The Alpha-Bestiary
L is for Leander,
The lizard from Laramie
Who slithered and slid along the muddy Platte Through rattler’s burrow and sage hen’s nest, Through coyote den and prairie dog town,
All to win the love of a Lincoln lady lizard.
Alas! The lady was no lady, not in the usual sense, Though with lizards it’s hard even for lizards to tell;
The Lincoln lady proved a lusty lizard lad
So Leander languished alone and lost in Lincoln, Until a passing Lamborghini laid him low.
L is for Leander,
The lizard from Laramie
Who slithered and slid along the muddy Platte Through rattler’s burrow and sage hen’s nest, Through coyote den and prairie dog town,
All to win the love of a Lincoln lady lizard.
Alas! The lady was no lady, not in the usual sense, Though with lizards it’s hard even for lizards to tell;
The Lincoln lady proved a lusty lizard lad
So Leander languished alone and lost in Lincoln, Until a passing Lamborghini laid him low.
Laramie, Wyoming, was founded in the mid-1860s as a tent city near the Overland Stage Line route (the Union Pacific portion of the 1st transcontinental railroad in the US), and just north of Ft. Sanders. It was named after 1 of the 1st Europeans to visit the area, Jacques LaRamie, a French-Canadian trapper who disappeared in the Laramie Mountains in the late 1810s. Construction crews reached the site on 4 May 1868, and regular passenger service began on 10 May, as more permanent structures were being built.
ReplyDeleteW. T. Donovan founded Lancaster in 1856. In 1859 the inhabitants organized as a county, and Donovan had the town chosen as the county seat. Since 1854 the capital of the Nebraska Territory had been Omaha, but by the late 1860s most of the territory's population lived south of the Platte River, but the southern part of the territory was interested in being annexed to Kansas, so the territorial legislature voted to relocate the capital when statehood was achieved in 1867. Since the area south of the Platte had been sympathetic to the Confederate cause in the Civil War, l Legislator J. N. H. Patrick tried to prevent the move by having the future capital city named after president Abraham Lincoln, who had led the war that defeated the Confederacy, but his ploy failed. Lancaster only had 30 residents but was chosen as the new capital and renamed Lincoln. By the end of 1868 it had grown to 500.
Parthogenesis ("virgin" + "creation" in Greek) is asexual reproduction in which growth and development of embryos occur without fertilization; in animals, it is the development of an embryo from an unfertilized egg cell. Most lizards reproduce sexually, although they are able to reproduce asexually, but whiptail lizards (of the Aspidoscelis genus) are all females and celibate. They have 2 X the number of chromosomes as other lizards and maintain heterozygosity (genetic diversity) by not recombining homologous chromosomes.
Ferruccio Lamborghini, the son of viticulturists, entered the automotive business in 1947 when he used surplus parts from military vehicles to build "Carioca" tractors, based on Morris truck engines augmented with a fuel atomizer he invented which allowed them to start with petrol and then switch to cheaper diesel fuel. The following year he set up Lamborghini Trattori to make agricultural equipment. In 1963 he decided to use his tractor components in luxury sports cars and founded Automobili Ferruccio Lamborghini S.p.A. But he ran into financial difficulties and sold Trattori in 1972, then sold 51% of Automobili to Georges-Henri Rossetti; in 1974 he sold his remaining 49% to Rossetti's friend René Leimer and returned to growing wine grapes. The company went bankrupt in 1978 and passed through a number of hand before its acquisition by the Volkswagen Group in 1998.