Jewels commemorating the dead were widely worn during the 17th century. This mourning buckle contains panels of woven hair, decorated with an elaborate inscription in gold thread and a small enamelled skull, all set behind rock crystal. The inscription, partly in Latin, tells us that the piece commemorates Elizabeth Harman who died on 11 April 1698, aged 27.
"His name is Ralph Bruno, and 25 years ago he was an apprentice pattern maker from Milwaukee who was reupholstering his mother's living room furniture when he found himself holding a leftover cushion.
On a whim, he burned holes into the cushion until his mother shooed him outside because of the awful smell. In his backyard, he painted the cushion yellow and fitted it on his head...More at the Los Angeles Times.
That night, in a direct rebuttal to the Chicago fans who have long ridiculed Wisconsinites with the infamous one-word mockery of their state's most beloved product, he wore the invention to a baseball game between the Milwaukee Brewers and the Chicago White Sox.
Ralph Bruno thus became the Original Cheesehead.
"All my friends made fun of me; they thought I looked like an idiot," Bruno recalled this week. "But then a bunch of pretty girls came over and asked to wear it."
... the company [Foamation] has fewer than 10 employees who make the cheeseheads by hand in a nondescript warehouse near Milwaukee. Business gets so big before Bears games that they brought in several temporary workers this week...
In 1995, Frank Emmert of Superior, Wis., claimed that jamming a cheesehead over his face saved him from death during the crash landing of a light plane during his return from a Packers game."
(1805) R. Parkinson Tour Amer. I. i. 48 Snake-fences; which are rails laid with the ends of one upon the other, from eight to sixteen in number in one length.- and defines it as an American idiom. Worm fence has been noted as early as 1833; other terms include "zigzag fence" and "battlefield fence." The best description I've found is at a page by the Forest Preserve District of Cook County (Illinois):
Very few new rails are made any more because they can only be split successfully from large, straight, solid logs without knots, such as the oaks and walnuts that grew in virgin timber.There is also a final notation that "Many an undesirable citizen left town riding on a rail" - a reminder that the "rail" in question is not a railroad, as some modern listeners assume.
The log was cut four "ax handles" long -- about eleven feet. The bark was peeled off and wooden mauls and wooden wedges, made of ironwood or other very hard wood, were used to split it into halves, then quarters, then eighths, like pieces of pie. These in turn were split into roughly triangular or rectangular rails measuring about 4 by 4 or 3 by 5 inches. The rails were laid on the ground in a very exact zigzag pattern with the ends extending a little over a foot from where they crossed. After the fence was seven or eight rails high, each corner was strengthened and braced by two other rails, or stakes, one on each side, sunk a foot or more in the ground and slanted upward to cross and hold the fence in place. These stake rails, in turn, were locked in place by an additional horizontal rail or "rider". Between seven and eight thousand rails were needed to build a mile of "worm" fence -- enough to enclose a forty-acre field...
None remain except red oak, white oak and black walnut, weathered and gray but as sound as the day they were split. All those made from less durable woods are gone.
"Worm" fences seemed a prodigal waste of land in later years because they occupied from three to four times as much ground as the modern barbed wire and woven wire fences. They quickly grew up in wild roses, wild raspberries, wild blackberries, weeds and vines, furnishing food and cover for a host of wildlife. With the clearing of the timber and more and more intense cultivation of the land, these fences offered refuges where the quail, the cottontail rabbit and dozens of other birds and animals learned to live with civilization.
Bematists accompanied Alexander the Great on his campaign in Asia. Their measurements of the distances traveled by Alexander's army show a high degree of precision to the point that it had been suggested that they must have used an odometer, although there is no direct mentioning of such a device.The earliest-recorded mechanical odometers were in Rome and China:
The odometer of Vitruvius was based on chariot wheels... For each revolution a pin on the axle engaged a 400 tooth cogwheel... This engaged another gear with holes along the circumference, where pebbles (calculus) were located, that were to drop one by one into a box. The distance travelled would thus be given simply by counting the number of pebbles...
Chinese texts of the 3rd century tell of the mechanical carriage's functions, and as one li is traversed, a mechanical-driven wooden figure strikes a drum, and when ten li is traversed, another wooden figure would strike a gong or a bell with its mechanical-operated arm...
The Sun Tzu Suan Ching (Master Sun's Mathematical Manual), dated from the 3rd century to 5th century, presented a mathematical problem for students involving the odometer. It involved a given distance between two cities, the small distance needed for one rotation of the carriage's wheel, and the posed question of how many rotations the wheels would have in all if the carriage was to travel between point A and B...
In 1959, however, in the Library of Congress, Hapgood noticed a presumably authentic map that instantly wiped out his doubts: a map of what was almost certainly Antarctica, done in 1531 by the French cartographer Oronce Fine, also known as Oronteus Finaeus... Admittedly it is too close to the tip of South America, and it is incorrectly oriented, yet the proportions seem similar, the coastal mountains, found in the 1957 geophysical study are in roughly the right places and so are many bays and rivers. Furthermore, the shape of South America itself seems right, and the close resemblance between a modern, scientifically exact map of the Ross Sea and Finaeus' unnamed gulf is striking.I've embedded the map above, and it is quite striking for a document from the early 1500s. It took a bit of searching today, but I finally found a well-written (and extensively illustrated) site that addresses these questions from a "mainstream" point-of-view.
What is different, however, is that the Oronteus Finaeus map does not seem to show the great shelves of ice that, today, surround the continent, nor the great glaciers that fringe the coastal regions. Instead there seem to be estuaries and inlets, suggesting great rivers... It also suggested to Hapgood that since the Antarctic was certainly ice-bound in 1531 - when Oronteus Finaeus made his map - Finaeus must have had access to very ancient maps indeed: maps made when Antarctica was largely free of the mile-thick ice cap that buries it today, and presumably has covered it for millennia.
The ruff which was worn by men, women and children, evolved from the small fabric ruffle at the drawstring neck of the shirt or chemise. They served as changeable pieces of cloth that could themselves be laundered while keeping the wearer's doublet from becoming soiled at the neckline.I suppose in an era when washing-up was not very meticulous, the removable collar did protect other clothing from stains. For "goffering irons" I had to retreat to the OED: to flute or crimp, from the French gaufrer "to stamp figures on cloth." And "smalt" is also of French derivation (ultimately related to the smelting of ores), and refers to a deep blue glass colored by cobalt oxides.
The discovery of starch allowed ruffs to be made wider without losing their shape. Later ruffs were separate garments that could be washed, starched, and set into elaborate figure-of-eight folds by the use of heated cone-shaped goffering irons. Ruffs were often coloured during starching, vegetable dyes were used to give the ruff a yellow, pink or mauve tint. A pale blue colour could also be obtained via the use of smalt, though for an unknown reason Elizabeth I took against this colour and issued a Royal Prerogative "Her Majesty's pleasure is that no blue starch shall be used or worn by any of her Majesty's subjects."
At their most extreme, ruffs were a foot or more wide; these cartwheel ruffs... required a wire frame called a supportasse or underpropper to hold them at the fashionable angle...
In September 1988 a slip of paper (the usual 4 x 6) for this word came from one of the editors, stating that the earliest quotation in the OED files was from a 1978 issue of the Tucson (Arizona) Magazine... Could I antedate? Added was a postscript asking if I could find its etymology. WNCD had suggested it might be 'fr. Sp. "nacho" flat-nosed'. Could I confirm this?...Armed with that information, you should be able to corral a free Dos Equis next time you go out for a Mexican dinner with friends.
I called several Texan friends in Washington that evening and each of them wanted to tell me all about nachos but none knew how the name had been derived. After three phone calls (and three different recipes for perfect nachos) I gave up on nachos that evening.
As I walked down the long corridor leading back to the library's central core, I heard a voice softly calling my name. There was a young woman I recognized as a staff member of the Hispanic Division. She had overheard our discussion of nacho in the reading room but had been reluctant to interrupt us. She told me she had been born and raised in Mexico and there nacho has only one common usage: it is the word used as a diminutive for a little boy who had been baptized Ignacio. His family and friends call him Nacho. She thought I should know this. What a wonderful bit of information!.. Now I was convinced there was a real Nacho somewhere who had dreamed up a combination of tortilla pieces with melted cheese and jalapeño peppers...
Several 1965+ quotations surfaced, and eventually I found A Taste of Texas, edited by Jane Trahey in 1949 with a perfect nachos quote on page 27:Pedro left. Sometime later he returned carrying a large dish of Nachos Especiales. 'These Nachos,' said Pedro, 'will help El Capitan—he will soon forget his troubles for nachos make one romantic.'And to add to the satisfaction, we have recently, with the help of the Rector and one of the parishioners of the Church of the Redeemer, Eagle Pass, Texas, been able to verify a quotation from that elusive 1954 St Anne's Cookbook which confirms the existence of Ignacio 'Nacho' Anaya, gives the Victory Club as the place in which he invented his 'nacho specials', and provides his own original recipe...
It's very clear that most Arab regimes are on edge over the possibility of the spread of the protests in Tunisia and Algeria. Arab columnists and TV shows have been excitedly debating the real causes of the protests and what they might mean... It's not at all clear whether these protests actually will spread yet, as regimes on high alert will not be taken by surprise and local conditions vary dramatically.More at the link for those interested.
The protests have already sparked a region-wide debate about the prospects for political change and the costs of political repression and economic stagnation. The discussion of the "Tunisia scenario" is everywhere. In Jordan, the Muslim Brotherhood warned today that the impending price rises planned by the new government will lead to an unprecedented explosion along the North African model...
From Kuwait and Tunisia's moves to ban al-Jazeera to traditional repression of local journalists to the escalating crackdown against Facebook, Twitter, and other social media, Arab regimes are trying to keep control of the narrative. But it doesn't seem to be working...
It still is not at all obvious that these protests will sustain themselves, lead to revolutions, or even force major changes in the policies of their regimes. But they have already seared themselves into Arab political discourse. Defenders of the regimes generally try to define the events as food and price riots, or else as externally fomented terrorism. Few independent columnists or activists agree with the idea that these are simply food and price riots, or external terrorism. They point to the underlying political problems which have enabled the economic mismanagement and corruption and lack of opportunity. How the events are framed will have real significance for the response...
Vanessa Tahbone grimaces while competing against Nicole Colbert during the ear pull event at the 49th Annual World Eskimo-Indian Olympic Games July 23 at the Carlson Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. (AP Photo/Fairbanks Daily News-Miner/Eric Engman)From the "Big Shots" compilation of the 100 Best Sports Photographs of 2010 (Part 3) at Boston.com's The Big Picture.
The ear pull is a traditional Inuit game which tests the competitors' ability to endure pain. In the ear pull, two competitors sit facing each other, their legs straddled and interlocked. A two-foot-long loop of string, similar to a thick, waxed dental floss, is looped behind their ears, connecting right ear to right ear, or left to left. The competitors then pull upon the opposing ear using their own ear until the cord comes free or one player quits from the pain. The game has been omitted from some Arctic sports competitions due to safety concerns and the squeamishness of spectators; the event can cause bleeding and competitors sometimes require stitches.Here's a video of the women's competition in 2007:
When Yuri and Lara first cross paths it's in a trolley. They don't see each other but when they touch accidentally the electric line above the trolley gives off a spark which symbolizes the emotional spark between those two characters.
David Lean's favorite color was yellow and he used yellow flowers, especially sunflowers to represent beauty and hope in the film. In the scene where Yuri and Lara part for the first time, sunflower petals fall mimicking tears.
[Director David Lean] really wanted to focus on her eyes but felt that Christie's soft pillowy lips took away from them. So throughout the film you see that shadows cover the lips or that the light specifically highlights the eyes versus the lips.
David Lean felt that it wasn't necessary to show violence that reaction shots were more important and added more to the drama.
The woman with the dead baby that gets pulled up onto the moving train by Yuri, the actress actually fell under the train and her legs were seriously injured. They used the actual shot of her being pulled under the train.
Author Pasternak's love affair with his mistress Olga is the basis of the love story of Yuri and Lara.
For the scene with the town of Yuriatan burning in the background, Lean had a crew burn 2 tons of rubber tires!
Since a trove is defined as ‘a store of valuable or delightful things,’ isn’t treasure trove redundant? Has anyone ever spoken of a garbage trove?’’Interesting. You learn something every day.
Treasure trove ultimately goes back to a Latin expression, ‘‘thesaurus inventus,’’ ...thesaurus simply means ‘‘treasure’’ or ‘‘treasury’’ ... The inventus part means ‘‘found,’’ so the entire phrase referred to a rediscovered deposit of precious items without any clues to its owner...
In Anglo-Norman... ‘‘thesaurus inventus’’ turned into tresor trové... adapted by English tongues into something more manageable: ‘‘treasure trove.’’
...Meanwhile, the ‘‘found’’ meaning behind trove (related to the modern French word trouvé) was forgotten, allowing English speakers to reinterpret the structure of the phrase. Instead of trove being understood as an adjective modifying treasure, it came to be thought of as a noun, one that eventually could stand on its own without treasure...
So rather than being needlessly wordy, treasure trove is the etymologically complete phrase, misconstrued over time as a noun-noun compound rather than a noun followed by an adjective. Because of this, some historically minded quibblers even assert that there’s no such thing as a trove. But it’s not surprising that trove has been given a second life as a noun, since adjectives don’t typically follow nouns in modern English...
Over the last several years, we’ve been particularly taken with the question of how kids learn... color words... The test was not designed to trip kids up. Far from it—we only tested basic color words, and we never made kids pick between confusable shades, like red and pink. To an adult, the test would be laughably easy. Yet, after several months of testing two-year olds, I could count my high scorers on one hand. Most would fail the test outright...More re the methodology and the technique at Scientific American, via Not Exactly Rocket Science. Photo source.Divorced from context, most two and three-year olds might as well be colorblind; certainly they look that way when asked to correctly identify colors in a line-up, or accurately use color words in novel contexts. What’s more, psychologists have found that even after hours and hours of repeated training on color words, children’s performance typically fails to noticeably improve, and children as old as six continue to make major color naming errors...
As it happens, English color words may be especially difficult to learn, because in English we throw in a curve ball: we like to use color words “prenominally,” meaning before nouns. So, we’ll often say things like “the red balloon,” instead of using the postnominal construction, “the balloon is red.”...
That was the idea, anyway, and the prediction was simple: using color words after nouns should make colors far easier to learn, and should make kids far faster at learning them. To test this, we took a couple dozen two-year olds and gave them some quick training on color words...
We found that the kids who got the postnominal training improved significantly over their baseline test scores, whereas the ones who got the prenominal training still looked just as confused as ever...
Bagworm sacs are spindle-shaped bags constructed of silk and plastered with dead spruce needles (although they are known to eat just about any plant – over 100 food plants – they prefer evergreens). Each structure is secured to the branch with a silken tie and, depending on whether they were made by a male or female worm, are either empty or full of eggs...
Eventually they emerge as adults in the early fall. The males, wasp-like creatures with clear wings, push their way out of the bag and fly off to seek the company of the females. The females, however, are wingless and are forced to remain within the confines of their bag. When the males find the females they mate with them through the narrow opening at the small end...
The impregnated females lay their egg clusters within the bag before crawling out and dropping helplessly to the ground. She will lay upwards of 1,000 eggs. Both sexes die shortly after mating (although the males are able to visit with a few more bags before cashing it in!) All this means that by wintertime only the female bags will contain living material in the form of yellowish egg clusters. The male shelters will be completely empty or contain the empty pupal skins...
Admiral Bruny d’Entrecasteaux and his sailors were the first in the West to encounter an unusual object... in what we now know as New Caledonia from April 17–May 3, 1793. His stay was longer than Captain Cook’s in 1774, and he was able to observe objects other than the spears and clubs that his illustrious predecessor had seen. While there, he was presented with an object that he had difficulty describing. He thought that it slightly resembled the monstrance used in Catholic ritual in connection with the Host, and to this day the term remains part of the French name for the object, which is called hache ostensoir, or “monstrance axe.”Additional information at Tribal Art and at the Ngilong Art Gallery.
...the Outdoor Power Equipment Institute and manufacturers argue that once gas stations sell [E15], consumers will mis-fuel their power equipment, with terrible results...More at the Washington Post. I've been using E10 in my lawnmower, chain saw, and snow thrower. I'm going to look for non-ethanol gas (if I can find it) for future fillups.
For veteran power-equipment guys such as Mick Matuskey, the prospect of E15 entering the fuel stream is vexing. Matuskey... has been in the business for 44 years and remembers when snowblowers, chain saws and mowers lasted much longer. "You're getting half of the life out of the product today compared to 30, 40 years ago," he said.
Cheaper components and higher running temperatures are taking their toll. But critics say a 15 percent ethanol blend would shorten engine life more and make equipment prone to fuel leaks and fire hazards. Apart from causing engines to run hotter, ethanol fuel eats away at rubber components...
Tools such as trimmers, mowers and blowers generally use engine technologies long abandoned by carmakers: air cooling, carburetion and, often, two-cycle engines fueled by an oil-gas mix . Ethanol blends cause engines to run leaner and hotter - modern auto engines can adjust for that; lawn mowers and chain saws cannot...
The institute says its members can develop machines that will run on more ethanol, just as they are making them less polluting. But there are as many as 200 million existing pieces of equipment now in jeopardy, used by homeowners, landscapers, foresters, companies and institutions...
Power-equipment makers say consumers filling a portable gas can while also fueling their vehicles are not going to pay attention to a sign telling them to use E15 only in approved automobiles. They also speculate that gasoline retailers will make more money from E15 than E10, and if it becomes legal for 54 percent of automobiles, "at some point there is likely to be a wholesale transfer over to a majority fuel," Guerry said...
Equipment makers are also worried that the ethanol, which absorbs water, will make the fuel unstable and destructive to engines when seasonable equipment is stored for months on end. Another problem, Kiser said, is that the faster engine idling speeds will cause machines with centrifugal clutches, such as chain saws, to engage blades at rest...
Mr Sellick, a father-of-four, fears the mud-horse method will be lost forever when he finally gives up as there is currently no one interested in learning the trade...A large photoset showing Mr. Sellick at work is posted at grovelinda's Flickr photostream.
'It is difficult work, you lie on your belly on it and push with your feet across the beach, but you sort of pick up techniques from watching. I don't believe you could do it unless it was in your blood, I am the fifth generation of my family to use the mud-horse and I could never give it up.''
There is a herd of Grass Mud Horses*and these footnotes:
In the wild and beautiful Ma Le Desert**
They are lively and intelligent
they are fun-loving and nimble
They live freely in the Ma Le Desert
They are courageous, tenacious, and overcome the difficult environment
Oh lying down Grass Mud Horse
Oh running wild Grass Mud Horse
They defeated river crabs*** in order to protect their grass land
River crabs forever disappeared from Ma Le Desert
* Grass Mud Horse (草泥马) is phonetically equivalent to “F**k Your Mother!” in ChineseSo the song and the videos and the phrase "Grass-mud horse" are vehicles used to protest internet censorship in the P.R.C.
** Ma Le Desert (马勒戈壁) is phonetically equivalent to “Your Mother’s C**t”
*** “River Crab (河蟹) ” is phonetically equivalent to “harmony (和谐).” Chinese netizens say their deleted posts have been “harmonized,” or “eaten by the river crab.” So “river crab” became a code name for internet censors.
“Grass Mud Horse (草泥马)” is not an uncivilized word and is not officially banned, therefore it can be sung publicly. Although many people use “Grass Mud horse” as an alternative curse or just use it randomly, this word and its deviant expression already generated a pattern of discourse and sub-culture. “Grass Mud Horse (草泥马)” represents such information and opinions which cannot be accepted by the mainstream discourse, and “the Song of the Grass Mud Horse” has become a metaphor of the power struggle over Internet expression.This alpaca-like animal appears to be the representation of a grass mud horse:
Robert Burns sent a copy of the original song to the Scots Musical Museum with the remark, “The following song, an old song, of the olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript until I took it down from an old man". Some of the lyrics were indeed "collected" rather than composed by the poet; the ballad "Old Long Syne" printed in 1711 by James Watson shows considerable similarity in the first verse and the chorus to Burns' later poem, and is almost certainly derived from the same "old song". It is a fair supposition to attribute the rest of the poem to Burns himself...Lyrics and text from Wikipedia (where's there's also a useful "English translation".)
Most common use of the song involves only the first verse and the chorus. The last lines of both of these are often sung with the extra words "For the sake of" or "And days of", rather than Burns' simpler lines. This allows one note for each word, rather than the slight melisma required to fit Burns' original words to the melody...
[After the swordfight sliced away the bridge of his nose]... Brahe escaped serious infection and, after his recovery, had a resplendent prosthesis made of gold and silver alloy, which he wore for important occasions, employing a lighter, copper-based nosepiece for general use. Had he desired to hide his deformity more effectively, he could have had a more convincingly flesh-colored piece fashioned from wax. It was characteristic of his larger-than-life personality, however, that he did not."Image source.
