In Popular Culture
John Linnell, of the rock band They Might Be Giants, reportedly wrote the song "Bee of the Bird of the Moth" (on their album The Else) after he saw a "hummingbird moth", presumably one of the members of this family that resembles a hummingbird.
Edgar Allan Poe includes a sphinx moth in his short story, "The Sphinx". The main character mistakenly thinks that the moth on a window is a huge monster. Much to his surprise, his friend points out that it is in fact very close and not on a hill in the distance.
Read more about this topic: Sphingidae
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“The lowest form of popular culture—lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people’s lives—has overrun real journalism. Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.”
—Carl Bernstein (b. 1944)
“Much of the ill-tempered railing against women that has characterized the popular writing of the last two years is a half-hearted attempt to find a way back to a more balanced relationship between our biological selves and the world we have built. So women are scolded both for being mothers and for not being mothers, for wanting to eat their cake and have it too, and for not wanting to eat their cake and have it too.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)
“When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)