Lifestyle

Today’s LL Study Guide ranges from Pablo Picasso’s tongue-twisting baptismal name and his unprecedented 90th‑birthday honor at the Louvre, to the tiny club of G‑rated Best Picture nominees standing in contrast to the X‑rated winner Midnight Cowboy. We also visit Leverkusen on the Rhine, where works team Bayer 04 Leverkusen finally shed their “Neverkusen” curse under Xabi Alonso while backed by pharmaceutical giant Bayer, and dig into the rise of fast‑fashion juggernaut Shein from its ZZKKO and SheInside days. Rounding things out: the conservation rescue of Texas Longhorn cattle by the U.S. Forest Service, the University of Texas mascot Bevo, and how Frank Sinatra’s “doo-be-doo-be-doo” scat on “Strangers in the Night” gave Scooby‑Doo his name and a half‑century of pop‑culture life. ...

Podcast Script Welcome back to the LL Study Guide daily review. I’m glad you’re here. We’re walking through another six-pack of questions, and today’s set really hops around: modern art, movie ratings, German soccer, fast fashion, Texas cattle, and a cartoon Great Dane named by Frank Sinatra. So if you felt a little whiplash playing this match day, that’s totally fair. As always, if you want the full write-up, extra examples, and links, you can check the study notes on our website at L L Study Guide dot com. I’ll just hit the key stories and connections here so you can listen on the go. ...

This match day moves quickly between big science, big media, and big money, anchored by six very “global” answers. At one end you have CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, a 27‑km ring under the French–Swiss border that is the world’s largest and highest‑energy particle accelerator and the site of the 2012 Higgs boson discovery; its superconducting magnets are cooled to an ultra‑cold 1.9 K, even colder than the 2.7 K cosmic microwave background of deep space. At the other end you have the Strait of Hormuz, the narrow passage between Iran and Oman that connects the Gulf of Oman to the Persian Gulf and carries roughly 20% of global oil flows, making it one of the most strategically sensitive waterways on Earth. ...

Podcast Script Welcome back to the LL Study Guide review podcast for another match day. I’m glad you’re here. We’re going to walk through all six questions from this day, hit the correct answers, and give you just enough background so the facts actually stick the next time you see something similar. If you want the full write‑ups, extra links, and source notes, those are all waiting for you in the study notes on our website at L L study guide dot com. Here in the audio, we’ll keep things tight and conversational so you can listen on the go. ...

This match day leans heavily on names that carry a lot of history: Indonesia’s planned capital Nusantara (and its long‑time capital Jakarta), the rowing town of Henley-on-Thames, America’s Yellowstone, Wall Street’s “Magnificent Seven,” the hyper‑polysemous word set, and the entertainment juggernaut known simply as SNL. Indonesia is in the midst of relocating its capital from Jakarta to the purpose‑built city of Nusantara in East Kalimantan under the 2022 State Capital Act; Henley-on-Thames hosts the prestigious Henley Royal Regatta and lends its name to the Henley shirt; Yellowstone National Park, named from the French rendering Roche Jaune of the Yellowstone River, was established in 1872 as the first U.S. national park and is widely considered the first in the world; Michael Hartnett of Bank of America borrowed the title of the 1960 Western The Magnificent Seven to label the mega‑cap tech stocks Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla; Guinness World Records and the OED highlight set as having 430 senses in the 1989 second edition; and NBC’s 2025 documentary Ladies & Gentlemen…50 Years of SNL Music makes explicit how central “SNL” has become as a three‑letter brand. ...

This match day pulled together a wide range of knowledge: the structure of the Hawaiian alphabet, a live unfolding constitutional crisis in Venezuela, early‑2000s diet culture, classic TV history, camera technology, and contemporary film casting. The ʻokina question pushes you into phonetics and indigenous language preservation—Hawaiian officially treats the glottal stop as a full consonant and one of 13 letters in its modern alphabet, which is why you see it in spellings like Hawaiʻi and Oʻahu. ...

Podcast Script Welcome back to the LL Study Guide daily review. I’m glad you’re here. We’re talking through Match Day 18 from season 107, and this one is very “name heavy” – country names, town names, brand-y nicknames, and even a tiny three-letter TV institution. As always, if you want links, maps, videos, or deeper dives, all the study notes are waiting for you at llstudyguide.com. Think of this as your quick audio walkthrough, and the website as your deep reference library. ...

Podcast Script Welcome back to the LL Study Guide daily review. I’m glad you’re here. Today we’re walking through Match Day 17 from season 107. We’ve got a really nice mix: Hawaiian language, breaking political news, early‑2000s diet culture, classic TV, camera history, and a very busy Guatemalan movie star. As always, if you want the full write‑ups, timelines, and links, you can check the study notes on our website at llstudyguide.com. What we’ll do here is hit the key facts, then give you a couple of patterns so you can recognize similar clues next time. ...

Match Day 12 Overview This match day covered a wide sweep of domains: physical geography and meteorology (trade winds in Earth’s atmospheric circulation), Latin popular music history (the rise of reggaeton), American sports trivia (Johnny “Football” Manziel and Don “Donnie Baseball” Mattingly), a core physics/mathematics concept (degrees of freedom), modern animated film canon (Frozen and Olaf), and post‑16 education in England (GCSEs and sixth form). A common thread is how names encode history and structure. Trade winds get their name from the oceanic trade routes they enabled for sailing ships; reggaeton’s very label emerged in Puerto Rico to describe a fusion of reggae en español, Jamaican dancehall, and hip hop built on the dembow beat; Don Mattingly’s “Donnie Baseball” mirrors Johnny Manziel’s “Johnny Football”; “degrees of freedom” compactly describe how many independent coordinates a system needs; and “sixth form” designates the final, A‑level‑focused stage of English secondary education after GCSEs. ...

Podcast Script Welcome back to the LL Study Guide podcast for another quick match day review. This is Match Day 12, and we’re going to walk through all six questions together. As always, if you want to go deeper, all the detailed study notes, links, and extra examples are waiting for you on our website at llstudyguide.com. Think of this episode as your friendly audio recap, and the study notes on the site as your deeper dive when you’ve got a screen in front of you. ...