Sorting out names of fictional characters
We know that the Lone Ranger's last name is "Reid," because his brother who was killed in the ambush by the Cavendish Gang was named Dan Reid. (This is also the name of the Lone Ranger's nephew, although we do not know what his true first name was. His mother was killed in an Indian attack and the kindly woman who raised him got the name Dan from a locket that Dan's mother had worn.) No first name was given to the Lone Ranger during the radio and television program. Somehow, though, the name "John" appeared in the liner notes of a Lone Ranger record. (Wes Tom fills in this part: "The name John first appeared in the book Radio's Golden Age by Frank Buxton and Bill Owen in 1966 published by Easton Valley Press.") The name was used in the 1981 "Legend of the Lone Ranger" movie. Many, however, refuse to accept that name as the Ranger's true name. This is debatable. Britt Reid is the name of the alter-ego of the Green Hornet. He is the Lone Ranger's nephew's grandson. (Or son, depending on whether you're talking about the radio Green Hornet or the television Green Hornet.) http://www.endeavorcomics.com/largent/ranger/faq.html

Pepper , the master spice
Peppercorns (piper nigrum) ground for use on the table and in cooking originally only came from India, but is now also cultivated in Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, and South America. India is still the major producer of this spice with over half of the product coming from there. A perennial bush, which often grows wild, is produced in mounds with trellises similar to grape vines. These mounds are usually about 8-feet tall but the bush itself can grow up to 33 feet in the proper climate. The bush has a round and smooth jointed stem; dark green leaves which are smooth, broad, and have seven nerves in them; and small white flowers. The flowers become the berries
which are harvested. The flowers grow in clusters of up to 150. Grown from cuttings, the bush bears fruit at three to four years until about fifteen years. Typically the pepper bush grows within about 20 degrees of the equator some believe the closer to the equator the hotter the peppercorn. Historically significant, pepper is the most common spice in use. Nutritionally beneficial and medicinally positive, pepper offers a unique flavor and a variety of uses. It is the third most common ingredient behind water and salt. http://whatscookingamerica.net/Information/Pepper.htm

During the Middle ages, pepper, as well as other spices and herbs, was commonly used as a monetary source. Eastern Europeans paid 10 pounds of pepper in order to gain access to trading with London merchants. Throughout Europe, peppercorns were accepted as a substitute for money (some landlords would get paid as a “peppercorn rent” (2). Peppercorns, counted out one by one, were accepted as currency to pay taxes, tolls, and rents (partly because of a coin shortage). Many European towns kept their accounts in pepper. Wealthy brides received pepper as a dowry. http://www.mccormickscienceinstitute.com/content.cfm?ID=10498

Cleveland, Ohio was named for General Moses Cleaveland, agent and chief surveyor for the Connecticut Land Co., who founded the city in 1796. The general was born at Canterbury, Conn., in 1754. He was the second son of Colonel Aaron Cleaveland and his wife Thankful. Their surname, of Saxon origin, was derived from the physical features of an estate in Yorkshire, England, that the family owned since before the Norman Conquest. The land was marked by deep crevices called "clefts" or "cleves" by the Saxons. It was variously written as Cleffland, Cliffland, Cleiveland, Cleveland and Cleaveland. The general preferred Cleaveland, and this was the original way name of the city was spelled. One story claims that an early newspaper, the Cleaveland Advertiser, was not quite large enough to accommodate the name in an identifying banner headline on the first page. The editor dropped the first "a" and the readers subsequently accepted the new spelling. http://www.lkwdpl.org/buckeye/buck05.htm

The highest city in the world is La Rinoconada, Peru at 5100 meters or 16,728 feet. See a list with pictures at: http://www.bootsnall.com/articles/09-03/highest-cities-world.html

The oldest city in the world still standing is Gaziantep, Turkey (3650 B.C.?). The capital city of Gaziantep Province (informally known as Antep) has a history dating back to the Hittites period. It was continually inhabited ever since the Paleolithic age, experiencing serious growth along with the Ottoman Empire. See a list with pictures at: http://blog.hotelclub.com/the-10-oldest-cities-on-earth/

John McPhee has been fishing for pickerel for more than thirty years, always in October in New Hampshire, with his friend George Hackl, whose wife owns an undeveloped island in Lake Winnipesaukee. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/08/100208fa_fact_mcphee#ixzz0eghhiT5k McPhee discusses an area of lily pads on Lake Winnipesaukee he calls The Patch and describes the voraciousness of pickerels: their stomachs are usually packed and distended. Pickerel that have been found in the stomachs of pickerel have in turn contained pickerel in their stomachs. A chain pickerel, on a good day, nails eighty per cent of the fish it goes after. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/02/08/100208fa_fact_mcphee#ixzz0eghYsDy7

On January 4, Dubai celebrated the opening of the new world’s tallest building with a spectacular fireworks show and the announcement that the skyscraper soars to a record-shattering height of 828 meters, or almost 2717 feet--more than 1,000 feet taller than the old record-holder in Taiwan. Yet in a stunning move, the tower--long known as the Burj Dubai--was renamed the Burj Khalifa in honor of the president of the neighboring emirate of oil-rich Abu Dhabi, which bailed Dubai out of its recent financial crisis. The $1.5 billion tower, designed by Chicago architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), is 160 stories.
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/theskyline/2010/01/trying-to-put-a-humbling-debt-crisis-behind-it-the-once-booming-city-state-of-dubai-on-monday-celebrated-the-opening-of-the.html
Comment: The photos you've been publishing have striking similarities to the "Illinois" drawn by Frank Lloyd Wright in 1956. I've attached a link to a comparison I found on the Web.
http://drupal02.nypl.org/files/15/Mile_High_Building_no_3.jpg

As of 9 a.m. on February 4, 1,771 earthquakes have been recorded at Yellowstone. The swarm began around 1 p.m. January 17, about 10 miles northwest of the Old Faithful area on the northwestern edge of the Yellowstone Caldera — and around 16 miles northeast of Island Park. Swarms have occurred in this area several times over the past two decades. This swarm has been longer in time and with more earthquakes than last year's swarm beneath Yellowstone Lake. However, the total seismic energy released is somewhat less. The largest recorded swarm at Yellowstone is the Fall 1985 swarm, also in the northwest corner of the Yellowstone Caldera.
http://www.islandparknews.com/atf.php?sid=7820¤t_edition=2010-02-04

Latest earthquakes in the world for the last seven days
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/recenteqsww/Quakes/quakes_all.php

A man died 4000 years ago on an offshore island of Greenland now called Qeqertasussuk - of what cause no one knows, but he left four tufts of his hair and a few bits of bone frozen into the permafrost, and now those thawed scraps tell a remarkable story through the updated alchemy of the Human Genome Project. For the first time, a team of 53 international scientists has sequenced the genes of an ancient human - a "Palaeo-Eskimo" - and learned more details about him than anyone might have expected. He belonged to a culture called the Saqqaq, a Greenland people whose forebears had apparently migrated to the huge glacier-capped western side of that island from far northeastern Siberia about 5,500 years ago. Archaeologists have found that the people ofhis culture became extinct many hundreds of years later, leaving only the name Saqqaq to denote a tiny, remote coastal village of 200 Greenlanders. By comparing Inuk's genes with those of indigenous people in many countries of northern Europe and Asia, the project's scientists determined that his ancestors were Siberia's Chukchi people, Greenland's earliest human settlers, who had migrated there from eastern Siberia by traveling more than 2,000 kilometers - about 1,250 miles - across the Bering Strait. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/02/10/MN411BV2EC.DTL