Finally watching Ken Burns’ “The Vietnam War” and just learned that Hồ Chí Minh once worked as a pastry chef at the Parker House Hotel in Boston. I was not aware of that.
Have any little known facts to share?
Open thread.
Reader Interactions
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TenguPhule
Iran Sanctions are fully back on by Trump. America’s word is now completely worthless internationally.
We are so fucked.
Elizabelle
Pastry chef in Boston? Wow. I like that he is more seen as a Vietnamese patriot, and not the bad guy in the Viet Nam war.
TenguPhule
@Elizabelle:
He was literally begging for help at the end of WW II for his country.
Had we helped at the time, we could have avoided a lot of unpleasantness.
James E Powell
Dr Ruth was trained to be a sniper in the Haganah.
germy
link via NYMag
Elizabelle
@TenguPhule: Didn’t see the segment about “pastry chef”, but the Burns documentary did report that Ho wrote a personal letter to President Harry Truman. Which was apparently never got to Truman.
HS Truman lived until 1972. I would bet he rued not getting that letter, although who knows who in Washington realized its import? Be interesting to learn what HST thought about the VIet Nam War, in the mid and late 1960s.
HumboldtBlue
If I’m not mistaken he (Minh) came to the United States on more than one occasion asking for help in liberating Vietnam, he saw distinct parallels in his fight against the French and Chinese and the fight for America’s freedom from England.
In other shitty motherfucking news. A dearly loved local woman, RN, got married last year.
In December she gave birth to a baby.
Last Monday she filed divorce papers.
Last Wednesday those papers were served to her husband.
On Friday the punk-ass-bitch cowardly motherfucking shitbag shot her dead after she went back to the house one last time for some baby items.
The fuck then killed himself, sniveling murderous fucking bitch.
bmoak
I learned about that from Tony Bourdain. He also worked as a saucier under Escoffier himself in Paris.
TenguPhule
Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease.
Adam L Silverman
@HumboldtBlue: I saw a news report about that.
JustRuss
I just finished Burns’ Vietnam last week. Well worth seeing, if pretty depressing. I wish he’d wrapped it up by pointing out all the lessons we didn’t learn as we jumped into Afghanistan and Iraq, but that’s not really his thing.
Martin
Lincoln was a Republican. Most people don’t know that.
Oh, and health care is complicated. Also not widely known.
oatler.
Papillon Soo Soo has a British accent.
Oh come on, like you don’t know who I’m talking about
Adam L Silverman
Sayyid Qutb, one of the intellectual fathers of the Muslim Brotherhood, was radicalized in Greeley, Colorado.
https://www.5280.com/2010/08/al-qaedas-greeley-roots/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/a-lesson-in-hate-109822568/
SiubhanDuinne
Was going to mention this anyhow to Schrödinger’s Kitty, so glad for the opportunity:
I had occasion earlier today to look up the slang term “Blighty” (an affectionate expat term for England) and was surprised to learn that it comes from the Hindi word “bilayati/vilayati,” meaning “foreigner” or “English.”
I never knew that before.
TenguPhule
@HumboldtBlue:
I hate this trope.
Its not worth your life to go back for something that inconsequential. Would you run into a burning house about to collapse in on itself?
Arggghhhhhh.
Martin
Trabuco Canyon on fire again. Burning away from Orange County. Good luck Riverside.
Roger Moore
@germy:
I don’t know if it counts as “little known” anymore, but Hedy Lamarr helped to develop frequency hopping spread spectrum communications as a way to avoid radio jamming during WWII. She had a remarkable combination of beauty and brains.
MomSense
@HumboldtBlue:
Oh my god. That’s so awful. Honestly, domestic violence scares me the most. Had a situation this week with a client and the police were not very helpful. We had to get the County Victim’s Advocate involved. He works out of the DA’s office.
Gin & Tonic
Visiting Hồ Chí Minh’s former residence and his current mausoleum, you come away completely convinced that he would have thoroughly hated the adulation and the personality cult that the VN government has built.
Martin
@Roger Moore: It’s ‘Hedly’
germy
Mark Zuckerberg Just Spent More Than $30 Million Buying 4 Neighboring Houses For Privacy
TenguPhule
@Martin:
Rename it Inferno Canyon already.
MomSense
My dad was the local Conscientious Objector Advisor. SDS met in our basement. They were consensus based so it was an all day affair. My grandmother made snacks. My dad tried to watch but couldn’t. Lots of tears.
lamh36
I can’t remember if so showed you guys my new luggage for bought in Miami? Found it at Nordstrom Rack!
My sis said it looks perfect for London!! I agreed so I could pass it up!
Some brand i never heard of called Vince Camuto?
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/5e37125071b477b041a6443e3dd2cb2f74b8b6de02ea2f56b973bc82c5dda29c.jpg https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/ffccbaa6f8993690da8a579cdc5a40c95db19a349a6ef6ea173a8630bb55d985.jpg
Major Major Major Major
@Gin & Tonic: I also had this impression. But I had it before I visited those too, haha.
Brachiator
I did not know that cartoonist Walt Kelly had been a crime reporter, and later worked for Walt Disney before he went on to create the Pogo comic strip.
And actress Myrna Loy was a big old lefty. Also, this,
There’s a bronze duplicate today.
Viva BrisVegas
@Roger Moore:
Plus she was great in Blazing Saddles.
lamh36
Repost about LeBron James new doc-u-series about athletes and new found political and social activism in new NBA athletes called “Shut Up & Dribble”
Different tweet, but posting for it’s perfect use of an appropriate LeBron GIF!!
https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/1026593305398661120?s=21
Between his Chump comments to this…LeBron is trolling all these Republican con artists and they ain’t ready for him
Kathleen
@germy: Did you see the documentary “Bombshell” which was the story of Hedy’s life?
Roger Moore
@Adam L Silverman:
That one I knew about, having grown up in Loveland. The idea that anyone would see Greeley as a hotbed of libertinism seems bizarre.
germy
@Brachiator:
I remember seeing Walt Kelly’s name in the opening credits for the Disney film “Reluctant Dragon” (and each name had a little self portrait next to it).
PJ
@bmoak: [That Guy] Actually, at the Ritz Carlton in London. Apparently, it was when he went to Paris after the war that he started to get into Communism.
@Gin & Tonic: Yeah, he had a two room house built to live in (one bedroom, one office) because he couldn’t stand to live in the Governor’s Palace in Hanoi.
germy
@Kathleen: Yes. I thought it was interesting there was some disputing of her inventions. One scientist claimed she copied the work. I honestly don’t know how much is true and how much is legend.
Brachiator
@lamh36: Nice looking luggage.
Robert Harvey
Hyenas are felines, not canines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyena
Although phylogenetically they are closer to felines and viverrids, and belong to the feliform category, hyenas are behaviourally and morphologically similar to canines in several elements of convergent evolution; both hyenas and canines are non-arboreal, cursorial hunters that catch prey with their teeth rather than claws.
Kathleen
@Roger Moore: I believe her invention was a precursor of packet switching technology.
PJ
@Martin: Also, Frederick Douglass is an example of someone who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.
thalarctosMaritimus
I was late to the party on Tom’s thread, so I’ll repost about how one of the veterans of WWII was a brown bear, Wojtek.
Kathleen
@Martin: Mel Brooks was featured in “Bombshell” and revealed he worshiped Hedy and, yes, he named Korrman’s character in honor of her.
germy
Trump’s nickname for Danny O’Connor is “Danny Boy”
(“A vote for Danny boy and the Democrats is a vote to let criminals and drugs pour into our country,” he said.)
Mike J
@TenguPhule:
Easy to say now. France wanted their colonies back after the embarrassment of being conquered in the war. They told us that if we wouldn’t help them enforce their claim, the Russians would. We have no way of knowing what the outcome of that would have been.
Kathleen
@germy: I got the feeling at the end of the movie that there was genuine support for acknowledging her as the inventor. At least in some circles.
Jim Parish
@Adam L Silverman: I recall reading an essay by Qutb, in which he noted, angrily, seeing an ad for the movie “Merrily We Go To Hell”. Apparently he believed it was a celebration of decadence, instead of (as it actually was) a cautionary tale.
hueyplong
Little known (and obscure) facts:
Vince Lombardi and G. Gordon Liddy went to the same college.
Not sure, but I may be the only person alive who has met both Lillian Gish (female lead in Birth of a Nation) and John Lewis.
Finally, the hitherto unknown Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and who, thanks to Donald Trump, is getting recognized more and more
lamh36
@Brachiator:
Thx
It was a deal! It was $400 when it was “in season”.m out of season (not sure how many) Nordstrom Rack (their outlet shop) was selling it for $80!! I thought it was a slip up, but sure enough $80.
Couldn’t miss that deal! (I mean I literally for two new sets of luggage before Australia)
ThresherK
Until they won recently, the Chicago Cubs weren’t even the last Major League Baseball team to win a championship while playing at that park full-time.
The Federal League Chicago Whales were the first team in what is now Wrigley Field, and they captured the Fed pennant in the early 19-teens.
different-church-lady
I don’t tell a lot of people this, but I was the eight Beatle.
JerryN
And a few decades later, Malcolm X was a busboy there.
Quaker in a Basement
If you repeat the word “orange” long enough, it starts to sound like the word “gullible.”
germy
If the Beatles were born today, they’d be called Conor, Joshua, Andrew and Ringo.
(McSweeneys)
HumboldtBlue
@hueyplong:
Fordham.
Where, Lombardi (40) was a member of the football team’s offensive line, a group that carries one of the most colorful nicknames in all of American sport — The seven blocks of granite
germy
(Robert Benchley)
Roger Moore
@ThresherK:
I would dispute this. If you’re going to count the Whales’ FL pennant as a championship, I’d think you’d have to count the Cubs’ National League pennants in 1918, 1929, 1932, 1935, 1938, and 1945, too.
hueyplong
@HumboldtBlue: Well done.
Ken B
I thought that he was at the Versailles peace conference in 1919, pushing for self-determination for what was then called French Indochina.
I think he also tried to lobby Wilson both at Versailles and after, apparently under the mistaken impression that Wilson’s 14 Points was intended to apply to non-whites.
hueyplong
@Roger Moore: But the Whales, unlike all those Cubs teams, didn’t lose out to anybody for the big prize.
Viva BrisVegas
@Brachiator:
That got me looking up Loy on Wikipedia.
Shortly after the statue was completed it was transported on the battleship Nevada for a Memorial Day pageant. Presumably to remind the sailors what they were fighting for.
The statue can also be seen in the background of some shots in the movie Grease.
schrodingers_cat
@SiubhanDuinne: I knew that. There are many links between English and Indian languages. Some new some ancient.
HumboldtBlue
@hueyplong:
Pretty sure the admissions office at Fordham had a hearty chuckle when they took a look at my application.
JAFD
He became almost as notorious as another baker at the Parker House; the one who asked his lady friend if she would be his roll model…
Ken B
@Ken B:
He being Ho Chi Minh.
Wayne Marks
@Roger Moore: I took a few classes at Northern Colorado for a semester in 1986. Had some good profs, but what I remember most was the smell from the feed lot on the outside of town. Maybe that’s why I have a fairly healthy BS meter.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
In 1911, Dr Sun Yatsen, first nondynastic leader of China, was actually in Denver, Colorado, USA, when the Qing monarchy collapsed. He was raising money for the revolution from the Chese expat community at the time. Of course he immediately headed to California to catch the first boat back…..
schrodingers_cat
The primary architect of the Indian Constitution, the Dalit* leader, Dr. Bhimrao Ambedkar got his PhD in Econ from Columbia. He was greatly influenced by the Harlem Renaissance.
*Dalit== downtrodden. He came from an untouchable caste from Maharashtra.
Mnemosyne
I had always thought that the word “skosh” (meaning “a little”) came from Polish, but it’s actually Japanese and entered the English language during the Korean War:
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/skosh
lollipopguild
The song “Walk this Way” was written after the band saw “Young Frankensteen”.
lamh36
Black Panther…still hitting milestones!
Official: #BlackPanther Becomes Just The 3rd Movie To Make $700M In The United States. buff.ly/2ndok3q
HumboldtBlue
@Mnemosyne:
I always thought it had Scandinavian roots.
Viva BrisVegas
@Mike J:
There were probably a lot of reasons for US connivance in the French recolonisation of Indochina. The one that I heard was that it was the price the French required for allowing Germany to start exporting coal after WWII. Coal being about the only viable export industry before the Marshall Plan kicked in.
Mnemosyne
@lollipopguild:
That’s FRONKENSTEEN!
?
SiubhanDuinne
@germy:
WereBear
The Catholic Church was involved in getting us into Vietnam.
The Shocking Story of the Catholic “Church’s” Role in Starting the Vietnam War
The Temptation Of Tom Dooley
Mnemosyne
@HumboldtBlue:
Also not a bad guess but, nope, it’s from the Japanese “sukoshi,” which American ears heard as “skosh.”
Roger Moore
@hueyplong:
Yeah, because they were a hopped up minor league that didn’t belong within miles of a real championship.
mdblanche
@JerryN: It really makes you wonder what working conditions must have been like there.
Brachiator
@germy:
Here’s a real trick of the eye from a British quiz show. When does the sun set below the horizon?
https://youtu.be/vvmq66op0G8
Very funny stuff.
hueyplong
Noted racist Woodrow Wilson attended the same college as Steph Curry, from which neither has (yet) graduated. And both played a varsity sport.
MoxieM
@HumboldtBlue: So sad. But the most dangerous time to be in a relationship with an abuser is when you are trying to leave him. Sadly known fact. I wish it were different–but–the abuse (and the maiming and killing) are so much about control.
A Ghost To Most
Today was not a good day to visit the acclaimed Cheyenne Mtn Zoo in Dobson Springs. Baseball sized hail sent 8 to hospitals, and wasted over a hundred cars. They are still taking inventory of the animals.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne: Most Koreans from that era would have learned Japanese during the colonial period.
Elizabelle
I’ll see your Ho Chi Minh and raise you one Salvador Dali. Got curious what became of that paternity claim; 61-year old woman who claimed her mother — Dali’s maid — had a liaison with him.
Paternity test came back negative. CNN story; you can see that she does resemble him, but maybe that’s just the regional coloring and features.
Dali on parenthood:
Trump might agree, but for the alluring Ivanka.
Fun British GQ roundup on Dali. 11 seriously strange things you didn’t know about Salvador Dali
“I don’t do drugs, I am drugs.”
I knew that the Dalis had an arrangement whereby he could only visit his wife, Gala, by written invitation. He had bought her the castle for a home, but was not always a welcome presence.
Melania is taking notes. Did not know this:
hueyplong
@Roger Moore: They had Three Finger Brown and Joe Tinker, giving rise to a question about which Chicago team was going minor at the moment.
Mnemosyne
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
The speculation is actually that American servicemen heard it on R&R trips to Tokyo and/or while part of the occupying force in post-war Japan and adopted it that way.
Elizabelle
@SiubhanDuinne: Jackson?? WTF. Why not Nigel?
What’s with Jackson with the Brits? Is he some character on a popular show?
raven
You don’t have the time.
Roger Moore
@MoxieM:
Yes. And pregnancy is one of the biggest risk factors for murder.
Origuy
@Mnemosyne: I knew this; my dad used “skosh” all the time and we had a cockapoo called “Skoshee”. He was in the Corps of Engineers in Okinawa and Korea during the Korean War.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Martin: Also nobody knows this but Iraq has a lot of oil.
Brachiator
CS Lewis and Aldous Huxley died on the same day, and almost nobody knew about it. Their passing was overshadowed by the assassination of JFK on November 22, 1963.
balconesfault
Just staywd at the Parker House last night. They’ve got a history archive in the basement which documents things like that.
For example, Malcolm X worked as a busboy there.
HumboldtBlue
@Brachiator:
Wow! TIL indeed.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Mnemosyne: Could be, but Japanese was the official language in Korea from 1910 to 1945, city names were changed to Japanese names and people’s names were changed to Japanese names.
MoxieM
@Roger Moore: Greeley the man, for whom a lot of western towns are named, was indeed important. The phrase, “Go West, young man!” gets attributed to him (altho’ hard to imagine nobody else ever said it … ) More importantly, he was founding editor of the New York Tribune–significant newspaper that included Karl Marx (yeah, that one) as a contributor, and Margaret Fuller, who was the first American woman foreign correspondent, travelling to Italy to cover the Risorgimento. (… more stuff …) The Fuller family, like the Greeleys, were prolific: Margaret’s grand-nephew was Buckminster Fuller, inventor, gadfly, and all around interesting weirdo.
Elizabelle
@Brachiator: And I think November 22 might be the same day Walt Disney first flew over Florida site on an aerial selection visit.
Jim Parish
George Washington was born on February 11. When England (and the colonies) finally adopted the Gregorian calendar, he chose to shift his birthday to accord with the new calendar – February 22.
debbie
@germy:
Troy Balderson’s nickname for him is Dishonest Danny. He’s out-Trumped Trump!
TenguPhule
So Saudi Arabia is feeling their oats and picking a fight with Canada.
This is going to end badly. For Saudi Arabia.
Shell
Linguists arent really sure the origins of the word “f*ck.” Many countries claim credit, but they cant say for sure.
HumboldtBlue
@Mnemosyne: I saw that after I doubted you (woe to the fool, eh?) and went all-googly-search.
@MoxieM: Yes, sadly death wins again.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@TenguPhule: What, where the Canadians not polite enough?
TenguPhule
And a Cat 5 Hurricane may or may not hit Hawaii in the near future.
Here’s to hoping Hector stays south of us. We have all the natural disasters we can handle at the moment.
Mnemosyne
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
I have no idea how quickly the Koreans were able to re-adopt their own language, but the first documented use in English was in 1952, so it was definitely after WWII and during the occupation of Japan.
Elizabelle
@MoxieM: Margaret Fuller drowned 100 yards off Fire Island, NY in 1850. She, her husband, and their toddler son. Shipwreck on way home from Europe; hit a sandbar at 3:30 in the morning in July. So close, and yet so far.
TenguPhule
@?BillinGlendaleCA:
Amazingly enough, this actually seems to be the case.
MisterForkbeard
@TenguPhule: It sounds like the Canadians were basically… fine? Not terribly impolite, but trying to urge action publicly.
And then the Saudis turned the outrage dial to 11.
raven
@Elizabelle: It’s also the that that my buddy was killed in Operation Meade River in 1968.
Chip Daniels
In Neil Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, he writes that Ho Chi Minh wrote FDR in the late 40s asking for America’s assistance in removing the French colonial occupiers. But at the time, relations with the French were more important than a small band of anti-colonists in a faraway place, so his plea was ignored.
What might have been!
raven
Ho also died the day I came home, 2 September 1969.
raven
@Chip Daniels: There is also great speculation that Korea was left off the map at Yalta when the world got chopped up so the NK’s figured no one would care if they took over.
“In February 1945, at the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt raised the issue of Korea again, proposing a trusteeship involving the United States, China and the Soviet Union, which could last twenty to thirty years. Soviet Premier Josef Stalin replied that the “shorter the period the better.” With this general and vague agreement between Roosevelt and Stalin, discussion of the postwar future of Korea ended.”
Elizabelle
@Chip Daniels: FDR and the State Department did not pay enough attention to cables from their ambassador to Germany, William Dodd, greatly concerned about the rise of the Nazis. They still hoped to get some German debt repaid. No antagonizing the powers that be’d. Erik Larson’s In the Garden of Beasts.
So, who cares about some pastry chef from Indochina …
Baud
@Chip Daniels: Hindsight is 20/20.
Wumpus
@Robert Harvey: Hyenas aren’t felines: felines are members of the family Felidae. Hyenas are members of the family Hyaenidae.
What the Wikipedia article is saying is that both the family Felidae and the family Hyaenidae are members of the suborder Feliforma, which contains all animals with catlike body plans. (Other families in Feliformia contain critters such as meerkats, mongooses, and civets; these aren’t termed felines either.)
Hyenas are more closely related to felines than to canines, but they’re their own (unique and quite fascinating) thing.
TenguPhule
@MisterForkbeard:
Their new leader looks to Donald Trump for inspiration.
Lapassionara
@HumboldtBlue: Tragic.
Ruviana
@germy: And he says privacy isn’t important anymore!
TenguPhule
@Wumpus: Fuck Capitalist Hyenas, this is a Democratic Jackal’s republic.
Uncle Ebeneezer
I loved the Burns series on Vietnam. Trying to figure out a way to watch again it while fast-forwarding through the really graphic parts. I think my wife would really appreciate the history, stories, etc., but she has very low tolerance for real violence in documentaries.
TenguPhule
@Ruviana:
Everything is Snowball’s fault. So sayest Zuckerberg.
Elizabelle
@raven: How sad. Too young. They all were.
cgordon
Jack Kerouac helped build the Pentagon.
Baud
@TenguPhule: I need to start following nation-states on Twitter.
raven
The solider on the original cover of “We Were Soldiers Once and Young” is Rick Rescorla. Rick was the security chief of Morgan Stanley and is credited with saving 2,700 people on 9/11. He also predicted that they would fly planes into the building.
TenguPhule
Berkeley police under fire for publishing anti-fascist activists’ names and photos
The infection in law enforcement has gone septic.
Amir Khalid
@hueyplong:
Woody Guthrie’s full name was Woodrow Wilson Guthrie. Yes, this most American of cultural heroes was named after a racist.
jeff bradley
I did not know that the Parker House Hotel was a communist refuge. And you thought Pizzagate was a sham!
raven
@Uncle Ebeneezer: The violence in that series is mostly verbal.
cope
Fucking hell, I just spent 10 minutes creating a version of this post on my iPad and I get a message that it had to reload. Not the first time, I might add. From now on, long posts from the computer only.
Interesting fact: Although Neptune was officially “discovered” in 1846 (after being predicted to exist based on mathematical analyses of quirks in Uranus’ orbit), Neptune was actually seen and recorded by Galileo in the period of time from December 1612 through January 1613. However, because there was a span of a couple of weeks between observations and the 30X power of his telescope could not resolve Neptune as a disk, he dismissed it.
When I first learned this a few years ago, I was still teaching astronomy. As I was telling one of my classes about it, they challenged me as to how we could possibly know that what Galileo saw was in fact Neptune. Somewhat hesitant, I fired up a powerful (and free) bit of software called Stellarium. Projecting it on the screen at the front of my room from my computer, I entered the dates of the observations (known from his drawings in his notebooks) and his location. Because Stellarium will show you what the sky looks like at any time thousands of years into the past or thousands of years into the future from any location in the solar system (a lunar eclipse viewed from the Moon is extremely cool), up popped Stellarium’s representation of what Galileo would have seen during these observations and there was Neptune. QED.
The use of even more powerful software that can simulate the skies has helped the development of a branch of astronomy known as archeoastronomy.
The world is a much nicer place when I can focus on things like this and ignore the surrounding shit storm.
Alain the site fixer
Made some much-needed tweaks to the caching. I’m going to let it sit like this for a few days before any other performance tweaks to see how it goes.
It seems zippier to me, I hope that is true for the rest of you. I suspect the mobile site is not benefiting as much from this as is the desktop site, but them’s the breaks, and it’s a much faster experience than is the desktop, anyway.
In case folks haven’t noticed, there’s a new way to report bad ads or site issues – in the sidebar, there’s a link to report ad issues or site issues so you don’t have to leave the page. If reporting ads, we need to know the advertiser name and the issue. We’ll report it and the issue should be resolved.
I’m out – good evening to all.
TenguPhule
Police violence, cliques, and secret tattoos: fears rise over LA sheriff ‘gangs’
Cop Gangs. Fucking Killer Cop Gangs.
JFC.
Gin & Tonic
@Alain the site fixer: Still not storing my nym.
Another Scott
@Brachiator: Heard that one from my dad. It’s true!
Another one I heard from him:
What’s the minimum number of people in a group such that there’s a greater than 50:50 chance that two of them have the same birthday?
Numbers are very counter-intuitive at times…
Cheers,
Scott.
(23)
MoxieM
@Elizabelle: Yes… and then ole Henry (Thoreau) went down to look at the wreck site and wrote up a creepily dispassionate description. Creepy because of course he had known Fuller reasonably well, not that he really approved all that much of educated or noise-making women. Despite his sisters (and mother) being among the chief abolition noise-makers in Concord, he was kind of a little snot about the Ladies. (despite his many wonderful &&&)
A Ghost To Most
@Wumpus: Thanks for the info on the Ruspublican party mascot.
Major Major Major Major
@Ruviana: That article is like five years old, but I do remember when it happened…
Jim Parish
@Another Scott: I used that one the last time I taught GenEd Statistics. (There were about 40 people in the class, so I could be almost certain there’d be a duplicate. I just went around the room asking birthdays until I hit one.)
oceandude
About 4 days ago I learned Darwin collected 3 tortoises from the Galapagos, well, at least 3 made it to England, Tom, Dick and Harry. Harry- later discovered to be Harriet, lived until 2006. She was approximately 175 years old when she died. She was cared for at an Australian zoo by Steve Irwin and his family. She was a main tourist attraction, beloved by the Irwins, and lived in a large enclosure with a pond. Her favorite food was Hibiscus flowers. There is some question as to who collected the tortoises and later donated them to a British museum(possibly the HMS Beagle captain), and who exactly brought her to Australia. She arrived in Australia in the early 1900s. But it seems Steve Irwin and Charles Darwin shared a pet.
Mnemosyne
@TenguPhule:
IANAL, but this sure sounds like the Berkeley police have set themselves up for a nice juicy lawsuit by posting the names and photos of people who haven’t even been charged with a crime.
I guarantee you that civil rights lawyers in the Bay Area are competing for those clients right about now.
SiubhanDuinne
Test (checking to see if FYWP/FYBJ will remember my nym and email.
Uncle Ebeneezer
@raven: I thought that and started re-watching it with the plan of noting any timestamps of graphic imagery. Realized pretty quickly that there was way more of it than I had noticed the first time.
Anne Laurie
Bostonians are still quite proud of this connection! At least one of the tourist trolleys, which travels past the Parker, mentions HCM’s residency along with the hotel’s earlier fame as the inventor of Parker House rolls.
SiubhanDuinne
@SiubhanDuinne:
NOPE. Even worse than before.
Edit: Doubt I will comment much until this is fixed. Will still read/lurk. Cheers, all.
raven
@Uncle Ebeneezer: Well it was a war.
smedley the uncertain
@?BillinGlendaleCA: Japanese was also the official language of Japan as we invaded at the end of the war. Skoshi was one of the many short phrases our troops adopted to interact with the locals; as in, Skoshi ‘bit’ when ordering a Saki to which the server would reply Chotte Matte Kudasi. Our troops of course turned that into ‘Just a Motte” or ‘Chotte Minute’… BTW, Koreans reverted as fast as they could to their native language but young Koreans having lived an entire lifetime under Japanese rule created a bit of a polyglot for a while.
MoxieM
@Jim Parish: We used the distribution of colors of M & Ms. (Had the actual numbers from Mars). That was fun, plus we got to give the students some candy!
?BillinGlendaleCA
@SiubhanDuinne: It’ll be cutting down on my commenting, guess that should improve performance.
raven
@smedley the uncertain: We do that wherever we go. Mox Nix!
smintheus
@TenguPhule: There have always been septic police in Berkeley.
Tehanu
Little-Known Facts About Well-Known People:
— Alan Arkin wrote the lyrics to “The Banana Boat Song.”
— Lincoln Logs were invented by John Lloyd Wright (son of…)
— Paul Winchell, ventriloquist of Jerry Mahoney on Fifties’ TV, invented the heart pacemaker.
— Jean-Paul Sartre was the great-nephew of Albert Schweitzer.
— Danny Kaye and Sir Laurence Olivier were lovers.
— “Ving” Rhames’ real name is … Irving Rhames.
Ajabu
Fun trivia:
In Swahili, words alter from the prefix.
Mlima means hill.
Ki is the prefix for diminutive (eg: mtoto=child kitoto= small child)
Njaro is a proper name.
Hence, the tallest mountain in Africa is called (affectionately)
Kilimanjaro. (little hill Njaro)
raven
@smedley the uncertain: My favorite Korean food was yaki mandu. When I was 50 I learned it was Japanese. My favorite thing to eat in veitnam was the french bread they made in the villages.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@smedley the uncertain: I’m aware of the recent Korean history since my late father-in-law lived through it. My point to Mnemo’s initial comment was that since she said it was during the Korean War that the Korean populous would also be aware of the term.
Yarrow
@Ruviana: His privacy, maybe. Not ours.
Anne Laurie
@smedley the uncertain: Honcho also arrived in American English from Japan post-WWII — specifically, derived from hancho, ‘group leader’.
Just about everyone I’ve shared this factoid with assumes it came via Spanish.
Ruckus
I watched the Burns doc on Vietnam back to back for two days on my vacation. Being of that time, being as I hated that war, being as I enlisted, for a lot of reasons, the almost least of which was not to have to go there and shoot people, or be shot at, I was moved a lot more than I thought I would be. Using the VA means I see a lot of vets my age, guys who did go to Vietnam and even an occasional WWII vet, guys who did shoot people, and who got shot at some hit some missed or guys that were in the same predicament in wars since. War is a terrible thing, no one is immune to the suffering, only the degree of suffering. As someone once said, in the course of human events, sometimes we must go to war. But we should make sure it’s the last resort, not the first. Those who deem that war is for others to fight and demand that they do, should be the first in and last out. Walking or carried is fine.
mad citizen
Tonight’s finale of the Bachelor/Bachelorette is the most exciting/unbelievable/emotional finale is Bachelor/Bachelorette history!
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Let’s see, little known facts…@ThresherK:
Yes. It was called Weeghman Park when it was built. The Whales’ owner Charles Weeghman built it.
HumboldtBlue
@Mnemosyne:
If they were arrested and booked it’s not a big deal at all, the same information is sent out regularly as press releases. That they used social media is not normal, but lawyers will be hard pressed to take any action. Law enforcement agencies regularly release information about arrests (before any charges have been filed) because it’s in the public interest to know about threats to public safety and order.
I don’t doubt it was done without malice, but that’s gonna be hard to prove.
Brachiator
Tempura is not entirely native Japanese. The name and the cooking style was adapted from a food prepared by the 16th century Portuguese.
Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.)
Another bit of trivia is that the Federal League Brooklyn Tip-Tops were the only major league baseball team ever named for a loaf of bread.
TenguPhule
@smedley the uncertain:
Sake. Sa-ke.
TenguPhule
@Brachiator:
And stole beef stew from the British and managed to make it into something delicious as nikujaga.
TenguPhule
@Smedley Darlington Prunebanks (formerly Mumphrey, et al.):
Not shoes?
A Ghost To Most
If you want to start a fight in Sydney, Oz, talk up Melbourne oysters. Likewise in Melbourne with Sydney oysters. If you want a lobster tail that tastes like blue crab, try the Moreton Bay bug when in Sydney.
Luthe
The street plan of Washington DC was inspired by the gardens of Versailles. L’Enfant’s father worked there as a gardener.
PJ
@raven: In hindsight it seems like an odd thing, but before 9/11, it was not a stretch: the WTC had already been bombed in 1993, and, on September 11, 1994, a guy took off and tried to crash a plane into the White House (he missed, and in the wee hours of Sept. 12, hit the South Lawn – so much for surface to air missiles). When, after 9/11, Condaleeza Rice, the National Security Advisor who presided over there worst national security disaster since Pearl Harbor, excused herself by saying, “No one could have predicted . . .”, I wanted to punch her in the nose.
Alain the site fixer
@Gin & Tonic: yes, WordPress made some security changes to the saving of the checkbox. I don’t know what to change but I will try to see what I can do tomorrow.
WhatsMyNym
@oatler.:
She was born in England.
feebog
@Another Scott:
We used to play that game when teaching electrical therory at Fort Belvior during the Vietnam Nam war. Most classes were 35-40 -grunts- students. We only lost the bet once.
TenguPhule
@PJ:
There was even a bad Steven Seagal Movie. “Executive Decision”.
hueyplong
@TenguPhule: Tip Top Bakery in Brooklyn.
DissidentFish
@Luthe: L’Enfant, before designing the street plan of DC, served under Lafayette in the United States Army.
When Lafayette visited the USA in 1824 at age 67, he refused transport on a warship in the spirit of liberty, instead arriving on a merchant ship.
While on his 1824 tour, he hoisted a 6 year old boy from a New York crowd over his shoulders. That boy: Walt Whitman.
kattails
@germy: And Hedy Lamarr invented frequency hopping, along with co-inventor George Anthiel, got a patent for it, gave it to the military who sat on the idea during WWII. But it’s what now enables Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS. But OF COURSE she did not get any recognition for it until very late in her life.
I also don’t know how to get my cats to eat the perfectly good food I bought for them if they decide against.
Luthe
@DissidentFish: The streets of Manhattan above 14th Street were laid out in 1811 by an appointed Board of Commissioners. There are many streets and few avenues because it was more important to transport goods across town from one river to another than it was to move goods uptown (no one lived there yet). Central Park was not part of the original plan.
Omnes Omnibus
@MoxieM: Fuller is an aunt many times removed of mine.
kattails
@kattails: OK, somebody got this way earlier and I missed it, but comment editor went all weird on me so couldn’t catch my post. And now it’s lost my name and email. Sorry Alain!
Citizen Scientist
There is a to-scale wooden replica (weighing around 400-pounds) of the Liberty Bell at Camp Robinson in Little Rock, AR for some reason. This replica was originally made and/or displayed in Texas, I believe.
J R in WV
@bmoak:
I doubt it. Escoffier died in 1935. How old was Tony when he died lately? He was born in 1956, so 6 years younger than me, and Escoffier was long dead by the time Tony was learning to cook.
Bobby Thomson
Bob Marley worked at the Chrysler plant in Newark, Delaware.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Luthe: remember also that because the Manhattan street grid was laid out before railroads, let alone the idea that everyone would use their own personal combustion engine to get around, everyone thought all goods and most travel would go by water. Most European cities expanded up and down the banks of rivers, and not inland, at the time. The planners thought it would be more important for everyone to have access to the docks than to go uptown or downtown.
Bobby Thomson
@Tehanu:
Better known as Tigger.
smedley the uncertain
@Wumpus: …and Jackals are…..
smedley the uncertain
@raven: Yup
smedley the uncertain
@TenguPhule: Yup. My bad…
J R in WV
@Ruckus:
I also enlisted in the Navy – as I tell close friend, at gun-point, to avoid being drafted into the Marines and set to the Nam. Won’t be watching the Burns documentary on that war. I haven’t even watched much of the Civil War piece he did. While war is obviously necessary sometimes, it wasn’t in Viet Nam. Not when we took over the fight.
I was in boot camp when the Kent State Murders took place… it was really hard, as many of my fellow boots were vocally willing to shoot anti-war demonstrators, not that that was who got killed at Kent State, those were just college students walking between classes.
A good friend was there in Kent at the time, she told me that the city was shut down and searched door to door by police and soldiers, looking for the communists that caused the shooting at the school. Crazed, of course.
She was a teen runaway at the time, and hid in the attic of the home she was staying in at the time, behind sets of drawers built into the low eaves of the attic. They pulled out the drawers but didn’t look behind them. She was panicked of course. Interesting the things you learn from friends who saw them!
smedley the uncertain
@?BillinGlendaleCA: No offense meant, amigo. My point was that American exposure to Japanese lingo occurred a bit earlier than our exposure in Korea.
A good friend, now deceased, de-mobilized in Tokyo at the end of the war and lived the rest of his life there. His stories as an 18 year old swabbie in 1945 trying to adapt to the culture and language would have made a book. Cho Cho san with a very happy ending.
smedley the uncertain
@Anne Laurie: I would have too.
smedley the uncertain
@raven: I can’t remember the names of all the great food the Koreans and Japanese exposed me to… Some however I wish had remained anonymous. Japanese Tako anyone??
Ruckus
@J R in WV:
The Burns doc is really pretty good and I believe it’s worth watching for anyone of the era. It’s our history, it shaped so very much of our lives coming of age. And it really, really opened a lot of eyes about politics and politicians. And that’s a good thing. Of course we forgot a lot of that, as we got older and more set in our ways, more complacent that we were making progress. It’s a reminder that there are trails to travel both as people and as a nation. We decided, even if it was by apathy, the road that was good enough. But it was anything but that. And we are paying for that now. As we always would have to do at some time. A nation supposedly of and by the people has to remain vigilant and we failed at that. Badly. We can talk about the republicans and how they’re just in it for the money and bigotry, but it was all of our job to pay attention to that, and we didn’t. Vietnam was part of the reason, a watershed moment that we didn’t see for the changes it let happen. We were just glad it was over. But we are still paying for that, among other things. And by letting that bill go way, way over due we are going t have to pay a lot more to clean it up, if we can.
prostratedragon
A key early “American pioneer” in the Washington side of the Oregon Country was a black man named George Washington Bush, still remembered in the city of Tumwater, WA.
Mr Mack
@TenguPhule: This is not new. I worked for the Sheriff Dept in So. Cal, and remember finding out that “teams” of deputies were deployed, without name tags, to problem areas and basically just kicked ass on any suspected gang member. One evening, I observed a group beating a Mexican man BEHIND THE JAIL nearly to death. I spoke up, was threatened, and quit the next day. This was in 1979.
Steeplejack (phone)
@J R in WV:
Ho Chi Minh is the one who (supposedly—documentation lacking) worked under Escoffier.