An Italian your guide teaches you everything you need to know about Italian hand gestures.
Enjoy!
https://youtu.be/VpU9jwZ1Rao
An important part of learning a foreign language is also mastering body language.
Sergio, an Italian tour guide, explains to some American tourists all the different hand gestures Italians use in every day conversation.
Unsurprisingly, there’s a lot of them.
Buono!
Antonio Docampo García, founder of the Bodegas Docampo wine company, would have two bottles with lunch and another two with dinner.
Stop training for that marathon and put down the quinoa. According to a 107-year-old Spanish winemaker, the secret to longevity is drinking red wine—a lot of it.
Antonio Docampo, who died last week at the ripe, very old age of 107, regularly drank two full bottles of red wine at lunch and another two bottles at dinner. “He could drink a liter and a half at once and he never drank water,” his son, Miguel Docampo López, told La Voz de Galicia. “When we were both at home we could get through 200 liters of wine a month.” To put that in an American perspective, that’s over 250 bottles.
Docampo supported his drinking regimen by founding his own winery, Bodegas Docampo in Ribeiro. “If he produced 60,000 liters a year he’d keep 3,000 liters for himself,” said his nephew, Jerónimo Docampo. “He always said that was his secret to living so long.” He also regularly took a shot of brandy with his breakfast.
The notion that red wine can help people live longer is nothing new. An article in the New York Times from 2008 cites a study suggesting that an compound called resveratrol found in some red wines increases longevity. Though, it would take about 35 bottles a day to actually make an impact. Still, Docampo’s intake was nothing to sneer at, so maybe the resveratrol is responsible. Or maybe it was genetic. Or maybe just insanely lucky. Whatever the case, take the opportunity tonight to lift a glass of red (or an entire bottle) to señor Docampo.
The Coconut Crab is like something from your nightmares!
IT’S HARD TO go wrong with a hermit crab as your child’s first pet. They’re low maintenance and kinda cute in their own way, plus they’re hypoallergenic, as PetSmart feels the need to point out. But use care when choosing your crab. Whatever you do, don’t pick up Birgus latro, which can grow to a leg span of 3 feet, climb out of your terrarium, and assault the family cat.
Birgus latro is more commonly known as the coconut crab, and it’s the largest terrestrial arthropod in the world (the largest overall being the Japanese spider crab — but that’s a story for another week). Also known as the robber crab due to its curious propensity for stealing silverware and pots and pans, it’s the 9-pound hermit crab PetSmart wouldn’t dare carry, no matter how conveniently hypoallergenic it is.
The coconut crab is endemic to a variety of islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans, though its populations are extremely threatened on some of these thanks to, you guessed it, human tomfoolery. It grows remarkably slowly, taking perhaps 120 years to reach full size, said ecologist Michelle Drew of the Max Planck Institute.
As an arthropod, the coconut crab wears its skeleton on the outside and must shed it as it grows, so once a year it crawls into the safety of a burrow and molts. It’s highly vulnerable once it steps out of this rigid shell, so to hasten the development of new armor it … consumes its old exoskeleton.
It is, in effect, recycling the materials, which are in short supply in its terrestrial environment. Coconut crabs that “are disturbed before they have consumed the entire shell often have soft exoskeletons until they have time to reaccumulate the necessary calcium and other minerals,” Drew said in an email to WIRED.
The crab can grow and molt every year like this for more a century, expanding and expanding like a dying star with claws until it threatens to infringe on the very laws of physics.
“In a water environment you get support from the water that allows you to move with a much heavier shell,” said Drew. “But on land, gravity will play a huge role on how you can move and how heavy you can get. [Coconut crabs] are probably at the limits of what is sustainable given gravity, the weight of the shell, and resources available to them in terms of food and water.”
Feeding this incredible growth is no small task, so the coconut crab eats anything it can get its claws on. It’ll go after fruit, vegetation, and carrion: dead birds and other coconut crabs and such. It has been observed hunting other crabs, and Drew has records of them ambushing young chickens as well as — don’t hate me for this — kittens, like a far less cuddly Alf of the tropics.
