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