With big food brands souring on high fructose corn syrup, the nation's corn-refining giants are seeking federal clearance to change the name of one of the most ubiquitous ingredients on grocery labels. The Corn Refiners Association, which includes commodity processing giants such as Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. and Cargill Inc., said it filed a petition September 14 with the Food and Drug Administration for permission to switch the name of high fructose corn syrup to "corn sugar." Corn refiners want to rename high-fructose corn syrup—used in myriad packaged foods— as 'corn sugar.' "We hope to erase consumer confusion," said Audrae Erickson, president of the Washington, D.C., trade group, which has been waging a two-year campaign to dispel the growing perception among some consumers that the corn industry's sweetener isn't as natural as sugar. Including food products, corn-derived sweeteners command roughly half of the caloric sweetener market in the U.S. The other half consists of sugar. Many scientists say there isn't much nutritional difference between high fructose corn syrup and sugar, and dentists say both can be bad for your teeth. But the sugar industry has made inroads with some consumers by labeling their corn-derived competition as an artificial sweetener because a lot of processing is involved in making high fructose corn syrup. The FDA requires that the names of food products be truthful and not misleading. While it's rare for the FDA to consider requests to change the name of a food, it has signed off on allowing prune marketers to call their product a dried plum, and for makers of rapeseed oil to market it as canola oil.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704285104575491993421624842.html

The word "pizza" is thought to have come from the Latin word pinsa, meaning flatbread (although there is much debate about the origin of the word). A legend suggests that Roman soldiers gained a taste for Jewish Matzoth while stationed in Roman occupied Palestine and developed a similar food after returning home. However a recent archeological discovery has found a preserved Bronze Age pizza in the Veneto region. By the Middle Ages these early pizzas started to take on a more modern look and taste. The peasantry of the time used what few ingredients they could get their hands on to produce the modern pizza dough and topped it with olive oil and herbs. The introduction of the Indian Water Buffalo gave pizza another dimension with the production of mozzarella cheese. Even today, the use of fresh mozzarella di buffalo in Italian pizza cannot be substituted. The introduction of tomatoes to Italian cuisine in the 18th and early 19th centuries finally gave us the true modern Italian pizza. Even though tomatoes reached Italy by the 1530's it was widely thought that they were poisonous and were grown only for decoration. http://www.lifeinitaly.com/food/pizza-history.asp

New York City goes by many names, but the Big Apple is the most kenspeckled. Actually, the widespread use of the nickname began in the 1970s as part of an official tourism campaign. Before that, John Joseph Fitz Gerald, a turf racing writer for the New York Morning Telegraph in the 1920s, used the name in his column. While in New Orleans, he heard stable hands refer to New York as “the big apple that all horsemen aspired to race at.” Soon writers began using the term to refer to New York in other contexts. A popular song and dance in the 1930s used the expression. The corner of West 54th Street and Broadway, where Fitz Gerald lived, was officially designated “Big Apple Corner.” The most populous city in the U.S. also goes by the name Gotham, which was first used by Washington Irving in an 1807 issue of his literary magazine about the legends of an English village named Gotham. http://hotword.dictionary.com/?p=1807 Enjoy quotes, words and puzzles at dictionary.com.

ken as a noun
cognizance, ken (range of what one can know or understand) "beyond my ken"
sight, ken (the range of vision) "out of sight of land"
http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=ken

kenspeckle (alteration of kenspeck) as adjective
easily recognized, distinctive, conspicuous.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kenspeckle

Several cities popularly claim to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Differences in opinion can result from different definitions of "city" as well as "continuously inhabited". See list of countries arranged by regions at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_time_of_continuous_habitation

Happy Birthday, Dutch by Bill Ott
Elmore Leonard’s friends call him Dutch. Many of his fans do, too, and while using a nickname presumes a degree of familiarity to which those of us who only know Leonard through his books aren’t entitled, we can’t help ourselves. We feel like we know him Leonard’s fans tend to stay the course; his 44th book, Djibouti, will be published in October, and I’m confident I’m not alone among his devotees in being able to say that I’ve read them all. So while I would never drop “Dutch” into cocktail conversation, I’m not above referring to him that way in those one-on-one conversations I imagine us having. On October 11, Leonard will celebrate his 85th birthday. He has been a professional writer for 60 of those 85 years. He came up the old-fashioned way, through the pulps. While working for a Detroit advertising agency in the 1950s, Leonard wrote western stories. In 1961, he tried writing full-time but was forced to take freelance advertising jobs to pay the bills. (Along with 44 published books, Leonard has accumulated more than 100 rejections in his writing life—but none lately.)
http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/columns/rousing-reads/happy-birthday-dutch