Edward Topsell (c. 1572 – 1625) was an English cleric and author best remembered for his bestiary.
Topsell, repeating ancient legends, assigns exotic attributes to actual animals. He writes, for example, that:
“Skippy was just hanging around. He hadn’t been all there for years, because he’d been into heroin all that time. In fact he actually ODed once and they had him in the morgue in San Jose with a tag on his toe. All of a sudden he got up and asked for a glass of water. Now he was snortin’ big clumps of coke, and nothing would happen to him. We couldn’t have him around because he’d be pacing the room, describing axe murders. So we got him a little place of his own. He had a little white rat named Oswald that would snort coke too. He’d never washed his dishes, and he’d try to get these little grammar school girls to go into the house with him. He was real bad. One of the parents finally called the cops, and they took him to the County Mental Health Hospital in Santa Cruz. Where they immediately lost him, and he turned up days later in the women’s ward.”
— Moby Grape’s Peter Lewis, on his bandmate Skip Spence.
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The English translation of the Spanish hay gato encerrado, which is in turn the Spanish idiom for the Pig In a Poke trick, a scheme popular in the middle ages, “when meat was scare and cats were not.”
It “entailed the sale of a suckling pig in a poke (bag). The wriggling bag would actually contain a cat (not particularly prized as a source of meat) that was sold to the victim in an unopened bag.”
In 1984 [Errol Morris] married Julia Sheehan, whom he had met in Wisconsin while researching Ed Gein and other serial killers. Morris would later recall an early conversation with Julia: “I was talking to a mass murderer but I was thinking of you,” he said, and instantly regretted it, afraid that it might not have sounded as affectionate as he had wished. But Julia was actually flattered: “I thought, really, that was one of the nicest things anyone ever said to me. It was hard to go out with other guys after that.”
Harold Nathan Braunhut aka Harold von Braunhut (31 March 1926 - 28 November 2003) was an American mail-order marketer and inventor, most famous as the creator and seller of both the Amazing Sea-Monkeys and the X-Ray Specs. Braunhut used comic book advertisements to sell an assortment of quirky products. Braunhut held 195 patents for various products, many of which became cultural icons. Some of his products included:
Late Elizabethan drama contains a profusion of minced oaths, probably due to Puritan opposition to swearing. Seven new minced oaths are first recorded between 1598 and 1602, including ‘sblood for By God’s blood from Shakespeare, ‘slight for God’s light from Ben Jonson, and ‘snails for By God’s nails from the historian John Hayward. Swearing on stage was officially banned by the Act to Restraine Abuses of Players in 1606, and a general ban on swearing followed in 1623.
In some cases the original meanings of these minced oaths were forgotten; ‘struth (By God’s truth) came to be spelled ‘strewth and zounds changed pronunciation so that it no longer sounded like By God’s wounds. Other examples from this period include ‘slid for “By God’s eyelid” (1598) and sfoot for “By God’s foot” (1602). Gadzooks for “by God’s hooks” (the nails on Christ’s cross) followed in the 1650s, egad for oh God in the late 17th century, and ods bodikins for “by God’s little body” in 1709. This is similar to the use popularized in the 1950s of gee whiz as an oath for Jesus’ wisdom.
The record for “Longest marathon on a bouncy castle (team)” is 25 hr 25 min, set by Will Scogin, Patrick Taylor, Miller Wright, David Wilson, Forrest Haynes and Jimbo Wilhite (all from USA) at Northridge High School, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, USA, on 10–11 October 2008.
The Big Mac PPP exchange rate between two countries is obtained by dividing the price of a Big Mac in one country (in its currency) by the price of a Big Mac in another country (in its currency). This value is then compared with the actual exchange rate; if it is lower, then the first currency is under-valued (according to PPP theory) compared with the second, and conversely, if it is higher, then the first currency is over-valued.
For example, using figures in July 2008:
* the price of a Big Mac was $3.57 in the United States
* the price of a Big Mac was £2.29 in the United Kingdom (Britain) (Varies by region)
* the implied purchasing power parity was $1.56 to £1, that is $3.57/£2.29 = 1.56
* this compares with an actual exchange rate of $2.00 to £1 at the time
* [(1.56-2.00)/2.00]*100= -22%
* the pound was thus overvalued against the dollar by 22%
The toadstone, also known as bufonite, is a mythical stone or gem thought to be found in, or produced by, a toad, and is supposed to be an antidote to poison.
Above: A 1497 illustration by Johannes de Cuba, depicting the extraction and use of a toadstone.
Poster for Zinda Laash (aka Dracula in Pakistan), the first movie in Pakistan to be X-rated.
