Nazaré is famous for its traditionally clad women who wear skirts with seven petticoats (one for each day). While the story is somewhat of an invention for the sake of tourism, there is an element of truth to it. In the old days, women would wait on the beach for fishermen to sail home. To keep warm in the face of a cold sea wind while staying modestly covered, they would wear several petticoats so they could fold layers over their heads, backs, and legs.
The Legend of the Octopus is a sports tradition during Detroit Red Wings home playoff games involving dead octopuses thrown onto the ice rink. The origins of the activity go back to the 1952 playoffs, when a National Hockey League team played two best-of-seven series to capture the Stanley Cup. Having eight arms, the octopus symbolized the number of playoff wins necessary for the Red Wings to win the Stanley Cup.
Tobu World Square is a theme park in Kinugawa Onsen, which exhibits 1/25th scale replicas of famous buildings from around the world. The models include ancient monuments, cultural treasures and UNESCO World Heritage Sites, reproduced with great detail all the way down to cars, trains and people populating the sites, and with gardens that change with the seasons.
Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges was an American woman known for being the first documented individual not only to be struck by a meteorite, but also to live through the encounter. At 12:46 PM (CST) on November 30, 1954, a meteorite fell through the skies of Sylacauga, Alabama. It split into at least three fragments, with one of the fragments falling through a roof and then landing on Hodges, who was napping on her couch. She recalled the meteorite came through her roof around 2:00 PM local time, although the official time the meteorite fell was 12:46 PM. The meteorite left a 3-foot (91 cm) wide hole in the roof of her house, bounced off a radio, and hit her on her upper thigh and hand, giving her a large bruise.
Allan Bridge was an American conceptual artist best known for his creation in 1980 of the confessional phone system known as the Apology Line. He went by the pseudonym Mr. Apology (a label which has since been adopted by an advice columnist) and used new technology of the time, an answering machine, to record confessions from anonymous callers.
The water anole, is a semi-aquatic species of anole, a lizard in the family Dactyloidae, native to southwestern Costa Rica and far southwestern Panama. The species demonstrates adaptations that allows it to spend periods of time underwater up to approximately a quarter of an hour, forming an air bubble which clings to its head and serves to recycle the animal's air supply while it spends time beneath the surface.
The Sandhof Lily Pan is a clay plain in the southern region of Namibia near the town of Maltehohe, 300 kilometers from the capital Windhoek. Miracles happen whenever rainfall reaches 15-30 cm. Thousands of lilies bloom at the same time, turning the entire area into a sea of flowers.
The Bibliothèque de la Pléiade is a French editorial collection which was created in 1931 by Jacques Schiffrin, an independent young editor. Schiffrin wanted to provide the public with reference editions of the complete works of classic authors in a pocket format. Each of the volumes published presents a similar high-quality appearance: a leather binding, stamped in gold on the spine, enclosing a text block on bible paper, all in a practical small format. The use of bible paper allows the books to contain a high number of pages; it is common for a Pléiade book to contain 1,500. The leather covers of the books are also colour-coded according to period: 20th-century literature comes in tobacco leather; 19th-century, in emerald green; 18th-century, in blue; 17th-century, in Venetian red; 16th, in Corinthian brown; the Middle Ages, purple; Antiquity, green; spiritual texts, grey; and anthologies, in red.
The British Premonitions Bureau was formed in 1966 by psychiatrist John Barker after the Aberfan mining disaster in which 144 people, including 116 children, died when 500,000 tons of debris smashed through the Welsh town and buried the primary school. Reports of precognitive dreams foretelling of the catastrophe prompted Barker to form the bureau in the hope of predicting and avoiding future tragedies. In the 18 months the Premonitions Bureau was open, nearly 1000 reports of premonitions were collected, and while a few seemed to foretell disasters, over 90 percent failed to predict future events and none prevented any disasters.
Iris Love was one of the most prominent female archeologists of the 1960s and 1970s. The society beauty was fodder for the media, appearing in the New York Times with her tanned limbs (honed from a 12-year dig in Turkey) and her cropped blonde hair three times. One report noted her stacks of fan mail at her Upper East Side apartment.