The tarsus is the part of the human foot just below the ankle and behind the toes and metatarsus. The tarsus is a group of seven separate articulating bones.
Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister of the UK three times- in the process, she defeated Labourites James Callaghan, Michael Foot and Neil Kinnock.
In 1984 Neil Kinnock appeared in the video for the Tracey Ullman song “My Guy” (his daughter was a fan) as a someone with a clipboard canvassing on a council estate. The record reached no.23 in the charts.
Ray Guy is the only punter to be drafted in the first round of the NFL draft.
Ozzy Osbourne’s second solo album, Diary of a Madman, shares its title with a popular short story by Guy de Maupassant.
The Wachowski Brothers’ adaptation of the British graphic novel V for Vendetta begins with a flashback to Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
In The Oxford Murders, John Hurt dresses up as Guy Fawkes, as he did in V for Vendetta.
John Hurt’s character, the tyrannical British fascist leader Adam Sutler, is hooded and bound near the end of V for Vendetta, but never is actually dressed like Guy Fawkes, IIRC.
A “sutler” is a civilian merchant who travels with the army and sells provisions to them.
The mythical character Uncle Sam originated from Samuel Wilson, a meatpacker in Troy, NY who supplied the US Army during the War of 1812, chiefly to a camp of 6,000 soldiers in Greenbush, NY. Many soldiers there were from the Troy area, recognized Wilson’s name, and joked that the “US” label on the crates stood for “Uncle Sam”.
In addition to being Presidents of the USA, Woodrow Wilson and Dwight Eisenhower were both presidents of Ivy League universities (Wilson at Princeton, Ike at Columbia).
What they didn’t teach me in high school: Several historians have described Wilson’s policies as racist; some also describe Wilson personally as a racist. In his book, History of the American People, Wilson depicted white European immigrants with empathy while African American immigrants and their children were regarded as unsuitable for citizenship and unable to assimilate positively into American society. Wilson believed that slavery was wrong on economic labor grounds, rather than for moral reasons.
Eleanor Wilson, Woodrow’s youngest daughter, married her father’s Secretary of the Treasury, William Gibbs McAdoo. The wedding was held at the White House in 1914.
Bob McAdoo, a basketball center from the University of North Carolina, won three consecutive NBA scoring titles with the Buffalo Braves, who are now the LA Clippers. He was later the sixth man for Magic Johnson’s “Showtime” LA Lakers, winning two titles with them.
The song “Puff the Magic Dragon” was written by Peter Yarrow, and based on a children’s story by Lenny Lipton, a classmate of Yarrow’s at Cornell University in the 1950s.
Despite Lipton and Yarrow’s vehement denials, many listeners remain convinced that the song was about marijuana.
Puff the Magic Dragon lived in a land called Hanah Lee. On Maui, the road to Hana takes you to Oheo Gulch at Kipahulu, where some nice pools make for some nice swimming near the road. There, you can hike up to Waimoku Falls – well worth it. The hike takes you through some bamboo forests. If the wind is blowing, the bamboo clank against each other with a nice sound. Just a couple of miles west along the Road is the Palapala Ho’Omau Congregational Church in Kipahulu. There, you can visit Charles Lindbergh’s grave.
Aloha!
Words that can be used to say both “hello” and “goodbye” include the Hawaiian “aloha,” French “salut,” Italian “ciao,” and Hebreq “sholem.”
Bel Kaufman, the high school teacher and writer best known for her semiautobiographical novel Up the Down Staircase, is a granddaughter of Yiddish writer Sholem Aleichem, author of the stories that became Fiddler on the Roof.
Six of Ireland’s thirty-two counties still belong to the United Kingdom: Antrim, Armagh, Down, Fermanagh, Londonderry and Tyrone.
“Around the World”, the theme song from the David Niven film Around the World in Eighty Days, includes the lyric “It might have been in County Down / Or in New York, or gay Paree, or even London town”.