Telmatobius culeus, commonly known as the Titicaca water frog, is a very large and critically endangered species of frog in the family Telmatobiidae. It is entirely aquatic and only found in Lake Titicaca and rivers that flow into this lake in South America. While the lungs are greatly reduced, this frog has excessive amounts of skin, used to help the frog respire in the high altitude in which it lives.
In reference to its excessive amounts of skin, it has also jokingly been referred to as the Titicaca scrotum water frog.
Lake Titicaca is one of numerous lakes in the world that is located in two countries, in this case Bolivia and Peru. There are numerous lakes straddling the US-Canada border (maybe hundreds, including prairie potholes), including Lake Memphremagog, on the Quebec-Vermont border. It is the alleged home of Memphre, a cryptid (like the Loch Ness Monster) who goes by the name of Memphre, and has been reported in three different centuries. It is pronounced mem-fra-MAY-gog.
Lake Victoria, in Equatorial Africa, straddles three countries: Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya, and is considered the source of the Nile River. The 23 acre island of Mukusu in the lake was the vacation home of Idi Amin and was used to torture and murder his enemies, who were then fed to the crocodiles. It is presently for sale.
Robert Anthony Noonan, known as singer Nile, comes from a musical family—his grandfather was a vaudeville pianist who played with Bill “Bojangles” Robinson and Eddie Cantor; his uncles played boogie-woogie.
Fred Noonan ran away from home at age 12, joined the merchant marine, and was a crew member on three ships that were sunk beneath him by U-boats in WWI. He got in on the ground floor in the new commercial aviation industry, and was the navigator on the historic first China Clipper flight. Noonan and Earhart were both already media celebrities before they attempted their round the world flight.
Vice-President Marshall is credited with the saying: “There were once two brothers. One ran away to sea and the other was elected Vice-President. Neither was ever heard from again.”
Bill Miller was Barry Goldwater’s running mate in 1964. A decade later, he was so unknown, he did an American Express commercial, saying he is so unknown, he would not be able to get credit without his AmEx card.
Miller Lite Beer’s long-running “Great Taste…Less Filling!” advertising campaign was ranked by Advertising Age magazine as the eighth best advertising campaign in history.
The Miller’s Tale, in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, is an example of what was termed a fabliau: a comic tale featuring sexual misconduct, deception and scatological humor.
David Essex played Che in the original London cast of Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice’s Evita. When he asked Rice and Michael Batt to write a holiday song for his new album, they obliged with A Winter’s Tale.
Shakespeare’s play The Winter’s Tale contains one of the most famous stage directions in theater: “Exit, pursued by a bear.” It is not known whether Shakespeare used a real bear from the London bear-pits, or an actor in bear costume.
The sport of bear-baiting, in which dogs fought a bear which was chained to a post, was popular in England until the 19th Century, but continued in South Carolina until recent years. In September 2013, the South Carolina Department of Natural Resources arrested a man and filed felony charges for ill-treatment of animals for allowing dogs to repeatedly attack and bite a captive bear; the man had several bears and was holding bear-baiting competitions.
In a 1995 episode of Beverly Hills, 90210, the four female lead characters are forced to spend a night in a convent after their car breaks down in the desert, a sharp contrast to their upper-class lifestyle in Beverly Hills. While sleeping, Claire Arnold (Kathleen Robertson) asks herself, “God, I just want to know one thing. When Sartre wrote No Exit, is this what he had in mind?”
Daniel Keyes’s 1959 short story Flowers for Algernon won a Hugo Award and was expanded into a novel which was published in 1966 and was joint winner of that year’s Nebula Award for Best Novel (with Babel-17). It subsequently was turned into a stage show starring Cliff Robertson, a musical called Algernon and Charley starring Michael Crawford, and a movie entitle Charley, winning Robertson an Oscar for his portrayal of the title role.
Samuel R. Delany, who wrote the novel Babel-17, was married for 14 years to poet Marilyn Hacker. Both Delany and Hacker have identified themselves as homosexual either during or since the marriage.
In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode “Journey to Babel,” Cmdr. Spock’s father, Amb. Sarek of Vulcan, and his mother, Amanda, first appear. The episode title refers to a neutral planetoid Babel, at which a Federation diplomatic conference is to be held.
Amanda Blake played Miss Kitty in over 400 eposides of “Gunsmoke” starting in 1955. But the then-rare name Amanda did not skyrocket to populatiry until about 1970, becoming the econd most popoular girls given name in 1980. The earliest Amanda in Wiki bios is Amanda Cajamder, born in 1827. She is a Finnish women’s hero, pioneering in the concept of women having productive jobs, as a deaconess in health care. The first appearance of the name Amanda appears in Ngram viewer in 1670.
The song “Mandy”, a Barry Manilow hit, is sometimes said to be about a woman whose real name is Amanda (Mandy being a nickname), or about a dog. The song, by Scott English and Richard Kerr, was originally titled “Brandy”. The suggestion that Scott English wrote the song about a favorite dog is apparently an urban legend. English has said that a reporter called him early one morning asking who “Brandy” was, and an irritated English made up the dog story to get the reporter off his back.