Insight: Let the laughs begin

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Back in the 1970s, I spent a good deal of time going to the movies and despite the lack of reclining stadium seats, Dolby surround sound, personalized concierge concessions and $18 tickets, I survived the experience.

'Foul Play' starring Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase is among
Ed Pierce's favorite comedy films of the 1970s.
COURTESY PHOTO   

I would attend midnight showings on weekends, drive-in marathons, and Saturday afternoon double-features. On most excursions to the neighborhood theater, I could buy a movie ticket, a Coke and a large popcorn combined for less than $10.

Recently I was asked about my favorite films from the 1970s era. I told them it was a very good question because it’s hard for me to pin that down as I watched so many movies in theaters during that time. Off the top of my head, I rattled off “A Clockwork Orange,” “Rocky,” “The Godfather,” “American Graffiti,” “Bound for Glory” and “Carrie,” but having more time to think about it, I might have answered differently.

Comedies have always appealed to me and the 1970s produced some of the very best which I vividly recall 50-some years later.

At the old Serf Theatre in Las Vegas, New Mexico in January 1972, I watched “Kelly’s Heroes,” an action caper set in World War II. I typically didn’t associate Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas with a comedy, but Donald Sutherland was hilarious and so were Don Rickles, Carroll O’Connor and Gavin McLeod. I was amazed at how much I laughed during this movie about a group of GIs trying to extract Nazi gold bars from a bank behind enemy lines in France. It was also the first time I remember seeing Donald Sutherland on the big screen.

While visiting home over Christmas Break from college in December 1972, I watched “What’s Up Doc?” at the Lowe’s Theater in Pittsford, New York. Ryan O’Neal, Barbra Streisand, Kenneth Mars, and Madeline Kahn are part of an insane screwball plot involving identical plaid bags, stolen Top Secret classified documents, a valuable jewel collection and a bunch of igneous rocks. It’s a madcap whirlwind ride through the streets of San Francisco and contains an assortment of oddball characters including Sorrell Booke (who went on to play Boss Hogg on television’s “The Dukes of Hazzard”) and John Hillerman (Higgins on TV’s “Magnum P.I.”).

The night that “Blazing Saddles” debuted in February 1974, I was watching it with friends at the Highland Theater in Albuquerque, New Mexico and couldn’t stop laughing. Harvey Korman, Cleavon Little, Gene Wilder and Madeline Kahn were perfectly cast in this classic directed by the legendary Mel Brooks. Former NFL football star Alex Karras as Mongo cracked me up too. The scene sitting around the campfire eating beans remains one of the best things that I’ve ever seen while attending a movie in my lifetime.

I didn’t know anything about “Slap Shot” when I saw it at the Coronado 4 movie theater in Albuquerque in April 1977. Starring Paul Newman as the coach of a losing minor league hockey team in West Virginia, the film becomes even funnier once the general manager, played by Strother Martin, adds the three “Hanson” brothers to the team. They inject craziness into a team going through the motions of a losing season. Between hockey fights and brawls before the puck is even dropped during their games, the Hansons inspire the team which is on the verge of folding.

In August 1978, I watched “National Lampoon's Animal House” at a U.S. Army and Air Force Exchange theater on Drake Kaserne in Frankfurt, Germany. Serving in the U.S. Air Force at the time, this movie brought me back to my college fraternity days. I identify with Tom Hulce in this film as the new fraternity pledge as I was back in 1971. John Belushi, Kevin Bacon, Tim Matheson, Steven Furst, Bruce McGill, Mark Metcalf, Peter Riegert, Karen Allen, Verna Bloom and John Vernon all deliver excellent performances. It’s non-stop laughs and remains one of those films I can watch today and find something new to laugh about. It still makes me chuckle to think about the toga party in this film.

The following week in August 1978 at the very same U.S. Army and Air Force Exchange theater on Drake Kaserne in Frankfurt, Germany, I watched “Foul Play” with Goldie Hawn and Chevy Chase. It’s a wacky story about a kooky librarian who is being stalked by a strange cult looking to kill the pope who is visiting San Francisco. Hawn picks up a hitchhiker who slips something into her purse and dies but not before telling her to “Beware the Dwarf.” That sets into motion a chain of bizarre events and she meets Chase, a detective who is investigating. Burgess Meredith and Billy Barty are also in the cast, but the scene stealer is Dudley Moore as an inept ladies’ man who keeps showing up at inopportune times. I can laugh just thinking about some of the Murphy bed scenes with Moore. The 1970s remains for me a Golden Age of classic films and a time when it was highly affordable to watch new movies at the theater and no screen flashes from smart phones lighting up the darkened theater. It was a different era and one I’d go back to in a heartbeat.

Andy Young: Keeping up with the Joneses

By Andy Young

The National Football League Players Association has filed a grievance on behalf of Christian Wilkins, a defensive tackle who has been released by the Las Vegas Raiders.

I have no interest in the brutal business of professional football or in the Raiders, who last time that I cared were calling Oakland home. I’m guessing Mr. Wilkins won’t starve though, since $84.75 million of the four-year, $110 million contract he signed in March of 2024 was guaranteed.

What caught my eye was the reason for the grievance. The NFLPA contends the Raiders are attempting to void the contract of an injured player, an action that is not only reprehensible, but also against the rules.

Mr. Wilkins is currently physically unable to perform due to his slow recovery from surgery to repair a Jones fracture.

What? You’ve never heard of a Jones fracture? Don’t feel bad. Neither had I.

A Jones fracture occurs at the base of the fifth metatarsal bone, which is on the outside of the foot. It can be caused by the sorts of repetitive stress professional athletes, particularly large ones, put on their bodies, and recovering from surgery on it is difficult, since the bone has a limited blood supply. Numerous NFL players, including current stars Derrick Henry and Deebo Samuel, have sustained Jones fractures, as has basketball superstar Keven Durant and more than two dozen other prominent NBA players.

What I want to know is who the Jones Fracture was named after. There are plenty of candidates, as “Jones” is the fifth-most common surname in the United States, behind only Smith, Johnson, Williams, and Brown.

It’s natural to assume that the first to sustain such an injury was an athlete, given the constant stress they put on their feet. Could the original Jones fracture have been suffered by Sam or K.C. Jones, two key members of the dynastic Boston Celtics teams of the 1950s and 1960s? And if not one of them, how about Caldwell, Wil, Major, or Charles Jones, four large brothers who played basketball for Albany (Georgia) State University before launching NBA careers of varying lengths. It’s not unlikely a basketball player was the first to suffer this particular injury since no fewer than 118 men (and at least 10 women) named Jones have played the sport professionally.

But then, it could be one of the 145 Joneses who’ve played major league baseball, or one of the 352, including seven Mikes, five Davids, four Willies, three Rods, two Victors, a Buddha, a Pacman, a Deacon, a Too-Tall, a Spike, and a Tebucky who’ve played in the National Football League.

Could Shirley Jones have fallen off a stage while dancing in Oklahoma, Carousel, or The Music Man, or during a taping of an episode of The Partridge Family? Maybe John Paul Jones tripped while declaring “I have not yet begun to fight,” during a memorable battle in British waters in 1779. Could it have been Davy Jones while on tour with The Monkees? Grace Jones tipping over when her hair got too heavy on one side? Carolyn Jones while performing a stunt as Morticia in an episode of the Addams Family? Terry Jones of Monty Python’s Flying Circus? James Earl Jones while voicing Darth Vader? Tommy Lee Jones? Catherine Zeta-Jones? Quincy Jones, or one of his daughters, Rashida or Kidada?

Okay. The Jones Fracture was named for … drum roll … Sir Robert Jones, a British doctor who first described the injury in 1902 after he himself sustained one while … dancing!

So there. And shame on those of you who pooh-poohed the possibility of the Jones fracture originating with Shirley while she danced. <

Rookie Mama: It’s automatic, it’s systematic – Why it’s a smart home system

By Michelle Cote
The Rookie Mama

“Rosie is stuck” – Our Google Home device.

No sadder words had been uttered in a long time.

If you’ve watched the Wild Robot or Wall-E films, you’d understand our penchant for curiously treating our ‘smart’ devices as family.

Perhaps we brought this phenomenon on ourselves because we name the darn things and talk to them, or conceivably it’s due to their automation and task completion that has become such an integral part of our day-to-day, each playing its role among the wild in the fanciful Cote homestead.

Alarms, LED lights, music, water usage and conservation – we named that one ’Mario the Plumber’ – There’s a smart-commodity for every little thing, each designed to assist in its own way.

Xennials and Millenials may remember the quirky Disney flick ‘Smart House’, released nearly three decades ago – quirky in that the computerized-home-experiment-gone-wrong came in the form of the ‘Married… with Children’ matriarch as a ‘90s AI, to the tune of ‘Slam Dunk da Funk’ boy band soundtrack fame (If you know, you know.)

Despite all that, the dated movie still serves as a forerunner of sorts to today’s smart device life.

Its 1999 release ahead of all that futuristic Y2K panic may not be coincidence.

But I digress – Back to Rosie.

Rosie was our Roomba robot vacuum, who dutifully cleaned our floors each morning via automation for more than a decade.

Despite our seemingly impeccable floors, dear Rosie humbled us each day when we emptied out the daily dirt and dust – There was always lots of it.

Those older than the Xennial/Millenial circuit will recall her namesake from The Jetsons – Now that’s a robot ahead of her time.

Sadly, our Rosie fell beyond repair in recent months, and we knew it was time to send her to the robot malt shop in the sky, also known as the Roomba recycling program.

The boys and I sadly thanked sweet old Rosie for her service and shipped her off, even as she rallied and tried to whirr her wheels to life a last time, to no avail.

Days passed; we purchased a new, more powerful and bells-and-whistles-y robot vacuum whom after much debate was aptly named R2-D2.

As Rosie had been, R2 was automated to vacuum our home on a schedule.

And when my husband accidentally commanded our Google Home device to start ‘Rosie’ – rather than ‘R2’ – Google simply responded that she was stuck, a solemn reminder that our beloved robot vacuum of yore was with us no more, and somewhere far, far away where the wild robots are.

My husband and I weren’t instant embracers of the smart-everythings.

We’ve been hesitant to accept it, as we feared losing some autonomy.

There are enough brothers in this house; we didn’t need another Big Brother.

A few years ago, we found ourselves needing to upgrade our wireless internet, and these updates came with smart speakers by happenstance.

Not only did we come to appreciate this added bonus, but we found the speakers to be useful – they are great at settling debates, sharing random trivia facts and knock-knock jokes, after all.

Then, our new heat splits came with full thermostat control via phone app, and this has been staggeringly useful as well.

As a busy mama who never has enough free hands, the hands-free commanding of these simple directives has been extraordinarily helpful.

There’s no fancy feeling like asking my Christmas tree to turn off its lights on a December evening.

What futuristic world is this place?

These smart home devices are assistive, certainly.

But our family remains old-school at heart, and by relying on these devices for the mundane, we are all the more afforded the mini luxuries to do what matters most.

Being aided by these attainable and useful technologies that didn’t exist until recent years – certainly not affordably if they did – allows us to thrive in all the old-school things that matter most.

We spend time having meaningful conversation, reading paperbacks, playing board games, camping, swimming, cannonball-dousing, and taking part in the wonderfully tangible pastimes of which core memories are truly made.

We’re grateful for the technology of assistance, the Rosies, the Marios, the R2-D2s of the smart home world so we can do what we truly love.

And without further ado, you should have a dance party of your own to ‘Slam Dunk da Funk’ like it’s 1999.

You won’t regret it.

­­– Michelle Cote lives in southern Maine with her husband and four sons, and enjoys camping, distance running, biking, gardening, road trips to new regions, arts and crafts, soccer, and singing to musical showtunes – often several or more at the same time! <

Insight: Friendship worth remembering

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

After my brother was born in 1957, our family moved the next summer from a smaller home in Gates, New York to a brand-new larger house in Brighton, New York. The Evans Farm subdivision had hundreds of homes and was a jackpot of places to go trick or treating on Halloween.

The parents of a young man who Ed Pierce befriended 
years ago gave him three of their son's first-edition
Hardy Boys mystery books from the 1920s and 1930s.
PHOTO BY ED PIERCE 

While in second grade in 1960, my mother walked around the neighborhood with me on Halloween as I was only 6 but soon to be 7 that December. She helped me to create my Halloween costume, a re-creation of Phineas T. Bluster, the Mayor of Doodyville on the popular Saturday morning children’s TV show Howdy Doody. I wore a yellow jacket with a red plaid vest with cotton balls my mom fashioned to resemble the white bushy eyebrows of the mayor.

As we walked from house to house down Glenhill Drive in Brighton, we turned onto Carverdale Drive and then left onto Del Rio Drive and into an older section of the subdivision. I rang the doorbell at the first house on that street and to my surprise, a tall young man opened the front door and grinned at me as he carried a dish of candy bars.

His mother and father soon joined him, and they all laughed at my costume. They asked my name, where I went to school and how old I was. The young man, who was their son, was incredibly shy and smiled a lot, but otherwise he had very little to say.

The young man's parents, Jeanne and Fred Dixon, told my mother that their son’s name was Franklin Dixon and that he was 26. As we started to leave, I turned around in their driveway and saw Franklin in the window waving to me. I waved back to him and when we reached the sidewalk, I asked my mother why Franklin didn’t say anything. She told me to mind my own business.

About a week later I was riding my bicycle through the neighborhood and rode past the Dixon’s house as they were outside raking leaves. I stopped and talked to Frank’s father, who told me that Franklin was mentally disabled and had been mute for his entire life.

He was an only child, and his parents had sent him to school when he was young, but other kids had teased him terribly and constantly made fun of him. Rather than subject him further to that, they kept him home and his aunt, a retired teacher, gave him reading and math lessons.

Some days after school when I finished my homework, I would get my baseball mitt and go play catch with Franklin. Or we would throw around a football in his front yard. He never said a word but laughed and smiled all the time.

The next spring, my teacher Miss Cross asked students in our class to choose a book from the school library to read and when we were finished with it, she asked us to stand in the front of the classroom and tell everybody about it. I chose the book “Quest of the Snow Leopard” by Roy Chapman Andrews. It was about an expedition into Tibet and the Yunan Province of China, and a killer snow leopard who escapes capture by hunters.

But while I was choosing that book from the library shelf, I glanced over at the books with authors whose last name started with “D” and spotted a series of books by an author with the last name of Dixon.

When I had read “Quest of the Snow Leopard” and during our next class visit to the school library, I checked out the only book in the F.W. Dixon series that was currently available. It was called “The Secret of the Old Mill.” I discovered that the mystery series was written by an author named Franklin W. Dixon and was about two fictional teen brothers who were amateur detectives, Frank and Joe Hardy. They lived in the city of Bayport with their father, detective Fenton Hardy, their mother, Laura Hardy and their Aunt Gertrude. They solve mysteries along with their friends Chet Morton, Biff Hooper, Jerry Gilroy, Phil Cohen, Tony Prito, Callie Shaw, and Chet’s sister Iola Morton.

One afternoon while playing catch with Franklin, I jokingly asked him if he had written the Hardy Boys book series since his name was the same as the author’s. He shook his head no at me. His father had overheard that and pulled me aside and told me that Franklin W. Dixon was a pen name used by a variety of different authors who were part of a collective team that wrote the Hardy Boys novels.

On Labor Day in 1961, Franklin set off on his bike to get an ice cream cone at a new Carvel shop that had opened on Monroe Avenue in Brighton. A distracted driver swerved suddenly and struck him from behind on Edgewood Avenue. He tumbled off his bike and hit his head on a large rock at the end of a driveway and died instantly.

Several weeks later, Frankin’s father knocked on our door, thanked me for being his son’s friend and gave me three of Franklin’s books, which were all first edition Hardy Boys books from the 1920s and 1930s. I keep those books in my office at home in honor of Franklin’s memory to this very day. <

Andy Young: There’s no accounting for taste

By Andy Young

Why do some people adore foods that others detest? I love beets and prunes, though perhaps not at the same time. The same goes for bran muffins, dried apricots, ripe watermelon, Pink Lady apples, and several other items I actively savor every time I have them. I cannot fathom how anyone could possibly dislike these culinary delights, yet I know plenty of people who wrinkle up their noses at just the mention of them. I think grape juice is fantastic, but others complain it’s too sweet.

On the other hand, many people love chocolate ice cream, but I don’t. The same goes for coffee, and also beer. But at least those beverages don’t drive me from a room. Anything topped with nasty, foul-smelling melted cheese does, though. I find that particular stench nearly as off-putting as tobacco smoke. Peanut butter is another stinky food item I could do without.

Certain condiments (ketchup and mayonnaise, to name two) render any food(s) inedible for me. Yet other people, including some in my own family, use more ketchup on their fries than I do of milk on my cereal.

Potatoes can be delicious mashed, baked, roasted, scalloped, boiled, French fried, or in soups, but the best and most convenient way to enjoy them is as chips. But let’s be clear; any chip that’s designed to taste like salt and vinegar, barbecue sauce, sour cream and onion, dill pickle, lime and chili, ketchup or cheddar cheese is, in my opinion, useful only as salty compost, or as crunchy bait for rat traps.

There is, in my view, only one appropriate flavor for a chip: potato. Period. The best ones, commonly known as “wavy” chips are the ones with big ridges in them. “Rippled” (small-ridged) chips aren’t as good; they’re too salty. Don’t ask me why; they just are. As for regular, ridge-free potato chips, they always seem a little greasy to me. They’re uninspired and uninspiring.

And on the subject of snack foods, what’s up with bagged popcorn? You’re supposed to pop the stuff yourself; that way it’s warm, and you can add as much (or as little) salt and butter as you want. People who eat bagged, pre-popped popcorn have no sense of taste or are just plain lazy. And don’t get me started about flavored popcorn.

At least four of the five senses play a significant role in how people decide what they are and aren’t willing to ingest. The exception involves hearing. I can’t think of anything edible that makes alluring or off-putting sounds, unless one counts the shriek that comes out of a lobster getting boiled alive. For those to whom texture (touch) is important, items like mushrooms and certain types of seafood are, if you’ll pardon the expression, untouchables.

Taste and smell are similar but can have very different effects when it comes to food. For me there aren’t many aromas more alluring than beef sizzling on a backyard grill. I haven’t eaten red meat in years, but I’m still drawn to the smell of it cooking. I find the fragrance that emanates from a steakhouse nearly as pleasing olfactorily as an orange-purple sunset is visually.

Finally, who in their right mind willingly puts hot sauce (or similar elixirs) on items they intend to eat? Hellfire Hot Sauce boasts of containing 6.66 million SHU (Scoville Heat Units). To me the only thing less desirable than eating something which scorches the esophagus en route to one’s digestive system is one that burns even hotter as it exits, a seemingly horrific sensation one can safely assume 6.66 million SHU hot sauce provides. <

Insight: 48 years and counting

By Ed Pierce
Managing Editor

Seems hard to believe that this week it will be 48 years since I completed my U.S. Air Force basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. Where has all the time gone?

Ed Pierce at Lackland Air Force Base during U.S.
Air Force Basic Training in July 1977.
COURTESY PHOTO 

Members of our Squadron 3723 Flight 610 arrived in San Antonio back in June 1977 for eight weeks of learning about what it meant to serve in the military. That first night, we gathered outside our dormitory waiting for everyone’s plane to land and to join us so we could begin training.

A friendly sergeant who waited outside with us called our group “Rainbows.” He said that term was derived from the fact we were all dressed in different colored clothing, like every shade of the rainbow.

Once everyone was there, another not so friendly sergeant joined us and told us we were going to play a game called “Pick ‘Em Up, Put Em Down” to get us accustomed to taking orders. For the next few hours, we lifted our suitcases upon his command and put them down when he instructed us to do so. It was boring and monotonous, but I adapted and avoided being screamed at for not following a command.

At the end of that drill, we were instructed to proceed into the dormitory and choose a cot. We slept head to toe, alternating positioning with each cot. The gruff training sergeant then told us we had five minutes to use the restroom, remove the whiskers from our faces, and pop into bed. That was an easy one for me as I was clean-shaven and at the age of 23, I couldn’t grow much of a beard or mustache at all. A frantic shaving rush ensued and by the next morning when I woke up and looked around the room, I saw many of my fellow trainees sporting significant shaving cuts and looking like they had gone through a hamburger grinder.

The person sleeping in the cot next to me was called out after the sergeant looked at his pillow and face. He had more than 40 deep facial hacks from his razor and his pillow resembled the underside of steak packaging at the supermarket. He told the training sergeant that he was frightened by his command to remove his whiskers, and we never saw him again as he was discharged for military incompatibility.

We marched as a group everywhere including to the barber shop to have our hair buzzed off, getting our first uniforms to wear or to the mess hall for breakfast, lunch and dinner. While being measured for a uniform, I was given pants two sizes too large but hesitated to complain out of fear that I could meet the same fate as what happened to the hamburger-faced trainee.

Rather than remain in the dorm on Sunday morning when we weren’t training, I joined many fellow flight members at church. Afterward several food trucks were in the parking lot, and you could unwind and just be yourself and socialize with your friends for a while there.

Our weekdays were spent marching around in 95-degree heat. On one occasion, the training sergeant noticed me at the back of a formation, and he pulled me aside. He told me that I better get in step or else I would face a “setback” or a return to day one of Basic Training. That was all it took for me to rapidly dedicate myself to always be in step during the three-mile marches.

In the classroom, we learned about the Uniform Code of Military Justice and basic hygiene principles, and what was expected of us as U.S. airmen. In the dormitory, we were shown how to make a bed using neat and sharp hospital corners. While demonstrating precisely what he wanted to see by showing us himself, the training sergeant yanked back the covers of a trainee’s bed to demonstrate but instead discovered a puddle of pee. That trainee was given a discharge for military incompatibility.

Each morning our dorm was inspected, and demerits were assigned for shoes under the beds not being aligned properly, messy lockers, filthy bars of soap, poorly made beds and uniforms not hung up the right way. Those demerits resulted in extra running drills for the entire flight or a smaller amount of time that we could use the telephone to call home after dinner once a week.

Eventually after weeks of racking up demerit after demerit, we came together and determined that we all needed to leave a bar of unused soap in our lockers. We instead all used a jug of liquid soap carefully hidden away in a shower vent. when we showered. A team of the best show aligners, best bed-makers, best locker arrangers, and best uniform hangers handled those tasks for everyone and there were no more demerits.

On Aug. 1, 1977, our training instructor bid us farewell and put us on a bus for tech school. My bus, bound for Sheppard Air Force Base in Wichita Falls, Texas, pulled out of the dorm parking lot and then suddenly stopped. A trainee had given the middle finger to the training instructor out the rear window as the bus was leaving. He was removed from the bus and given a “setback” and had to do the eight weeks of basic training all over again. <

Andy Young: No kangaroos, but plenty of Stachelschweins

By Andy Young

I love getting unusual postcards, which my niece knows. That’s why, while traveling in Europe recently, she took the time to send me one featuring a yellow sign declaring, “No Kangaroos in Austria,” with the very recognizable outline of the Australian marsupial in its center.

The card made me smile, but it also made me wonder: how many of the locals, the majority of whom speak German, actually get the joke? After all, 97 percent of Austrians speak German; it’s the mother tongue of 93 percent of them.

What, I wondered, is the German word for this animal that to my knowledge is native to only one continent on Earth, and one that’s a very long way from Europe? But then, “Kangaroo” seems like a pretty uncommon word. How different could it be in other languages?

Well, thanks to an online translator, I now know that känguru is German for Kangaroo. It’s kangourou in French, canguro in Spanish and Italian, kangur in Polish, kinghar in Arabic, kangoro in Farsi, kengúra in Icelandic, and kanguru in Turkish. It’s also two symbols in Chinese that neither my computer (nor The Windham Eagle’s, apparently) has on its keyboard, although the approximate pronunciation is, allegedly, Dàishǔ.

But for my money, the languages with the best word for “kangaroo” are, among others, Swahili, Samoan, Hmong, Dinka, and Jamaican Patois, all of which refer to what we English speakers call a kangaroo as a “kangaroo.”

Another animal most Austrians would likely see only in zoos is what the folks in Turkey call a zürafa. This long-necked creature is a girafe to the French, a jirafa to Spanish speakers, a giraffa in Italian, a giraf in Danish, and a sjiraff in Norwegian. It’s a shame most standard laptop keyboards lack the capability of composing in Vietnamese, Greek, or Hindi, because the term for Giraffe in each of those languages is a real mouthful.

Thankfully not every word system is so complicated when it comes to identifying the animal with nature’s longest neck. For example, in German and in Filipino, the word for giraffe is “giraffe.”

If life were truly just, only linguists from the region unusual animals are native to would have the right to name these creatures. That’s why fair-minded people should refer to what we currently call a panda as a Xióngmāo, which is what locals call the adorable, rotund bamboo-munchers that exist in the wild solely in the mountainous region of southwestern China.

But anglophones aren’t the only group arrogant enough to make up our own words for animals not native to where we live. The word “panda” literally translates to “panda” in, among other languages, Spanish, French, Dutch, German, Turkish, Danish, Kurdish, Hungarian, Portuguese, Romanian, Javanese, Japanese, and Susu, a tongue spoken in West Africa that’s one of the official languages of Guinea. Don’t use the word “Susu” in Indonesia, though. Its meaning there is different, and quite vulgar, apparently.

Common sense dictates that one should never startle a mofeta in Mexico, a mouffette in Quebec, a haisunäätä in Helsinki, or a skunk in Sweden, Germany, Samoa, and every English-speaking nation on the planet. Similarly, smart people know better than to pet an animal known as a yamārashi in Japanese, a dikobraz in Russian, a puerco espín in Spanish, a stachelschwein in German, a porc-épic in French, a kirpi in Uzbek and Azerbaijani, a pokio in Hawaiian, a porkopi in Papiamento, and a porcupine in English.

It’s too bad that porcupines live where my niece just visited, because I’ll bet “No Stachelschweins in Austria” postcards would sell like hotcakes in Vienna to tourists and locals alike! <