Of the first 299 covers of Sports Illustrated, only nine featured basketball. By contrast, twelve featured dogs and nine birds. (I don’t have any further details on the animal covers.) This data is from Over Time, a Frank Deford memoir.
Iditarod? Hunting?
And of course duck hunting dogs.
Probaby women’s swimwear.
[Wolverine - Wikipedia]
(Gulo gulo gulo), the Eurasian wolverine.
That’s a TIL for me. I had no idea there were wolverines in Scandinavia.
I love that gulo is Latin for glutton.
j
In German, the wolverine is a “Vielfraß”, literally “Eat-Much”.
That’s going to join Eichelhäher in my short vocabulary of German animal names based on eating habits.
j
I remember the Eichelhäher.
Yeah, this thread. (If anyone is the slightest bit interested, post 1284 et seq, with a slight return at post 1299.)
j
I learned that, if you were hanging out on the surface of Mars, the moon Phobos would always rise in the west and spend about five to six hours crossing the sky before setting in the east, doing this about 3 times a day.
It is almost unique, but not quite. If you could ride one of the doldrum bands of Jupiter in a dirigible, at an appropriate latitude, there is a small moon that would exhibit similar behavior, albeit not nearly as rapidly. And, of course, if you were on Pluto, the moon Charon would be an excellent navigation tool, as it would always be in the same spot in the sky.
Which got me to wondering about Neptune’s little moon Nereid. Most of the time, it would behave normally, as a normal moon should. But (assuming you could establish a fixed location on Neptune where you could see it – like some kind of unimaginably tall tower to the cloud tops) I was trying to discern whether it would appear to rise in the west and set in east when about once an Earth-year, it passes close to Neptune, traveling very fast. I wish my math skills were better.
And in Spanish the beast is called glotón, which also means glutton. The description on Wikipedia is hilarious:
Es un carnívoro fornido con muy mal genio y musculoso.
He is a stocky carnivore with a very bad temper and a muscular build.
Sounds like the tundra’s answer to the Tasmanian Devil.
The Dutch call it a veelvraat. Which means Vielfraß. Literally.
I’d heard of the wolverine, but for a long time, I thought it was a creature of North American myth, like the polecat or snow snake or sasquatch.
The pole cat is European. The only ones over here are dirty, no-good, conniving bushwhackers!
Hugh Jackman thought a wolverine was a kind of wolf.
TIL that the PAR in PAR lamps, which I have been using at home and on stage for decades, stands for Parabolic Aluminized Reflector. I had always assumed it was just an abbreviation for parabolic.
Likewise in Hebrew (“Gargran”).
Canada - 88 percent of the roads in Saskarchewan are unpaved, compared to 60 percent of Canada overall. The length of Saskatchewan’s unpaved roads is more than the lengths of Ontario’s and Quebec’s paved roads combined (much larger provinces).
More than a billion dollars will be spent this yesr on Halloween costumes…for pets.