Feedback from muse reader: In 2004 I hiked the Wainwright Trail through the Lake District and across England, from the Irish Sea to the North Sea. 192 miles and 25,000 feet of elevation gain in 13 days on the trail. A magnificent adventure! It was unbelievably beautiful. Read about it at http://www.sherpa-walking-holidays.co.uk/tours/britain/wccrc.asp, which is the B&B/sherpa service that I used. I note that now they do it in 15 days, as at 13 days the hardest day, day 6, was immediately followed by the second hardest day, which was a killer pair. David Grogan

Martha: I got out my trail book to refresh my memory. It was day 4 and 5 that were the killers. Day 4 was Patterdale to Shap, 16 miles and 2,700 feet of ascent, with almost all of the ascent in the first 5 miles climbing Kidsty Pike. I was hiking with a couple of young, former British Army buddies. At the top of Kidsty Pike we collapsed for lunch next to an ancient shepherd's hut, and this goat kept trying to sneak up behind us to grab a bite. From the top, we had a magnificent view down along the Haweswater (a long, narrow dammed lake) to our destination of Shap 11 miles away. We gave back 1,700 feet of that hard-earned altitude in less than two miles. The next day, Shap to Kirby Stephen, was only 1,600 feet in elevation gain but 21 miles with a nice, sharp 600 foot gain right at the end. My dogs were barking! About a mile out of town, there was an advertisement painted on the side of a two-story barn for a chiropractor in Kirby Stephen (this was on the trail and nowhere near a road, so it was just for hikers to see), but I was too tired to look for him. The next morning, a troop of gypsies came down the street right in front of my B&B with their brightly painted wagons and horses. Just amazing. I was hiking the first two weeks of June, and every tree, bush, shrub, and meadow was blooming in Technicolor. David

Personal voices from the Library of Congress, including links to Ask a Librarian, Digital Collections and Library Catalogs http://blogs.loc.gov/

The bright-orange sea-buckthorn berry may sound like something from Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. In fact, it's one of Scandinavian cuisine's star ingredients, which are driving adventurous foodies to forage in cutting-edge restaurants, Pacific-Northwest wine bars, local health-food stores and IKEA outlets. "I love the boom," says Marcus Samuelsson, the Swedish-raised New York chef who helped pioneer awareness of Scandinavian cuisine in the U.S. when he was executive chef at Aquavit, which he co-owns. Mr. Samuelsson uses aromatic cloudberries—"the king of berries," he calls them—in sorbet and serves the sour sea-buckthorn berries with game meats. He sometimes spikes a sauce with Norwegian brunost, a sweet brown cheese traditionally made from caramelized goat's milk whey. "It's like goat-cheese butter," Mr. Samuelsson says. Andrea Rowe, vice president of Marina Market, a food importer and wholesaler near Seattle specializing in Scandinavian fare, says Norwegian brown cheese "is a very big seller." In Poulsbo, Wash., MorMor Bistro & Bar tops cheesecake with cloudberry preserves infused with Riesling wine and orange zest. The Swedish food section in IKEA stores sell cloudberry jam, which Swedes often serve with hot waffles. The juice of sea-buckthorn berries—which are sometimes called a "superfruit" because of their high antioxidant content—can be found in local health-food and organic grocery stores. Birch, in the form of a varnish-colored syrup, is a signature flavor for many young chefs in Scandinavia. In winter, Fäviken serves roasted beets flavored with butter and a drizzle of birch syrup. The estate-made birch syrup, which is much more concentrated than maple syrup, "is very good with vegetables," Mr. Nilsson says. See more plus pictures at:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903461104576457893839972506.html

The term gad, is the correct old spelling of the word which we now spell goad, in its two meanings of (1) a prick (2) the pole to which the prick is fastened. Thus a gad-fly, is a goad-fly, or stinging fly; and &gad also came to mean a wand, a measuring-rod, a fishingrod, &c., and at gad-whip meant a long whip for goading oxen. It is from the Anglo Saxon gad, a goad, the point of a weapon, a prick. Shakespeare says :—"I will go get a leal of brass, And with a gad of steel will write these words." Titus Androniats, iv. I. http://books.google.com/books?id=kEJFAAAAYAAJ&pg=RA1-PA92&lpg=RA1-PA92&dq=gad-fly+goad-fly+goading+gad-whip&source=bl&ots=Se_ph1dqXi&sig=1fL5ALrZkJf0tu-cduoN56v1zbw&hl=en&ei=HzMgTtXwFY3VgAen5v3jBQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=gad-fly%20goad-fly%20goading%20gad-whip&f=false

Semiotics, also called semiotic studies or (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology, is the study of signs and sign processes (semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, metaphor, symbolism, signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics, which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically. Semiotics is often divided into three branches:
Semantics: Relation between signs and the things to which they refer; their denotata, or meaning
Syntactics: Relations among signs in formal structures
Pragmatics: Relation between signs and the effects they have on the people who use them http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotics

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics. However, many modern linguists and philosophers of language consider his ideas outdated. Some philosophers of language believe that these critics are themselves applying outdated argumentation to portray Saussurean ideas as obscurantist or deliberately distorted. While Saussure's concepts—particularly semiotics—have received little to no attention in modern linguistic textbooks, his ideas have significantly influenced the humanities and social sciences. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferdinand_de_Saussure

Opinion concerning "anymore" vs "any more" divides roughly into three camps:
· There is no such word as "anymore". It is simply a misspelling.
· "Anymore" and "any more" are two ways of spelling the same thing, and the two have the same meaning.
· There is a useful difference in meaning between the two.The difference in meaning considered useful by the third camp is that "anymore" is an adverb meaning "nowadays" or "any longer", while "any more" can be either adverb plus adjective, as in "I don't want any more pie", or adjective plus noun, as in "I don't want any more." The difference between the two meanings is illustrated in the sentence: "I don't buy books anymore because I don't need any more books." http://alt-usage-english.org/anymore.html

Anyway or any way? The compound word anyway is an adverb meaning "regardless." Any way is simply the word way modified by the word any. It means "any manner" or "any method." http://englishplus.com/grammar/00000283.htm