Q. What do the letters B, M, P and W have in common?
A. You must close your lips to pronounce them.

Marostica is a town in the province of Vicenza, in the Veneto region in northern Italy. It is mostly famous for its living chess event held every two years in September where people take on the roles of the various chess pieces (king, knight, bishop, etc.). This is typically done on an outdoor field, with the squares of the board marked out on the grass. Many Human Combat Chess Matches are choreographed stage shows performed by actors trained in stage combat. The story of the Chess Game dates back to 1454 when Marostica belonged to the Venetian Republic. http://italianmedia.com.au/w4/index.php/english-magazine/english-features/tourism-in-italy/5768-marostica-a-living-chess-game-with-real-people-on-the-board

Tom Swift (in the 2nd series Tom Swift, Jr.) is the name of the central character in five series of books, first appearing in 1910, totaling over 100 volumes, of American juvenile science fiction and adventure novels that emphasize science, invention and technology. The character was created by Edward Stratemeyer, the founder of the Stratemeyer Syndicate, a book-packaging firm. His adventures have been written by a number of different ghostwriters over the years. Most of the books are published under the collective pseudonym Victor Appleton. Translated into a number of languages, the books have sold over 30 million copies worldwide. Tom Swift has also been the subject of a board game and a television show. A number of prominent figures, including Steve Wozniak and Isaac Asimov, have cited "Tom Swift" as an inspiration. The series' writing style, which was sometimes adverb-heavy, suggested a name for a type of adverbial pun promulgated in the 1960s, the "Tom Swifties". Some examples are: "'I lost my crutches,' said Tom lamely"; and "'I'll take the prisoner downstairs', said Tom condescendingly." Tom Swift's fictional inventions have directly inspired several actual inventions, among them Lee Felsenstein's "Tom Swift Terminal", which "drove the creation of an early personal computer known as the Sol", and the taser. The name "taser" was originally "TSER", for "Tom Swift Electric Rifle". The invention was named after the central device in Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle (1911); according to inventor Jack Cover, "an 'A' was added because we got tired of answering the phone 'TSER.'" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Swift

Maltese is a Central Semitic language spoken by about 350,000 people on the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo. The Maltese language developed from the Siculo-Arabic or Sicilian Arabic, a form of Arabic that developed in Sicily and Malta between the 9th and 14th centuries. Siculo-Arabic was extinct in Sicily by about 1300, but continued to be spoken in Malta and evolved into Maltese. The first reference to Malta having a distinct language dates from 1364, and the language is first referred to as lingua maltensi in the will of a certain Pawlu Peregrino from 1436. There is also a theory that Maltese developed from Carthaginian or Punic, the language of Carthage, which was a form of Phoenician. As Carthaginian and Arabic are both Semitic languages that developed from the same roots, it is difficult to be sure whether Maltese words arrived via Carthaginian or Arabic. The first known literary text in Maltese, II Cantilena, appeared during the 15th century, the first Maltese dictionary was published in 1649. As well as the Arabs who began taking over Malta in 870 AD, Malta was occupied by Norman-speaking Normans from 1090, and between 1530 and 1798 by the Knights Hospitaller of St John who spoke French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Latin and German. In 1800 Malta became a British colony and the British tried to replace Italian with English as the local language. As a result, about half of the vocabulary of Maltese comes from Sicilian and Italian, and a fifth comes from English. Maltese also contains quite a bit of vocabulary from Norman and French. After Malta become independent in 1964 both English and Maltese were given official status and Maltese became the national language of Malta. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/maltese.htm

Galicia is an autonomous community in northwest Spain, with the official status of a nationality of Spain. Its component provinces are A Coruña, Lugo, Ourense and Pontevedra. It is bordered by Portugal to the south, the Spanish autonomous communities of Castile and León and Asturias to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, and the Bay of Biscay to the north. Besides its continental territory, Galicia includes Arousa Island, and the archipelagos of Cíes, Ons, Sálvora Island, Cortegada Island, Malveiras Islands, Sisargas Islands, and other minor isles and islets. Galicia has roughly 2.79 million inhabitants as of 2011. Two languages are official and widely used in Galicia, Galician, a Romance language which, along with Portuguese, descends from medieval Galician-Portuguese, and Castilian. Like most of Western Europe, Galicia's history has been defined by mass emigration. There was significant Galician emigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the industrialized Spanish cities of Barcelona, Bilbao, Zaragoza and Madrid and to Latin America - Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil and Cuba in particular. The two cities with the greatest number of people of Galician descent outside of Galicia itself are Buenos Aires, Argentina, and nearby Montevideo, Uruguay, where immigration from Galicia was so significant that Argentines and Uruguayans now commonly refer to all Spaniards as gallegos (Galicians). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galicia_(Spain)

Most American food history sources confirm "chop suey" is an American dish. Notes here: Chop suey was invented, fact or fiction?, Library of Congress. "The second famous "Chinese-American" dish to come out of the mining frontier is chop suey, the subject of some historical controversy. It has been common wisdom to say that chop suey...did not exist in old China. The stir-fried hash was invented, according to tradition, in a San Francisco restaurant during the wee hours one morning when a rowdy group of holidaying diners would not hear of the Chinese cook's plea that he had no food. Rather than risk a drubbing, the cook concocted chop suey of the day's scraps. Perhaps. At least one Chinese authority...insists that chop suey was intimately familiar to emigrants from Toisan, the region south of Canton that is the ancestral home of more than half the American Chinse. It does seem hard to believe that a people wracked by poverty had not thought to put together "miscellaneous stuff" before they arrived at the "Golden Mountain."
---Bacon, Beans and Galantines: Food and Foodways on the Western Mining Frontier, Joseph R. Conlin [University of Nevada Press: Reno] 1986 (p. 192-3)
Mr. Conlin's alternate theory is confirmed here: "Last of all, chop suey is not--as many would-be connoisseurs belive--an American invention. As Li Shu-fan points out in his delightful autobiography, Hong Kong Surgeon (1964), it is a local Toisanese dish. Toisan is an rural district south of Canton, the home for most of the early immigrants from Kwangtung to California. The name is Cantonese tsap seui (Mandarin tsa sui), "Miscellaneous scraps." Basically , it is leftover of odd-lot vegetables stir-fried together. Noodles are often included. Bean sprouts are almost invariably present, but the rest of the dish varies according to whatever is around. The origin myth of chop suey is that it was invented in San Francisco, when someone demanded food late at night at a small Chinese restaurant. Out of food, the restaurant cooked up the day's slops, and chop suey was born. (The "someone" can be a Chinese dignitary, a band of drunken miners, a San Francisco political boss, and so on.)" ---Food of China, E. N. Anderson [Yale University Press:New Haven] 1988 (p. 212-3)
"Edamame...In summer, pods of young soybeans (daizu) on the stalk are boiled and the beans eaten as a side dish with beer. Also called sayamame." ---A Dictionary of Japanese Food: Ingredients & Culture, Richard Hosking [Chartles E. Tuttle Company:Rutland VT] 1996 (p. 39)
Food historians genereally agree the classic "fortune cookie" served in Chinese-American restaurants is a Japanese-American culinary contribution. The cookie's actual "invention" is a classic example of food lore. Many claimants covet this particular title. None of the stories can be verified. There is agreement on these points: (1) The first fortune cookies surfaced in California in the early 20th century; (2) The first commercial fortune cookies were manufactured by Japanese companies; (3) Fortune cookies became ubiquitous by the 1960s.
http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodasian.html#chopsuey

Ohio Art Co., maker of the classic baby boomer toy, is sending a big box of Etch A Sketches to the presidential campaigns to say thanks for the publicity and a boost in sales. It all started when Mitt Romney strategist Eric Fehrnstrom was asked March 21 about the candidate's politics now versus next fall, and he likened the campaign to an Etch A Sketch: "You can kind of shake it up and we start all over again." Its stock, which trades over the counter, almost tripled March 22, closing at $9.65, and major stores reported a jump in sales, chairman Bill Killgallon said. "We're proud that one of our products is shaking up the debate," he said. Ohio Art has sold more than 100 million Etch A Sketches worldwide since its introduction in 1960. The toy, with its familiar gray screen and bright-red frame, allows youngsters to draw things by twisting two white knobs. A quick shake erases the image and lets you start over. http://www.lancastereaglegazette.com/article/20120323/NEWS01/203230307/Politics-puts-Etch-Sketch-back-picture