Meat Loaf couldn’t have said it better.
Forget Meat Loaf. This one’s in play:
The Darién Gap, in southern Panama and northern Colombia (Darién Province, Panama), is impassable by motor vehicle (Jeep or dirt motorcycle). It is remote, has difficult terrain and an extreme environment, and has a reputation as one of the most inhospitable regions in the world. However, the Darién Gap is the only land bridge between North and South America and through the years it has historically served as a major route for both humans and wildlife.
Motorcyclists riding the entire length of the Pan-American Highway (as I once considered) typically have to put their bikes on a boat and travel around the Darién Gap
The Darién Gap is considered one of the most difficult border crossings ever.
Bienvenidos a Darién!
Darién National Park, Darien National Park - UNESCO World Heritage Centre, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in Panama.
ADDED: Yaviza, Darién Province, Panama is the farthest south one can drive from the US on the Pan-American Highway to the Darién Gap. There, the road dead ends.
ADDED #2: Bienvenidos a Cabo San Lucas!
Cabo San Lucas is a 1,600 mile drive from San Francisco CA USA. I’ve done it twice. I took this picture in February 2006 on my second drive there.
The Cumberland Gap is a mountain pass in the Appalachian Mountains at the juncture of Virginia, Tennessee and Kentucky. Long used by Native Americans, it was also used by frontiersman Daniel Boone who led settlers to the Transylvania Purchase of central Kentucky.
Les Nessman was a character on the television situation comedy WKRP in Cincinnati, which was set at a struggling radio station. Nessman, portrayed by actor Richard Sanders, was the station’s nebbishy, clueless news and farm reporter.
Among Les’s quirks was putting masking tape on the floor around his desk in the station’s “bullpen” office, to represent where he hoped to someday have walls, and unintentionally mispronouncing words and names: he pronounced “Appalachia” as “apple-lah-CHEE-ah,” and golfer Chi Chi Rodriguez’s name as “Chigh ((rhyming with “high”)) Chigh ROD-rih-gwez.”
There have been five warships named USS Cincinnati to serve in the United States Navy. The first was a City-class ironclad during the Civil War. The most recent is an Independence-class littoral combat ship; she was commissioned in 2019 and is still in service.
A littoral combat ship fight in the littorals. Littoral warfare involves operations near shore as well as in more confining sea regions, such as the Strait of Hormuz or the Persian Gulf. Near shore means close enough to bring force to bear on the adjacent.
Literally, not figuratively.
Scientists and cartographers consider the Persian Gulf - also known as the Arabian Gulf - to be an arm of the Indian Ocean. It has an average depth of only 164 feet.
Officially there are five oceans of Earth: Pacific, Atlantic, Arctic, Indian, and Southern. Unofficially, there are seven seas: North Atlantic, South Atlantic, North Pacific, South Pacific, Arctic, Indian, and Southern/Antarctic. There is no sharp distinction between seas and oceans, though generally seas are smaller and contained by land masses or act as “arms” of oceans (such as Red Sea and North Sea).
“Arctic” comes from the Greek arktikos referring to a bear, either the big or little bear constellation. “Antarctica” means opposite of the Arctic.
Ursa Minor (the Little Bear, in the Little Dipper), was one of the 48 constellations listed by the 2nd-century astronomer Ptolemy. It remains one of the 88 modern constellations.
Based on observations he made with his naked eye, Ptolemy saw the Universe as a set of nested, transparent spheres, with Earth in the center. He posited that the Moon, Mercury, Venus, and the Sun all revolved around Earth.
In Richard Garfinkle’s 1996 science fiction novel Celestial Matters, Ptolemy’s beliefs about astronomy, Aristotle’s about physics, and Galen’s about medicine are all factual.
In Poul Anderson’s novel, A Midsummer Tempest, all of Shakespeare’s plays are factually accurate, leading to a 17th century society which is more technologically advanced than our timeline, and in which fairies are real. Prince Rupert of the Rhine is a lead character.
Movies which have been loosely adapted from Shakespeare’s plays include West Side Story (based on Romeo and Juliet), Forbidden Planet (based on The Tempest), Strange Brew (based on Hamlet), and 10 Things I Hate About You (based on The Taming of the Shrew)
Per Wiki: “No written contemporary description of Shakespeare’s physical appearance survives, and no evidence suggests that he ever commissioned a portrait. From the 18th century, the desire for authentic Shakespeare portraits fueled claims that various surviving pictures depicted Shakespeare. That demand also led to the production of several fake portraits, as well as misattributions, re-paintings, and relabelling of portraits of other people.”
No officially certified likeness of Shakespeare (1564-1616) is known to exist. But some are considered to be ‘likely’ of him. This is one.
The ‘Chandos Portrait’ (1600–1610) can be found in the National Portrait Gallery and is probably the most famous depiction of Shakespeare as well as the most likely to be a legitimate likeness. It is believed to have been painted by John Taylor (1585–1651) and served as the basis for the engraving of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout (1601–1650) used in the First Folio (1623).
Named after the Dukes of Chandos who formerly owned the painting, it was bequeathed to The National Gallery in 1856, as one of the first works in its collection.
(From artUK.org ➜ https://artuk.org/discover/stories/what-did-shakespeare-really-look-like ⇦)
His Royal Highness Prince William, the Prince of Wales, is also Duke of Cornwall in England and Duke of Rothesay in Scotland, as was his father, now King Charles III, before him.
Duke University, now located in Durham, North Carolina, began in 1838 in Trinity, North Carolina. It was originally called Brown’s Schoolhouse and was founded by a group of Methodists and Quakers. In 1841 it became the Union Institute Academy; in 1851 it was renamed the Normal School; and in 1859 it became Trinity University. In 1892 the school was moved to Durham largely because of the generosity of wealthy benefactor Washington Duke. Then, in 1924 when James Duke, son of Washington, established a 40-million-dollar endowment, the school was once again renamed, this time to Duke University.
Duke University, North Carolina State University, and University of North Carolina Chapel Hill make up the Triangle Research Park.
I know it as RTP, Research Triangle Park. You’ve got the cities of Raleigh and Durham and the town of Chapel Hill there. It is the largest research park in the US and home to numerous high tech companies.
The four ACC schools, Duke, North Carolina, North Carolina State, and Wake Forest University, are referred to as Tobacco Road by sportscasters, particularly in basketball. All four teams consistently produce high-caliber teams. Each of the RTP-based universities listed has won at least two NCAA Basketball national championships.