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Why should the river that tumbles out of the Ethiopian highlands and joins the White
Nile at Khartoum be called the Blue Nile?
It is not particularly blue.
Perhaps it should be called the Summer River, because for most of the
year it provides little water compared to the White Nile, but in summer it is
very much the dominant tributary. In the
summer, winds from the SE bring moist air from the Indian Ocean. This is forced to rise over the Ethiopian
Plateau, half of which is over 2 km high; the highest point in Ethiopia. The moist air cools as it rises, and this
wrings out the moisture in torrents known as monsoon. Monsoon rains wash the Ethiopian highlands in
summer, filling every dry wash that drains down to the Blue Nile. Within 30 km of its source at Lake Tana the
river enters a canyon which it does not leave for 400 km. This gorge is a tremendous obstacle for
travel and communication from the north half of Ethiopia to the southern
half. The traditional source of the Blue
Nile is a spring which feeds the Little Abbai, a stream which flows NE into
Lake Tana. Lake Tana itself lies at an
elevation of a little over 1800 m and was formed when a young lava flow blocked
t he river, flooding a shallow depression.
The river has cut through this barrier, flowing to the SE. As the river cuts deeper into its gorge, it
slowly turns south, then SW, then W.
Finally, as it leaves the great canyon, it turns to NNW to meet with its
sister stream at Khartoum. The course of
the stream thus turns 270 degrees from start to finish. The Blue Nile is vital to the livelihood of
Egypt. Almost 60% of the water that
reaches Egypt originates from the Blue Nile branch of the great river. The river is also an important resource for
Sudan where dams produce 80% of the country's power as well as irrigation for
the Gezira Plain, a project delivering water to over 2 million acres. https://www.utdallas.edu/geosciences/remsens/Nile/BlueText.html
Written any letters lately? What
letters do you remember? My husband was
in the army and sent me a love letter (actually many letters, each with one
word on them). Unforgettable. A travel guide who had driven us around wine
country in California sent us a beautiful, and much appreciated, two-page
letter written on fanciful stationery with florid handwriting about our unusual
trip. See also Handwriting Is on the
Wall: Penmanship skills are being slowly erased in a
typing and texting age by Cullen Murphy, a review of Script and Scribble by Kitty Burns Florey at http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB123275735842311981 If the preceding link doesn't work, you may
cut and paste the cite in your browser address bar. Or, you can use keywords--it should come up
one way or the other.
Feedback to A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg
From: Doug
Peterson Subject:
Words using only one of the vowels
This week’s theme reminds
me of a game we play around the campfire.
We take a traditional nursery rhyme and try to come up with a version
that is inspired by the original but is made entirely of words using only one
of the vowels. We call it a Single Vowel
Nursery Rhyme. For example, if the
original rhyme is: Mary had a little
lamb, Its fleece was white as snow, And everywhere that Mary went, The lamb was
sure to go. Then the Single Vowel
Nursery Rhyme could be: Jojo owns two
bold old dogs, Two dogs of color brown, Both dogs follow Jojo so Two old dogs go to town.
Dutch elm disease (DED) is one of the most destructive urban forest diseases. This disease affects native American elm
species, such as American (Ulmus americana), slippery (red) (U. rubra), winged
(U. alata), rock (U. thomasii), September (U. serotina), and cedar (U.
crassifolia) elms. The Asiatic elms,
such as Siberian (U. pumila), Japanese (U. japonica), or lacebark (U.
parvifolia) elms, are much less susceptible to DED, and the disease is not
considered an issue for these species.
Introduced into America near Cleveland in the 1930s, this disease still
kills mature elms today. Dutch elm
disease occurs throughout the natural range of American elms, and is found in
virtually all the continental United States except the desert Southwest. Historically speaking, it is known as “Dutch”
elm disease because the first extensive research was done by pioneering Dutch
women. American elm trees once dominated
our urban landscapes as beautiful shade trees.
Now, due to DED, they are no longer prominent. In fact, American elms are virtually absent
in most communities today, with the exception of lone “survivors.” Some communities have made extensive attempts
to save their elm trees, such as Washington, D.C., and Syracuse, New York, but
more often than not the costs of managing DED on a city-wide scale prohibit the
development of successful management programs.
In nature both American and slippery elms can still be seen in locales
where the environmental conditions are suitable for natural elm regeneration,
such as in riparian environments. Chris
Wallis, Dennis J. Lewandowski and Pierluigi (Enrico) Bonello
Ke-tchup means “preserved-fish sauce” in the
southern Chinese language of Hokkien. In his new book, The
Language of Food: A Linguist Reads the
Menu (W.W. Norton &
Company, 2014), Dan Jurafsky takes us on a journey tracing culinary words
across cultures. Jurafsky shows how the
history of the world is laid out in the dishes set before us. We “toast” partly because actual toast was
once served in wine and beer; this was known as a “sop,” from which the words supper and soup come.
The English word semolina (course-ground wheat often used for
making pasta) derives from the ancient word samidu,
which appears in the 3,700-year-old Yale culinary tablets, three small
Mesopotamian slabs that contain some of the world’s oldest written
recipes. In German, that same word
became semmel and refers
to the hard white kaiser rolls still eaten in Wisconsin and other areas of the
United States where German immigrants settled.
“Next time you eat a bratwurst on a Sheboygan hard ‘semmel’ roll,”
Jurafsky writes, “remember that the name goes all the way back to the
Assyrians.”
Marshmallow treats called Peeps are owned and made by Just Born Inc., a candy company
located in Bethlehem,
Pa. The company is named after Sam Born,
a Russian-born founder
and confectioner, who started the brand in 1917 after immigrating to the United
States. His candy company grew and
eventually acquired Rodda Candy Company in 1953. "They were
primarily interested in that company for the jelly bean technology," Matt
Pye, the vice president of corporate affairs for Just Born, told USA TODAY
Network. "But while the family was
touring the Rodda Candy Company, in the back part of the factory were these
women with pastry tubes squirting these marshmallow chicks by hand," Pye
said. Today,
Just Born makes about 5.5 million each day in a variety of shapes and
colors. Peeps skyrocketed in
popularity in the 1990s, according to Pye. The company credits that to increased press
coverage and the rise of the Internet where people shared their thoughts and
even their wacky Peeps experiments online, he said. In 2004, the first Peeps diorama contest was
held by the St. Paul Pioneer Press in
Minnesota. Today many other
newspapers and organizations across the country host community competitions that
award prizes for the best dioramas featuring Peeps. Lori Grisham
Find more information and see pictures at http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2015/03/30/peeps-marshmallow-easter-history-just-born/70553468/
ALA Awards 2015: Horn Book reviews of the
winners Link to winners of the Newbery
and Caldecott Medals and other awards including Sibert, Printz, and Batchelder at
http://www.hbook.com/2015/02/news/awards/ala-awards-2015-horn-book-reviews-winners/
Video: Badgers' Vitto Brown
sings National Anthem before NCAA Final Four semifinals Vitto Brown of Wisconsin along with Duke football player Deion Williams
joined Michigan State soccer player Michelle Dear and Kentucky soccer player
Kennedy Collier in singing the national anthem April 5, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=su65bMz-TOM
3:31
See also Shades of Brown, consisting of
Vitto Brown and his family, singing the National Anthem before Wisconsin faced
Indiana in 2014.
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1280
April 6, 2015 On this date in
1861, the first performance of Arthur
Sullivan's debut success, his suite of incidental
music for The Tempest, took place. On this date in 1869, Celluloid was patented.
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