Cleavage of a bond in an iridoid’s cyclopentane ring gives rise to a subclass known as secoiridoids, such as oleuropein and amarogentin. Iridoids are typically found in plants as glycosides, most often bound to glucose.
National Cleavage Day (abbreviated NCD) is an annual celebration held in either March or April in South Africa, sponsored by the brassiere marketer Wonderbra. National Cleavage Day was started in 2002 and held at the beginning of April every year. Wonderbra together with Cosmopolitan magazine and 5fm, a SABC radio station mainly based in Johannesburg, sponsor the observation.
Known as the barrier of spears, the Drakensberg peaks forms the boundary between South Africa and Lesotho. This feature is but one of many reasons to visit South Africa. Besides, of course, NCD.
Lesotho, San Marino, and Vatican City are the only countries completely surrounded by another.
Vanuatu, a small, South Pacific Island Nation, has more languages per capita than any other country. One of the many languages is Sungwadia, which is also known as Marino.
Inhabitants of Gomera Island, in the Canaries, are able to communicate by whistling their language, which can be heard and understood over great distances. But it is not a true language, it is just Spanish reduced to fewer phonemes. Most languages have more phonemes than are necessary for intelligibility. As in English, if someone whispers you can understand it, even though d/t. f/v, p/b, s/z amd g/k cannot be distinguished.
Scottish regiments raised to fight for King George III during the American Revolution had to be taught English in order to serve under British Army command. Many used Gaelic for orders and internal communications throughout the war.
The St. Mary Gaels of St. Mary College in Moraga CA have held their team nickname since 1926. Before that, the team nickname was Saints.
The University of Connecticut’s teams are nicknamed “Huskies”, a name adopted in 1934 after the school’s name changed from Connecticut Agricultural College to Connecticut State College in 1933 before then, the teams were referred to as the Aggies and Nutmeggers. Though there is a relationship between the pronunciation of “UConn” and the Yukon, where Huskies are native, the “Huskies” nickname predates the school’s 1939 name change to the University of Connecticut; the first recorded use of “UConn” was later in 1939.
The word ‘Connecticut’ is derived from ‘Quinnehtukqut’, a Mohegan Indian word for “Long River Place” or “Beside the Long Tidal River”. The Connecticut River is the largest river in New England.
On the 2003 Carols for a Cure holiday songs CD, the cast of the musical revival of Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which featured both hearing and hard of hearing actors performing in both speaking and sign language roles, performed (what else?) Silent Night.
Russia, Sweden, Canada and the USA are the only countries in the world outside Finland that have more than 100,000 ancestral Finns. In the USA, the largest concentration is in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
The Finns invented the Molotov cocktail. At the onset of World War II, Joseph Stalin demanded to use Finnish territory for strategic purposes. Stalin ordered that the Hangö Peninsula would serve as port for the Soviet Navy. The Finns refused. Vyacheslav Molotov, the Soviet foreign minister, bombed Helsinki. The first bombing raid killed 65 men, women and children. Molotov snidely remarked that Soviet aircraft were only dropping ‘food parcels’. Later in the war, Finnish troops returned the insult by hurling ‘Molotov cocktails’ at Soviet tanks.
Snidely Whiplash, the archenemy of Dudley Doo-right of Rocky/Bullwinkle fame, tied Nell Fenwick to the railroad tracks. This scenario apparently never occurred in real life, before being used as a device in fictional portrayals.
Rocky the Musical (originally Rocky: Das Musical), with music and lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens, with a book by Thomas Meehan held its world premiere in Hamburg in 2012 and opened on Broadway in 2014 at the Winter Garden Theatre.
Of Germany’s 16 states, three of them (Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin) ate “city-states”, in that they are geographically small, encompassing only the urban ares of their central cities.
John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth, also ate the first meal in space-- applesauce-- in 1962.
NASA astronaut and former Hexcel Corporation employee Leroy Chiao took the first photo from space of China’s Great Wall, with a 180mm telephoto lens, and proved that one cannot see the Great Wall from space with the unaided human eye. Leroy Chiao was also the first US astronaut to cast his vote from space.
The word “hex” did not come into widespread use until the 1920s, when it became associated with the symbols on Pennsylvania Dutch farm buildings, and hence, to an evil spell, attached to it’s origin through the German word ‘hexa’, which means witch. The Pennsylvania Dutch had no intention of the symbols being anything more than randomly decorative.
Interesting. I found these images: hex sign Pennsylvania Dutch barn symbol