The American chestnut, Castanea dentate, was once considered the redwood of the east.  Chestnut trees grew to be very large with trunks often greater than 5 feet in diameter and reaching heights of 100 feet.  In states like Pennsylvania, it made up 25 percent of the forest.  The American chestnut was a major source of lumber and an important source of food for many animals.  It was also a favorite of many people that loved to eat it roasted.  The chestnut rivaled the white oak as an important food source for animals with one major difference:  it could produce a crop of nuts after eight years, while the oak often took over 20 years.  A single chestnut tree could produce 10 or more bushels of nuts.  This important tree for food and lumber was decimated by a fungal blight that was introduced into the New York area on imported chestnut trees around 1904.  The chestnut blight fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, quickly spread across the eastern half of the United States, killing more than three billion trees by the 1930s.  The Midwest Nut Producers Council started trials of chestnut cultivars at Michigan State University Extension’s Southwest Michigan Research and Extension Center in Benton Harbor, Mich.  By 1996, data from these trial plots suggested that ‘Colossal,’ a European x Japanese hybrid provided large nuts and large yields.  Though the European chestnut is susceptible to chestnut blight, it also produces four to five times more nuts than the Chinese chestnuts.  Growers in Michigan have chosen to grow both the resistant Chinese chestnuts along with the very productive, blight-susceptible European chestnuts.  http://msue.anr.msu.edu/news/chestnuts_growing_a_food_crop_and_an_industry_in_michigan

 

Chestnut flour is a grayish-tan alternative to regular all-purpose flour made from ground chestnuts. Its sweet flavor makes it a favorite ingredient for recipes involving almonds, chocolate, honey, and hazelnuts.  A gluten-free product, chestnut flour is a cooking option for people with celiac disease or other gluten intolerances or allergies.  Since chestnuts do not contain the fat content regular nuts have, and are instead largely composed of carbohydrates, they have many of the same properties as flour.  Known as the grain that grows on trees, chestnuts have been dried and made into mellow, sweet flavored flour in Italy for centuries.  In Tuscany, where it is known as Farina di Castagne, chestnut flour is considered a staple food, and it is commonly called for in recipes.  http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-chestnut-flour.htm 

Dead as a doornail is an ancient expression:  we have a reference to this dating back to 1350, and it also appears in the fourteenth-century work The Vision of Piers Plowman and in Shakespeare’s Henry IV.  Another expression, of rather later date, is as dead as a herring, because most people only saw herrings when they were long dead and preserved; there are other similes with the same meaning, such as dead as mutton, or dead as a stone.  William and Mary Morris, in The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, quote a correspondent who points out that it could come from a standard term in carpentry.  If you hammer a nail through a piece of timber and then flatten the end over on the inside so it can’t be removed again (a technique called clinching), the nail is said to be dead, because you can’t use it again.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-dea1.htm    

Figgy pudding--a.k.a. plum pudding, plum porridge, Christmas pudding and steamed pudding-- is a quintessentially British sweet with a history that might go back to Shakespeare's time.  We know it was around in the mid-1600s, because that's when the English Puritans banned it and Christmas, too.  There probably aren't too many sweets that have been banned, but then there aren't too many sweets that are as alcoholic as this one. 

See recipe at:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17356371

Christmas Island is located in the Indian Ocean, 380 kilometres south of Java and 2650 kilometres north west of Perth.  The nearest point on the Australian mainland is Northwest Cape, approximately 1565 kilometres to the south east.  The Island has an area of 135 square kilometres.  http://www.regional.gov.au/territories/christmas/

The Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory’s (PPPL) focus — magnetic fusion research — began at the university in 1951.  It was grounded in the earlier work of a European scientist then living in Princeton.  Einstein’s theory that mass could be converted into energy had been demonstrated six years earlier near Alamogordo, N.M., by fission — the splitting of atoms, which released the energy that held the atoms together.  By the 1950s, however, attention was turning to an unimaginably more promising method of releasing energy from transforming matter — the way the sun does, by fusion.  Every second the sun produces a million times more energy than the world consumes in a year.  But to “take a sun and put it in a box” — the description of one scientist here — requires developing the new field of plasma physics and solving the most difficult engineering problems in the history of science.  The objective is to create conditions for the controlled release of huge amounts of energy from the fusion of two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium.  Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe; Earth’s water contains a virtually inexhaustible supply (10 million million tons) of deuterium, and tritium is “bred” in the fusion plant itself.  The sun is a huge sphere of plasma, which is a hot, electrically charged gas.  The production and confinement of plasma in laboratories is now routine. The task now is to solve the problem of “net energy” — producing more electrical power than is required for the production of it.  Magnets produce a field sufficient to prevent particles heated beyond the sun’s temperature — more than 100 million degrees Celsius — from hitting the walls of the containment vessel.  Understanding plasma’s behavior requires the assistance of Titan, one of the world’s fastest computers, which is located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee and can perform more than 17 quadrillion — a million billion — calculations a second.  As in today’s coal-fired power plants, the ultimate object is heat — to turn water into steam that drives generators. Fusion, however, produces no greenhouse gases, no long-lived nuclear waste and no risk of the sort of runaway reaction that occurred at Fukushima  Geroge F. Will  http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-f-will-the-fusion-in-our-future/2013/12/20/73c28c2a-68d4-11e3-ae56-22de072140a2_story.html?hpid=z2 

Dec. 20, 2013  Two Canadian cities, Vancouver and Montreal, have the world’s best public library systems, according to a new survey by German researchers.  Library mavens at the Heinrich Heine University in Dusseldorf studied libraries in 31 major world cities, from London and Los Angeles, and from Shanghai to Sao Paulo, Brazil.  Two U.S. library systems finished third and fourth: Chicago and San Francisco.  The New York Public Library system (ranked 9th overall), scored at the top in terms of digital services, while Montreal was judged to have the best physical facilities and book collection.   Hector Tobar   http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-two-canadian-cities-have-worlds-best-public-libraries-survey-finds-20131220,0,1665035.story#axzz2o7yRS1Ig

Forget Peter and his peppers, and Sally and her seashells. Researchers at MIT claim they have found the twistiest tongue twister in the English language:  "Pad kid poured curd pulled cod." 

Presenting the work at the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco in December 2013, Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, an MIT psychologist who helped coin the phrase, says it's so tricky that when she asked subjects to say it ten times fast, some became so tongue-tied that they simply gave up.  This puts it in the league of famously frustrating phrases like "Clean clams crammed in clean cans"; "The top cop saw a cop top"; and "The seething sea ceaseth and thus the seething sea sufficeth us."  So what makes some phrases harder to say than others?  Researchers say tongue twisters share certain qualities that the human brain and mouth tend to reject.  For example, they often contain a quick string of similar but distinct phonemes, which are the smallest linguistic unit (like "s" or "sh"). Inversions, such as "the top cop saw a cop top," also prove tricky.  And "Pad kid poured curd pulled cod" has the extra bonus of being totally nonsensical.  Researchers have also identified the kinds of mistakes people tend to make when attempting these phrases.  They often conflate consonants, a mistake linguists refer to as double onsets.  "Top cop" sometimes becomes "tkop," for example.  People also tend to turn vowels into mush.  "Toy boat" very quickly becomes "tuh-boyt."  Is the brain jumbling the syllables, or are the muscles in our mouths unable to handle certain rapid movements?  In 1982, researchers Ralph and Lyn Haber examined where the mistakes occur.  Asking college-age test subjects to silently read two types of sentences — ones that contained tongue twisters, and ones that were similar in complexity, but did not contain tongue twisters — the Habers found that subjects slowed down on sentences with tongue twisters, even when their actual tongues were not in use.  This implied that the brain is confusing the sounds before they ever reach the mouth.  Carmel Lobello  http://theweek.com/article/index/253872/this-is-the-twistiest-tongue-twister-ever-says-science 

Here are three stories from three great writers of the 20th century that will put the holidays in a new light. 

(1)  The first is John Cheever’s wonderfully funny 1949 story, “Christmas is a Sad Season for the Poor,” originally published in The New Yorker  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1949/12/24/1949_12_24_017_TNY_CARDS_000222088?currentPage=all  Cheever’s protagonist, Charlie, is an elevator operator for a Park Avenue apartment building.  He isn’t happy about having to work on Christmas, and he voices his complaint to the very first apartment dweller who enters his elevator.  The doorman repeats his complaint — and throws in a lie or two — to other people in the building, and soon he’s being surprised with a windfall of food and gifts.

(2)  In Truman Capote's “A Christmas Memory,"  http://faculty.weber.edu/jyoung/English%206710/A%20Christmas%20Memory.pdf  he recounts a tale of the Christmas he was 7 years old and living with his mother’s eccentric relatives in Alabama.  The story is centered on one relative he was especially close to, and who conspired with him to make the most Christmasy food she could think of:  fruitcake (the recipe requires whiskey, which wasn't available legally).    
(3)  If you’re looking for a "white" Christmas, then look no further than the poet Dylan Thomas’ "A Child's Christmas in Wales."   http://www.bfsmedia.com/MAS/Dylan/Christmas.html  a reminiscence of his childhood.  Originally read by Thomas for a radio show in 1952, the story  cemented Thomas's fame in the U.S.  Hector Tobar  http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-three-alternative-christmas-tales-from-literary-greats-20131224,0,4787578.story#axzz2oVBeQSYy