In college, the Notre Dame sports information director convinced future Washington Redskins quarterback and NFL MVP Joe Theismann to change the pronunciation of his name from “THEEZ-min” to “THIGHS-min” so it would rhyme with Heisman. The new Mr. Thighsman would not win his Heisman. He finished second to Jim Plunkett. QB Archie Manning, father of NFL QBs Peyton and Eli, finished third in the voting.
Joe Theismann’s NFL career ended in a Monday Night Football game, on November 18, 1985, when he was tackled by Lawrence Taylor and Harry Carson of the New York Giants, and suffered a gruesome broken leg.
Over 30 years later, Theismann continues to be known for the injury; he owns a restaurant in Alexandria, Virginia (just outside of Washington, DC), where one of the beers on tap is custom-brewed for the restaurant, and is called Broken Leg Lager.
Playing video games to excess is now a medical condition recognized as an addiction disorder by the World Health Organization. The WHO has updated its official diagnostic manual, to include “gaming disorder.”
According to the WHO definition, gaming becomes a disorder when it interferes with daily life. That’s seen when a person loses control around gaming, prioritizes gaming over other interests and daily activities, and continues gaming despite negative effects on work, schooling, family life or social relationships.
The American Psychiatric Association estimates that between 0.3% and 1% of the world’s population suffers from gaming disorder, or upwards of 75 million people.
The phrase “trick cyclist”, meaning psychiatrist, dates back to the 1930s. It may have origins in Cockney rhyming slang.
Best dialogue from Jack Chick’s The Trick
Who do you think you are Becky, a psychiatrist?
No, I’m an ex-witch. Now I serve Jesus.
Rock band Cheap Trick was founded in Rockford, Illinois in 1973; members of the band had previously played together in two earlier bands: Fuse and Sick Man of Europe.
Bassist Tom Petersson has indicated that the band’s name was inspired by their attendance at a concert by the English rock group Slade; Petersson had, at the time, commented that Slade’s performance used “every cheap trick in the book.”
Cheap Trick performed but did not write a song, “Mighty Wings,” for the best-selling Top Gun soundtrack in 1986. It is played over the movie’s end credits: Cheap Trick - Mighty Wings - YouTube
SFTI (“siff-tee”), the US Navy’s Navy Strike Fighter Tactics Instructor program or Topgun, was established in 1969 at NAS Miramar. Since 1996 it has been based at NAS Fallon, at NAWDC (“naw-dick”), or the Naval Aviation Warfighting Development Center. Miramar is now an MCAS, a Marine Corps Air Station.
Miramar, a small town in Valencia on the shores of the Mediterranean, contains a few Roman ruins but was probably founded by the Moors during their conquest of Spain. When Moorish descendants were expelled in the early 1600s, the town was resettled with immigrants from Genoa and other towns of the Liguria region.
Reversi is a two-player board game, developed in the 1880s in England. It consists of an 8x8 checkered game board, and a number of disks, which are light-colored on one side, and dark-colored on the other. Players attempt to change their opponents’ disks to their color, by placing a disk of their own color at each end of a line of the opponent’s disks (allowing the player to flip their opponent’s disks to their color).
Since the 1970s, a slightly revised version of Reversi has been marketed in a number of countries under the name “Othello,” which is, of course, borrowed from the name of William Shakespeare’s play, “Othello (The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice).”
In the 1880s, the summer of 1883 to be more exact, the Indonesia volcano Krakatoa erupted cataclysmically. 36,000 people were killed. The majority were killed by the resulting tsunami.
The term “tsunami” is a borrowing from the Japanese tsunami 津波, meaning “harbor wave”. The plural can either follow ordinary English practice and add an s, or use an invariable plural as in the Japanese. Most English speakers alter the word’s initial “ts” to an “s” by dropping the “t”, since English does not have words beginning with “ts,” though the original Japanese pronunciation is “ts.”
Well that just tsucks. 
Good trivia, thanks Annie. I didn’t know what an invariable plural was. Well I knew what it was, I just didn’t know what it was called.
In play: Invariant nouns (also known as invariable nouns) are nouns which do not change when infected into plural form. Besides “tsunami”, another example is “sheep”.
“Infected”?
I dropped an L!
“Sheep dip” is a term for a liquid concoction, typically including an insecticide and a fungicide, used by shepherds and farmers to protect their sheep from infestation by parasites. It gets its name from the practice of immersing sheep in water containing the insecticide and fungicide.
“Sheep Dip” is also the name of a brand of blended Scotch whisky; the Scotch obviously borrows its name from the farming concoction, and was allegedly named such in order to allow farmers to order whisky while hiding the nature of their orders from their accountants.
:: hands Bullitt an L ::
In play:
A 1969 sketch on Monty Python’s Flying Circus had a farmer and his visitor musing over the peculiar phenomenon of sheep nesting in trees: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2v9uxz
Other animals in Python sketches…
Confuse a cat
Dead parrot
Fish license
Exploding TV top penguin
Spy dog
Python is a programming language that does not need a compiler. It was created in 1991 and remains a popular language today.
https://www.python.org/ is the official home of the language.
Python’s core philosophy is summarized in the document The Zen of Python (PEP 20), which includes aphorisms such as:
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Readability counts.
Parc Oriental de Maulévrier, in France’s Loire Valley, is the largest Japanese Zen garden in Europe. 300 plant species, 180 of which come from the Far East, grow on its 30 hectare/74 acre grounds.