A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg
olio (OH-lee-oh)
noun A miscellaneous collection
of things, for example, a variety show.
From Spanish olla (pot, stew), from Latin olla (pot). “I will launch into an olio of malapropisms, bad
abbreviations, similar words that tend to be used interchangeably.”
All right, Already! Today You Get Plenty of Options; Daily
Herald (Illinois); September 13, 2015.
Feedback to A.Word.A.Day
From: Glenn
Glazer Subject:
olio ‘Olio’ is also Italian for ‘oil’ and many
pasta recipes have this word in their names, for example Spaghetti aglio e
olio.
Pemmican is a concentrated mixture of fat and protein used as a nutritious food. The word comes from the Cree word pimîhkân,
which itself is derived from the word pimî, "fat, grease".
It
was invented by the native
peoples of North America. It
was widely adopted as a high-energy food
by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Sir Ernest
Henry Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen. The specific ingredients used were usually
whatever was available; the meat was often bison, moose, elk,
or deer.
Fruits such as cranberries and saskatoon berries were
sometimes added.
Cherries, currants, chokeberries and blueberries were also used, but almost
exclusively in ceremonial and wedding pemmican.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemmican
Pemmican
Recipes: New and Old http://paleofood.com/pemmican.htm
preposterous incongruous; inviting ridicule adjective Original source: Princeton WordNet
Etymology: Latin praeposterus "absurd,
contrary to nature", literally "before-behind" http://www.memidex.com/preposterous#etymology
An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time
when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes. Part
of the discrepancy has to do with the basic rules of American football. Unlike hockey or basketball, the 60-minute
game clock in football can run even when the ball is not in play. That means a lot of game time is spent
standing around or huddling up before each play begins. The 11 minutes of action was famously calculated a few years ago by the Wall Street
Journal. Its analysis found that an
average NFL broadcast spent more time on replays (17 minutes) than live
play. The plurality of time (75 minutes)
was spent watching players, coaches, and referees essentially loiter on the
field. An average play in the NFL lasts
just four seconds. The average NFL game
includes 20 commercial breaks containing more than 100 ads. The
Journal’s analysis found that commercials took up about an hour, or one-third,
of the game. Football’s stop-and-go
nature makes it particularly prime for commercials, unlike soccer, which forces
broadcasters to creatively insert ads during the 45 minutes of continuous play
in each half. Broadcasts of NFL games in
Europe, incidentally, include far fewer commercials.
You've probably heard about the
legendary "Johnny Appleseed" who, according to story and song, spread his apple seeds all
over the nation. Did you know there
really was a "Johnny Appleseed"?
His name was Jonathan Chapman.
Born in Massachusetts on September 26, 1775, Chapman earned his nickname
because he planted small orchards and individual apple trees during his travels
as he walked across 100,000 square miles of Midwestern wilderness and
prairie. In 1801, Chapman transported 16
bushels of apple seeds from western Pennsylvania down the Ohio River. About 1830, Chapman also acquired land in
Fort Wayne, Indiana. There, he planted a
nursery that produced thousands of seedling apple trees that he sold, traded,
and planted elsewhere. http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/revolut/jb_revolut_apple_1.html
Johnny Appleseed Squares recipe http://www.cooks.com/recipe/r7924910/johnny-appleseed-squares.html Johnny Appleseed Squares is also the name of
a square dance club that started in 1968.
A Penny for your Books by Dan Nosowitz In recent years, my bookshelves have swelled.
Old John le Carré and Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block titles are easier
than ever to find online, along with pretty much every other book published in
the last century. They’re all on Amazon,
priced incredibly low, and sold by third-party booksellers nobody has ever
heard of. Better-known titles with more
robust print circulation quickly obey the seesaw of supply and demand; after
time, their prices can sink even lower, because of the increased number of
copies floating around. Take Jennifer
Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad”: You can buy a new hardcover or paperback copy
for $18.82 or $9.19, from Amazon itself, or download the Kindle version for
$8.56. Or, as with hundreds of thousands
of other books on Amazon, you can click through to the “used” section and buy
the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction for a penny. Despite the naysaying about the death of
publishing, the industry’s most vital numbers—sales and revenue—aren’t actually
all that gloomy. In 2014, publishers
sold just over 2.7 billion books domestically, for a total net revenue of just
under $28 billion, a larger profit than in the preceding two years, according
to the Association
of American Publishers. There were
just over 300,000 new titles (including re-releases) published in the United
States in 2013. The book industry may
not be as strong as it once was, but it’s still enormous, and generates a
considerable amount of surplus product each year. Enter the penny booksellers. There are dozens of sellers offering scores of
relatively sought-after books in varying conditions for a cent. Even including the standard $3.99 shipping,
the total sum comes out to several dollars cheaper than what you’d pay at most
brick-and-mortar used-book stores. “At
some point in the next two to three years, I predict that ‘Go Set a Watchman’
will be selling for a penny,” says Mike Ward, president of the Seattle-based
used-book seller Thriftbooks. Ward would
know; though it isn’t considered in the same league as Barnes & Noble or
Books-A-Million, Thriftbooks sells about 12 million books a year, mostly on
Amazon, and many for a penny. (In
comparison, Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest book retailer, sells
somewhere around 300 million books a year, but has the added weight of hundreds
of enormous, expensive megastores to run and thousands of employees.) Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/a-penny-for-your-books.html?_r=0
October 30, 2015 Two things you probably haven’t been paying a
lot of attention to lately: Election Day in Ohio. Former boy-band star and reality TV
spouse Nick Lachey. Well, settle in,
because you have some catching up to do. On November 3, 2015, Ohio residents go to the
polls to decide whether marijuana should be legal. If they vote yes, the Cincinnati native and
long-ago leading man of “Newlyweds: Nick
and Jessica” will automatically become one of the top weed kingpins of the
Buckeye State. It is one of the most
curious ballot initiatives in the country—a synergy of B-list celebrity and
entrepreneurial democracy in a culturally conservative state that would hardly
be expected to lead the charge for legal pot.
And yet it has driven a wedge into the usual pro-marijuana coalition, in
part because of language in the measure that would restrict virtually all
large-scale marijuana cultivation to 10 designated farms. The owners of those farms? A random bunch, including Lachey, designer
Nanette Lepore, NBA legend Oscar Robertson, NFL journeyman Frostee Rucker, a
pair of President William Howard Taft’s great-great-grandnephews and
twenty-some others—who, not coincidentally, are the same folks bankrolling the
campaign, and stand to become very, very wealthy if the measure passes. Each ownership group was asked to put up an
initial $4 million to underwrite the ballot campaign; it cost them an estimated
$10 million more to buy land and get their farms up and running. Lachey’s piece of the action would be 29 acres
just outside of Akron, which he would co-own with a couple of financial
executives and a car dealership owner from Texas. Every one of the 1,100 state-regulated
marijuana retail shops across Ohio will have no choice but to buy from his or
one of the other nine farms. Jessica
Contrera https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-ohio-marijuana-vote-that-could-make-nick-lachey-a-weed-kingpin-yes-that-nick-lachey/2015/10/30/58bd2b28-7cc4-11e5-b575-d8dcfedb4ea1_story.html
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1372
November 3, 2015 On this date in
1789, the first District Court established by the Constitution opened
in New York City.
On this date in 1903, with the encouragement of the United States, Panama separated
from Colombia.
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