TIL, with some pleasurable amusement, that the Latin name for the hoopoe is Upupa epops
And just last week I saw one for the first time in my life! It is called Wiedehopf in German, abubilla in Spanish and when I read the Latin name I knew exactly what it was. Don’t ask me how, I did not know the English name, but it somehow was obvious.
For those of us who live in America and have no idea what they’re talking about, they’re referring to some strikingly marked bird in Europe.
The first I’ve ever heard of it.
A woodpecker with Invasion markings.
And I always thought it was an American bird as well
. we live and learn
Another interesting fact I learned from Lucy and Desi, mentioned above. When Lucy became pregnant for the first time, she and Desi first learned about it in a newspaper column. Walter Winchell had spies in the Hollywood labs that processed pregnancy tests, and reported it before Lucy heard from her doctor.
Also, Desi constantly cheated on Luci with other women, mostly prostitutes. He didn’t understand why Luci objected to this. He said that he didn’t love the other women. He only loved Luci.
I only know it because of the NYTimes Spelling Bee puzzle.
Although it touches on his problems with alcohol, the film doesn’t even hint at this.
I mean that it’s .. odd … in being different than previous research. Not wrong, just that that they’ve got different results by asking an only slightly different question.
Italy was out because they wanted to host and refused to play away.
And it was Amateur. This was ?? the reason England was out of it for a while ?? Association football in the UK was more working-class than rugby, and the match payment system wasn’t acceptable to Europe ??
Interesting aside (to me). One of the points of 'amateur" sport was that it wasn’t corrupted by gambling interests. The players weren’t playing for money, and weren’t taking money to get the “right” result.
My Spotify list recently played “China Girl” sung by Iggy Pop. I was only familiar with the David Bowie version. Turns out Bowie scored the music while Iggy improvised the lyrics in 1977, based on a fling he had with a Vietnamese girl where neither one could understand the other’s language.
Bowie released his own version in 1983, and shared royalties with Iggy to help him out financially.
I feel like I’m missing something. How would amateur status prevent players cheating? If bettors want to bet on a game and offer money to a player to get the “right” result, the player’s amateur status isn’t going to prevent him from wanting money.
“Amateur” was code for “British Public School Gentleman”. A gentleman would never cheat.
Which is convenient, because if you accept this belief, a gentleman can never be called out on his cheating, lest you insult his status as a gentleman, which another gentleman would never do.
Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ was originally called Der Schrei der Natur, which translates from German to “The Scream of Nature”.
The figure isn’t screaming, it is in shock, clamping its hands tightly over its ears in a desperate, failed attempt to block out a deafening, existential sound vibrating through the air, the scream of nature.
Think of the three biggest empires of history: Roman, Mongol, and British. What was the only country occupied by all three?
Iraq. 
Not to mention the Persian, Macedonian, Ottoman, and American empires.
Wasn’t the USSR bigger than the Roman Empire?