And the VW Scirocco (1974-1992) was also named after a type of wind.
I owned one; a great little car.
…and we have a Passat. Inevitably, your post made me look up the name, and once again:
In German, Passat means “trade wind".
Source:
https://www.donaldsonsvw.com/blog/what-do-volkswagen-car-names-mean/
j
There’s one false statement in that article though:
That’s not true. “Jetta” in German means nothing, it’s a made up word for the VW model.
Eh, Balrogs are a local problem. Now, if they had wings we’d be in real trouble…
“As Iluvatar is my witness, I thought Balrogs could fly!”
That joke was ancient when they were in Kansas City 
Here’s one I’m struggling to believe. British breweries have a long history of buying the rights to produce local versions of very good European lagers; and then turning out unrecognizable, least-cost, watered down piss-poor crap for British drinkers who knew no better. Hoffmeister was one of the brand names thus abused.
The random fact?
You’ll find the same claim in other sources.
j
I coughed one out at night once, and was impressed enough at the size that I thought I should share it with the rest of the household. Turns out that, even if I had managed to preserve the thing, no one else wanted to see it – despite their love of other gross things, like pimple popping.
Today I learned that in the 1930s, New Zealanders experienced a rash of exploding pants. As in, the pants exploded into flame, often while being worn.
Liar!
This one is a little long, but it answers a couple of questions I’ve had for a while.
Tarzan has been appearing in comic strips since 1929 and in comic books since the late 1940s. I grew up reading the Tarzan comics of the 1950s and and 1960s, published first by Dell and later by Gold Key. Although the Dell comics and the early Gold Key ones took their lead mostly from the movies (especially the Johnny Weissmuller films made by MGM in the 1930s – “Boy” was Tarzan’s son), they also took material from the novels, like the land of Pal-ul-don, with its dinosaurs (how could any comic book ignore stuff like that?)
That changed in the 1960s. Gold Key started adapting Edgar Rice Burroughs’ books directly into the comics. Tarzan’s son was no longer “Boy” (as in the movies) but “Korak” (as in ERB’s novels), and he got his own comic book with that as a title. DC comics bought the rights to Tarzan in 1972 and started their own series (but curiously keeping the same numbering that had been used by Dell and then by Gold Key, so the enumeration ran through three different comic book companies), starting with a new adaptation of Tarzan of the Apes drawn by veteran Joe Kubert. When they started doing new stories, they based them on the novels, not the movies. Then in 1977 Marvel started doing Tarzan, with art by John Buscema. They started the enumeration over. And, I suspect to do something different, they didn’t start with an adaptation of Tarzan of the Apes, although they, too, followed the books rather than the movies (they make a point of calling Tarzan’s monkey companion “Nkima” in the first issue, not “Cheetah”). Since then, other comic book companies have done Tarzan adaptations, but none of them used the movies as inspiration.
So why did it change? I just learned that there was another comic book incarnation of Tarzan that I had not been aware of. Charlton comics had always been the lower-quality off-brand cousin to DC and Marvel, turning out a few horror, science fiction, western, and superhero comics. But they didn’t show up as frequently in the newsstands I frequented. They used sterile block lettering instead of the warmer hand lettering used by the other companies, and their artwork was often poorer (although Steve Ditko – the co-creator of Spiderman, Dr. Strange and other Marvel and DC properties – drew several issues, especially of Charlton’s movie-based properties like Gorgo and Konga). But in January of 1965 they started putting out Jungle Tales of Tarzan, which ran all of four issues.
The comic book adapted stories from the collection of the same name. Some of the artwork was done by the guy who had been drawing Kona, Monarch of Monster Island for Dell, a title that Dell started, ironically, when it lost Tarzan to Gold Key (Although a lot of Dell titles switched to Gold Key, the two companies were not identical – it’s complicated). The stories were, from all reports, very well written and drawn. And very faithful to ERB’s novels, with no nods to the flicks.
How could Charlton put out a Tarzan comic when Gold Key had the comic book rights to the character? Apparently a lot of folks in the mid-1960swere under the (incorrect) impression that Tarzan had fallen into the public domain. Why this was I do not know – Edgar Rice Burroughs had died in 1950, only about a decade and a half earlier, and his works ought not to have become public domain until about now.
Charlton evidently believed it, though. So, I guess, did Ace Books. Ballantine books had the paperback rights to ERB’s Tarzan series and published almost all of his Tarzan books in 1963 (and reprinted them later), along with his John Carter of Mars series. Ace books had the paperback rights to some other ERB series (Pellucidar, Carson of Venus, Caspak, and various unaffiliated stories, which they started publishing in 1962), but not the Tarzan series, yet they, too, started printing some of the Tarzan books, starting with The Beasts of Tarzan in 1963. I’d wondered how two different companies could be printing paperback editions simultaneously in the same country (three, actually, since Dover published a few in higher-quality trade paperback size) . It turned out to be because Ace played loosely with copyright law (look at the way they published Lord of the Rings in 1965 on either a technicality or misinformation, depending on who your believe).
In any event, the folks at ERB noticed what was going on and took legal action. The Charlton series was stopped after four issues, the last cover-dated July 1965. The Ace series stopped after the 1963 series (One of the titles published was Jungle Tales of Tarzan. It was possible for the folks at Charlton to have been using the Ace books as inspiration).
And it was only a couple of months later that Gold Key stopped doing comics inspired by the movie version of Tarzan and started adapting ERB’s novels, beginning with Tarzan of the Apes in issue 155, cover dated December 1965. They contuinued in about the order of the novels, doing The Return of Tarzan in 156 and The Beasts of Tarzan in 157. Some adaptations took multiple comic books (multiple-issue story arcs were just starting to be a thing in comic books about this time). Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar took three issues. Issues 169-170, interestingly, adapted some Jungle Tales of Tarzan(July and August 1967, just two years after Charlton’s).
Since the TV series starring Ron Ely as Tarzan started broadcasting in September 1966, and Gold Key had a deal with them, the issues directly based on ERB books were interspersed with “Tarzan TV Adventures” based on the TV series. Although they ran “TV” issues and the occasional non-ERB story, Gold Key continued its adaptations of the novels until October of 1970
It was apparently a lack of interest by Gold key in adapting other ERB properties that spurred the move to another comic company. DC. They adapted several Tarzan novels, but most of their Tarzan output was original stories. But they also issued Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Weird Worlds that published adaptations of John Carter of Mars, Carson of Venus, and the Pellucidar series. Unfortunately, this ceased after only seven issues (they ran multiple stories in each issue) Marvel ran a John Carter Warlord of Mars series starting in 1977 (scripted by Marv Wolfman, who’d scripted the DC adaptation of John Carter) (Marvel had earlier run a very freely adapted “Gullivar of Mars” series, sorta based on Edwin Arnold’s pre-John Carter novel that some claim influenced ERB to write his series. I’m sure they did this because they didn’t have the rights to John Carter, because their stories bear little resemblance to Arnold’;s).
So that’s it – it looks like the Edgar Rice Burroughs renaissance in comic books may have been kicked off by Charlton’s faithful adaptation made in the mistaken assumption that the character was in the public domain. And Ace Books’ reprinting of the Tarzan books might stem from the same assumption. Interesting stuff.
Tarzana, California (it’s part of the City of Los Angeles, actually) is so named because Edgar Rice Burroughs had a ranch there called Tarzana.
Immediately north of it is Reseda, which Tom Petty references in the song “Free Fallin’.”
That’s also where Daniel LaRusso lived.
https://www.apartments.com/the-south-seas-reseda-ca/t8c8zjb/
Tarzana is also where SF author Larry Niven lives (or at least lived for along time; I don’t know if he’s there now)
Wikipedia lists 33 other notable people who live or have lived there, including Kaley Cuoco. But not Niven, oddly enough.
OK, this one is pretty obscure, but in Euripides’ Trojan Women, Cassandra has this observation on how the Greeks can go choke on their victory:
“For from the day that they did land upon Scamander’s strand, their doom began, not for loss of stolen frontier nor yet for fatherland with frowning towers; whomso Ares slew, those never saw their babes again, nor were they shrouded for the tomb by hand of wife, but in a foreign land they lie.”
Only a few miles but many centuries away lie the graves of not Greeks this time but Australians. Maybe whoever wrote Attaturk’s message to their mothers knew his Euripides and wanted to reverse the sentiment:
“Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives …
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side in this country of ours.
You, the mothers, who sent their sons from far away countries, wipe away your tears.
Your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”
It’s remarkable if true. It’s could be apocryphal although I found a Guardian article that says “…an advertising campaign that reportedly proved to be cinema legend Orson Welles’ last project as a director.” George the bear seeks new followers as Hofmeister lager returns | Food & drink industry | The Guardian
Yeah, I can’t get away from the suspicion that all the cites are simply media sources referencing each other and perpetuating an urban myth.
I tried checking out IMDB to see if that had anything on the story. I found nothing relevant, but I did stumble across this, which is almost as hard to believe:
H.G. Wells was driving through San Antonio, Texas, and stopped to ask the way. The person he happened to ask was none other than Orson Welles, who had recently broadcast “The War of the Worlds” on the radio. They got on well and spent the day together.
Where’s that emoji again? Oh, yeah…
j
I never heard this story of a chance m,eeting before, and suspect they got it wrong.
Wells and Welles were both in San Antonio at the same time, and participated in a joint radio broadcast. It’s purportedly the only time they met. The broadcast has been recorded. I suppose it’s possible that they ran into each other on the way there. supoosedly they just happened to be in the sme town at the same time.
Actually, no. His earliest Tarzan stories, first published in 1912, probably entered PD in 1968. Although current copyright law provides protection for life of the author plus 70 years, for most of the 20th century copyright lasted 28 years and could be renewed for a second 28-year-period.
Although the majority of copyright holders did not renew after the initial period, in 1923 Burroughs formed a corporation to protect and publish his works, one of the first authors to do so. So it is almost certain that the copyright on all his works was extended to the maximum provided. But that still means that all of his works published before 1922 (i.e., 56 years before the 1976 revision to the Copyright Act took effect) were (probably*) PD as of 56 years after their publication.
Of course, Charlton and the other publishers you speak about were violating copyright if they were printing Tarzan stories before 1968, when Tarzan of the Apes was first serialized in 1912. Either they assumed that the copyrights hadn’t been extended, or maybe they thought (wrongly, from what you write) that they were close enough to expiring that ERB, Inc., wouldn’t bother to file a suit that might be drawn out until the works really were PD.
*Copyright law is complicated, so it’s possible ERB, Inc., was able to do something to extend the copyrights in the stories beyond the normal 56 years. I’m sure one of our resident lawyers or copyright mavens will be along to explain other ways the Tarzan stories were, or might have been, protected.
Interesting find - perhaps that was the occasion, and subsequently the story of their “random meeting” became somewhat… embellished?
j