Moles, voles and gophers all create tunnels and are active underground, but what they eat and the damage they cause varies.  They all improve the soil by aerating it and mixing nutrients, but sometimes their habits get them in trouble with gardeners.  Gophers favor bulbs and roots.  Voles go for grass, but also gnaw on shrubs and stems nearest their holes and runways.  Moles, which are rarely if ever seen, prefer non-plant food.  https://news.oregonstate.edu/news/moles-voles-and-gophers-dig-garden 

Species belonging to the genus Amaranthus have been cultivated for their grains for 8,000 years.  Amaranth plants are classified as pseudocereals that are grown for their edible starchy seeds,  but they are not in the same botanical family as true cereals, such as wheat and rice. Amaranth species that are still used as a grain are Amaranthus caudatus L., Amaranthus cruentus L., and Amaranthus hypochondriacus L. The yield of grain amaranth is comparable to that of rice or maize.  The grain was a staple food of the Aztecs and an integral part of Aztec religious ceremonies.  The cultivation of amaranth was banned by the conquistadores upon their conquest of the Aztec nation.  However, the plant has grown as a weed since then, so its genetic base has been largely maintained.  Research on grain amaranth began in the United States in the 1970s.  By the end of the 1970s, a few thousand acres were being cultivated there, and continue to be cultivated.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_grain    

Amaranth is from the same family as quinoa, Amaranthacea, and includes a variety of flowering herbs, shrubs, and greens (such as spinach).  The stems of the plants have panicles and clusters of tiny flowers that produce the seeds.  From there, the seeds easily dislodge from the plant (which can make large-scale harvesting difficult but a bit of a boon for home growers).  While there are over 50 species of amaranth, only a dozen or so are cultivated for consumption.  Of those species, a handful are cultivated for their seeds.   

1 cup amaranth (190g)

2 to 3 cups water, milk, or broth (480mL to 720mL)

Place amaranth in a small saucepan and heat over medium-low heat.  Toast the amaranth for 3-4 minutes until the grains start to deepen in color and have a nutty aroma.  Watch the heat and time, as amaranth will begin to pop if heated too high or too long.  https://naturallyella.com/pantry/grains/amaranth/    

I think, at a child's birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift should be curiosity.  Eleanor Roosevelt  https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/eleanor_roosevelt_161633    

Some of the earliest mentions of deadline come up in 1863, preserved in diaries kept by captive soldiers during the Civil War.  Early in this year a Confederate prison for captured Union soldiers was established in Andersonville, Georgia, which would remain operational for slightly more than a year.  The prison was notorious for poor conditions, harsh punishments, and for, you guessed it, having deadlines.  Suddenly the word was being used considerably more often (in news reports, partisan poetry, and commission reports), often in reference to the prison at Andersonville.  Although this sense of deadline saw some figurative use following the end of the Civil War, by the middle of the 20th century the dominant meaning of the word was well established as a time-related thing, rather than a shoot-a-person-for-crossing-a-line one.  https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/your-deadline-wont-kill-you  Thank you, reader.    

September 29, 2025 

 

Nursery Crime is a series of humorous fantasy /detective novels written by meta-fiction maverick Jasper Fforde.  They are a loose spin-off of the same author's Thursday Next series:  the world it's set in existed within an unpublishable Police Procedural novel that Thursday occupied in The Well of Lost Plots, wherein the characters worried they would be deleted.  It was turned into a refuge for characters from Oral Tradition lacking a proper ink-and-paper home to call their own, and thus Nursery Crime was born.  The books themselves deal with the strange adventures of Police Detective Jack Spratt and his partner Sergeant Mary Mary, who live in an otherworldly version of Reading, England where characters from nursery rhymes are not only real and alive, but also enjoy celebrity status.  https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/NurseryCrime    

Jasper Fforde (born 11 January 1961) is a British science-fiction, fantasy, and detective mystery novelist, oftentimes all three at once.  He's the mind behind such offbeat series as Thursday Next, Nursery Crime, and Shades of Grey, and famous for his humorous style, both silly and highly intellectual, playing quite liberally with meta-fictional concepts  (And for the puns. Tons and tons of puns).  Fforde is an aviation buff and enjoys flying, and before publishing his first book, The Eyre Affair, in 2001, he worked as a cameraman on such Hollywood productions as GoldenEye, Quills, and Entrapment.  https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/JasperFforde   

The species belonging to the genus Amaranthus have been cultivated for their grains for 8,000 years.  Amaranth plants are classified as pseudocereals that are grown for their edible starchy seeds, but they are not in the same botanical family as true cereals, such as wheat and rice. Amaranth species that are still used as a grain are Amaranthus caudatus L., Amaranthus cruentus L., and Amaranthus hypochondriacus L.  The yield of grain amaranth is comparable to that of rice or maize.  The grain was a staple food of the Aztecs and an integral part of Aztec religious ceremonies.  The cultivation of amaranth was banned by the conquistadores upon their conquest of the Aztec nation.  However, the plant has grown as a weed since then, so its genetic base has been largely maintained.  Research on grain amaranth began in the United States in the 1970s.  By the end of the 1970s, a few thousand acres were being cultivated there, and continue to be cultivated.   Grain amaranth is also grown as a food crop in limited areas of Mexico, where it is used to make a candy called alegría (Spanish for joy) at festival times.  In other preparations, the grain can be popped like popcorn and then either mixed with honey, or served with milk, dried fruit and nuts like a cold breakfast cereal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amaranth_grain     

Amaranth (Amaranthus caudatus), a plant grown for both grain and greens, originates in South and Central America, but a clear domestication point is unclear. However, the seeds traveled throughout the continents, becoming a staple for consumption and religious ceremonies, most notably by the Aztecs.   As amaranth expanded outwards, it made its way to Eastern Asia.  Researchers initially thought amaranth might have had a secondary domestication event in Asia.  However, given genetic markers, it appears more likely that amaranth was part of early trading between continents.   Amaranth has also become a staple in the Caribbean and African cuisine, most likely through the Atlantic trade of enslaved people.  Amaranth is from the same family as quinoa, Amaranthacea, and includes a variety of flowering herbs, shrubs, and greens (such as spinach).  https://naturallyella.com/pantry/grains/amaranth/    

An apartment where puppeteer Bil Baird established a marionette theater and studio in New York is now selling for $4.2 million.  Baird and his wife, Cora, founded a theater in the mid-1960s at the five-story building in Manhattan’s West Village, on Barrow Street.  The Bairds also lived in the building and created a film studio space there.  Some of the theater’s off-Broadway productions included “The Wizard of Oz,” “Winnie the Pooh” and “Alice in Wonderland.”  The most recognizable work by Baird, who died in 1987 at 82, can be seen in the 1965 film version of “The Sound of Music,” in which he and Cora, who was also a puppeteer, produced and performed the marionette puppetry sequence for the song “The Lonely Goatherd.”  “There are little holes in the brick wall in the master bedroom that were used to hold the marionettes,” said owner Debra Sanders.  https://www.mansionglobal.com/articles/marionette-holes-in-the-walls-a-4-2-million-new-york-apartment-with-a-puppetry-past-hits-the-market-a5f74b07?mod=hp_minor_pos30

September 24, 2025 

 

You may know that the Ides of March--the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated--was the 15th of March, but that doesn't mean the Ides of a month was necessarily on the 15th.  The Roman calendar was originally based on the first three phases of the moon, with days counted, not according to a concept of a week, but backward from lunar phases.  The new moon was the day of the Kalends, the moon's first quarter was the day of the Nones, and the Ides fell on the day of the full moon.  The Kalends' section of the month was the longest, since it spanned two lunar phases, from the full to the new moon.  To see it another way:

Kalends = New Moon (no moon to be seen)

Nones = 1st quarter moon

Ides = Full Moon (whole moon visible in the night sky)

When the Romans fixed the length of the months, they also fixed the date of the Ides.  In March, May, July, and October, which were (most of them) months with 31 days, the Ides was on the 15th.  On other months, it was the 13th.  The number of days in the Ides period, from the Nones to the Ides, remained the same, eight days, while the None's period, from the Kalends to the Nones, might have four or six and the Kalends' period, from the Ides to the start of the next month, had from 16-19 days.  https://www.thoughtco.com/roman-calendar-terminology-111519    

According to most Roman accounts, their original calendar was established by their legendary first king Romulus.  It consisted of ten months, beginning in spring with March and leaving winter as an unassigned span of days before the next year. These months each had 30 or 31 days and ran for 38 nundinal cycles, each forming a kind of eight-day week—nine days counted inclusively in the Roman manner—and ending with religious rituals and a public market.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar

Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares.  The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.  American architect Alfred Mosher Butts invented the game in 1931.  Scrabble is produced in the United States and Canada by Hasbro, under the brands of both of its subsidiaries, Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers.  Mattel owns the rights to manufacture Scrabble outside the U.S. and Canada.  As of 2008, the game is sold in 121 countries and is available in more than 30 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide, and roughly one-third of American homes and half of British homes have a Scrabble set.  There are approximately 4,000 Scrabble clubs around the world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble   

Pine nuts, also called piñón, pinoli or pignoli, are the edible seeds of pines (family Pinaceae, genus Pinus).  According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, only 29 species provide edible nuts, while 20 are traded locally or internationally owing to their seed size being large enough to be worth harvesting; in other pines, the seeds are also edible but are too small to be of notable value as human food.  The biggest exporters of pine nuts are China, Russia, North Korea, Pakistan and Afghanistan.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pine_nut   

Sorghum bicolor, commonly called sorghum and also known as broomcorn, great millet, Indian millet, Guinea corn, or jowar, is a species in the grass genus Sorghum cultivated chiefly for its grain. The grain is used as food by humans, while the plant is used for animal feed and ethanol production.  The stalk of sweet sorghum varieties, called sorgo or sorgho and taller than those grown for grain, can be used for forage or silage or crushed for juice that can be boiled down into edible syrup or fermented into ethanol.  Sorghum originated in Africa, and is widely cultivated in tropical and subtropical regions.  It is the world's fifth-most important cereal crop after rice, wheat, maize, and barley.  It is typically an annual, but some cultivars are perennial.  It grows in clumps that may reach over 4 metres (13 ft) high.  The grain is small, 2 to 4 millimetres (0.08 to 0.2 in) in diameter.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorghum    

September 22, 2025