A population of about 20,000 California gray whales migrate from Alaska in the summer to Baja California in the winter. In Baja, the three most popular lagoons are Laguna Ojo de Liebre, Bahia San Ignacio, and Bahia Magdalena. Laguna Ojo de Liebre was formerly known in English as Scammon’s Lagoon, after whaleman Charles Melville Scammon, who discovered the lagoons in the 1850s and hunted the grays.
“Ojo de Liebre” is Spanish for “eye of a hare”. Baby hares, called leverets, are born with their fur and their eyes open, unlike baby rabbits, born blind and furless. Rabbits and hares are quite different, so much so that they don’t breed with one another in their natural habitats.
Laguna Ojo de Liebre lies very close to the state line separating Baja California and BCS, or Baja California Sur. These are the only two states on the Baja peninsula. There are 31 states in Mexico.
Baskin-Robbins is the world’s largest chain of ice cream specialty shops. Their slogan is “31 Flavors” but they’ve actually introduced more than 1000 flavors since they were founded in 1945
Ben & Jerry’s Burlington VT store had a “flavor board” where customers could suggest a new ice cream flavor they’d like to see. One anonymous soul said “chocolate chip cookie dough.” They introduced it in the store in 1984, and knew they had a huge hit when people started complaining the flavor wasn’t available in other B&J stores and they had to drive to Burlington to get it.
When they packaged Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Ice Cream in pints, in three months it become their top seller, and now every ice cream company makes it.
Originally, chocolate chips were made of semi-sweet chocolate, but today there are many flavors. These include bittersweet chocolate chips, peanut butter chips, butterscotch chips, mint chocolate chips, white chocolate chips, dark chocolate chips, milk chocolate chips, and white and dark swirled chocolate chips.
2015 marked the sixth straight year of declining annual volume sales of ice cream. The top ice cream manufacturer is Unilever, which owns such brands as Magnum (and their Belgian chocoltate-covered ice cream bars), the top selling brand in 2015, and Cornetto and Ben & Jerry’s. The second selling brand in 2015 was Häagen-Dazs. The name Häagen-Dazs is a nonsense name meant to evoke Danish.
German chocolate cake has nothing to do with Germany. It was originally called German’s chocolate cake, a recipe created by a Texas housewife using a product called German’s Chocolate, a product developed by Samuel German, an English-American who worked for the American Baker’s Chocolate Company.
All of Joanne Fluke’s Hannah Swenson culinary mysteries have titles of a baked good, followed by “Murder”; i.e. the Chocolate Chip Cookie Murder, with the exception of the Candy Cane Murder. That book does have a good recipe for Candy Cane Chocolate Bars, based on the fact that Hannah gets the killer put behind bars.
Plain white candy canes were shown on Christmas cards produced before 1900. Red and white striped candy canes only started to appear on Christmas cards at the beginning of the 20th century. There are no verifiable connections of the candy cane to any Christian symbology such as the red representing the scourging of Jesus Christ, or the candy cane being a simple symbol by which persecuted Christians could recognize each other, and therefore could worship together - these all appear to be false.
Red and white are the team colors of Shaker Heights High School in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the alma mater of both Paul Newman and Majel Barrett Roddenberry.
In the late 1920s, George M. Darrow of the USDA began tracking down reports of a large, reddish-purple berry that had been grown on Rudolph Boysen’s Northern California farm. Darrow enlisted the help of Walter Knott, a Southern California farmer who was known as a berry expert. Knott had never heard of the new berry, but he agreed to help Darrow in his search.
Darrow and Knott learned that Boysen had abandoned his growing experiments several years earlier and sold his farm. Undaunted by this news, Darrow and Knott headed out to Boysen’s old farm, on which they found several frail vines surviving in a field choked with weeds. They transplanted the vines to Knott’s farm in Buena Park, California, where he nurtured them back to fruit-bearing health. Walter Knott was the first to commercially cultivate the berry in Southern California. He began selling the berries at his farm stand in 1932 and soon noticed that people kept returning to buy the large, tasty berries. When asked what they were called, Knott said, “Boysenberries,” after their originator. His family’s small restaurant and pie business eventually grew into Knott’s Berry Farm. As the berry’s popularity grew, Mrs. Knott began making preserves, which ultimately made Knott’s Berry Farm famous
The boysenberry is believed to be a cross between a loganberry, red raspberry and blackberry.
The Marionberry is a cross between the ‘Chehalem’ and ‘Olallie’ blackberries. It was developed at Oregon State University in Corvalis, OR.
Oregon State University entomology professor George Poinar, Jr. is known for extracting DNA from prehistoric insects fossilized in amber. His work was the inspiration for the novel and movie Jurassic Park.
William Kirby is widely considered as the father of Entomology. In collaboration with William Spence, he published a definitive entomological encyclopedia, Introduction to Entomology, regarded as the subject’s foundational text. He also helped to found the Royal Entomological Society in London in 1833.
Edmund Kirby was a US Army artilleryman who served during the American Civil War. Kirby Cove, underneath the San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, is named in his honor.
Edmund Kirby Smith was an undistinguished Confederate general in the Civil War, who spent very little of his life in Florida after his birth in St. Augustine. Nonetheless, his statue is one of the two that represent Florida in the National Statuary Hall Collection in the old House chamber in the United States Capitol (each state is allocated two; the other Floridian represented is Dr. John Gorrie, purported (though dubiously) inventor of air conditioning). Recent legislation will remove Smith’s statue, to be replaced by either pioneering Negro educator Mary McLeod Bethune, environmentalist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, or grocer and philanthropist George Jenkins.
Probably not: Are Bert and Ernie named after characters from It's a Wonderful Life? | Muppet Wiki | Fandom
'Twas Salmon, not Samuel.
In play:
Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn’s cat in True Grit was named General Sterling Price, after the Confederate officer under whom Cogburn served in the Civil War.
The musical Li’l Abner, based on the comic strip, featured the song “Jubilation T. Cornpone”, about a gloriously failed Confederate general.
…*Who went re-con-noiter-ing to flank the enemy’s rear,
Circled through the piney woods, and disappeared for a year?
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone;
Old “Treat 'em with scorn - pone.”
Jubilation T. Cornpone, the missing mountaineer!
Who became so famous with a reputation so great,
That he ran for president and didn’t carry a state?
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone;
Old “Wouldn’t be sworn - pone.”
Jubilation T. Cornpone, he made the country wait!
Stonewall Jackson got his name by standing firm in the fray.
Who was known to all his men as good ol’ “Paper Mache?”
Why it was Jubilation T. Cornpone!*