That’s a nice story, but Charles V was actually born in Ghent, and grew up in Mechelen, in what is now Belgium. When he arrived in Spain as a teenage monarch, barely knowing Spanish customs and surrounded by Flemish advisors, he was viewed as a foreign interloper and there were popular revolts against his rule.
Sorry for the misinformation, I was working from memory and didn’t know that Charles V didn’t grow up in Spain. But the reality gives this an even better twist, so he had to face the troubles of being considered an interloper twice, first in Spain and then in Germany?
Actors Toby Jones and Tom Hollander have both portrayed Alfred Hitchcock and Truman Capote. The chance of a third actor joining them in this coincidence seems remote.
Connie Booth was married to the Minister of Silly Walks, then later married the son of the Cowardly Lion.
This is a fact I will carry to my grave.
Considering her brother was named Scrooge, I think Hortense got off easy.
Hortense married Quackmore Duck, and they hatched Donald. According to one source, they also hatched Thelma, mother of Huey, Dewey, and Louie. The other source states that Della is the mother of the triplets. Their father may or may not be Howard the Duck.
Speaking of Howard the Duck-- Marvel Comics had an agreement with Disney that would they would depict him wearing pants so he would look distinctive from Donald Duck.
Now that Disney OWNS Marvel I doubt anyone would care.
Does anyone care about Howard the Duck in any respect these days?
Marvel/Disney in general and James Gunn in particular, since he stuck Howard in (virtually in cameos) in a couple of his movies.
Howard was in several What If…? episodes where he married Darcy (the tech geek from the Thor movies) and they had a superhuman child, Byrdie.
Yesterday on a local Facebook page someone posted a photo of a device attached to a plastic backing the size of a credit card that they found in a parking lot and turned in at the business in case someone needed it. I googled it (which of course the finder should have done) and it is a kind of thermometer that measures the temperature up to 12,288 times over 42.5 days. You include it in a temperature-sensitive shipment and when it arrives you can plug it into a computer USB port and see records of the temperature in transit to make sure it didn’t reach a damaging level. I thought it was a neat bit of technology that must be very familiar to some people and completely unknown to almost everyone else.
I’ve used those for sensitive epoxies. There are also devices that show if a package has been tipped or jostled too much. Like a large piece of equipment that must remain upright. The lower bulbs have small plastic beads and the arrow part backing is sticky.
I think he’s a great character. Some volumes of his comic involve pretty heavy social commentary, some are lighter parody, and in some he is just a kind of funny character. His last series (volume 6, 11 issues) ended in 2016 but there was a single issue “volume 7” released in 2023 for his 50th anniversary. He has cross-overs with “lighter” Marvel titles like She-Hulk and Squirrel Girl.
His most recent crossover appearance I’ve seen is issue 9 of Spider-Boy last year, where the Spider Society is hosting a duck version of Spider-man until they can get him back to his proper universe. Until Spider-Boy makes them realize it is just Howard mooching off of free food.
He got a $240 figure this year.
As an aside, when I was in Jr High, a friend of mine was a comic book nerd and wouldn’t shut up about Howard. I asked him to buy me the latest issue which happened to be the 16th issue in late 1977. I recall it being some kind of meta humor thing that I didn’t get. Assuming it wasn’t a rare variant, had I saved it in excellent condition, I could sell it on eBay now for $11.
When I priced out my comic books before liquidating them c1980, I was surprised to find my handful of Howards were fetching 50x cover price in some cases. Howard the Duck has always had a devoted fan base that rivals many of Marvels more iconic characters.
Professional basketball and hockey are (almost always) played indoors. Football can be played indoors or outdoors but in outdoor venues the game will be played in almost any weather. Baseball can be played indoors or outdoors. Outdoor games will be postponed if the weather is bad, particularly when it’s wet weather because it can be very dangerous for the batter.
When a baseball game is postponed you can get a refund or a pass to see a different game for free. In the early days, you’d exchange your ticket stub for a different paper ticket that you could use later to trade for a game ticket. The name of that paper ticket that you’d use when the original game was canceled was a rain check.
Similarly, a “meal ticket” was a coupon issued as part of one’s stay at an upscale hotel to eat in the hotel dining room.
I got one of those in the 21st century, when I got bumped from a flight and the airline comped me a hotel room. The value wasn’t high enough to get an actual meal from it at hotel-restaurant prices, though, so I ate at some fast food place and then had a really nice slice of pie from it for dessert.
From the country’s beginning to 1898, all the Presidents combined, in all their public addresses captured in print, referred to the country as America - as distinct from The United States of America - exactly 11 times.
That changed overnight after the U.S.A. took Porto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and Hawaii [1898 spellings] as territories, or, as the Attorney General claimed in court, colonies. By 1899 Greater America was the phrase used everywhere and textbooks included all the ex-Spanish territories in maps the way Alaska and Hawai’i are today.
Teddy Roosevelt, the great imperialist, used America in his first annual address to Congress and everybody has copied him since. America! America! America!
The original run of Howard the Duck was excellent, a satire of many things.
For our first Christmas together, my wife got all my missing issues of Howard the Duck (and Swamp Thing – the Len Wein issues). The comic book store owner was delighted to oblige, especially since I didn’t care about the condition. She gave him a list of what I was missing and he found them all, except for Howard the Duck #1, which was quite expensive ($50 or more IIRC) at the point. But he found a magazine that reprinted the story, so I had a full run.