There are 128 species of maple trees, most of which are native to Asia. Other species are found in Europe, Northern Africa, and North America. Only one species, however, is native to the Southern Hemisphere; it is mainly found in Southeast Asia.
Some varieties of maple tree are becoming a problem in the Northeast and Midwest, where they are displacing native shrubs and understory trees. The Amur maple is not recommended for planting and is being considered for inclusion on the list of invasive species in the Midwest. The Norway maple has been planted extensively as an ornamental tree and is now found invading natural areas where it often outcompetes native sugar and red maples and other deciduous trees, and is on the list of invasives in New York and Connecticut.
Southeast Asia has many plants with great medicinal or nutritional value, for example the Gac Vine (Momordica cochinchinensis) which has far more carotenes than carrots have. Although it grows like a vine, Gac has a thick woody root like a tree.
The word “Carrot” is believe to originate with the Indo-European word “ker,” meaning “horn.”
Among the English words ultimately derived from PIE /ker/ ‘horn’ are Corn (via Old French), Cranium (via Greek), Horn (via Germanic), Cerebrum (via French). Note the consonant K shifting to H (Germanic) or S (French) due to regular sound changes.
The French frigate *Acheron *in the Russell Crowe movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, a film based on the Napoleonic naval adventure books by Patrick O’Brien, was a digital copy of the USS Constitution. The latter is a 1797 sail frigate still commissioned in the United States Navy and near-permanently docked in Charlestown, Mass.
The U.S. has had only a single Constitution since 1789, although there have been Amendments. Thailand, OTOH, has had at least 18 different Constitutions since 1932. (Does this mean Thailand’s government is more constitutional than that of the U.S.?)
You know this is bullshit, right?
The English word shit derives from Old English scitan, from Proto-Germanic *skit- and is traced back to the PIE root *skei- ‘to cut, split.’ Many other English words derive from the same PIE root including conscience, conscious, escutcheon, rescind, science, schism, schizophrenia, sheath, sheave, shingle, shyster.
It was a joke based on statues of military leaders and how they died. Sorry for the confusion.
George Carlin’s “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television”, originally released on his album Class Clown and expanded upon in Occupation: Foole, were: shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits. A 1973 broadcast of the routine on WBAI in New York led to the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978), which defined the power of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) over indecent material as applied to broadcasting
Sean Connery in the 1981 British sf thriller Outland, loosely based on High Noon, plays a Federal Security Agency marshal assigned to the rough-and-tumble mining colony on Jupiter’s moon Io.
Sean Connery first met Michael Caine in 1954 at a party during the production of South Pacific, and the two later became close friends. Films where they starred together include The Man Who Would Be King (1975), and A Bridge Too Far (1977).
The screenplay for the 1957 film The Bridge on the River Kwai was written by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson (Foreman had written an initial draft of the script, with which director David Lean was dissatisfied, so Wilson was brought in to finish it).
However, both Foreman and Wilson were on the Hollywood blacklist, and unable to work in Hollywood (both men had moved to England in order to work). Because of their presence on the blacklist, the credit for the script was originally given to Pierre Boulle, who had written the novel from which the script was adapted (despite the fact that Boulle, a Frenchman, did not speak English).
Boulle wound up winning the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for the film; years later, after the blacklist was lifted, the truth behind the authorship of the script was revealed, and, in 1984, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences retroactively (and, in both cases, posthumously) awarded the Oscar to Foreman and Wilson.
Pierre Boulle’s two most famous novels were both adapted into famous Hollywood productions, with the usual plot modifications: The semi-autobiographical The Bridge over the River Kwai (1952) and the non-biographical Planet of the Apes (1963).
There is a “Bridge over the River Kwai” tourist attraction in the middle of Kanchanaburi City, but it is not the bridge depicted in the same-named film. In fact, the river it crosses was called part of the Mae Klong River but was renamed to Khwae Yai River in the 1960’s to accord with the movie about a bridge on the “Death Railway.”
Over 100,000 forced laborers died during the construction of the Siam–Burma Railway.
The Thousand Islands Bridge is a series of bridges spanning the USA-Canadian border over the St. Lawrence River in the Thousand Islands region of western New York state and Ontario Province. While it is a complex bridge infrastructure system, the actual international border crossing is a set of two parallel 90-foot-long bridges between Wellesley Island in the United States and Hill Island in Canada.
(gImage — https://tinyurl.com/y3n4nb2f)
(gMaps — Google Maps — and Google Maps)
Boasting a length of 5, 525 miles, the Canada-United States border is the longest international border in the world. There are more than 100 land border crossings between Canada and the USA. The US state with the most border crossings is Maine, with 24. By contrast, New Hampshire has just one such crossing.
In July of 2017,Hollis, Maine police arrested a drunk, one-armed clown who was brandishing a machete.Cite (And I still cannot tell anybody this story without laughing)
In March of 2018 Brendon Whitney passed away. Whitney, whose stage alias was Alias, was a rapper and music producer from Hollis, Maine.
John Hollis Bankhead, Senator from Alabama, was the father of Senator John Hollis Bankhead II, Speaker of the House William Brockman Bankhead; and grandfather of the actress Tallulah Bankhead.