was impeached by the people."


And so it goes.