The Missouri River is the longest river in North America and the 4th longest in the world (when combined with the Mississippi River system).  Its utmost source (defined by the longest flow of water at its furthest source to sea) originates at Brower’s Spring in the Centennial Mountains southeast of Dillon, Montana.  This upper section form Hellroaring Creek (not the same one that’s in Yellowstone Park), Red Rock River, Beaverhead River and the Jefferson River.  The Missouri-proper starts where the Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin rivers join near Three Forks, Montana.  It flows 2,540 miles to where it joins the Mississippi River near St. Louis.  From there, the water continues to the Gulf of Mexico, another 1300 miles.  From source to sea, the total is nearly 3800 miles.  https://www.uppermissouri.com/resources/quick-facts-name-origin#:~:text=The%20Missouri%20River%20is%20the,Mountains%20southeast%20of%20Dillon%2C%20Montana.   

Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood of 4.4 square miles in Boston, Massachusetts.  Settled by Puritans seeking farmland to the south, it was originally part of Roxbury.  The community seceded from Roxbury during the formation of West Roxbury in 1851 and became part of Boston when West Roxbury was annexed in 1874.  In the 19th century, Jamaica Plain became one of the first streetcar suburbs in America and home to a significant portion of Boston's Emerald Necklace of parks, designed by Frederick Law Olmsted.  In 2020, Jamaica Plain had a population of 41,012 according to the United States Census.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica_Plain    

James Saburo Shigeta (1929–2014) was an American actor and singer.  He was known for his roles in The Crimson Kimono (1959), Walk Like a Dragon (1960), Flower Drum Song (1961), Bridge to the Sun (1961), Midway (1976), Die Hard (1988), and Mulan (1998).  In 1960, he won the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer–Male, along with three other actors.  Shigeta entered and won first prize on Ted Mack's television talent show, The Original Amateur Hour in 1950.  Embarking on a singing career in Los Angeles, he teamed with Hawaiian operatic tenor Charles K.L. Davis.  Their agent at the time gave them the non-ethnic sounding stage names of "Guy Brion" for Shigeta, and "Charles Durand" for Davis.  They developed a supper club musical career in the United States, singing at venues such as the Mocambo and the Los Angeles Players Club.  Despite that success, breaking into the movies eluded him. 

During the Korean War Shigeta enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, where he entertained troops in California.  En route to Korea, the ceasefire led Shigeta to Japan, where he was discharged from the Marines and hired by the theatrical division of Toho Studios.   Shigeta did not speak Japanese until Toho Studios in Tokyo invited him to be a musical star under his real name in Japan.  He became a success in all media aspects of his day-–radio, television, stage, supper clubs, movies, recordings–-to such an extent that he became widely known as "The Frank Sinatra of Japan".  The 1961 romantic comedy Cry for Happy had Shigeta co-starring with Glenn Ford, Donald O'Connor and Miyoshi Umeki in a tale about Korean War era United States Navy photographers in Japan.  In 1961, Shigeta was cast as Wang Ta, a role originated by Ed Kenney on Broadway, in the Academy Award-nominated movie version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Flower Drum Song with Nancy Kwan and Miyoshi Umeki playing the love interests.  He was cast as World War II Japanese diplomat Hidenari Terasaki opposite Carroll Baker as Gwen Terasaki in the 1961 biographical movie Bridge to the Sun.   A rarity for its era, the movie told the true story of a racially mixed marriage set against the background of the war between the United States and Japan.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Shigeta 

The Landlord's Game is a board game patented in 1904 by Elizabeth Magie as U.S. patent 748,626.  A realty and taxation game intended to educate users about Georgism, it is the inspiration for the 1935 board game Monopoly.  In 1902 to 1903, Magie designed the game and playtested it in Arden, Delaware.   The game was created to be a "practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences".   She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed by Henry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game     

Arden is a village in New Castle County, Delaware, founded in 1900 as a radical Georgist single-tax community by sculptor Frank Stephens and architect William Lightfoot Price.   The village occupies approximately 160 acres, with half kept as open land.  According to the 2010 census, the population of the village is 439.   In 1973, the entire village was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  Two neighboring villages of similar size were founded on Georgist principles, Ardentown, in 1922, and Ardencroft, in 1950.  In 2003, they were also listed on the NRHP as the Ardens Historic District.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arden,_Delaware    

November 6, 2025

A Ponzi scheme is a form of fraud that lures investors and pays profits to earlier investors with funds from more recent investors.  Named after Italian con artist Charles Ponzi, this type of scheme misleads investors by either falsely suggesting that profits are derived from legitimate business activities (whereas the business activities are non-existent), or by exaggerating the extent and profitability of the legitimate business activities, leveraging new investments to fabricate or supplement these profits.  A Ponzi scheme can maintain the illusion of a sustainable business as long as investors continue to contribute new funds, and as long as most of the investors do not demand full repayment or lose faith in the non-existent assets they are purported to own.  Some of the first recorded incidents to meet the modern definition of the Ponzi scheme were carried out from 1869 to 1872 by Adele Spitzeder in Germany and by Sarah Howe in the United States in the 1880s through the "Ladies' Deposit".  Howe offered a solely female clientele an 8% monthly interest rate and then stole the money that the women had invested. She was eventually discovered and served three years in prison.  The Ponzi scheme was also previously described in novels; Charles Dickens's 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit and his 1857 novel Little Dorrit both feature such a scheme.   In the 1920s, Charles Ponzi carried out this scheme and became well known throughout the United States because of the huge amount of money that he took in.  His original scheme was purportedly based on the legitimate arbitrage of international reply coupons for postage stamps, but it proved infeasible, and he soon began diverting new investors' money to make payments to earlier investors and to himself.  Unlike earlier similar schemes, Ponzi's gained considerable press coverage both within the United States and internationally both while it was being perpetrated and after it collapsed--this notoriety eventually led to the type of scheme being named after him.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ponzi_scheme    

The Furry Dance is a celebration of the passing of winter and the arrival of spring, and one of the oldest British customs still practised today.  Traditionally held on 8 May, it is held in Helston, Cornwall, where dancers wear lily of the valley, the town's symbolic flower.  The name probably derives from Cornish fer meaning "fair, feast".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Furry_Dance    

Lemony Snicket is the pen name of American author Daniel Handler (born 1970) and a fictional character of his creation.  Handler has published various children's books under the name, including A Series of Unfortunate Events, which has sold over 60 million copies and spawned a 2004 film and Netflix TV series from 2017 to 2019 of the same name.  Lemony Snicket also serves as the in-universe author who investigates and re-tells the story of the Baudelaire orphans in A Series of Unfortunate Events.  Snicket is also the subject of a fictional autobiography titled Lemony Snicket:  The Unauthorized Autobiography.  Further telling of Snicket's adventures can be found in the four-part children's series All the Wrong Questions, as well as a pamphlet titled 13 Shocking Secrets You'll Wish You Never Knew About Lemony Snicket (released in promotion of The End).  Other works by Snicket include The Baby in the Manger, The Composer Is Dead, Horseradish:  Bitter Truths You Can't Avoid, The Latke Who Couldn't Stop Screaming, The Lump of Coal, and 13 Words.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemony_Snicket   Villanelle    A French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas.  These two refrain lines form the final couplet in the quatrain.  See “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art,”  and Edwin Arlington Robinson’s “The House on the Hill.”  Browse more villanelles at  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/villanelle    

Lesley University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  It was founded in 1909 to educate teachers.  Originally founded as a women's college, male students were admitted beginning in 2005.  The Lesley School (also known as Lesley Normal School) was founded by Edith Lesley in 1909 at her home at 29 Everett Street, Cambridge.  The school began as a private women's institution that trained kindergarten teachers.  It espoused the work of Friedrich Froebel, who invented the concept of kindergarten as a complement to the care given to children by their mothers.  Teacher and writer Elizabeth Peabody opened Boston's first Froebel-inspired kindergarten in 1860; more kindergartens followed.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesley_University    

November 4, 2025

Maraschino cherries are used in many alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks and cocktails, including the Old Fashioned, tequila sunrise, the Queen Mary and the Shirley Temple, giving them the nickname cocktail cherries.  (This term is also used to refer to other varieties, including Amarena, Balaton, and Bing, when used for the same purpose, typically soaked in alcohol or sugar.)  Sometimes the cherries, along with some of the maraschino syrup, are put into a glass of cola to make an old-fashioned or homemade cherry cola.  As a garnish, they can be used to decorate frozen yogurt, baked ham, cakes, pastry, parfaits, milkshakes and ice cream sodas.  They are an integral part of an American ice cream sundae, giving rise to the term "cherry on top" in more general usage.  They are frequently included in canned fruit cocktail.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maraschino_cherry   

"The Wild Swans at Coole" is a lyric poem by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats (1865–1939).  Written between 1916 and early 1917, the poem was first published in the June 1917 issue of the Little Review, and became the title poem in the Yeats's 1917 and 1919 collections The Wild Swans at Coole.   It was written during a period when Yeats was staying with his friend Lady Gregory at her home at Coole Park, and the assembled collection was dedicated to her son, Major Robert Gregory (1881–1918), a British airman killed during a friendly fire incident in the First World War.  Literary scholar Daniel Tobin writes that Yeats was melancholy and unhappy, reflecting on his advancing age, romantic rejections by both Maud Gonne and her daughter Iseult Gonne, and the ongoing Irish rebellion against the British.

Poem:

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine-and-fifty swans.

See the rest of the poem at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wild_Swans_at_Coole_(poem)

Thank you, reader.   

Bistre (or bister) is a pigment made from soot.  Historically, beechwood was burned to produce the soot, which was boiled and diluted with water.  Many Old Masters used bistre as the ink for their wash paintings.  Bistre's appearance is generally of a dark grayish brown, with a yellowish cast.  Bistre has also been used to name colors resembling the pigment, typically shades of brown.  The first recorded use of bistre as a color name in English was in 1727; another name for the color bistre is soot brown.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bistre  Thank you, reader.    

cochineal, red dyestuff consisting of the dried, pulverized bodies of certain female scale insects, Dactylopius coccus, of the Coccidae family, cactus-eating insects native to tropical and subtropical America.  Cochineal is used to produce scarlet, crimson, orange, and other tints and to prepare pigments such as lake and carmine. The dye was introduced into Europe from Mexico, where it had been used long before the coming of the Spaniards.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bistre  Thank you, reader.    

October 29 is National Cat Day in the USA, which was established on this day 20 years ago in 2005 by the American animal welfare advocate Colleen Paige with the support of the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to encourage people to celebrate the companionship provided by cats, and to be aware of the need to rescue and adopt them.    

Stanford Medicine researchers compared how three different time policies — permanent standard time, permanent daylight saving time and biannual shifting — could affect people’s circadian rhythms, and, in turn, their health throughout the country.  Circadian rhythm is the body’s innate, roughly 24-hour clock, which regulates many physiological processes.  The team found that, from a circadian perspective, we’ve made the worst choice.  Either permanent standard time or permanent daylight saving time would be healthier than our seasonal waffling, with permanent standard time benefitting the most people.  https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2025/09/daylight-saving-time.html    

kigurumi (plural kigurumi or kigurumis)  noun 

A full-body costume of a cartoon character (typically a mascot of cartoonish proportions) originating in Japan.   Synonyms: kig, kigu

(anime) A full-body cosplay of a human cartoon character with realistic proportions paired with an anime-style mask, originating in Japan; also (metonymic), the anime-style mask used in such a cosplay.  Synonyms: animegao, kig, kigu

(fashion) A themed onesie, typically in the style of a cartoon animal.  Synonyms: kig, kigu  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/kigurumi#English

November 3, 2025