James Audubon Killed All The Birds He Painted

   One of America's great naturalists, John James Audubon painted highly realistic portraits of practically every type of bird in North America. The self-taught artist's resulting four-volume collection of life-size paintings, The Birds of America (1827-38), is regarded as both an artistic and an ornithological masterpiece, and reproductions of his work are still brightening walls around the world.
   But exactly how Audubon was able to capture our feathered friends' likenesses so completely is usually glossed over. The Encyclopedia Britannica fails to even broach the subject. The Audubon Society's page on their namesake mentions that he loved the hunt, but the connection is never explicitly made. Audubon shot all the birds he painted. He then used wires to pose the corpses of these hawks, falcons, partridges, sparrows, woodpeckers, and other winged creatures before putting brush to canvas. In one diary entry, he writes about sneaking up on a large group of sleeping pelicans and blasting two of them before his gun jammed and the awakened survivors took off (he was disappointed that he didn't get to kill them all). And when hunting snoozing avians in the wild was too much trouble, he resorted to other methods. He once bought a caged eagle, killed it, then captured its likeness.
   One of Audubons biographers, Duff Hart-Davis, reveals: "The rarer the bird, the more eagerly he pursued it, never apparently worrying that by killing it he might hasten the extinction of its kind."
   Over 1,000 individual birds appear in Audubon's paintings, but we know that the body count is much higher. He didn't feel some kills worthy of being painted. Others were put on canvas, but the artist was dissatisfied with his work and never displayed it. In other cases, he had already painted a specific type of bird but then found an intriguing individual variation, so he just had to blow it away.
   He once wrote: "I call birds few when I shoot less than one hundred per day."
  

Gandhi Refused To Let His Dying Wife Take Penicillin, Yet Took Quinine To Save Himself

   Gandhi is often ranked, directly or subtly, alongside Jesus Christ, and Martin Luther King Jr. as one of the greatest peacemakers---indeed, one of the greatest human beings---of all time. The mythology that surrounds him---which he built, leaving his followers, admirers, and hagiographers to reinforce and embellish---has almost completely smothered the many unflattering facts about him. In such a compact book, space doesn't permit a full exploration of Gandhi's numerous, consequential skeletons---his racism toward blacks and whites, his betrayal of the Untouchables, his acquiescence toward the Nazis. Instead, lets focus on something more personal and, in fact some ways, more upsetting.
   In August 1942, Gandhi and his wife, Kasturba, among others, were imprisoned by the British in Aga Khan Palace near Poona. Kasturba had poor circulation, and she'd weathered several heart attacks. While detained in the palace, she developed bronchial pneumonia. One of her four sons, Devadas, wanted her to take penicillin. Gandhi refused. He was okay with her receiving traditional remedies, such as water from the Ganges, but he refused her any medicines, including this newfangled antibiotic, saying that the Almighty would have to heal her.
   The Life and Death of Mahatma Gandhi quotes him on February 19, 1944: "If God wills it,  He will pull her through." Gandhi: A Life adds this wisdom from the Mahatma: "You cannot cure your mother now, no matter what wonder drugs you may muster. She is in God's hands now." Three days later, Devadas was still pushing for the penicillin, but Gandhi shot back: "Why don't you trust God?" Kasturba died that day.
   The next night, Gandhi cried out: "But how God tested my faith!" He told one of Kasturba's doctors that the antibiotic wouldn't have saved her and that allowing her to have it "would have meant the bankruptcy of my faith." (Emphasis mine.)
   But Gandhi's faith wasn't much of an obstacle a short time later when it was his ass on the line. A mere six weeks after Kasturba died, Gandhi was flattened by malaria. He stuck to an all-liquid diet as his doctors tried to convince him to take quinine. But Gandhi completely refused and died of the disease, right? No, actually, after three weeks of deterioration, he took the diabolical drug and quickly recovered. That stuff about trusting God's will and testing faith only applied when his wife's life hung in the balance. When he needed a drug to stave off the Grim Reaper, down the hatch it went.

Play That Funky Music II

   In every show Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (The Fantasticks) wrote, there was at least one song about rain.
   Aerosmith's "Dude Looks Like a Lady" was written about Vince Neil of Motley Crue.
   Andy Warhol created The Rolling Stones' emblem depicting the big tongue. It first appeared on the cover of the Sticky Fingers album.
   "Happy Birthday to You" is the most often sung song in America.
   The band Steely Dan got its name from a sexual device depicted in the book Naked Lunch.
   Al Kooper played keyboards for Bob Dylan before he was famous.
   Frank Sinatra was once quoted as saying that rock 'n' roll was only played by "cretinous goons."
   Jim Morrison of the Doors was the first rock star to be arrested onstage.
   Mr. Mojo Risin is an anagram for Jim Morrison.
   Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Jim Morrison were all twenty-seven years old when they died.
   Karen Carpenter's doorbell chimed the first six notes of "We've Only Just Begun."
   Madonna once did a commercial for Pepsi.
   Mick Jagger attended the London School of Economics for two years.
   Shannon Hoon, the late lead singer of the group Blind Melon, was a backup singer for Guns N' Roses on their Use Your Illusion I album.
   Sheryl Crow's two front teeth are fake. She knocked them out when she tripped onstage earlier in her career.
   Michael Jackson is black.
Long Live The King of Rock
   Elvis Presley had a twin brother named Garon, who died at birth. Elvis's middle name was spelled Aron in honor of his brother.
   Elvis loved to eat meatloaf and peanut butter and banana sandwiches. He weighed 230 pounds at the time of his death.
   Elvis failed music class in school.
   Elvis never gave an encore.
   Elvis was once appointed Special Agent of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. According to Elvis's autopsy, he had ten different drugs in his body at the time of his death.

Play That Funky Music I

   At age forty-seven, The Rolling Stones' bassist, Bill Wyman, began a relationship with thirteen-year-old Mandy Smith, with her mother's blessing. Six years later, they were married, but the marriage only lasted a year. Not long after, Bill's thirty- year-old son, Stephen, married Mandy's mother, age forty-six. That made Stephen a stepfather to his former stepmother. If Bill and Mandy had remained married, Stephen would have been his father's father-in-law and his own grandfather.
   The music hall entertainer Nosmo King derived his stage name from a NO SMOKING sign.
   Jonathan Houseman Davis, lead singer of Korn, was born a Presbyterian but converted to Catholicism because his mother wanted to marry his stepfather in a Catholic church.
   Nick Mason is the only member of Pink Floyd to appear on all the band's albums.
   The naked baby on the cover of Nirvana's album Nevermind is named Spencer Eldon.
   The 1980s song "Rosanna" was written about Rosanna Arquette.
   The B-52s were named after a 1950s hairdo.
   The band Duran Duran got their name from a character in the 1968 movie Barbarella.
   The Beach Boys formed in 1961.
   The bestselling Christmas single of all time is Bing Crosby's "White Christmas."
   The first CD pressed in the United States was Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA."
   The Grateful Dead were once called The Mugwumps.
   The only member of the band ZZ Top to not have a beard has the last name Beard.
   There is a band named "A Life-Threatening Buttocks Condition."
   The song with the longest title is " I'm a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank on the Streets of Yokohama with My Honolulu Mama Doin' Those Beat-O-Beat-O Flat-On-My- Seat-O, Hirohito Blues," written by Hoagy Carmichael. He later claimed the song title ended with "Yank" and the rest was a joke.
   Tommy James got the inspiration to write his number-one hit "Mony Mony" while he was in a New York hotel looking at the Mutual of New York buildings neon sign flashing repeatedly: M-O-N-Y.
   ABBA got its name by taking the first letter from each of the band members' names (Agnetha, Bjorn, Benny, and Anni-frid).
   The opera singer Enrico Caruso practiced in the bath, while accompanied by a pianist in a nearby room.
   Enrico Caruso and Roy Orbison were the only tenors in the twentieth century capable of hitting the note E over high C.

Bible Talk

Almost all the villains in the Bible have red hair.
The last word in the Bible is Amen.
The longest chapter in the Bible is Psalms 119.
There are more than 1,700 references to gems and precious stones in the King James Version of the Bible.
The Bible is the number-one shoplifted book in America.
The book of Esther in the Bible is the only book that does not mention the name of God.
The term devil's advocate comes from the Roman Catholic Church. When deciding if someone should be sainted, a devil's advocate is always appointed to give an alternative view.
The Bible has been translated into Klingon.
It is believed that Skakespeare was forty six around the time the King James Version of the Bible was written. In Psalms 46, the forty-sixth word from the first word is shake, and the forty-sixth word from the last word is spear.
Every minute, forty-seven Bibles are sold or distributed throughout the world.
According to Genesis 1:20-22, the chicken came before the egg.
All Hebrew-originating names that end with the letters "el" have something to do with God.
A seventeenth-century Swedish philologist claimed that in the Garden of Eden God spoke Swedish, Adam spoke Danish, and the serpent spoke French.

In Case You Were Wondering III

Sekkusu means "sex" in Japanese.
Spain literally means "the land of rabbits."
The "You Are Here" arrow on a map is called the IDEO locator.
The third year of marriage is the leather anniversary.
The abbreviation "e.g." stands for "exempli gratia," or "for example."
The abbreviation for pound "lb.," comes from the astrological sign Libra, meaning "balance."
The French term bourrage de crane for wartime propaganda means "brain stuffing."
 The infinity character on the keyboard is called a lemniscate.
The Japanese translation of switch is pronounced suitchi.
The name for fungal remains found in coal is Sclerotinite.
The phrase "jet lag" was once called boat lag, back before airplanes existed.
The Sanskrit word for war means "desire for more cows."
The slang word crap comes from T. Crapper, the man who invented the modern toilet.
The slash character is called virgule, or solidus. A URL uses slash characters, not backslash characters.
The word karate means "empty hand."
The word byte is a contraction of "by eight."
Trabant is the German word for "satellite."
Zorro means "fox" in Spanish.
A coward was originally a boy who took care of cows.
A group of officers is called a mess.
The next-to-last event is the penultimate, and the second-to-last is the antepenultimate.

SEMANTICS
Naked means "to be unprotected"; nude means "unclothed."
A hamlet is a village without a church, and a town is not a city until it has a cathedral.

In Case You Were Wondering II

Women who wink at men are known as nictiting women.
A necropsy is an autopsy on animals.
A poem written to celebrate a wedding is called an epithalamium.
A scholar who studies the Marquis de Sade is called a Sadian, not a Sadist.
According to author Douglas Adams, a salween is the faint taste of dishwashing liquid in a cup of fresh tea.
Alma mater means "bountiful mother."
An animal epidemic is called epizootic.
Degringolade means "to fall and disintegrate."
Dendrology is the study of trees.
Dibble means "to drink like a duck."
EEG stands for electroencephalogram.
EMI stands for electrical and musical instrument.
Groaking is to watch people eating in the hope that they will offer you some.
"Hara kiri" is an impolite way of saying the Japanese word seppuku, which means, literally, "belly splitting."
It is possible to drown and not die. Technically, the term drowning refers to the process of taking water into the lungs, not to death caused by that process.
Karaoke means "empty orchestra" in Japanese.
Kemosabe means "soggy shrub" in Navajo.
Koala is Aboriginal for "no drink."
Lead poisoning is known as plumbism.
Scatologists are experts who study feces.