Today I fell down a rabbit hole and learned about the USS Water Witch. Firstly, it’s interesting because it’s a weird name for a military ship, and second because she was shot at by Paraguayans during a mapping survey of a river.
Of the ten largest US cities - San Diego is the only one whose name has never appeared as part of a “Billboard” chart recording. (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia, San Antonio, San Diego, Dallas, Austin) Yes - there was a “Dallas Blues” recorded in 1931 by Ted Lewis & his band, and a song called “Austin” from 2001 by Blake Shelton.
Nitpick - Los Angeles (in full) has never appeared either (only as L.A.). Arlo Guthrie’s “Coming into Los Angeles” (which he sung at “Woodstock”) never made the charts.
If you look in a mirror and shift your gaze from one eye to the other, you will not see your eyes move. This is because of saccadic masking, a little trick that your brain plays on you, in which anything you see during a saccade (a fast eye movement) is edited out by your visual system, so you don’t see the blur that would otherwise be visible while your eyes are moving.
Anyone watching you do the mirror test can easily see that your eyes are moving, and if you take a video of yourself doing it, you can see that your eyes are moving. But in real time, it appears to you that your gaze is somehow magically shifting from one eye to the other without your eyes moving.
From the American Geographical Society.
Catatumbo lightning is an atmospheric phenomenon that occurs over the mouth of the Catatumbo River where it empties into Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela. Catatumbo means “House of Thunder” in the language of the Bari people. It originates from a mass of storm clouds at an altitude of more than 0.6 mi (1 km), and occurs for almost 150 nights a year, nine hours per day, and with lightning flashes from 16 to 40 times per minute. The storms are thought to be the result of winds blowing across the lake and the surrounding swampy plains. These air masses meet the high mountain ridges of the Andes which enclose the plain from three sides. The heat and moisture collected across the plains create electrical charges. The air masses are destabilized by the mountain ridges, which results in thunderstorm activity. Warm, moist air from the Caribbean meets cold, drier air from the Andes, creating the perfect conditions for lightning.
That’s like a planet designed for an sf novel.
For a Night of the Lepus-size rabbit hole, here’s the list of names for WWII Liberty Ships. a lot of artists and poets, a few Confederate generals, even Algonquin Roundtable wit Alexander Wolcott (perhaps because he died on the radio while trashing Hitler). Thomas Edison got a ship, but so did Nicholas Tesla.
And this fact is what led filmmakers in the very early days of cinema to realize that cutting to a close-up or different angle instead of panning the camera would not confuse viewers or seem unnatural.
“Maryland My Maryland” (written in the 1860’s) is no longer the state song of the state of Maryland, due to some pro-Confederate lyrics. Here are the lyrics from a Tennessee Ernie Ford version (6 stanzas - the version on the State archives has 9 stanzas). Sung to the tune of “O Christmas Tree” (“O Tannenbaum”) which predates MMM by several decades. So what do they sing at the Preakness now?:
The despot’s heel is on thy shore
Maryland, my Maryland
His torches at thy temple door
Maryland, my Maryland
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore
And be the battle queen of yore
Maryland, my Maryland
Thou wilt not cower in the dust
Maryland, my Maryland
Thy beaming sword shall never rust
Maryland, my Maryland
Remember Carroll’s sacred trust [signer of the Declaration of Independence - from Maryland]
Remember Howard’s warlike thrust [Continental Army officer during the Revolution]
And though thy slumberers with the just
Maryland, my Maryland
Dear mother, burst the tyrant’s chain
Maryland, my Maryland
Virginia should not call in vain
Maryland, my Maryland
She meets her sisters on the plain
“Sic semper” 'tis the proud refrain
That baffle’s minions back again
Maryland, my Maryland
Arise, arise in majesty again
Maryland, Maryland, my Maryland
Madge Blake and her husband worked on the detonator project for the A-bomb in WWII.
She was just playing dumb as Aunt Harriet on Batman. She was probably using Wayne funds to built something weirder.
You, or Tennessee Ernie, left out the best part of James Randall’s original lyric:
“Huzzah! She spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! She burns! She’ll come! She’ll come!”
I believe the tune, often referred to as Lauriger Horatius, predates the US Civil War by a couple of centuries, not just a few decades.
“El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula” ?
Hey, I can contribute something, and it might even be true.
The last two words there, de Porciúncula, were part of the name given to the river by the first Spanish explorers. There’s no evidence that I’ve ever seen that they were part of the name of the tiny pueblo named after the river.
But what do those words even mean, and where did they come from? A year ago, I went on a tour of Italy with some friends, and we stopped in Assisi to see Saint Francis’ cathedral there. That is, there’s a large cathedral built around the tiny shed-like chapel where Saint Francis liked to do his praying. The chapel was built on a tiny lot of land owned by Saint Francis’ order – in Italian, it’s called Porciúncula. (I can’t hope to set the diacritical properly.) Well, I haven’t got any proof, but it makes sense to me that it somehow just got added to the name of the river as an extra tribute to Saint Francis.
A coloring book spent 14 weeks on the NY Times non-fiction Best Sellers list in 1962.
JFK Coloring Book 1962 – The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza
That reminds me of The Executive Coloring Book from 1961.
…and with that, I fell down the rabbit hole.
I apologize if it’s just this non-American who didn’t know this, but it turns out that briefly, in the early 1960s, adult coloring books were all the rage:
This passage really caught my eye:
The captions became more knowing and metaphorical. A picture of a smoking jacket-clad young man says: “He has a fun time… Color the gleam in his eyes brightly.” 1963’s Programmer’s Primer and Coloring Book made complicated jokes about bugs and core dumps with bizarre instructions to “Color me Mickey Mouse” and “Color him naïve.” They lacked the straightforward sadness of The Executive Coloring Book ’s instruction—made sadder because so plausible—to “Color me gray.”
Well, color me surprised - see where I’m going here? This led me to The Word Detective
- which includes this fascinating tidbit 9my bold:
The Oxford English Dictionary dates “color me” to 1963 (and cites an unattributed example from that year in a promotion for the US TV comedy “I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster”), but, given the fact that coloring books first became available in the late 1870s, I’d be surprised if the phrase weren’t quite a bit older.
So the first appearance the OED has for Color me xxxx is pretty much the time that there was a vogue for adult coloring books that veered into strange coloring instructions like Color him naïve.
I don’t know if I’ve got a fact here, but I think it’s interesting and random.
j
Yes, the early 1960s, when everyone was getting into shape with Royal Canadian Air Force exercises
My stepdad had that! I assure you he never followed the plan.
There have been two periods of popularity of adult coloring books. The first was in the early 1960s, and those were parodies of children’s coloring books. The second was in the 2010s, and those were meant seriously, often as a sort of therapy.
I seem to have what looks like a colouring phone app pushed at me from time to time. I’m not quite that bored, just yet.
You used the correct diacritic in the Spanish name. But the Italian name is spelled Porziuncula. As in Spanish, the antepenult syllable is stressed, but not marked with an accent. In Italian, the accent is only used when the stress is on the final syllable, and it goes the opposite direction: e.g. Felicità (said when someone sneezes).
You’re 100% correct that the Franciscans’ “little portion” gave its name to long-form Los Angeles. It was Franciscans who named it, after all. In Franco Zeffirelli’s film Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Saint Francis (played by an Englishman) discovers a dilapidated little chapel and restores it by hand and while all their followers join in helping, they sing a song by Donovan. That’s what all’s behind the name of Los Angeles. Excuse me: Ángeles. ANG-khe-les.
Sahelanthropus tchadensis, whose type fossil is a skull named Toumaï, lived 6 or 7 million years ago.
At some point in the past several thousand years, wind erosion exposed his skull on the desert surface. Nomads passing by found some (unrelated) long bones nearby, and guessing these bones to belong to Toumaï, arranged them with his skull in a reburial.
Then sometime in the past 1,000 years, after Islam had reached that part of Africa, Muslims found his skull exposed on the surface again and reburied him facing Mecca, no doubt with appropriate prayers as an act of charity for a poor soul who’d died alone in the desert. A few decades ago, scientists found Toumaï exposed at the surface again in his Islamic grave.