One piece of trivia I have known most of my life is that koalas have two thumbs on each hand. I always assumed there was one on each side with three fingers in between. Nope.
Evidently, curling is a business is tough-as-granite and stones weigh more than souls … especially the finest ones …
… or is it owed to the “pre-woke” years?
Delayed nitpick- Gorilla gorilla gorilla is specifically the Western lowland gorilla.
There is also the extremely endangered Gorilla gorilla diehli and the Eastern gorilla Gorilla berengei, which is also split into two subspecies; G. b. berengei and G. b. graueri.
Used to be just 3 subspecies, all of Gorilla gorilla when I was a kid, there’s been some reclassifying going on recently.
Sportcaster Al Michaels’ first job in television was picking the women who would appear on “The Dating Game.”
Many of us have likely read at least some of the brothers Grimm fairy tails. But I was surprised to learn that they wrote a version of Cinderella, in which the stepsisters cut off their toes to make their feet fit into the slipper. Grimm, indeed!
Andre the Giant was born in France, but his father was from Bulgaria, and his mother was from Poland. While he was French by birth, he also identified as Polish, and his family spoke Polish in the home. Why Polish and not Bulgarian is something we’ll probably never know.
I vaguely remember hearing that one such original ending featured someone being put inside a barrel lined with nails and then the barrel being rolled down a hill. Was that it?
In the Grimm’s version of Snow White, the evil stepmother/queen is forced to wear red hot iron shoes on Snow White’s and the Prince’s wedding, and dances herself to death. These are some dark tales before having been Disneyfied.
And if I’m remembering correctly, Rapunzel’s eyes get pecked out, and Little Red Riding Hood strips and gets into bed with the Wolf.
And Goldilocks was originally burned, drowned, impaled on a church steeple and eaten by the bears.
The Grimms did not write the tales; they collected them from oral legends.
Note that Jacob Grimm formulated an important law of how sounds change over time.
Nitpick: while they did collect and publish legends, the tales you are talking about are Märchen (folktales).
Because his mother was polish?
MOTHERtongue?
Mother talked with her baby the language that she knew and that later gets carried on. The same as in my family.
… except for the Bulgarian the Polish and Andre.
I’m pretty sure in DIsneys version the evil stepmother would not have been blonde but rather dark-haired, too.
She was in the Disney film, IIRC. It was the first film I ever saw in a theater at maybe 6 or 7 (of course on a re-release. I’m old, but not THAT old).
Christopher Columbus’ son Hernando Colón also made a major mark on history. He’s credited with discovering* the great idea that books should be displayed on shelves with their spines visible to make them easier to find.
This is one of those great ideas that sound obvious, but previously books had been normally stored in trunks or on their sides on shelves built for one huge open book. That worked when even the Vatican library in 1477 had a mere sixteen chests with stacks of books piled on their tops. The coming of the printing press immediately upped the number of books by orders of magnitude. Hernando had a collection of 15,000 in 1539, more than me at my peak, and the need for organization had become critical.
* or at least championing
And HIS son made a minor mark ;
I hereby award you one (1) shiny, internet point.
Musical fans know this because Sondheim included it in Into the Woods. Somewhat surprisingly, the movie version retained that bit, even though a lot of the darker stuff was otherwise Disneyfied.
I only just learned that The Beach Boys’ 80s hit, “Kokomo” was co-written by John Phillips of The Mamas & The Papas.
His primary co-writer was Scott McKenzie, best known for “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)” written by… John Phillips.
The two were in the folk trio The Journeymen together before Phillips formed TM&TP.