Canajoharie is a village in the town of Canajoharie in Montgomery County, New York.  As of the 2010 census, the village had a population of 2,229.  The name is said to be an Iroquois term meaning "the pot that washes itself," a reference to the "Canajoharie Boiling Pot," a circular gorge in the Canajoharie Creek, just south of the village.  The village of Canajoharie is at the north border of the Town of Canajoharie and is east of Utica and west of Amsterdam.  Canajoharie is home to one of at least three operating "dummy-lights" in the United States, located downtown at the intersection of Church, Mohawk and Montgomery Streets.  It is a traffic signal on a pedestal which sits in the middle of an intersection, first installed in 1926. The other two are also located in New York State, in Beacon and Croton-on-Hudson.  The Erie Canal passes the north side of the village.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canajoharie_(village),_New_York 

Arkell Museum at Canajoharie  Bartlett Arkell, the founder and first president of the Beech-Nut Packing Company built the original Canajoharie Gallery in 1927 based on galleries he had experienced in his travels to Europe.  A museum designed by Ann Beha and DesignLAB Architects was added in 2007 to the existing Canajoharie Library and Art Gallery to provide inspiring new space for exhibitions and programs.  Almost all of the paintings in the permanent collection were purchased by Bartlett Arkell for the people of Canajoharie. The American painting collection includes 21 works by Winslow Homer, and significant paintings by many distinguished artists, including George Inness, William M. Chase, Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Robert Henri, and other members of The Eight.  Permanent and changing exhibitions also feature selections from the museum’s Mohawk Valley History collection as well as the Beech-Nut archives of early twentieth-century advertising material.  http://www.arkellmuseum.org/  See also:  Hidden in the Valley  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443884104577647630328919876.html?mod=ITP_personaljournal_2

Lettuce (Lactuca sativa) is an annual plant of the aster or sunflower family Asteraceae.  It is most often grown as a leaf vegetable, but sometimes for its stem and seeds.  Lettuce was first cultivated by the ancient Egyptians who turned it from a weed, whose seeds were used to make oil, into a plant grown for its leaves.  Lettuce spread to the Greeks and Romans, the latter of whom gave it the name "lactuca", from which the English "lettuce" ultimately derived.   The species was first described in 1753 by Carl Linnaeus in the second volume of his Species Plantarum.  The Romans referred to lettuce as lactuca (lac meaning milk in Latin), an allusion to the white substance, now called latex, exuded by cut stems.  This word has become the genus name, while sativa (meaning "sown" or "cultivated") was added to create the species name.  The current word lettuce, originally from Middle English, came from the Old French letues or laitues, which derived from the Roman name.  The name romaine came from that type's use in the Roman papal gardens, while cos, another term for romaine lettuce, came from the earliest European seeds of the type from the Greek island of Cos, a center of lettuce farming in the Byzantine period.  Lettuce's native range spreads from the Mediterranean to Siberia, although it has been transported to almost all areas of the world.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lettuce

Medigap:  a primer  by Carol Rapaport   

Congressional Research Service 7-5700  www.crs.gov   R42745 

Medicare is a nationwide health insurance program for individuals aged 65 and over and certain
disabled individuals.  The basic Medicare benefit package (termed “Original Medicare” in this
report) provides broad protection against the costs of many, primarily acute, health care services.
However, Medicare beneficiaries may still have significant additional costs, including
copayments, coinsurance, deductibles, and the full cost of services that are not covered by
Medicare.  In 2008, about 17% of Medicare beneficiaries purchased the private supplemental
insurance known as Medigap to fill some of the cost gaps left by Original Medicare.  All Medigap plans cover some percentage of Medicare’s cost-sharing.  Some plans offer additions
to these basics, including various combinations of greater coverage of Medicare cost-sharing, and care associated with foreign travel emergencies.  The most popular plans are the most
comprehensive, and cover all deductibles, copayments, and coinsurance not covered by Medicare.   Medigap generally does not cover medical treatments not covered by Medicare, although it does extend coverage for certain covered services, such as coverage for additional hospital days beyond the Medicare benefit.  Read 32-page report at:  http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R42745.pdf

For well over a century and a half the people of Indiana have been called Hoosiers.  It is one of the oldest of state nicknames and has had a wider acceptance than most.  But where did Hoosier come from?  What is its origin?  We know that it came into general usage in the 1830s. John Finley of Richmond wrote a poem, "The Hoosier's Nest," which was used as the "Carrier's Address" of the Indianapolis Journal, Jan. 1, 1833.  It was widely copied throughout the country and even abroad.  Finley originally wrote Hoosier as "Hoosher."  Apparently the poet felt that it was sufficiently familiar to be understandable to his readers.  A few days later, on January 8, 1833, at the Jackson Day dinner at Indianapolis, John W. Davis offered "The Hoosher State of Indiana" as a toast.  And in August, former Indiana governor James B. Ray announced that he intended to publish a newspaper, The Hoosier, at Greencastle, Indiana.  A few instances of the earlier written use of Hoosier have been found.  The word appears in the "Carrier's Address" of the Indiana Democrat on January 3, 1832.  G. L. Murdock wrote on February 11, 1831, in a letter to General John Tipton, "Our Boat will [be] named the Indiana Hoosier."   

Read popular theories of origin of the term at:  http://www.in.gov/history/2612.htm

Q:  Did Ronald Reagan say, "Win one for the Gipper!"?
 A:  Not in "Knute Rockne, All-American" (1940).  It's actor Pat O'Brien who says:  "The last thing George said to me, 'Rock,' he said, 'sometime, when a team is up against it and the breaks are beating the boys, tell them to go out there with all they got and win just one for the Gipper.'"
O'Brien played Rockne. Reagan played George Gipp. -- Various sources.
Q:  I know what "between the devil and the deep blue sea" means, but what's its origin?
A:  A theory:  The "devil seam" is a curved deckboard near the side of the ship.  If a sailor slipped, he could find himself between the seam and the sea. -- Various sources.
Q:  What part of the world was first called "America"?
A:  The name was first used for central Brazil in honor of Italian cartographer Amerigo Vespucci.  America is the feminine form of his name.   It was applied to the whole western world by Flemish geographer Gerardus Mercator in 1538. -- U.S. Archives.  http://www.thecourier.com/Opinion/columns/2012/Sep/JU/ar_JU_092412.asp?d=092412,2012,Sep,24&c=c_13

Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs.  Those elaborate pictographs were the elite script for recording the lives and triumphs of pharaohs in their tombs and on the monumental stones along the Nile.  But almost from the beginning, people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs.  These were the words of love and family, the law and commerce, private letters and texts on science, religion and literature.  For at least 1,000 years, roughly from 500 B.C. to A.D. 500, both the language and the distinctive cursive script were known as Demotic Egyptian, a name given it by the Greeks to mean the tongue of the demos, or the common people.  Demotic was one of the three scripts inscribed on the Rosetta stone, along with Greek and hieroglyphs, enabling European scholars to decipher the royal language in the early 19th century and thus read the top-down version of a great civilization’s long history.  Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words.  John Noble Wilford  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/science/new-demotic-dictionary-translates-lives-of-ancient-egyptians.html?pagewanted=all&_moc.semityn.www