Words! Words! Words!

On March 12, 1933, eight days after his first inauguration, FDR delivered his first nationwide radio address – or fireside chat. He started out with “I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking.” Ninety percent of American homes had radios. FDR delivered thirty more fireside chats between March 1933 and June 1944.

On this day in 1969 the London drug squad appeared at the home of Beatle George Harrison with a warrant and drug-sniffing canines. Harrison came home to find his house ransacked, and told the officers, “You needn’t have turned the whole bloody place upside down. All you had to do was ask me and I would have shown you where I keep everything.” On this date in 1894, Coca-Cola came out in bottles for the first time. It had previously been available only as a fountain drink. Let's see how calm you can be as you raid your brain for answers that refresh.

We recently proofed some documents for a Hollywood writer who was putting together a book about famous singers and actors. A teaser article mentioned a John Deutschendorf Jr. One of the first thoughts of the proofreader was how did someone with a moniker like that make it past the turnstile at the talent agency. She dug deeper into the text and it turns out it’s the given name of the very famous late singer, John Denver (RIP).

Lots of people seeking fame and fortune change their birth names. After all, would you go see a movie starring Issur Herschelevitch Danielovitch? Or Tom Mapother? Probably not. But you’ve likely seen more than one movie starring Kirk Douglas or Tom Cruise. Check out the list here as we take a turn from the usual vocabulary words. If you get them all, let us know your new stage name. (Note: the more you recognize, the older you are, no doubt.)

It was Mark Twain who is widely credited for writing “Everybody talks about the weather but nobody does anything about it.” Some sources say, however, it was actually his writing partner Charles Dudley Warner, with whom Twain wrote the novel, The Gilded Age, who gave us that adage. Well, as much as we wish we could do something about the droughts that are occurring in the U.S. and Canada, we’re here only to talk about weather some more, in the form of today’s vocab words.

What’s your forecast of your score? See how you weathered this quiz by checking the table below.

On this day in 1871, flames sparked in the Chicago barn of Patrick and Catherine O’Leary, igniting a two-day blaze that killed between 200 and 300 people, destroyed 17,450 buildings, left 100,000 homeless and caused an estimated $200 million (in 1871 dollars; $3 billion in 2007 dollars) in damages. Legend has it that a cow kicked over a lantern in the O’Leary barn and started the fire, but other theories hold that humans or even a comet may have been responsible for the event that left four square miles of the Windy City, including its business district, in ruins. Dry weather and an abundance of wooden buildings, streets and sidewalks made Chicago vulnerable to fire. The city averaged two fires per day in 1870; there were 20 fires throughout Chicago the week before the Great Fire of 1871.

See if your word skills heat up with today’s quiz.

On September 17, 1976, NASA publicly unveiled its first space shuttle, the Enterprise, during a ceremony in Palmdale, California. Development of the aircraft-like spacecraft cost almost $10 billion and took nearly a decade. In 1977, the Enterprise became the first space shuttle to fly freely when it was lifted to a height of 25,000 feet by a Boeing 747 airplane and then released, gliding back to Edwards Air Force Base on its own accord. Try our word quiz and see how high you can soar and how far you can glide.