turkey info

The fleshy appendage that hangs over the top of the turkey's beak = the snood.

The appendage that hangs from the turkey's neck = the wattle.

( A philtrum is the indentation between the human nose and upper lip.)

Male turkeys are called toms; females are called hens. Turkey hatchlings are called poults.

Benjamin Franklin favored the turkey over the eagle as the national bird.

The substance in turkey that has been suspected of making diners sleepy after a big Thanksgiving meal is tryptophan.

Thirty percent of the typical commercially grown Thanksgiving turkey is dark meat.

source The Columbus Dispatch November 26, 2009

Nobel Peace Prize - U.S. Presidents

Theodore Roosevelt
Woodrow Wilson
Jimmy Carter
Barack Obama

Shahnameh

The epic story of Iran

source The Columbus Dispatch, section E, November 1, 2009

Acc to Wikipedia poetic opus by Persian poet Ferdowsi @1000 AD
national epic of Persian speaking world
tells mythical and historical past of (Greater) Iran from creation of the world until Islamic conquest of Persia in the 6th century

Chile

In the north is the Atacama Desert, the driest place on Earth.

At the southern tip of Chile's mainland is Punta Arenas, the southernmost city in the world.

Tierra el Fuego is an island divided between Chile and Argentina.

The southernmost point of South America is Cape Horn, a 1,390-feet rock on Horn Island in the Wollaston group, which belongs to Chile.

Chile also claims sovereignty over 482,628 sq. miles of Antarctic territory; the Juan Fernandez Islands (about 400 miles west of the mainland); and Easter Island (about 2,000 miles west)

source: Infoplease.com

highest point

The highest point in Ohio is Campbell Hill in Logan County - 1,549.81 feet

states surrounding Ohio
West Virginia - Spruce Knobb - 4,863 feet
Kentucky - Black Mountain - 4,039 feet
Pennsylvania - Mount Davis - 3,213 feet
Michigan - Mount Arvon - 1,979 feet
Indiana - Hoosier Hill - 1,257 feet


source: The Columbus Dispatch, August 16, 2009
for further info on state high points, visit www.highpointers.org

Acropolis

New Acropolis Museum designed by architect Bernard Tschumi

click here

acronyms

ALS = Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis known as Lou Gehrig's Disease

Progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord

Amyotrophic comes from the Greek language.
"A" means no or negative.
"Myo" refers to muscle.
"Trophic" means nourishment.
No muscle nourishment.

source ALS Association

anaerobes

Germs that live without oxygen

First women

In June 1963, Valentina Tereshkova, a Soviet cosmonaut, became the first woman to fly in space when she orbited Earth 48 times in the spacecraft Vostok 6. A crater on the Moon is named in her honor.

First American woman in space = Sally Ride, 1983

First American woman to earn a medical degree = Elizabeth Blackwell, 1849

First woman to practice law before U.S. Supreme Court = Belva Ann Lockwood, 1879

First woman named U.S. four-star general = Ann Dunwoody, 2008

First woman to run for U.S. president = Vicotria Woodhull, 1872

First African-American woman elected to Congress = Shirley Chisholm

First African-American woman to run for U. S. president = Shirley Chisholm

see: infoplease.com/spot/womensfirsts

Juneteenth

Juneteenth, also known as Freedom Day or Emancipation Day, commemorates the announcement in Texas in 1865 if the abolition of slavery, two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

Trivia

What is a doula?
The word doula is derived from ancient Greek meaning "a woman who serves." The term refers to a trained and experienced professional who provides physical, emotional and informational support to a mother during and just after childbirth.
http://www.dona.org/

At what age did Beethoven become deaf?
Ludwig van Beethoven notified friends of his growing deafness in a letter dated 1801, making him about 31. His deafness increased until, in 1818, he started his "conversation books." which he used for communication with friends.
http://www.lvbeethoven.com/

Why do so many racetracks have "Downs" in the name?
Downs indicates "the treeless, undulation chalk uplands of the south and southeast of England, serving chiefly for pasturage." The names of tracks are apparently influenced by such terrain.
(Oxford English Dictionary)

Where did the names of the scale originate?
"Do re mi fa sol la ti" correspond to the seven notes of the Western diatonic scale. Despite changes through time, the English syllables are traced to about 1000 - when they were developed by monk Guido d'Arrezzo.
(World Book Encyclopedia)

What does the phrase "a cappella" mean?
The style of singing without instrumental accompaniment comes form Italian, meaning "in chapel style."
(Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary) see November 16, 2008 post

source the Columbus Dispatch June 6, 2009

Easter Island

Polynesian island in the relative far east of the Pacific Ocean. 2,360 miles from South America

residents are citizens of Chile

Rapa Nui = name of island

Rapanui = people

Isla de Pascua = Spanish name of the island

Moai = carved figures mad between A.D. 1000 and 1600, busts average 13 feet tall known to islanders as the "living faces"

source The Wall Street Journal May 16-17, 2009 & Wikipedia

Trivia

1. MEDICINE: Which vitamin is essential in blood clotting?
2. U. S. STATES: Which U. S. state has a license plate that proclaims, "Land of Lincoln"?
3. GENERAL KNOWLEDGE: Which one of the seven dwarfs in the film "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" did not have a beard?
4. LITERATURE: who wrote the novel "Interview With the Vampire'?
5. LANGUAGE: What were known as "liberty steaks"during World War I in America?
6. ANIMAL KINGDOM: How many arms does a squid have?
7. HISTORY: Who tried to assassinate George Wallace while he was campaigning for president in 1972?
8. GAMES: What is also known as skeet?
9. MOVIES: How many roles did Peter Sellers play in the movie "Dr. Strangelove"?
10. MEASUREMENTS: How may tablespoons are in one-fourth cup?

1. Vitamin K 2. Illinois 3. Dopey 4. Anne Rice 5. Hamburgers 6. 10 7. Arthur Bremer
8. Trapshooting 9. Three 10. Four

source Kinf Features Synd., Inc. 2009 (Fifi Rodriguez)

Benjamin Netanyahu

Current Israeli prime minister (since March 2009). He also held the position 1996-99 and is the first (and to date only) Israeli prime minister born after the State of Israel's foundation. Netanyahu is chairman of the Likud party. Known as Bibi.

source Time magazine May 18, 2009

NASA

agency's first black administrator retired astronaut Gen. Charles Bolden
the second astronaut to run NASA in its 50-year history (first was Adm. Richard Truly)
appointed May 23, 2009

source The Columbus Dispatch May 24, 2009

APGAR

A score given to a newborn a minute after birth to assess how well an infant makes the transition from womb to room. Babies are assigned a score of 0, 1, or 2 to each of the five categories.
Appearance
Pulse
Grimace
Activity
Respiration
Named for Virginia Apgar ( b. 1909 d. 1974) who developed the test in 1949. Dr. Apgar never made any money from the test. She helped to build anesthesiology into a medical specialty. Dr Apgar became a senior medical official at the March of Dimes in 1959. She wrote a book on birth defects with Joan Beck - Is My Baby All Right?

source - The Wall Street Journal May 26, 2009

The World's 10 Worst Dictators (Parade magazine)

1. Robert Mugabe - Zimbabwe
Age: 85 In power since 1980
Last year's rank: 6

2. Omar al-Bashir - Sudan
Age: 65. In power since 1989
Last year's rank: 2

3. Kim Jong-Il - North Korea
Age: 67 In power since 1994
Last year's rank: 1

4. Than Shwe - Burma (Myanmar)
Age: 76. In power since 1992
Last year's rank: 3

5. King Abdullah - Saudi Arabia
Age: 85 In power since 1995
Last year's rank: 4

6. Hu Jintao - China
Age: 66 In power since 2002
Last year's rank: 5

7. Sayyid Ali Khamenei - Iran
Age: 69 In power since 1989
Last year's rank: 7

8. Isayas Afewerki - Eritrea
Age 63 In power since 1991
Last year's rank: 10

9. Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov - Turkmenistan
Age: 51 In power since 2006
Last year's rank: Unranked

10. Muammar al-Qaddafi - Libya
Age: 66 In power since 1969
Last year's rank 11

source: Parade magazine March 22, 2009
(Parade.com/dictators)

The American Academy of Arts and Letters

The academy was founded more than a century ago, with a mission "to foster and sustain an interest in literature, music and the fine arts." New members are elected after previous members die. There are 250 members.

Current members include Edward Albee, Philip Glass and Toni Morrison.
Past members included Henry Adams, Mark Rothko and Mark Twain.

May 2009 new members are: fiction writers T. Coraghessan Boyle (Drop City, World's End and Richard Price (Clockers, Lush Life); poets Jorie Graham and Yusef Komunyakaa; composers Stephen Hartke, Frederic Rzewski and Augusta Read Thomas; visual artist Judy Pfaff; and architect Tod Williams.

source: The Columbus Dispatch, April 2009

Pi

Pi - which, as the ratio indicating the circumference of a circle divided by its diameter, is rounded to 3.14 - was calculated to 206,158,430,000 digits in 1999 by a supercomputer at the University of Tokyo.

(www.math.com)

The U. S. President's cabinet

The cabinet consists of the vice president as well as the heads of 15 executive departments - the secretaries of Agriculture, Commerce, Defense, Education, Energy, Health and Human Services, Homeland Security, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Labor, State, Transportation, Treasury, and Veterans Affairs - and the attorney general.

www.whitehouse.gov/administration/cabinet

the term "blue blood"

During the five-century reign of the Moors in Spain, from 700 to 1200, lighter-skinned aristocrats from the Castile region dubbed themselves "blue bloods" to distinguish themselves from the darker-skinned Moors. The reason: Their lighter skin made their veins look blue.

Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins

INITIALS

CS. Lewis = Clive Staples

J.R.R. Tolkien = John Ronald Ruel

W.H.Auden (British poet 1907-1973) = Wystan Hugh

T.S. Eliot (1888-1965 poet, playwright, literary critic, born in U.S. 1888, moved to U.K. 1914, became British subject 1927) = Thomas Stearns

A.N. Wilson (b.1950 English writer known for critical biographies, novels and works of popular and cultural history) = Andrew Norman

Santo domingo, the Dominican Republic

Bartholomew Columbus, brother of Christopher, founded Santo Domingo in 1496, making it the oldest city established by Europeans in the Americas.

St. Augustine, Florida, is the oldest city in the United States. First visited by Ponce de Leon in 1513. Settled in 1565 by Pedro Menendez Aviles.

Mudejar

Antonio Gaudi's Parc Guell, with its organic, asymmetrical forms and brilliantly patterned surfaces, is representative of the architect's eclectic style combining elements of mujedar (Spain's characteristic Christian-Muslim amalgam), Gothic and baroque architecture.

La Mezquita Mosque in Cordoba, Spain, is a breathtaking example of the mujedar style of architecture.
The red and white striped pattern of brick and stone in the arches gives a unity and distinctive character to the whole design. There are more than 80 colored granite jasper and marble pillars in total.

Stieg Larsson 1954-2004

Swedish political activist and journalist. An international study based on best-seller lists ranked Larsson the No.2 fiction writer in 2008 - after Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns.

The Millennium Series = Men Who Hate Women (2005)
The Girl Who Played With Fire (2006)
Castles in the Sky (working title) (2007)
All three have film adaptations in the works.

John Gilligan, Kathleen Sibelius

The only father-daughter governors in U.S. history.

John Gilligan - Ohio governor 1971-1975

Kathleen Sibelius - Kansas governor 2003-2009
current - Secretary of Health and Human Services

Femtocell

Small base station that plugs into a home Internet connection to improve the speed and clarity of cellphone connections inside the building.

Femto is a decimal prefix that denotes one quadrillionth. The femtocell is so called because it is smaller than the picocell (which denotes a trillionth), which is used to improve indoor coverage in a larger area like a shopping mall.

Feng shui

A Chinese system of beliefs in the influence of stars, geography and the location of objects on people's lives.

Spirit of 76

painting known as Yankee Doodle by Willard (from Ohio)

first exhibited at Columbian Exposition 1876

The Great Gatsby artwork

novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald first published 1925

covert art Celestial Eyes by Francis Cugat

Celestial Eyes is most celebrated and widely disseminated jacket art in 20th century American literature. The artist's image preceded the finished manuscript.

Cugat - born in Spain 1893, raised in Cuba, death date unknown
brother of orchestra leader Xavier Cugat
no other Cugat jackets have been identified
one man show in New York in 1942

anniversaries

Abraham Lincoln, 16th American president, born February 12, 1809

Charles Darwin, British naturalist, born February 12, 1809
published The Origin of Species 1859

Edgar Allan Poe, American writer and poet, born January 19, 1809

Felix Mendelssohn, German composer, born February 3, 1809

Miami University (Ohio) established February 17, 1809

The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today 1873 a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America.

The term "gilded age", commonly given to the era, comes from the title of this book. Twain and Warner got the name from Shakespeare's King John (1595).

The book is remarkable for two reasons 1) it is the only book Twain wrote with a collaborator 2) it's title quickly became synonymous with graft, materialism and corruption in public life.

source Wikipedia

How fast does a compact disc rotate?

A disc spins at about 500 rpm when read near the center, decreasing to about 200 rpm when read near the circumference - producing a linear velocity equal to 3 to 8 rpm.

(Vinyl records spin at rates of 33,45 and 78 rpm.)

rpm = revolutions per minute

source The Columbus Dispatch February 7, 2009 (Encyclopedia Americana)

First female judge to swear in a president

Sarah T. Hughes, a U.S. District Court judge from Texas, administered the oath of office to Lyndon B. Johnson on Nov.22, 1963, aboard Air Force One.

source The Columbus Dispatch February 7, 2009

Who are the four US presidents who did not deliver a speech on inauguration day?

John Tyler (1841-45)
Millard Fillmore (1850-53)
Andrew Johnson (1865-69)
Chester Arthur (1881-85)

source The Wall Street Journal January 20, 2009

What is the largest port complex in the United States?

The twin ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach

source The Columbus Dispatch August 31, 2008

Presidents by birth-state

Virginia - 8 - George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, William Henry Harrison, James Madison, James Monroe, John Tyler, Zachary Taylor, Woodrow Wilson

William Henry Harrison
9th president March 4-April 4, 1841
Whig
came to Ohio early 1790's to fight Indians
Represented Ohio in House of Representatives 1816-1819
Served as Ohio senator in U. S. Senate 1825-1828
"Keep the ball rolling" "Tippecanoe and Tyler too"
First president to die in office (shortest term)
Record for longest inaugural speech (one hour 45 minutes)
Grandfather of a president



Ohio - 7 - Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Warren Harding

Ulysses Simpson Grant
18th president - March 4, 1869 - March 3, 1877
Republican
Born in Pt. Pleasant, Ohio
First president to run against a woman (Victoria Claflin Woodhull from Ohio - nominated by the Equal Rights Party for 1872 election)

Rutherford Birchard Hayes

19th president - March 4, 1877 - March 3 188

Republican

Born in Delaware, Ohio

First president to use oval office desk (gift of Queen Victoria)

James Abram Garfield

20th president March 4 - September 19, 1881

Republican

Born in Orange, Ohio

Could write Greek with one hand at same time he wrote Latin in other

Brigadier general in the Civil War

Shot July 2, 1881, and died Sept 19 from infection and internal hemorrhage

Benjamin Harrison

23rd president - March 4, 1889 - March 4, 1893

Republican

Born in North Bend, Ohio

Grandson of William Henry Harrison

Only president to be preceded and followed by same person (Cleveland)

Had first Christmas tree in White House (1889)

First to have electricity in White House (1891)

William McKinley

25th president - March 4, 1897 - Sept 14, 1901

Born in Niles, Ohio

First president to campaign by phone (1896)

Foreign policy dominated administration

Assassinated by deranged anarchist at Buffalo Pan-American Exposition

William Howard Taft

27th president March 4, 1909 - March 3, 1913

Republican

Born in Cincinnati, Ohio

Largest US president (6'2" 333 lbs.

Started tradition of president opening baseball season

ONLY PRESIDENT TO BECOME CHIEF JUSTICE OF SUPREME COURT (appointed by Harding 1921)

Warren Gamaliel Harding

29th president

Republican

Born in Corsica, Ohio

Newspaper publisher

First presidential election where women voted nationwide

First president who could drive a car

Died while in office - heart attack in San Francisco

Massachusetts - 4 - John Adams, John Quincy Adams, John F. Kennedy, George H. W. Bush

New York - 4 - Martin Van Buren, Millard Fillmore, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt

North Carolina - 2 - James Polk, Andrew Johnson

Texas - 2 - Dwight D. Eisenhower, Lyndon B. Johnson

Vermont - 2 - Chester A. Arthur, Calvin Coolidge

Fourteen states - 1 - Arkansas Bill Clinton; California Richard M. Nixon; Connecticut George W. Bush; Georgia Jimmy Carter; Hawaii Barack Obama; Illinois Ronald Reagan; Iowa Herbert Hoover; Kentucky Abraham Lincoln; Missouri Harry S. Truman; Nebraska Gerald Ford; New Hampshire Franklin Pierce; New Jersey Grover Cleveland; Pennsylvania James Buchanan; South Carolina Andrew Jackson

source The Columbus Dispatch January 25, 2009

Broadway Musical "Rent"

Rent closed in New York on Sept. 7, 2008, after 5,124 performances, making it the seventh-longest-running show in Broadway history. Written by Jonathan Larson who died shortly after Rent began its life 0ff-Broadway. The musical is based on Puccini's classic 1896 opera La Boheme. It tells the story of young bohemians who move to the city to pursue their artistic dreams. (The story of young artists in New York's East Village.)

Kentucky

First state to be carved out of the frontier west of the Appalachian Mountains 1792

American poets

First American poet laureate Robert Penn Warren
Current American poet laureate Kay Ryan

Only 4 poets have read at US presidential inaugurations
1. Robert Frost John F. Kennedy 1961
2. Maya Angelou Bill Clinton 1993
3. Miller Williams Bill Clinton 1997
4. Elizabeth Alexander Barack Obama 2009