In 2014, following the beheadings of two American journalists, Vice-President Biden declared that American security forces would follow the ISIS terrorists “to the Gates of Hell.”
Dorothy L. Sayers is best remembered today for her detective stories featuring Lord Peter Wimsey. She was also a scholar who translated Dante’s Divina Commedia, using his original terza rima rhyme scheme. Unlike many translators who left untranslated the title of the first book, “Inferno”, she translated it, so her first volume was titled “Hell”.
In “The Far Side,” Hell is featured among other recurring themes, depicting Satan and his minions as grim-looking figures in robes with horns and pitchforks, running the place in business-like manner: in one instance, the bespectacled secretary behind the typewriter asks her boss seen as a silhouette behind the office door: There is an insurance salesman here. Should I admit him in or tell to go to Heaven?
One of Gary Larson’s more famous Far Side cartoons shows a chimpanzee couple grooming. The female finds a blonde human hair on the male and inquires, “Conducting a little more ‘research’ with that Jane Goodall tramp?” A representative from the Jane Goodall Institute thought that this was in bad taste and wrote a critical letter to Larson regarding it. Larson contacted the Goodall institute personally to apologize only to find that Jane Goodall herself, who was in Africa at the time of the cartoon’s publication and only learned of it years after its initial publication, approved it, stating that she found it amusing. Since then, all profits from sales of a shirt featuring this cartoon go to the Goodall Institute. Goodall wrote a preface to The Far Side Gallery 5, detailing her version of the “Jane Goodall Tramp” controversy.
On March 26, 1953, Jonas Salk announced the successful test of his polio vaccine on a small group of adults and children. In 1960, he founded the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, which is today a center for medical and scientific research (La Jolla is now officially a part of San Diego).
Quaqtaq, one of the most northerly towns in Quebec, has a name of the most unusual biological origin. The name Quaqtaq derives from a man who once came to the area to hunt beluga whales and found live parasites in his faeces. His hunting companions began to call the place Quaqtaq, the Inuit word for tapeworm. It is the onlly place in the world spelled with four Q’s.
The Brave Companions were a notorious sellsword (mercenary) company of criminals and outcasts from many nations in George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire saga, adapted by HBO as Game of Thrones.
On March 22, 1933, the construction of the first Nazi concentration camp at Dachau was completed. It was located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near Dachau, a suburb northwest of Munich. Opened by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labor, and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, ordinary German and Austrian criminals, and eventually foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded.
The city of Varosha, in Cyprus, was suddenly abandoned, with 36,000 inhabitants leaving, with dinner on the table. When the Greek and Turkish forces divided Cyprus along the Green Line in 1974, the people of Varosha feared a massacre, and left within hours. The city remains unoccupied, literally collapsing and being reclaimed by nature 42 years later.
Before the flag of Cyprus was introduced, the flags of Greece and Turkey were used. The current flag was created as the result of a design competition in 1960. Under the constitution, the flag should not include either blue or red colors (the colors of the flags of Greece and Turkey), nor portray a cross or a crescent. All participants deliberately avoided use of these four elements in an attempt to make the flag “neutral”. The winning design was based on a proposal by İsmet Güney, a Turkish Cypriot art teacher.
The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Society incorporates both the cross and the crescent in its symbolism. Although the cross has nothing to do with Christianity, the Ottomans in 1878 objected to it because of its association with the Crusades. The red cross was employed as a reversal of the flag of neutral Switzerland. The red crescent is the same reversals, of the flag of the Ottoman Empire. The importance of the crescent to Muslims is that each month of their holy calendar begins at the moment the first crescent moon is visible after the new moon.
According to legend, the kipfel, the Viennese word for the croissant, originated in 1683 as a celebration of Austrian victory over the Ottomans at the siege of Vienna. The story goes that a baker, up early to make bread, saved the city when he heard the Turks tunneling underneath the city and sounded an alarm. The kipfel’s curved shape is said to mimic the crescent moon of the Ottoman flag, paying poetic tribute to the spirit of a city that resisted a powerful invading force. However, the kipfel was already known in the 13th Century.
Total solar eclipses are seen on Earth because of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. Even on Earth, the diversity of eclipses familiar to people today is a temporary (on a geological time scale) phenomenon. Hundreds of millions of years in the past, the Moon was closer to the Earth and therefore apparently larger, so every solar eclipse was total and there were no annular eclipses. Over a billion years in the future, the Moon will be too far away to fully occlude the Sun, and no total eclipses will occur.
In the distant future written about by Isaac Asimov in his Foundation series, Earth is radioactive and uninhabitable, and not all historians agree that it was the original homeworld of humanity.
As regular NPR listeners know, “The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation supports creative people, effective institutions, and influential networks building a more just, verdant, and peaceful world.” The foundation is best known for its “Genius Grants”.
Noted American tycoon John D. Rockefeller is buried in Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery, beneath a white obelisk reminiscent of the Washington Monument.
Cleopatra’s Needle is the popular name for each of three Ancient Egyptian obelisks re-erected in London, Paris, and New York City during the nineteenth century. The obelisks in London and New York are a pair, and the one in Paris is also part of a pair originally from a different site in Luxor, where its twin remains. The London and New York “needles” were originally made during the reign of 18th Dynasty Pharaoh Hatshepsut. The Paris “needle” dates to the reign of 19th Dynasty Pharaoh Ramesses II and was the first to be moved and re-erected.
On August 12, 30 BCE, Cleopatra VII Philopator, generally known as Cleopatra, committed suicide—allegedly by means of an asp bite. She was the last ruler of the Egyptian Ptolemaic dynasty. After her reign, Egypt became a province of the then-recently established Roman Empire.
2015 Triple Crown winner American Pharoah’s name is inspired by that of his sire, Pioneerof the Nile, and his dam’s sire, Yankee Gentleman. The horse’s name also acknowledges his owner Ahmed Zayat’s Egyptian-American background. The misspelling of “Pharaoh” is permanent, but inadvertent. Zayat originally claimed that the spelling was the result of an error by The Jockey Club, but the organization’s president stated, “The name request for the 2012 colt American Pharoah was submitted electronically on January 25, 2014, through The Jockey Club’s interactive registration site. Since the name met all of the criteria for naming and was available, it was granted exactly as it was spelled on the digital name application.”
In the sitcom Frasier, it had originally been intended that Frasier be an only child, but the producers saw David Hyde Pierce’s headshot and commented on how much he looked like a young Kelsey Grammer. Unlike Frasier, part of whose background comes from Cheers, Niles’ background is established over the course of Frasier.
Pierce described Niles as “what Frasier would be if he had never gone to Boston and never been exposed to the people at Cheers.”