It is not piranha, nor crocodilians, nor electric eels which are the most feared
creatures of the Amazon basin waters.
It is the loathsome candiru, smallest member of the catfish family, which normally
obtains sustenance by lodging inside the gills of a fish victim and sucking its blood.
So why should humans worry, since they don’t have gills? Because the candiru
sometimes mistakes any of several human orifices for a gill opening. It is difficult
to impossible to extract because it possesses unfolding spines which it uses to
penetrate the walls of the victim’s orifice, locking itself securely and agonizingly
in place.
Cecil himself has been moved to write extensively on this foul little beast:
The song that launched Claude King’s country career was 1962’s “Wolverton Mountain”, written by Merle Kilgore about his uncle Clifton Clowers and his daughters on their farm in Arkansas.
Comic book artist Basil Wolverton was famous for his bizarrely grotesque characters and for several years wrote and drew Powerhouse Pepper. Much like Popeye, Pepper had incredible strength, and he spoke in a series of rhymes and alliterations. Wolverton later drew grotesque characters as one-shots for Mad Magazine.
Basil, a member of the family Lamiaceae, was originally found in India, but is now a widely used staple in northeaster Asian, southeastern Asian and Italian cooking. Among other recipes, it is a primary ingredient in pesto.
The 1st Major League Baseball All-Star game took place in 1933 in Chicago
at the White Sox home field Comiskey Park. Fittiingly, Babe Ruth hit the 1st ASG home run, a 2-run shot in the 3rd inning which provided the margin
of victory for the American League in a 4-2 final.
All “East-West All Star Games” of the Negro Leagues were also held at Comiskey Park 1933-1939, and with few exceptions until 1962. In the 1933 debut game, the majority of West starters were from the Chicago American Giants, while most of the East’s were from either the Pittsburgh Crawfords or Homestead Grays. Bill Foster pitched a complete game for the West and Mule Suttles hit the game’s only home run.
Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated for his first term as President on March 4, 1933. Four years later, after the Constitution was amended to shorten the lame-duck period between terms, he was inaugurated on Jan. 20, 1937.
Haven’t you gone through the entire history of the Presidency by now?
A cricket batsman’s dismissal after a failure to score a single run in his innings is called a “duck”. The term is short for “duck’s egg”, the shape of a zero, and is a cognate of the tennis term “love”, from “l’oeuf”.
The Long Island Ducks were a minor league hockey team that played in the Eastern Hockey League in the 1960s. When the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim were given an NHL franchise, Disney mentioned them as an example of another team that used that team name.
The Long Island iced tea was first served in the mid-1970s by Robert “Rosebud” Butts, a bartender at the Oak Beach Inn in the Long Island town of Babylon.
Rumor has it that “Rosebud” was William Randolph Hearst’s nickname for his lover Marian Davies’s vagina. This was first reported by author Gore Vidal, but no one is sure where he got the information; it seems very unlikely Hearst would have told anyone about it other than Davies.
Patty Hearst’s 1982 autobiography, Every Secret Thing, about her kidnapping, impriosnments, trial and subsequent pardon was made into the biopic Patty Hearst by Paul Schrader in 1988, with Natasha Richardson portraying Hearst.
Warren Zevon’s song “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”, off his 1978 album “Excitable Boy”, ends with the lyrics “Patty Hearst / heard the burst / of Roland’s Thompson gun / and bought it.” The album also includes the timeless sing-alongs “Werewolves of London” and “Lawyers, Guns, and Money”.