Sorry, you’re from where?
While in general, town names are more or less benign and uninteresting, there are many around the world that make people do a double-take. Invariably, most if not all of these names gain attention because they’re considered expletives, double entendres, or have sexual connotations.
For the people who call these towns home, their name is either a blessing or a curse.
Dull, Scotland
They may live in Dull but the villagers who call this hamlet in Perthshire home are anything but.
Besides having stunning Highland scenery on their doorsteps, people from Dull also have quite a sense of humour. Spinning the uninspiring village name to its advantage, Dull twinned itself with Boring in Oregon, USA, in 2012, before welcoming Bland in New South Wales, Australia, into the fold.
A widespread but wholly ignored phenomenon. Thu Mar 11, 2021
Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. A few days after Muslim migrants firebombed an 800-year-old Swedish church twice over the course of four days once on Jan. 20, 2021 and another on Jan. 24 a Feb 4 report came out saying that 829 “hate crimes” against churches in Sweden have been reported between just 2012-2018, or about 138 attacks on average every year. Thus the churches of Sweden join those of other Western European nations that have taken in sizeable Muslim migrants. In France, for example, two churches are vandalized every day. According to a 2019 PI-News report, 1,063 attacks on Christian churches or symbols (crucifixes, icons, statues) were registered in France in 2018. This represents a 17 percent increase compared to the previous year (2017), when 878 attacks were registered meaning such attacks are only going from bad to worse.
It was Robert Horry, the NBA basketball legend, who once said that âpressure can burst a pipe or pressure can make a diamond.â
It is a quote that sprung to mind on Thursday as England head coach Eddie Jones named his starting XV to face France at Twickenham on Saturday.
The pressure has been building on England after two defeats in the opening three rounds of the Guinness Six Nations Championship.
And with Grand Slam-chasing France arriving into London with the kind of swagger we have not seen from Les Bleus for over a decade, it feels like England have reached the point where this year will be defined by how they react to that pressure on Saturday.
Tony Bravo March 11, 2021Updated: March 11, 2021, 5:42 pm
Artwork by Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso is seen March 2 at the “Calder-Picasso” exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. Photo: Lea Suzuki, The Chronicle
In their groundbreaking 20th century works, Alexander Calder and Pablo Picasso changed the way art approached the subject of space itself. Picasso’s paintings explode concepts of line and dimension, explored through both abstraction and representation in his art. Calder’s signature mobiles and wire sculptures make the viewer consider the area between materials as well as their ever-changing movability.
Although born only 17 years apart and moving in many of the same modern art circles, the two artists only met four times in their lives. Their most significant intersection was in 1937, at the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair, where Calder’s “Mercury Fountain” made its debut and Picasso famously hung his antiwar masterp