All thoroughbreds are descendants of three horses: the Goldolphin Arabian, the Darley Arabian, and the Bylerley Turk. There are many horses running today with no connection to Secretariat.
How many, if any, are descended from only one or two of those three? I’d expect that their family trees have been thoroughly interbraided by now.
Angelique Pettyjohn, who played Captain Kirk’s drill thrall in The Gamesters Of Triskellion, also played ‘Charlie Watkins’, a male CONTROL agent and ‘master of disguise’ who is able to appear convincingly female on Get Smart. Time to break out the DVDs, I guess.
The currency of Triskellion is the quatloo.
I always found it odd how little things get latched onto. “Quatloo” only appears in that episode, and only in two or three scenes, but somehow it gained major traction as this word that means space money. And, honestly, it is one of the more meh episodes – not horrible like the one with Melvin Belli or that unwatchable thing with the historical figures and the rock monster, but well below the median.
The one actor who appeared in several episodes of Star Trek, as well as other television and movie roles, but most of us do not know what Janos Prohaska looks like because he was always some sort of beast (gorilla, bear, animated geology, etc). Sadly, Janos and his son Robert (who was following in dad’s footsteps) died together in an airplane crash in the early '70s, and the industry had to resort to actual animals.
At the Boston Museum of Science they used to have an exhibit consisting of preserved, hardened brains of various animals (including people and pares) all under a clear plastic dome. Every damned time I passed that exhibit my own mind cried out “300 quatloos on the Earthman!”
It’s gone now, so I’m safe.
What is “pares” in this context?
I had always thought her name was completely made up, but, no. That’s only half right. She did make up the name “Angelique” (actual first name Dorothy), but she was married to a much older man named “Otha Pettyjohn.” (She ended up with several more husbands over the years.)
It was supposed to be “apes”. I don’t know how it got to be “pares”
I just learned one of my favorite dinosaurs - the sail-backed dinosaur or dimetridon - wasn’t a dinosaur at all, but was related to mammals.
Which to my mind, is more interesting than a creature related to birds.
So was its relative, often-neglected edaphosaurus.
Lots of those Triassic-era creatures that look like dinosaurs weren’t. Neither were the flying ones – pterosaurs and the like – nor the marine one like Ichthyosaur, Mosasaur, Plesiosaur, etc.
I was severely disappointed as a kid when I saw the actual skeletons at the American Museum of Natural History to learn that the stegosaurus – huge as it was, was nowhere near as big as they made it appear in King Kong. And that the Dimetrodons were nowhere near as big as they were portrayed in the 1959 movie a Journey to the Center of the Earth
It was a “synapsid”. Which modern-day mammals are the only surviving sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-sub clade of. (I might even have not added enough sub-'s there).
The British army has more horses than tanks.
We have more tanks than dogs in the US Army. It’s less than twice as many though. Tanks 4650, dogs 2500.
Update: I was motivated to go back through Wikipedia’s articles on this and nine sub-'s from Synapsidia to Mammalia is about right, although there might be a few transitional clades I didn’t count; different articles either list or skip over different sub-clades and it’s not always clear if the same taxon is being given different names. It’s a little as if three dialects of American English were the last surviving examples of the Indo-European language group. If you want the gruesome details, see Mammal, Mammaliaformes and Evolution of Mammals.
But do the horses have automatic barrel stabilization?
To be fair, you can slice up taxonomy into pretty much any number of levels of sub-clades you like.
I don’t trust horses. They kick at one end, and bite at the other. And their brain is pretty small.
But the German army seems to be fairly good at barrel stabilisation
The opening credits of most American movies run top-to-bottom. A few movies have them going from bottom-to-top. The earliest (I know of) and probably best known example is Kiss Me Deadly (1955). This very evening, however, I stumbled upon Once a Thief (1950) starring Cesar Romero, June Havoc and Lon Chaney, Jr. An extremely low-budget film noir shot in LA and directed by Billy Wilder’s less talented brother, it has opening credits which run bottom-to-top. Given the film’s extreme obscurity, I doubt there is any reference anywhere in the universe to this fact. You read it here first.
And now for a factule that’s truly random, and which I really did just learn a week or so ago, after watching The Good Shepherd.
The Whiffenpoof a cappela group at Yale, has a business manager and a musical director, chosen each year as the the members graduate and the new Whiffenpoofs come in.
The business manager is known as Popocatapetl
The musical director is Pitchpipe.
Knowing this makes my life happier.