Tobago  is the smaller of the two main islands that make up the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago.  It is located in the southern Caribbean, northeast of the island of Trinidad and southeast of Grenada.  The island lies outside the hurricane belt.  According to the earliest English-language source cited in the Oxford English Dictionary, Tobago bore a name that has become the English word tobacco.   Tobago has a land area of 300 km² and is approximately 40 km long and 10 km wide.  It is located at latitude 11° 15' N, longitude 60° 40' W, slightly north of Trinidad.   Possession of Tobago has been fought over by numerous nations since it was first sighted by Columbus in 1498.  Read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobago

Robinson Crusoe  is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719.  This first edition credited the work's fictional protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents.  It was published under the considerably longer original title The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner:  Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates.  Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is a fictional autobiography of the title character (whose birth name is Robinson Kreutznaer)—a castaway who spends years on a remote tropical island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers before being rescued.  The story is widely perceived to have been influenced by the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on the Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" (in 1966 its name was changed to Robinson Crusoe Island).  The details of Crusoe's island were probably based on the Caribbean island of Tobago, since that island lies a short distance north of the Venezuelan coast near the mouth of the Orinoco river, in sight of Trinidad.  By the end of the 19th century, no book in the history of Western literature had more editions, spin-offs and translations (even into languages such as Inuktitut, Coptic and Maltese) than Robinson Crusoe, with more than 700 such alternative versions, including children's versions with mainly pictures and no text.  The term "Robinsonade" was coined to describe the genre of stories similar to Robinson Crusoe.  Defoe went on to write a lesser-known sequel, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.  It was intended to be the last part of his stories, according to the original title-page of its first edition but a third part, Serious Reflections During the Life & Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, With His Vision of the Angelic World, was added later; it is a mostly forgotten series of moral essays with Crusoe's name attached to give interest.  Robinson Crusoe marked the beginning of realistic fiction as a literary genre.  Its success led to many imitators, and castaway novels became quite popular in Europe in the 18th and early 19th centuries.  Most of these have fallen into obscurity, but some became established, including The Swiss Family Robinson.  Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, published seven years after Robinson Crusoe, may be read as a systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robinson_Crusoe  See also fictional castaways at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fictional_castaways

jungle

(location)  a location marked by an intense competition and struggle for survival
(camp)  a place where hoboes camp
(forest)  an impenetrable equatorial forest

First use:  Late 18th century  Origin:  Hindi jaṅgal "wasteland" from Sanskrit jāṅgala "dry"  http://www.memidex.com/jungle

Use of jungle in culture:  The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, The Jungle Book and the Second Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling ("law of the jungle" used by Kipling), The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter, and The Concrete Jungle.  See list of films, music and other publications at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_jungle

Oscar nominees for 86th awards honoring movies released in 2013   http://oscar.go.com/nominees  Ceremony will be held on March 2, 2014.

Jan. 30, 2014  The song "Alone Yet Not Alone" from the movie of the same name was stripped of its Oscar nomination by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences because of lobbying by the tune's writer, Bruce Broughton.  A member of the academy's music branch executive committee and a former AMPAS governor, Broughton committed the no-no of emailing other members about his nomination during the voting period.  "Using one’s position as a former governor and current executive committee member to personally promote one’s own Oscar submission creates the appearance of an unfair advantage,” said academy President Cheryl Boone Isaacs.  http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/cotown/la-et-ct-morning-fix-20140130,0,6761712.story#ixzz2rtnwgoFh

Details on the controversy at http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/envelope/moviesnow/la-et-mn-alone-yet-not-alone-oscar-nomination-revoked-20140129,0,139757.story#axzz2rt8HeCJp and http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/race/academy-disqualifies-oscar-nominated-song-675480

Adjectives modify nouns.  Articles (a, an, and the) are a special kind of adjective.  Articles may be definite or indefinite.  Adverbs modify verbs.  But they also modify adjectives and other adverbs, indicating "when," "in what way," and "to what degree."  Find examples and link to other parts of speech at http://students.case.edu/education/peer/sagesguide/grammar/speech1.html

The banana is not a tree, but an herb.  Julian W. Sauls, Extension Horticulturist with the Texas A&M University Agricultural Extension Service, describes it as a tropical, herbaceous plant consisting of an underground corm and a trunk (pseudostem) comprised of concentric layers of leaf sheaths.  A true stem, with a terminal inflorescence (flower) that bears fruit, is the last thing to emerge from the center of the pseudostem.  The flowers appear in groups called "hands" along this true stem.  They are covered by purplish bracts, which roll back and shed as the fruit stem develops. Generally, a bract rolls up and sheds to expose a new hand of flowers almost daily.  A single banana pseudostem will live only 2 to 3 years, or until its fruit is harvested and it is cut down.  But the corm from which it grew can survive for many years, and every one of the dozens of pups it produces has the potential to develop a stalk of bananas.  The corm will continue to enlarge and store energy to nurture an endless supply of pups.  http://ag.arizona.edu/maricopa/garden/html/pubs/0104/bananas.html

Issue 1105  February 3, 2014  On this day in 1637, Tulip mania collapsed in the United Provinces (now the Netherlands) as sellers could no longer find buyers for their bulb contracts.