Whether it’s an innocuous-seeming cherry or the more obvious culprit of wine, food and drink have been blamed for the deaths of various notable figures over the years. In the interests of public safety, here are 10 unusual eating-and-drinking-related deaths and the ingredients that are to blame. Don’t be surprised if this makes dinner seem much more ominous.

1. KING HENRY I // A “SURFEIT OF LAMPREYS”

Lampreys are an ancient variety of fish akin to an eel, and the slippery fellows have been blamed for the death of one of England’s kings. Henry I (c.1068—1135) was the youngest son of William the Conqueror, and lived into his mid-to-late sixties. As with most kings of this period he enjoyed a good feast, and one evening, against the advice of his doctors, he indulged in a large portion of lampreys (reportedly one of his favorite dishes). Henry fell ill and died soon after, forever tying his fate to that pesky final plate of fish.

2. DENIS DIDEROT // AN APRICOT

Eighteenth-century French philosopher Denis Diderot was fond of his food and on occasion was known to overeat. One evening in 1784 as Diderot dined with his wife, he reportedly reached for an apricot with which to conclude his meal. His wife, concerned for his health, scolded him for eating too much, and he replied: “But what the devil do you think that will do to me?” Diderot died just moments after consuming the fruit (and we can picture his wife desperately trying to prevent herself from shouting out “I told you so!”).

3. KING ADOLF FREDERICK OF SWEDEN // CREAM BUNS

 
King Adolf Frederick of Sweden was a famous glutton and died after consuming an enormous final meal in 1771. The occasion was Shrove Tuesday (or Mardi Gras), the last big feast before the austerity of Lent. The 60-year-old monarch put away a meal of lobster, caviar, sauerkraut, kippers, and champagne—so far, so normal—but then he decided to finish off with the traditional Swedish dessert of semla, a cream-filled bun, served in a bowl of milk. However, Adolf Frederick did not stop at one or even two buns—he ate 14 cream-filled buns. It comes as no great surprise to learn he ended up with terrible indigestion and possibly food poisoning, which ultimately killed him.

4. LUCIUS FABIUS CILO // MILK

Roman Senator Lucius Fabius Cilo was one of the most wealthy and influential men in Rome during the 2nd century, but he met his end in a rather unedifying fashion. According to legend, the senator died during a feast after he choked to death on a single hair in his cup of milk.

5. PRESIDENT ZACHARY TAYLOR // CHERRIES

 
On a blisteringly hot July 4, President Zachary Taylor attended the national celebrations before walking back to the White House along the Potomac River. Arriving home hot and bothered, Taylor drank copious glasses of iced water and milk and ate a great deal of cherries. Soon he was doubled over suffering from extreme stomach pains, and he took to his bed. For five days Taylor lingered on in agony, until on July 9 he died, the official cause of death described as cholera morbus—an infection of the small intestine. However, historians have also suggested the president could have been felled by gastroenteritis caused or aggravated by the acidic cherries, or by food poisoning (still other theories suggest typhoid fever).

6. EUSTACE IV, COUNT OF BOULOGNE // EELS

Eustace IV was the 12th-century Count of Boulogne and heir apparent to the English throne, since his father, Stephen, was king. However, Stephen had been engaged in a long battle with his cousin Matilda and her son Henry, who also claimed to be heir to the English throne. Eustace was not greatly liked, and having recently sacked a sacred monastery at Bury St Edmunds, no one was surprised when during dinner he choked on a plateful of eels and died. Rumors abounded that he may have been poisoned, as his death conveniently paved the way for a peace between the warring parties and for the crown to pass from Stephen to his nephew, Henry II.

7. ADRIAN IV // WINE

 
In 1154, Nicholas Breakspear was crowned pope as Adrian IV, becoming the only Englishman to ever hold the post. Contemporary reports suggest that Adrian died suddenly after choking on a fly that had landed in his wine. Some modern historians cast doubt on this story, in part because it seems such an unlikely way to go, and instead propose he died of an inflammation of the tonsils.

8. MARTY FELDMAN // SHELLFISH

Marty Feldman was an English comedy actor famous for playing Igor in Young Frankenstein. He died in Mexico City in 1982 after filming for Yellowbeard. Feldman suffered a massive heart attack that his friend, filmmaker Michael Mileham, claimed was the result of eating some bad shellfish that had given both him and Feldman food poisoning.

9. TYCHO BRAHE // DRINK

Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe reportedly died after sitting through a lengthy royal banquet with a very full bladder in 1601. Brahe felt that excusing himself from the table to pee would be an unacceptable breach of etiquette, so despite his discomfort he remained sitting, continuing to eat and drink until his poor bladder could take it no longer and it ruptured, causing his death 11 days later. In 2010 tests were carried out on Brahe’s remains which put to rest rumors that he had been poisoned with mercury by his pupil, Johannes Kepler (who would go on to be a famous astronomer himself). The tests showed no unusually elevated mercury levels, indicating that his death was likely indeed caused by a bladder infection, as Kepler had originally reported.

BONUS: SIR FRANCIS BACON // A FROZEN CHICKEN

In March 1626, the elderly philosopher and statesman Sir Francis Bacon was traveling home to St. Albans in a coach when he decided to test his theory that freezing food could preserve it for longer. Bacon stopped the coach and purchased a chicken from an old lady in Highgate Hill, which he then slaughtered, plucked, and proceeded to stuff with snow. Unfortunately, this exposure to the cold and wet caused Bacon to contract pneumonia, from which he died some days later. A number of rather dubious reports have suggested that a ghost of the fateful chicken returned to the site of its death at Pond Square in Highgate, and still occasionally appears to unwary passers-by, running around in circles and flapping its plucked wings.

Between the holidays and all that vacation time you’ve got to use before you lose it, December is a wonderful time for getting cozy on the sofa and turning your day into a movie marathon. And Netflix has got plenty of fresh content to keep you busy through the new year. Here’s everything new that’s coming to Netflix next month.

December 1

Always (1989)
Angels in the Snow (2015)
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Beyond Bollywood (2014)
Black Snake Moan (2007)
Chill with Bob Ross: Collection (1990)
Compulsion (1959)
D2: The Mighty Ducks (1994)
David Blaine: Street Magic (1997)
Dreamland (2010)
For the Love of Spock (2016)
Girlfriends’ Guide to Divorce: Season 2 (2015)
Glory Daze: The Life and Time of Michael Alig (2016)
Harry and the Hendersons (1987)
Hitler: A Career (1977)
Holiday Engagement (2011)
Honey, I Shrunk the Kids (1989)
House of Wax (2006)
Hannibal (2001)
Merli: Season 1
Merry Kissmas (2015)
National Lampoon’s Animal House (1978)
Picture Perfect (1997)
Rainbow Time (2016)
Rodeo & Juliet (2015)
Swept Under (2016)
Switchback (1997)
The Angry Birds Movie (2016)
The Crucible (1996)
The Little Rascals (1994)
The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000)
The Rock (1996)
The Spirit of Christmas (2015)
Toys (1992)
Uncle Nick (2015)
Waking Life (2001)
Way of the Dragon (1972)
We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story (1993)
White Girl (2016)
Wildflower (2016)
Zero Point (2014)

December 2

Fauda: Season 1
Hip Hop Evolution: Season 1
Pacific Heat: Season 1

December 3

Lost & Found Music Studios: Season 2

December 5

Mad (2016)
The Good Neighbor (2016)

December 6

Blue Jay (2016)
Homeland (Iraq Year Zero): Season 1
Reggie Watts: Spatial
The Devil Dolls (2016)
The Model (2016)

December 8

The Cuba Libre Story: Season 1

December 9

Captive: Season 1
Cirque du Soleil Junior – Luna Petunia: Season 1
Club de Cuervos: Season 1
Fuller House: Season 2
Four Seasons in Havana: Season 1
Medici: Masters of Florence: Season 1
Spectral
White Rabbit Project: Season 1

December 10

Lucky Number Slevin (2006)
Phantom of the Theater (2016)

December 11

Breaking a Monster (2016)

December 12

Ricardo O’Farrill: Christmas Special

December 13

Colony: Season 1
Killswitch (2016)
I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016)
Nobel: Season 1

December 14

Versailles: Season 1 (2015)

December 16

Barry (2016)
Call Me Francis: Season 1
Crazyhead: Season 1
No Second Chance: Season 1
Rats (2016)
The Adventures of Puss in Boots: Season 4

December 19

Miss Stevens (2016)

December 20

Disorder (2015)
Gabriel Iglesias: Sorry For What I Said When I Was Hungry
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Season 6 (2016)
Ten Percent: Season 1
The Break: Season 1

December 23

Travelers: Season 1
Trollhunters: Season 1

December 25

Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War (2016)
When Hari Got Married (2013)

December 27

Ajin: Season 2
Chasing Cameron: Season 1

December 28

Comedy Bang! Bang!: Season 5 (2016)

December 29

The Hollywood Shorties (2016)

December 30

The Eighties: Season 1 (2016)

December 31

Big in Bollywood (2011)

Researchers have figured out how to monitor the genetic health of endangered whale sharks without ever touching them—by testing the waters they swim in. They described their progress in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Keeping tabs on endangered animals is an essential part of keeping them safe. Yet our current monitoring methods are imperfect at best. Some, like aerial monitoring, depend on clear weather and good visibility. Others, like tagging, can actually hurt [PDF] the animals they’re meant to protect. It’s time to find new ways to look out for our fellow animals.

One international research team came up with an interesting idea: rather than taking tissue samples from whale sharks’ bodies, what about testing the environment in which they swim?

Study author and geneticist Philip Francis Thomsen of the Natural History Museum of Denmark has been investigating the various uses of environmental DNA (eDNA) for the last few years. He and his colleagues found that testing the water is a great way to help scientists identify and count its piscine inhabitants. But they’d never used eDNA to examine a given fish population’s genetics—that is, how the members of the group are related to one another and others in their species.

Thomsen and an international team of his peers traveled to a site in the Persian Gulf where whale sharks like to congregate. First, they counted the number of fins at the surface to estimate how many sharks were around. Then they collected 20 small samples of seawater and small tissue samples from the sharks so they could compare their results.

They sequenced the DNA found in the tissue samples and the DNA in the water and found that the two yielded similar results. By combining these genetic family trees with their observations of the site, the researchers were able to estimate the number of sharks present. They found that the sharks in the gulf were more closely related to other populations in the Indian and Pacific Oceans than they were to Atlantic whale sharks.

There’s more work still to be done, the authors write, but this hands-off method shows a lot of promise. Whale sharks, if you’re reading this: We’ll keep you posted.

When the newly-married Joe and Tracey Drelick pulled up in front of a house for sale in Harleysville, Pennsylvania in 1998, she thought it was one of the most attractive properties she had ever seen. It was in their price range, well-cared for, and in their preferred neighborhood.

Joe refused to get out of the car.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Are you kidding?”

Joe shook his head. “The castle,” he said. “The castle won’t fit in the front yard.”

For 15 years, Joe’s father, Bill, had been engineering one of the most elaborate and spectacular displays of holiday cheer of any private residence in the country. In addition to a 17-foot-tall castle, there was a church, a nativity scene, tens of thousands of lights, and over two dozen interactive displays. Press a button and an animated Santa would laugh heartily or the Little Drummer Boy would bounce up and down. Press another and tiny figures in the windows of the miniature buildings would dance.

Bill Drelick’s spectacle had attracted thousands of visitors from every state. But Joe knew his father wouldn’t do it forever. The day would come when the Drelick tradition would fall into his hands. And he would need a large enough yard to tend to it.

The couple kept looking. When they found another house, Tracey walked through it with the realtor while Joe stayed outside, measuring tape in hand. He wanted to be sure the spirit of Christmas could fit into 800 square feet.

The Drelick preoccupation with holiday excess began in 1983, the year Joe, then 13, begged and pleaded with his parents to put up a more elaborate display than the spare decorations they preferred. One night, with Bill and his wife at a party, Joe brought friends over and had them help with the lights. When the Drelicks returned, the exterior of the house looked like a Macy’s department store.

“My wife was very upset,” Bill tells mental_floss. “Hollering at him. ‘I’m gonna kill that kid.’ Typical mother.”

Bill convinced her the lights would be a fitting tribute to her father, who had recently passed. She relented. For years, Joe and his mother added to the display, hanging a series of lights until Bill realized he couldn’t watch television because all of that holiday spirit kept blowing fuses.

“That’s when I decided to get involved,” he says.

A facilities manager by trade, Bill had the electrical and carpentry knowledge needed to match his son’s ambition for increasingly involved decorations. “Around 1990, I made a castle out of plywood,” Joe, now 46, tells mental_floss. “Every time the wind would blow, it would fall over. So my father essentially remade it using metal screening so the wind would go right through it. We had little windows with elves in them. And that was really the beginning.”

The activity in the castle’s windows soon began to attract passersby, who would stop and peer out of their cars. “I thought, let’s give them something to really look at and study,” Bill says. “So each window had an ornament, and when you press a button, it would turn on.”

“I equate that to the invention of sliced bread,” Joe says. “It was huge.”

The push buttons gave the Drelick yard interactivity. Soon, dozens of people were getting out of their cars and approaching the residence, marveling at the growing population of plastic reindeer and animatronic figures. Despite $600 utility bills, Bill kept the lights on for hours at a time, setting a curfew only when he realized that people who came later at night had enjoyed a little too much liquid cheer.

“I would have buses from the senior home pull up,” he says. “Some of them were too old to get out and look, so I’d get on the bus and describe everything to them.”

Bill’s neighbors were generally tolerant of the traffic, apart from one resident who had just moved in and never quite acclimated to the goodwill. He had police come out nightly and complained to the township over noise levels, which put Bill on the radar of local electrical inspectors.

“They wanted me to get licensed or something,” he recalls. “But the push buttons were hooked up to a 5-volt battery. It’s no different than holding a flashlight.” Bill finally got an attorney to write a sternly-worded letter, which ended the back-and-forth.

“Still won’t talk to us,” Bill says.

 
By 1998, Joe was out of the house, married and expecting his first child. His own display was comparatively modest, but he’d spend up to eight weeks helping his father get ready for the unveiling of the Ambler display on Black Friday.

“We just enjoyed each other’s company,” Joe says. “I knew he’d retire at some point. He did it until he was 75 years old.”

Bill’s final year as the lead builder was 2010. “I’m 80 now,” he says. “It just got to the point where it didn’t feel right. I’d be out of breath and have to sit down in a chair and burp every 20 minutes.” His retirement was official after both a quadruple bypass and a spill off a ladder. “That had nothing to do with my health, just my own stupidity,” he says. “I was standing on the very top step of a 12-foot ladder, which you should not do. The sun was high and I was trying to see around it. Down I went, brrrrrappp down the steps. They slowed the fall.”

Bill was fine, but done. In 2011, he and Joe began the laborious process of moving over all of his materials 20 minutes away to Joe’s residence in Harleysville, where Joe constructed a shed in his backyard to help contain it all. You could fit three cars in there, Joe says, except it’s full of gingerbread houses. Displays like the castle—which measures 24 feet across—were designed by Bill with storage in mind. The pieces are like Russian nesting dolls, folding into one another. In Joe’s basement workshop, he and his father spend time repairing displays that were pounded by weather the year prior.

“Olaf from Frozen took a beating,” Joe says.

New additions are frequent. Last year, Joe built a Philadelphia skyline featuring his beloved Phillies and a silhouette of Rocky Balboa. Two years before that, he constructed an immense clock tower that he had fantasized about crafting since he was a kid.

“It’s 19 feet tall and sits on top of the shed,” Joe says. “Kids look up in awe. It’s like Big Ben.”

Last winter, ABC came calling, wanting to film the Drelick display so they could go up against other light fanatics in a primetime contest special. The Drelicks lost. Sort of.

“Someone left a handmade trophy on our porch shortly after the show aired,” Tracey says. “It came with a note saying, ‘You guys were the real winners.’”

Joe has been a facilities manager for 25 years, which gives him a fair amount of vacation time. He uses 10 days of it every year to help meet the demands of preparing the display, which is sometimes enough to keep him up at night.

“I just want to get it done for Black Friday,” he says. “You hope the weather is good. I always worry about Nor’easters.”

He likes to say he’s happy year-round and Christmas is a time when everyone else catches up. Joe will play Santa at least once this year, handing out stuffed animals and coloring books. When his children were younger, they would play elves. “We have that on videotape,” Tracey says, which sounds vaguely threatening. Their oldest, Jordynn, wrote her college application essay about the display. Jacob, 16, is responsible for carrying parts around.

“It’s coming his way if he wants it,” Joe says. “I’m grooming him.”

Last year, the family received more than 12,500 visitors, with an average night attracting around 500 people. There’s no admission charge, though sometimes people will leave cookies or festive sweaters. Many sign the guestbook, which Tracey and Joe read after the 35,000 lights—mostly LEDs—go out at 9:30 p.m. It’s tangible evidence that their work has brought a lot of people a lot of happiness.

“Reading things like, ‘You have an amazing soul’ can get to you,” she says. Men have proposed to girlfriends in her yard. Young couples who visited Bill’s display in the past now show up with their own children in tow. Local police have told her they’ve driven by the house on nights they need cheering up. It always works.

You can follow the Drelicks’ progress as they set up the lights—and find out how you can visit—on their Facebook page.

All images courtesy of Joe Drelick.

Paul Newman starred in 1967’s Cool Hand Luke as Lucas Jackson, a rebellious man who becomes a hero to his fellow prison camp members for his apparent fearlessness. Over time, he gets beaten down physically and emotionally when his numerous attempts to escape are thwarted, and he eats an insane amount of eggs.

George Kennedy—who won an Oscar for his performance—played Dragline, the chain gang leader who grows to respect Luke and eventually becomes his best friend. The film also boasted great performances from Strother Martin (Captain), Dennis Hopper (Babalugats), Wayne Rogers (Gambler), Harry Dean Stanton (Tramp), and others. Here are some facts about the anti-establishment classic.

1. IT WAS WRITTEN BY AN EX-CON.

While in the Merchant Marine, Donn Pearce was caught counterfeiting money and thrown in a French prison. He escaped, returned to the U.S., and became a safe-cracker. A waitress ratted him out and he spent two years on a prison road gang where he heard about a Luke Jackson—someone who was an excellent poker player, a banjo expert, and who had once eaten 50 boiled eggs for a bet. He wrote about him in his book Cool Hand Luke, which was published in 1965. Pearce sold the movie rights to Warner Bros. for $80,000, and got an additional $15,000 to write the screenplay.

But it was his first time trying to write a screenplay, and Frank Pierson was later hired to rework the draft. Pearce appeared in the movie as the convict Sailor and was the production’s technical adviser. He punched someone out on the final day on set and was not invited to the film premiere.

2. JACK LEMMON OR TELLY SAVALAS COULD HAVE PLAYED LUKE.

Jack Lemmon’s production company, Jalem Productions, produced the movie, so Lemmon had first dibs on playing the lead, but he recognized that he wasn’t right for the part. Telly Savalas was then cast as Luke, but he was in Europe filming The Dirty Dozen, and since he refused to fly, the production had to look elsewhere for the starring role to get started on time.

3. PAUL NEWMAN STUDIED WEST VIRGINIANS TO GET THE ACCENT DOWN.

Newman heard about the project and asked for the part before he had even read the script. Newman, a Cleveland native, spent a weekend in Huntington, West Virginia, with businessman Andy Houvouras, on the recommendation of a mutual friend who was the director of the U.S. Office for Economic Opportunity. Houvouras drove Newman to various counties, where Newman talked to residents and recorded them. Everybody apparently knew who he was with one exception:

“He went to St. Joe High School to go pick up my sister Anne, and this nun walked up to see what the commotion was,” Houvouras’s son recalled decades later. “Dad said, ‘I would like you to meet Paul Newman,’ and the nun said, ‘Nice to meet you, Mr. Newman, what do you do for a living?’ She had no idea who he was.”

4. IT WAS SET IN FLORIDA, BUT FILMED IN STOCKTON, CALIFORNIA.

A crew went to Tavares Road Prison in Tavares, Florida, to take photographs and measurements so it could be rebuilt in Stockton. A dozen buildings were constructed, including barracks, a mess hall, and guard houses. Spanish moss imported from Louisiana hung from the trees. The actors stayed at the local Holiday Inn. Their mode of transportation to the set and back to their rooms were the trucks used in the movie. They rode on the backs of them.

5. NEWMAN JUDGED THE SHOOT WITH HIS NOSE.

Apparently, Newman had a good feeling about the film. “There’s a good smell about this,” Newman told a visitor on the set one day. “We’re gonna have a good picture.”

6. THE BOXING MATCH TOOK THREE DAYS TO SHOOT.

George Kennedy said he and Newman were both completely worn out from their boxing match—Kennedy from the fighting, Newman from the fighting and falling onto hard ground for three days in a row.

7. BETTE DAVIS WAS THE ORIGINAL CHOICE TO PLAY LUKE’S MOTHER.

Bette Davis turned down the chance to play Luke’s mother, Arletta, which was a one-scene role. It went to Jo Van Fleet (East of Eden) instead, even though she was only 11 years older than Newman. For her single day of shooting, Van Fleet sat on a tree stump, 200 yards from everyone else, looking over her lines. Harry Dean Stanton recalled that Van Fleet asked him to sing to her before her take, and it made her cry.

8. THE DIRECTOR WOULDN’T ALLOW THE ACTORS’ WIVES ON SET.

To get the men to feel like they were truly members of a chain gang, director Stuart Rosenberg banned women from the set. Even Joy Harmon (“Lucille”) was kept away from the cast. She stayed in a hotel all alone for two days and shot her scene with just Rosenberg.

9. THE CONVICTS WERE REALLY COLD DURING THE CAR WASH SCENE.

Harmon didn’t realize how suggestive the scene in which the men watch her wash her car was until she saw it in the theater.

“I just figured it was washing the car. I’ve always been naive and innocent,” she said. “I was acting and not trying to be sexy. Maybe that’s why the scene played so well. After seeing it at the premiere, I was a bit embarrassed.”

When Rosenberg shot the convicts in the ditch watching Lucille, he used a stand-in: an overcoat-wearing 15-year-old girl. Despite the coat, Kennedy remembered her teeth were chattering from the cold weather. He also wrote, “Those guys shivering in a ditch did some great acting.”

10. NEWMAN HAD TROUBLE LEARNING TO PLAY THE BANJO.

Originally, the scene where Newman plays “Plastic Jesus” as an ode to his mother was scheduled for the beginning of the shoot, but after Newman insisted on learning the instrument, Rosenberg delayed it a few weeks. When they tried it and the playing was unsatisfactory, it was bumped until the next to last day of production. Newman and Rosenberg had a shouting match after Newman still couldn’t get it down. In what Kennedy remembered as a “tense, electrically charged, quiet” place, Newman tried again. When he finished, Rosenberg called “Print.” Newman insisted he could do better. “Nobody could do it better,” Rosenberg replied.

It was Stanton who taught Newman how to play “Plastic Jesus.”

11. THE STUDIO DEMANDED TO SEE NEWMAN’S BLUE EYES.

Cinematographer Conrad Hall said the studio drove him “insane,” and that his filming techniques were repeatedly questioned. Eventually, they explained that he wasn’t showcasing Newman’s famous eyeballs enough. He had to shoot a scene four times before shooting Newman “correctly.”

12. FRANK PIERSON WROTE A WHOLE BACKSTORY FOR THE CAPTAIN TO EXPLAIN ONE FAMOUS LINE.

“The phrase just sort of appeared on the page,” Pierson said of the film’s famous “What we’ve got here is … failure to communicate” line. “I looked at it and thought, ‘Now that’s interesting,’ Then I thought, these words are going to be spoken by an actor (Strother Martin) who is playing a real redneck character who probably never went beyond high school, and it has a faintly academic feel to it, that line. I thought, people are going to question it.” So he wrote a backstory for the character.

According to Pierson’s biography of the Captain, Strother Martin’s character advanced in the prison guard ranks by taking courses in criminology, where he was “exposed to an academic atmosphere.” Donn Pearce still thought it was too intelligent of a statement to be made by the Captain, but Pierson won out.

13. NO, NEWMAN DID NOT EAT 50 EGGS.

About that now-iconic hardboiled egg scene? “I never swallowed an egg,” Newman admitted to a reporter.

George Kennedy got into the specifics in his book Trust Me: A Memoir. He wrote that Newman “consumed” as many as eight eggs. As soon as Rosenberg would yell “cut”, Newman vomited into nearby garbage cans.

14. GEORGE KENNEDY PAID FOR HIS OWN ADVERTISING TO HELP HIM WIN THE OSCAR.

Kennedy took out $5000 in trade paper advertising to campaign for an Oscar. The ad read “George Kennedy—Supporting” over a still from the movie of Dragline carrying Luke. Even so, Kennedy was still surprised when he did take home the statue for Best Supporting Actor—so much so that he hadn’t even prepared a speech.

15. DONN PEARCE DIDN’T THINK PAUL NEWMAN WAS RIGHT FOR THE PART.

Though Newman received a lot of acclaim, and a Best Actor Oscar nomination, for playing the part of Luke, Pearce wasn’t impressed. “They did a lousy job and I disliked it intensely,” he said in 2011. Pearce thought Newman “was so cute looking. He was too scrawny. He wouldn’t have lasted five minutes on the road.”

Julia Child, America’s original celebrity chef, was surprisingly relaxed about that most food-focused of national holidays, Thanksgiving. The author of Mastering the Art of French Cooking didn’t break out complicated recipes like stuffed duck or deconstructed turkey for Turkey Day. As friends and former guests at her Thanksgivings told The New York Times, she was quite down-to-earth as a host. 

Before the meal, she set out Goldfish crackers for folks to munch on, and made what she called “reverse martinis,” consisting of vermouth on the rocks with just a little bit of gin. She rarely used complicated spices, often opting for just salt and pepper, and instead of deconstructing her bird, she usually just popped the whole turkey in the oven. (For the curious cooks out there, she roasted it at 325°F.) For dessert, she served her Aunt Helen’s molasses-and-bourbon-laced pumpkin pie.

Her Thanksgiving advice to novice chefs often boiled down to some version of “relax.” 

“I even heard her tell people that turkey wasn’t meant to be served hot,” a former Child Thanksgiving guest told The New York Times. Hey, if Julia Child says it, it must be true! 

[h/t: The New York Times] 

Residents of Australia are used to avoiding dangerous wildlife. Now in addition to sharks, poisonous spiders, and cassowaries, Australians can include crows on their list of animals to look out for. As the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reports, incidents of hostile crows swooping over passersby are on the rise.

The behavior is common in magpies around nesting season, but it’s rarely observed in crows. Dr. Darryl Jones, a behavioral ecologist with Griffith University in South East Queensland, told ABC he believes the crows are copying the actions of their avian neighbors. “There’ll be chicks in the nest, they’ve decided that the people walking past are a threat,” he said. He’s been able to witness the phenomenon firsthand, thanks to a nest of native Australian Torresian crows located on the building where he works. He said, “Now I walk outside my own building and get attacked by the bloody crows.”

The increased crow swooping that’s been reported throughout Gold Coast, Queensland could possibly be a result of urban development. As humans encroach on crow territory the birds become less fearful of our presence, emboldening them to attack.

Crows only spend about three weeks raising their young, so residents can look forward to the aerial onslaughts ending soon. But people shouldn’t take that as an excuse to antagonize the animals while they can: Crows remember the faces of people who wronged them and enlist their friends to help them enact vengeance. So if you make yourself the target of a crow grudge now, you may end up regretting it next year.

[h/t ABC]

Thanksgiving originated as a way to celebrate, and enjoy, all the fruits and vegetables harvested this time of year. But the fall harvest doesn’t let word lovers go hungry, as it yields a cornucopia of etymological roots as well. Feast on the bounty of these seasonal word origins.

1. ARTICHOKE

Artichoke ultimately comes from the Arabic al-harshuf, “the artichoke.” The word, and plant, passed into Spanish, Italian, and then English, as archicokk, in the 1530s. Speakers tried to explain its unusual name with folk etymologies: The plant’s center would choke anyone who tried to eat it, or it chokes the growth of other plants in the garden. These folk beliefs are preserved in the modern spelling.

2. AND 3. SCALLION AND SHALLOT

Scallions and shallots may be two different species of onion, but they share a common root: the Vulgar Latin cepa escalonia, the “Ascalonian onion.” Ascalon is modern-day Ashkelon, an Israeli coastal city and a historically important seaport, apparently, for trading the likes of scallions and shallots. The Latin cepa, for onion, is also the source of another name for the scallion, chive.

4. ONION

If we peel back the etymological layers of onion, we find the Latin unio, which named both a pearl and a type of onion. Unio probably sprouts from unus, Latin for “one,” the idea being that this vegetable’s layers all comprise a single whole.

5. FENNEL

Fennel looks like an onion, but it’s actually in the carrot family. Appearances, though, are still the key to the origin of this word. Fennel, which is documented in English as early as 700, comes from a diminutive form of Latin faenum, for hay, which the plant’s feathery foliage and aroma evokes.

6. CARROT

Speaking of carrots, this orange vegetable is rooted in the Greek karaton. The origin of the Greek word is unclear. It could be from an Indo-European root ker, for horn, thanks to its shape. Ker could also mean head, possibly alluding to the way the carrot grows—and making a red-headed carrot-top etymologically redundant.

7., 8., 9., AND 10. KALE, COLLARD, KOHLRABI, AND CAULIFLOWER

These seasonal superfoods have a super-etymology. Latin had a word caulis, for stem, stalk, or cabbage, which produced quite the lexical bumper crop.

Old Norse borrowed caulis as kal, source of the word kale and the cole in coleslaw. In English, cole itself was an old word for cabbage as well as other leafy greens, like colewort, which American English speakers came to pronounce as collard, hence collard greens.

Kohlrabi literally means “cabbage-turnip” in German, cultivating its kohl from an Italian descendant of the original Latin caulis. And cauliflower, from Modern Latin cauliflora, is simply “cabbage flower.”

11. CABBAGE

If Latin’s caulis means cabbage, what does cabbage mean? Head, from the Old French caboce, in turn from the Latin caput. It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand why the Romans so named this heavy and round vegetable.

12. TURNIP

A turnip is a neep that looks like its been “turned” into its round shape, or so some etymologists guess. Neep comes from the Latin napus, a kind of turnip.

13. PARSNIP

This vegetable was once believed to be a kind of turnip, and so was made to look like turnip as a word. (The parsnip is actually related to the carrot while the turnip is related to the cabbage.) Parsnip stems from pastinaca, the Latin name for the vegetable, which may be related to pastinum, a two-pronged tool used to harvest tubers like parsnips.

14. AND 15. RADISH AND RUTABAGA

The roots of these roots are “roots.” Radish comes from the Latin radix, a root, both botanically and metaphorically, as we can see in derivatives like radical and eradicate. This radix, according to Indo-European scholars, grows from a more ancient soil: wrad, believed to mean root or branch. Wrad is featured in another vegetal word: rutabaga, which English took from the Swedish rotabagge by the 1780s. Rotabagge literally means “root bag,” with bag a kind of bundle in Old Norse.

16. and 17. PUMPKIN AND SQUASH

If you thought turnips and parsnips were all mixed up, then have a look at pumpkin. English immediately carved pumpkin out of French and Latin roots. The word’s ending, -kin, is influenced by a Germanic suffix for “little,” also seen in words like napkin. The ultimate root is the Greek pepon, meaning “ripe” and related to its verb for “cook.”

A Greek pepon was a kind of melon enjoyed when ripe. And the word melon, squashed from the Greek melopepon, literally means “ripe apple.” So, etymologically, a pumpkin is a melon, which is an apple. Early British colonists applied the word pumpkin—which, to make things more confusing, is technically a fruit—for the type of squash they encountered in the Americas.

Squash has nothing to do with smashing pumpkins. The word is shortened from the Algonquian askutasquash, literally “green things that may be eaten raw,” as the Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology glosses it.

18. POTATO

You say potato, I say batata. Christopher Columbus is said to have brought the word batata back from his voyages. The batata, probably from the Haitian Taíno language, was actually a kind of sweet potato. Later, Spanish conquistadors brought what we commonly think of as the potato back from South America, where it was called papa in the Quechuan language. Botanically, sweet potatoes and potatoes are completely unrelated, but that didn’t stop English speakers from confusing them by using the word potato as a common term.

19. YAM

Sweet potatoes aren’t a type of potato—and nor are they yams, even if we insist on calling them so. Yam crops up as inany in 1588, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, a borrowing of the Portuguese inhame or Spanish igname, possibly from a word in West African languages meaning “to eat.” Because of the slave trade, yam may have been directly borrowed from a West African language in American and Jamaican English.

20. BEET

Beet comes from the Old English bete, in turn from the Latin beta. These words just mean, for a refreshing change, beet. But even the humble beet has its baggage. The word was common in Old English but disappeared from the existing record until about the 1400s. It seems the English language didn’t much want to eat its vegetables in the late Middle Ages.