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Julie d’Aubigny

Julie d'Aubigny was a 17th century swordswoman and opera singer. Her tumultuous career and flamboyant life were the subject of gossip and colorful stories in her own time, and inspired romances and novels afterwards. In the following years, d'Aubigny gathered a reputation as a wild woman who hit shopkeepers and fought duels with young aristocrats. She became involved with an assistant fencing master named Serannes. In about 1688, when lieutenant-general of the police Gabriel Nicolas de la Reynie tried to apprehend Serannes for killing a man in an illegal duel, the pair fled the city to Marseille. In Villeperdue she fought a victorious duel against three squires and drove her blade through the shoulder of one of them. Next day she asked for his health and found out he was Louis-Joseph d'Albert Luynes, son of the Duke of Luynes. Next evening one of his companions came to offer his apologies and she appeared in his room in female clothing. They became lovers.

Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas is a painter.

Dueling scar

At the turn of the 20th century, the dueling scar was popularized by upper-class Austrians and Germans who saw it as a mark of their class and of their honor, due to the social importance of dueling societies at Austrian universities at the time. If you were a doctor, lawyer, or professor, the dueling scar was a tattoo that signified your inclusion in an elite social rank, and visitors to university cafes would expect to see young men with bandaged faces.

Dar Robinson

Dar Robinson was an American stunt performer and actor. Robinson broke nine world records and set 21 "world's firsts." Dar Robinson's stunts were always well planned, and he never broke a bone in his 19-year Hollywood career.

Damascus steel

Damascus steel is a hot-forged steel used in Middle Eastern swordmaking from about 1100 to 1700 AD. Damascus swords were of legendary sharpness and strength, and were apocryphally claimed to be able to cut through lesser quality swords and even rock. The technique used to create original Damascus steel is now a matter of historical conjecture. Many raw materials and the metalsmiths' recipes are no longer available.

Joe Dallesandro

Raised by foster parents in Brooklyn and Long Island, the young Dallesandro was expelled from school for punching the principal, which was followed by a spate of petty gangland crime. He had a successful escape from a rehabilitation center for boys in New York's Catskill Mountains, where he had been held for a year after crashing a stolen car. A pioneering figure in the sexual revolution, he was a teenage tearaway turned icon of rebellious youth and sexuality. Perhaps now best known as the torso on The Smiths' debut album or as that bulge on the cover of The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers.

Dabbawala

A dabbawala is a person in Mumbai who is employed in a unique service industry whose primary business is collecting the freshly cooked food in lunch boxes from the residences of the office workers, delivering it to their respective workplaces and returning back the empty boxes by using various modes of transport.

Guy Debord’s Kriegspiel

In January 1977, the French Situationist Guy Debord founded the company Strategic and Historical Games. This company had an immediate goal: to produce a game of war that Debord had already designed in his head years before. Inspired by the military theory of Carl von Clausewitz and the European campaigns of Napoleon, Debord's game is a chess-variant played by two opposing players on a game board of 500 squares arranged in rows of 20 by 25 squares.

Drvengrad

Drvengrad is a traditional village that the Serbian film director Emir Kusturicahad built for his film Life Is a Miracle. The streets in the village bear the names of various individuals that Kusturica holds in high esteem or finds to be personally significant: Nikola Tesla,Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Diego Maradona, Miodrag Petrović Čkalja, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Joe Strummer, Novak Djoković and of course, Ivo Andrić, after whom the main street is named.

Desert grassland whiptail lizard

Desert grassland whiptail lizard is an all-female species. These reptiles reproduce by parthenogenesis; eggs undergo a chromosome doubling after meiosis and develop into lizards without being fertilized. However, ovulation is enhanced by female-female courtship and "mating" (pseudocopulation) rituals that resemble the behavior of closely related species that reproduce sexually.

Opus

Encyclopædia of the sublime

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