Feb. 7, 2014 Kazakh
President Nursultan Nazarbayev doesn't like the name Kazakhstan.
"Kazakhstan has the
'stan' ending like many other nations of Central Asia. At
the same time, foreigners take an interest in Mongolia, the population of which
makes up only two million, but its name does not end in '-stan,'" he told
onlookers while visiting a school in Atyrau, according
to his official website. "Perhaps, eventually it is necessary to
consider an issue of changing the name of our country into the 'Kazakh Nation',
but first of all, it should necessarily be discussed with people." (His proposed name would be rendered as "Kazakh
Eli" in English.) And Nazarbayev does have a point about his
country's name. There are seven
countries in Central Asia with the suffix "-stan": Kazakhstan,
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The suffix comes from the Persian root istan, or "land"—hence the "land
of the Uzbeks," "land of the Kazakhs," and so forth. Pakistan bucks the trend somewhat: Its name
means "land of the pure." This
isn't a Central Asian quirk. English and other Germanic languages frequently
use "-land" in a similar manner. The name "England", for example,
means "land of the Angles," the Anglo-Saxon tribe that populated the
early medieval British Isles. The Scots
call their country "Alba" in Scottish Gaelic, but use
"Scotland" in English. Germany's name in German is "Deutschland." Europe alone has Finland, Poland, Iceland,
Greenland, Ireland, and the Netherlands; Africa has Swaziland; Asia has
Thailand; Oceania has New Zealand. There's
even the U.S. state of Maryland. The
difference for Kazakhstan and its neighbors is the cultural and geopolitical
context. There's a certain stigma
associated with the suffix "-stan." Apartheid South Africa's segregated
black-majority enclaves, for example, became known as "bantustans," a term that came to connote
artificial, ethnically defined statelets. In the U.S., people broadly uses the suffix
"-stan" to give a generic Oriental vibe to fictional Middle Eastern
countries, as with 24's sinister
Islamic Republic of Kamistan or Team
America: World Police's
Derkaderkastan, or to indicate backwardness and instability, with names
like Doonesbury's Berzerkistan or The Onion's Ethniklashistan and Nukehavistan. Matt Ford http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/02/kazakhstans-president-is-tired-of-his-countrys-name-ending-in-stan/283676/
Find information on countries in Central Asia with names in ending with the suffix
"stan" at http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/stan.htm
The Great Molasses Flood was not simply a disaster (twenty-one killed, 150
injured) that occurred in 1919 when a tank in Boston collapsed, but rather a saga that spanned a decade, from the construction
of the tank in 1915 through the conclusion of a huge civil lawsuit in
1925. Beyond its role in the commercial
distillation of rum, certainly its most important contribution to the colonial
economy, molasses was a staple among families. A cheap sugar substitute, molasses is a
by-product extracted during the sugar refining process. Sugar cane is crushed to remove the juice,
which is then boiled to extract sugar.
The remaining syrup, after the sugar has been crystallized, becomes
known as “first molasses,” the sweetest variety. The leftover syrup from the
second boiling is called second molasses—less sweet and cheaper—and the syrup
remaining after the third extraction of sugar from sugar cane is known as
“blackstrap molasses,” a dark, bittersweet, unpleasant-tasting liquid that was
used in the production of industrial alcohol by USIA and other companies. Colonists not only used molasses to produce
their own beer and rum, they considered it a vital part of their diet. New
Englanders made baked beans, brown bread, and pumpkin pie with it. The German communities in Pennsylvania used molasses in shoofly pie and pandowdy, a baked apple-and-spice dish.
In colonial Carolina, molasses went by the name of "long
sugar" and was said to “serve all the purposes of
sugar, both in eating and drinking.”
Historian John J. McCusker, in his comprehensive 1989 study of the
molasses trade and rum production in the thirteen American colonies, points out
that in the town of Colchester, Connecticut, at least one Thanksgiving
celebration had to be delayed until additional molasses could be procured. In the mid-1700s, each colonist was consuming
about three quarts of molasses per year.
Read Dark Tide: The Great Molasses
Flood of 1919 by Stephen Puleo at http://www.scribd.com/doc/190099648/Dark-Tide-the-Great-Boston-Molasses-Flo-Stephen-Puleo
Quotes and paraphrases from Brunswick Gardens by Anne Perry
The earth consumes the
light. The water gives it back. I miss the sea, but when I was at sea I
missed the smell of damp earth and the colors of autumn. Perhaps you can have everything, but not all
at once. That's what memories are for.
People in Hispanic countries use cassavas (also called manioc, mandioca, yucca, yuca,
yucca root, yuca root, Brazilian arrowroot) much like those of us in the U.S.
use potatoes Some of the tubers are
sweet even when eaten raw; others are bitter. In the case of the Agavaceae, most times the
bitterness seems to be in the skin, so peeling the tuber before using or
cooking should greatly reduce the bitterness (which is due to its prussic acid
content). Fresh tubers can be hard to
peel; nuking it for a minute or so may make it easier, just as it does with
winter squash. The fresh tubers don't
have a long shelf life, so use within a couple of days of purchase. The flowers,
especially the young ones of must Yucca species are tender and sweet when eaten
raw. You can even stuff them with a
savory vegetable/bread crumb stuffing and steam or bake them.
Melissa Kaplan http://www.anapsid.org/resources/yucca.html
Pickle-ball® is
a game for the whole family. So it’s only fitting that it was invented by a
family, too. The game got its start back
in 1965, in Bainbridge Island, just a short ferry ride away from Seattle, WA. When Congressmen Joel Pritchard, William Bell
and Barney McCallum came home from a game of golf one day to find their kids
bored and restless, they set out to create a game that would engage them
through the lazy days of summer. They
wanted to create a game that would be challenging, but still accessible. They handed the kids ping-pong paddles and a wiffle
ball, and lowered the net on their badminton court.
Jordan
almond--a high-quality almond of a variety grown chiefly in southeastern
Spain. late Middle English: jordan apparently from French or Spanish jardin 'garden'. http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/jordan-almond
January
18, 2014 MagicBands. They’re a new
technology for Disney World, and the program officially opened up about a month
ago. Beneath the surface
of the rubber wristband is a sophisticated RFID tag. These bands, which are individually coded to
each visitor, allow Disney to track individuals wherever they go in the parks
and resorts with long-range RFID readers. You check into FASTPASS rides with your band,
you purchase food by swiping your band and you use it as a key to your hotel
room. The bands are even uniquely
colored and monogrammed with your family members’ names so that they won’t get
switched up. Why? Because they don’t want their database to get
confused and think that you, a 45-year-old man, rode the teacups instead of
your little son Timmy. Disney tracfks everything you do, everything
you buy, everything you eat, everything you ride, everywhere you go in the
park. “Meat space” (coined by William Gibson in Neuromancer)
is a term for the physical world where our bodies (meat) move around and do
meat-like things (for example, eat, jog or go clubbin’). The interesting thing about the term is it’s a
play on “cyber space” — meat space is an internet-first way of viewing the
world. And that internet-first way of
seeing the world is what’s driving these changes at Disney, casinos, insurance companies, etc. We’ve been “cookie-ing” people online and
tracking their browsing habits for years, and in that contained environment,
businesses have seen the value of acting on personal transactional data. But now businesses are taking this approach
and applying it to meat space. We now
know this is Google’s end game. Self-driving
cars, Google Glass and the purchase of Nest — Google is dying to get out of
your computer and all up in your life. With Nest, Google won’t just know how you like
your air to feel. It’ll know when you’re at work and when you’re at home.
It gets pieces in a data puzzle that is
your entire observable life. Loyalty
cards (those things you swipe at the grocery store) were the first salvos into
this real-world data gathering. Now,
department stores are doing a lo-fi version of MagicBands by tracking the hardware ID on your cell phone’s Wi-Fi card as
you wander the store. John Foreman http://gigaom.com/2014/01/18/you-dont-want-your-privacy-disney-and-the-meat-space-data-race/
hIssue 1108
February 10, 2014 On this date in
1763, the Treaty of Paris ended the French and Indian War, and France ceded
Quebec to Great Britain.
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