Friday, June 24, 2016

The jackfruit is the largest tree fruit in the world, capable of reaching 100 pounds.  And it grows on the branches and the trunks of trees that can reach 30, 40, 50 feet.  Jackfruits are also a nutritional bonanza:  high in protein, potassium and vitamin B.  And, with about 95 calories in about a half a cup, they aren't quite as high-carb or caloric as staples like rice or corn.  Yet the jackfruit is "an underutilized crop" in the tropical-to-subtropical climate where it thrives, says Nyree Zerega, director of the graduate program in plant biology and conservation at Northwestern University and the Chicago Botanic Garden.  In countries like India and Bangladesh, where the jackfruit was once widely cultivated, it has fallen out of favor.  It's a versatile food source and thus a potential economic boon for countries that market it.  Jackfruits can be dried, roasted, added to soups, used in chips, jams, juices, ice cream.  The seeds can be boiled, roasted or ground into flour.  Even the tree itself is valuable:  high-quality, rot-resistant timber for furniture and musical instruments.  Or you can eat a jackfruit fresh.  The jackfruit is made up of hundreds or even thousands of individual flowers that are fused together.  We eat the "fleshy petals" that surround the seed, which is the actual fruit.  Marc Silver http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/01/308708000/heres-the-scoop-on-jackfruit-a-ginormous-fruit-to-feed-the-world

May 28, 2016  Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport offers food, drinks, and even live video of the alligator exhibit at the Tennessee Aquarium to help travelers pass time awaiting their flights.  Soon, airport patrons will have access to a bookstore as well.  Friends of the Library, calling the business model a first for an airport nationally, will lease about 750 square feet in the lower level of the terminal where it will sell books.  William Sundquist, chairman of the group that supports Chattanooga Public Library, said plans are to provide books which will be mainly donated or are library discards.  The store will be unmanned with sales done on "the honor system," he said, permitting buyers to pay either in cash or with a credit card.  "We'll restock on a weekly basis," Sundquist told the Chattanooga Airport Authority this week.  "We're really thrilled about this opportunity to bring library material to the airport.  We'll make sure it's maintained properly and looks good."  All of the proceeds will support the library, he said.  Mike Pare  http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/business/diary/story/2016/may/28/library-grosell-books-chattanoogairport/368152/

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg   ricochet words/clone words/reduplicatives   Sometimes a word is repeated exactly (pooh-pooh, blah-blah), other times with a change in a letter (itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie).
hugger-mugger  (HUHG-uhr MUHG-uh)  noun  1. Confusion.  2. Secrecy.  adjective  1. Confused.  2. Secret.  verb tr., intr.:  To keep secret or act in a secretive manner.  adverb  1. Secretly.  2.  Confusingly.
argle-bargle  (AHR-guhl BAHR-guhl)  noun  1.  A vigorous discussion or noisy dispute.  2.  Nonsense.  From reduplication of argle, alteration of argue. 
hoity-toity  (HOI-tee TOI-tee)  adjective  Haughty; pretentious; huffy.  From reduplication of hoit (to romp).
hurly-burly  (HUHR-lee BUHR-lee)   noun  Disorder; confusion; commotion; uproar.   adjective  Characterized by disorder, confusion, commotion, uproar, etc.  A reduplication of hurling, from hurl (to toss).
Feedback to A.Word.A.Day
From:  Elaine Fear  Subject:  Double Trouble in Walla Walla
Double Trouble in Walla Walla by Andrew Clements. This delightful but crazy book has amused my grandchildren ever since they were quite little!
From:  Carl Rosenberg  Subject:  hurly-burly  My favourite usage of this term is the witches in Macbeth:  “When the hurly-burly’s done, when the battle’s lost and won.”
From:  Janet Rizvi  Subject:  Hugger Mugger  Hugger-Mugger in the Louvre!  My mother was reading the novel, about 70 years ago, and I, aged seven or thereabouts, was totally flummoxed by the title.  As well as the idea of hugger-mugger, it was the first time I heard of the Louvre; and from that day to this whenever the Louvre floats into my consciousness for any reason, it’s with a background frisson of rushing and confusion.  What you call reduplicatives are, as you are surely aware, common in Hindi/Urdu. In one Hindi grammar that I studied, they were identified as ‘jingling appositives’.
From:  Pegi Bevins  Subject:  Hugger-Mugger  We bought the Huggermugger board game years ago and still play it.  As you can imagine, the goal of the game is to reveal the secret word.  Great game and a must for those of us who love language!

Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle and one of the best known in the English-speaking world.  He is typically portrayed as an anthropomorphic egg, though he is not explicitly described so.  The first recorded versions of the rhyme date from late eighteenth-century England and the tune from 1870 in James William Elliott's National Nursery Rhymes and Nursery Songs.  The rhyme is listed in the Roud Folk Song Index as No. 13026.  Humpty Dumpty has become a highly popular nursery rhyme character. American actor George L. Fox (1825–77) helped to popularise the character in nineteenth-century stage productions of pantomime versions, music, and rhyme.  The character is also a common literary allusion, particularly to refer to a person in an insecure position, something that would be difficult to reconstruct once broken, or a short and fat person.  Humpty Dumpty has been used in a large range of literary works in addition to his appearance as a character in Through the Looking-Glass, including L. Frank Baum's Mother Goose in Prose (1901), where the rhyming riddle is devised by the daughter of the king, having witnessed Humpty's "death" and her father's soldiers' efforts to save him.  In Neil Gaiman's early short story The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds, the Humpty Dumpty story is turned into a film noir-style hardboiledcrime story, involving also Cock Robin, the Queen of Hearts, Little Bo Peep, Old Mother Hubbard, and other characters from popular nursery rhymes.  Robert Rankin used Humpty Dumpty as one victim of a serial fairy-tale character murderer in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse (2002).  Jasper Fforde included Humpty Dumpty in his novels The Well of Lost Plots (2003) and The Big Over Easy (2005), which use him respectively as a ringleader of dissatisfied nursery rhyme characters threatening to strike and as the victim of a murder. The rhyme has also been used as a reference in more serious literary works, including as a recurring motif of the Fall of Man in James Joyce's 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.  Robert Penn Warren's 1946 American novel All the King's Men is the story of populist politician Willie Stark's rise to the position of governor and eventual fall, based on the career of the corrupt Louisiana Senator Huey Long.  It won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize and was twice made into a film All the King's Men in 1949 and 2006, the former winning the Academy Award for best motion picture.  This was echoed in Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward's book All the President's Men, about the Watergate scandal, referring to the failure of the President's staff to repair the damage once the scandal had leaked out.  It was filmed as All the President's Men in 1976, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman.  Similarly, Humpty Dumpty is referred to in Paul Auster's 1985 novel City of Glass, when two characters discuss him as "the purest embodiment of the human condition" and quote extensively from Through the Looking Glass.  It has also been used as a common motif in popular music, including Hank Thompson's "Humpty Dumpty Heart" (1948), The Monkees' "All the King's Horses" (1966), Aretha Franklin's "All the King's Horses" (1972), Tori Amos's "Humpty Dumpty" (1992), and Travis's "The Humpty Dumpty Love Song" (2001).  In jazz, Ornette Coleman and Chick Corea wrote different compositions, both titled Humpty Dumpty.  In the Dolly Parton song Starting Over Again, it's all the king's horses and all the king's men who can't put the divorced couple back together again.  Humpty Dumpty has been used to demonstrate the second law of thermodynamics.  The law describes a process known as entropy, a measure of the number of specific ways in which a system may be arranged, often taken to be a measure of "disorder".  The higher the entropy, the higher the disorder.  After his fall and subsequent shattering, the inability to put him together again is representative of this principle, as it would be highly unlikely (though not impossible) to return him to his earlier state of lower entropy, as the entropy of an isolated system never decreases.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty

Brexit:  the world’s most complex divorce begins by Alex Barker  
There are rough guidelines on how to proceed, but the negotiation will be largely improvised.  Estimates of how long it will take range from two years to a decade or more.  The goal is to unwind Britain's 43-year membership of the bloc, disentangle and sever the legacy of shared sovereignty, and then reshape the biggest single market on earth.  Three fundamental issues arise.  On substance, what political and commercial arrangements will Brexit Britain demand and will the EU accept them?  In execution, will the exit deal—the divorce and breaking of old obligations—be struck at the same time as a trade agreement covering post-Brexit trade?  And if no, is a transition possible to ensure a soft landing?  Across the continent, markets, officials, presidents and prime ministers know that Britain and its former partners in the EU are embarking on a potentially dangerous political voyage, navigating largely in the dark.  "Until the UK formally leaves the EU, EU law will continue to apply to and within the UK and by this I mean rights as well as obligations," he added.  "All the procedures for the withdrawal of the UK from the EU are clear and set out in the treaties."  Lawyers in Whitehall and Brussels see two distinct tracks.  The first is under Article 50 of the EU treaties—the so-called "exit clause"—which lays down a two-year renewable deadline for a country to leave.  A second track makes arrangements for future relations, from trade to co-operation on security or law enforcement.  This is a more complex negotiation and, once agreed, harder to ratify. It requires unanimity and approval by more than 30 European, national and regional parliaments, possibly after national referendums.  There are alternatives.  One is to attempt a divorce on British terms.  The Leave campaign has outlined plans to legislate in the House of Commons to repeal some EU obligations immediately, while holding-off on invoking the Article 50 divorce clause to deprive the EU of leverage on timing.  By law, nothing fundamental will change for British companies in the coming weeks, months and possibly years. The formal EU rupture is some time away.  But Britain has been thrown into political turmoil.  David Cameron's decision to step down as prime minister triggers a Conservative party leadership race could take several months to play out.   Mr Cameron made clear the decision on when to trigger Article 50 is for his successor.   means any formal EU negotiations will not start until the autumn at the earliest.  http://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/24/brexit-the-worlds-most-complex-divorce-begins.html


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1488  June 24, 2016  On this date in 1880, O Canada, the song that would become the national anthem of Canada, was first performed at the Congrès national des Canadiens-Français.  (The Canadian House of Commons overwhelmingly passed Bill C-210 by a vote of 225 to 74 on June 14, 2016, tweaking the third line of “O Canada” to incorporate gender-neutral phrasing.)  All thy sons is now all of us.  The French-language version of the anthem, which uses different lyrics than its Anglophonic counterpart, is already gender-neutral.  See http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/06/o-canada-gender-neutral/487298/  On this date in 1939, Siam was renamed Thailand by Plaek Phibunsongkhram, the country's third prime minister.  (On July 20th, 1948, the Siamese constituent assembly voted to change the name of Siam to Thailand, the change to come into effect the following year.  Muang Thai or Thailand means ‘land of the free’ and the name had been changed before, in 1939, but the anti-Axis powers refused to recognise the new name after Siam allied herself with the Japanese and in 1942 declared war on the United States and the United Kingdom.)  See http://www.historytoday.com/richard-cavendish/siam-officially-renamed-thailand

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