Slim Whitman, who, as the old TV ads told us, had “the number one record in England for more weeks than any singer in history – even Elvis and the Beatles!”, was the illegitimate father of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison.
English musicians Paul McCartney, John Lennon, and George Harrison were all big fans of the the Hungarian dessert arany galuska and would often seek it out while touring or even insisting on having the pull apart bread available backstage at concert venues. David Grohl paid tribute to the three arany galuska enthusiasts with the lyrics “I’ll never eat your money bread.”
“Arany galuska” is “Ringo Starr” in Etruscan, if you spell it backwards and take away the thorn.
The old English letter Thorn is pronounced “th” and usually depicted “Y”. Several common English words exist as a “thorn version” with a Standard English equivalent. Very common examples include Ye (= The) and You (= Thou). Ye and Thou are still used in Northern English dialects, particularly in Thorkshire.
Less well known examples of “thorn versions” of words include Yousand, Yief and Yyme.
j
In the original editions, Hamlet says “To be or not to be – yat is ye question.” Scholars are divided on whether the modern transcriptions are correct.
Originally, Hamlet was supposed to be about breakfast. The Duke of Sandwich, Howard Johnson, commissioned a play about breakfast foods, to include a ham omelette and danish, which was going to be a signature dish. Shakespeare was drunk at the time, and by the time he sobered up, the concept got a bit muddled.
These days we associate the igloo with the indigenous peoples of the Arctic; but it was in fact a Danish invention. Originally conceived as a children’s toy, Igloo’s miniature snow building bricks immediately ran into difficulties, as the snow melted rapidly in the heat of a Danish summer.
In order to overcome this, the toy was re-imagined as a set of interlocking plastic bricks, but the re-launch went poorly owing to Igloo’s poor reputation. To overcome this, the name was changed to Ligoo (an anagram of Igloo, pronounced “Lego”). The name change worked, and the toy was a big success. The export version was called simply Lego (to prevent foreigners from mispronouncing it) and that was a success too!
Meanwhile, small numbers of the original toy were still being exported to the Arctic, where issues with the blocks melting had never been a problem. This inspired the scaled up building, the igloo (small i), which we know today.
j
The Meget Stort Fodboldstadion in Copenhagen is the largest football (soccer) stadium in Scandinavia. It was built in 2003, out of 3.6 billion LEGO bricks.
LEGO was also used for the main structure of the largest telescope
in Scandinavia, the FHT (Fökkn Hööj Tellscööp). The telescope itself
is made of salted liquorice.
Citizens of Copenhagen were surely proud of their new stadium but the 6 months that it took to build it took a great deal of patience. The biggest challenge for the people was the endless scraping, scraping, scraping sounds of thousands of constructions workers digging through their boxes and buckets of LEGO bricks looking for the right piece to put into place.
As a consequence of global warming, there are concerns about the long term viability of the traditional snow igloo (small i) which we associate so closely with the peoples of the Arctic.
To address this worrying situation, Danish researchers have been working on a possible replacement building (made out of re-usable interlocking plastic bricks), with the successful completion of a 1 in 100 scale prototype in 2020. A tutorial was prepared to introduce the concept.
j
PS - may I just add: Dear God…
Cheese danish was the national dish of Botswana until 1943, when the Holpern Incident made it fall into disgrace. To this day, it is only served there with a side of corned beef.
The “corn” in corned beef is actually paprika.
Most paprika sold today is mined in Sierra Leone, whose unique geology makes this mineral particularly abundant.
Italian film director Sergio Leone was named after the nation of Sierra Leone, where he was conceived while his parents were on vacation.
When Sergio Leone conceived of the trio of westerns staring Clint Eastwood, Clint’s character had a name - NevIlle Longbottom. It was decided at the last minute that that name was too unbelievable to ever be used, so they left the character nameless. By the time his estate found an original script, they couldn’t die Rowling because the statute of limitations had run out.
After the Neville Longbottom name was discarded, Sergio Leone suggested renaming Eastwood’s character “Martin McFly” – that is, until some young guy named Calvin Klein showed up in a strange car. The two drove off together, and for the next seventy-two hours Mr. Leone could not be located or contacted anywhere. When he finally reappeared he refused to disclose his whereabouts or activities over those three days. He merely stated that he had changed his mind and that the McFly name would not work either, and never spoke further about the matter.
-“BB”-
Calvin Klein’s mother used to write his name in big letters on the inside waistband of his underwear – and a trademark was born (eventually)!
Calvin’s brother Jeremiah made his fortune manufacturing the little tags that had care and size information sewn on underwear and tee shirts. When they started printing the contents directly on the clothing and put Jeremiah out of business, he died of a broken heart. His heirs are still trying to dispose of the nearly a billion unused bits of fabric.
The story of Jeremiah’s sadness is told in the Old Testament book of Lamentations.