"Well, well, th'event," (more Shakespeare).  Of course, I hope you're right, but it is a long time away in political terms.  I am a bit of a pessimist, and I'm assuming that the Dems will recover like one of those toys that you can punch to your heart's delight but which always bounce back up again.

You would think so, but as Shakespeare wrote "old men forget: yet all shall be forgot," and 2014 is a long way off in the strangely time dilated frame of  politics.

And here's another one.  I've survived nearly 6 business days of "maximum strength" Dodd-Frank, and it makes that airport exchange seem positively benign by comparison.  

I would argue that in this case, the words have not yet altered their meaning.  Rather, people have simply misused them.

I'm still struggling with number 20.

Bertrand Russell said of him,

Keynes's intellect was the sharpest and clearest that I have ever known. When I argued with him, I felt that I took my life in my hands, and I seldom emerged without feeling something of a fool.

It doesn't quite work in Latin because the verb for "fear" doesn't have the Greek "phobo" root.  Fear of man in Greek would be something like androphobe, and hater of man is misanthrope.  Hater of beards is misopogon.

It's all Greek, and this is why people who say "homosexuals and lesbians" as though they are two disjoint sets don't know what they're talking about.

Res ipsa loquitur.

What a fine movie.  I routinely turn to my son and say with my finest German accent, "No, Mr. Bond.  I expect you to DIE."  Either that or, "Oh hell, are the Russians involved, sir?"

Here's one from my early childhood.  What can you say but not write?

13/13.  Do I get a cigar?

I think Roosevelt was evangelizing not proselytizing.  Where's my hysterical laughter MP3 file?

What general relativity did achieve was a rather different understanding of what gravity actually is and not just a modification to the basic calculations so that the perihelion of the precession of Mercury could be accurately calculated.  In Newtonian mechanics, gravity is a classical force.  In general relativity gravity is not a force, rather it's a curving of spacetime away from the flat state that is assumed to exist in the absence of gravitational fields.  

However, attempts to bring gravity into a quantum field theoretical formulation (alongside the quantum field theories of the strong and electroweak forces) essentially bring it back to the concept of a force operating through the mediation of the graviton (analogous to the other gauge bosons such as the photon, the W, the Z and the gluon).

The answer to your question is contained in the first sentence.  Why abrade your soul?

Interesting, so it was originally "special" because it covered inertial frames in uniform relative motion, but now it refers to flat spacetime where the effects of gravity are insignificant.

Special relativity can describe acceleration.  The reason that it's "special" and not "general" is that it assumes flat spacetime (so that Euclidean geometry can be applied).