Maybe it’s too construed, but in a flip circumstance, the German word for glove is “Handschuh”, literally “hand shoe”.
E.g., Latin “hallux”.
Saudi Arabia, the world’s 12th largest country, has no permanent rivers.
Reading up on the first Sino-Japanese War, TIL about Philo McGiffin, worthy of a place in the Flashman novels just for his name alone, but holding a place among the Westerners who, for whatever motives, rendered assistance to the Chinese Empire; along with Frederick Townsend Ward, Chinese Gordon, and Two-Gun Cohen.
McGiffin lives on as a legendary prankster at the US Naval Academy, for a host of audacious and probably apocryphal exploits. He went on to give admirable service to the Quing navy. Unfortunately, rife corruption and lackadaisical training doomed the contest in favor of the Japanese. Poor Philo should have just hired on with the merchant marine
I was reading something earlier today about John Travolta which mentioned his family history is Italian, from Sicily specifically. I nodded, because I knew that, but then I paused: what the heck kind of Italian name is “Travolta”?
A few minutes of searching later, I had learned two things: (a) the name “Travolta” is unique, known nowhere else except Travolta and his family and their immediate ancestors (which is pretty amazing), and (b) the name seems to have appeared a couple-few generations ago, in the late 1800s, when an official misread or miswrote the original Sicilian name Travotta, for which there is some spotty evidence weakly connected to family forebears.
The available documentation is weak and the cites are iffy (1, 2 in Italian, also 3), so I’m regarding this as a provisional fact, but the case seems reasonable.
Which means, basically, that Travolta has his unique and memorable name because of a 19th century typo.
This sort of thing is very common among Italian and Jewish immigrants in the 1880s to the 1920s who came through Ellis Island. My last name is very rare. It’s rare to begin but the spelling my family uses is an alternate mis-transliteration from the original Cyrillic spelling. There are probably only two branches and a couple dozen people total.
I’ve read that those stupidly expensive appliances like $10,000 refrigerators basically only exist to get people to buy the $4,000 refrigerators instead of the $1,600 ones.
TIL that Lee Greenwood, the writer of “God Bless The USA”, also wrote “God bless Canada.” It’s pretty much the same.
That’s called “staging” of course. Most people have very limited imaginations and are easily manipulated by such things.
Glenn Close’s father was the personal physician to President Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire.
John Oliver had a lengthy report about “God Bless the USA” a few weeks ago on This Week Tonight, where he brought up the Canada song, and played parts o it. And commented, at hilarious length.
Today I learned that when Anheuser-Busch bought the St. Louis Cardinals in 1953, the company also bought the stadium, Sportsmen’s Park, from Bill Veeck and the St. Louis Browns. The president of the company, Augustus Busch, Jr., wanted to rename the stadium to Budweiser Stadium, but at the time league rules prohibited naming a venue after an alcoholic beverage. So Busch named the stadium after his family name, and the company immediately began producing a beer called…Busch Beer.
Cool. So that’s when they started making a semi-drinkable beer by switching from rice to corn as the primary adjunct. I did not know that!
I was under the impression that 95%+ of all the maize ever converted into alcoholic beverages was distilled into corn liquor. I knew of corn beer as a VERY niche and not very popular product. Which makes me wonder whether one could breed a strain of maize that could ferment into a better less crappy corn beer.
I’m not aware of any beer that is 100% corn or rice. (Am not even sure it could be defined as a beer.) For most American pilsners, corn and/or rice is mixed-in with malted barley for the mash. The percentage of corn or rice in the overall grain depends on the brewer and beer, but I believe it is always less than 50%. (A Google search shows that rice is 30% of the mash for Budweiser.)
Corn beer is used in the further distillation of corn liquor. It’s not made for human consumption, but that’s what it’s called.
Rice is the reason I can’t/don’t drink anything Budweiser. Well, that and a modicum of self-respect. But I grew up on beers like Busch back on the farm every summer. Very distinctive taste when you mash corn with barley. Quite a few of the cheap beers back then used corn as an adjunct, especially in the Dark Days before craft brewing took off.
That works at all price ranges. If you offer two prices for a good, the lower price will dominate. If you offer three prices, people gravitate to the one in the middle. That will be true for $16, $40, and $100 objects.
Plus, some people are motivated to buy the most expensive product regardless of other factors, just as some people are motivated to buy the least expensive. Offering a range of products and prices best exploits consumer psychology.
Hi, Elizabeth!
Sorry, you made me think of an artist I knew, whose thumbs looked like big toes. She did such creative things with those that they were intriguing, not weird.
Doctors do sometimes transplant a big toe onto a hand to replace a severed thumb.