07 December 2012

Arkansas and Kansas

Arkansas (AR-kən-saw) is a state located in the Southern region of the United States. It has a diverse geography which ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozarks and the Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta.

Arkansas is the 29th most extensive and the 32nd most populous of the 50 United States. The capital and most populous city is Little Rock, located in the central portion of the state.

The Territory of Arkansas was admitted to the Union as the 25th state on June 15, 1836.

As you might guess, the name “Arkansas” derives from the same root as the name for the state of Kansas.

The Kansa tribe of Native Americans are closely associated with the Sioux tribes of the Great Plains. The word “Arkansas” itself is a French pronunciation (“Arcansas”) of a Quapaw (a related “Kaw” tribe) word, akakaze, meaning “land of downriver people” or the Sioux word akakaze meaning “people of the south wind”. The "s" was added by the French to make a plural.

The pronunciation of Arkansas was made official by an act of the state legislature in 1881, after a dispute between two U.S. Senators from Arkansas. One wanted to pronounce the name ar-KAN-zəs (r -kansas) and the other wanted AR-kən-saw.

In 2007, the state legislature passed a non-binding resolution declaring the possessive form of the state's name to be Arkansas's, which has been followed increasingly by the state government.

Kansas is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States and is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area.

The tribe's name (natively kką:ze) is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind," although this was probably not the term's original meaning.

For thousands of years what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Kansas was first settled by European Americans in the 1830s.

Missouri and Arkansas sent settlers into Kansas all along its eastern border. These settlers attempted to sway votes in favor of slavery, but a secondary settlement were abolitionists from Massachusetts and other Free-Staters, who attempted to stop the spread of slavery from neighboring Missouri.

Kansas was admitted to the United States as a slave-free state on January 29, 1861, making it the 34th state to enter the Union.

Today, Kansas is one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of wheat, sorghum and sunflowers. Kansas is the 15th most extensive and the 33rd most populous of the 50 United States.

Residents of Kansas are called "Kansans."


05 December 2012

Bialy and Bagel



A bialy is a roll that is similar to a bagel usually with onion flakes sprinkled on it.

Bialy is a Yiddish word and a short form of bialystoker kuchen, from Białystok, a city in Poland.

This small roll was a traditional dish in Polish Ashkenazi cuisine but has become more generally popular.

A traditional bialy has a diameter of up to 15 cm (6 inches) and is a chewy yeast roll similar to a bagel. But, unlike a bagel which is boiled before baking, a bialy is simply baked. It doesn't have a hole in the middle, but simply a depression which, before baking, is filled with diced onions and other ingredients, including garlic, poppy seeds, or bread crumbs.

Białystok, Poland literally means "white river," from Polish biały "white" + stok "river" because the Bialy River flows through the region.

According to Wikipedia, contrary to common legend, the bagel was not created in the shape of a stirrup to commemorate the victory of Poland's King Jan III Sobieski over the Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Vienna in 1683. It was actually invented much earlier in Kraków, Poland, as a competitor to the obwarzanek, a lean bread of wheat flour designed for Lent.

In the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries, the bajgiel became a staple of the Polish national diet,and a staple of the Slavic diet generally.

That the name originated from beugal - an old spelling of Bügel, meaning bail/bow or bale. It is thought that it may stem from the shape of traditionally handmade bagels not being perfectly circular but rather slightly stirrup-shaped.

Variants of the word beugal are used in Yiddish and Austrian German to refer to a somewhat similar form of sweet filled pastry. The Mohnbeugel is made with poppy seeds and the Nussbeugel is made with with ground nuts.

According to the Merriam-Webster's dictionary, 'bagel' derives from the transliteration of the Yiddish 'beygl', which came from the Middle High German 'böugel' or ring, which itself came from 'bouc' (ring) in Old High German, similar to the Old English 'bēag' '(ring), and 'būgan' (to bend or bow).

Similarly another etymology in the Webster's New World College Dictionary says that the Middle High German form was derived from the Austrian German 'beugel', a kind of croissant, and was similar to the German 'bügel', a stirrup or ring.

No matter what the origin, both are delicious.

03 December 2012

Nome, Alaska

Nome gold pan


The city of Nome, Alaska has a curious and unclear origin.

Nome's founder, Jafet Lindeberg, may have given it that name because of a Nome Valley near his childhood home in Kvænangen, Norway. (In Norwegian, Nomedalen)

Some say that Nome received its name by a mistake. A British cartographer allegedly copied an unclear annotation on a nautical chart made by a Naval officer while on a voyage up the Bering Strait. The officer had written "? Name" next to the unnamed cape. The mapmaker misread the annotation as "C. Nome", or Cape Nome, and used that name on his own chart. Cape Nome made the map and the nearby city took its name from the cape.

This actually did cause some confusion and in 1899, some local miners and merchants voted to change the name from Nome to Anvil City to avoid confusion with Cape Nome which was 12 miles (19 km) south, and the Nome River, the mouth of which is four miles (6 km) south of Nome. But the United States Post Office in Nome refused to accept the change. Fearing a move of the post office to Nome City, a mining camp on the Nome River, the merchants unhappily agreed to change the name of Anvil City back to Nome.

Another story is that a settler asked a native to the area the name of the place and recieved the reply "no-me" meaning “I don’t know” and the settler accepted his comprehension of that answer as the name place.



http://www.nomealaska.org

01 December 2012

Rhyme or Reason

Back in 1589, Edmund Spenser had been an admired poet by the rich and famous. His pastoral poems called The Shepheardes Calender in 1579 was a great success at court.

But poets did not make a living selling books, but by having rich patrons. Running short on money, Spenser took a position as a secretary to Lord Grey, the new Deputy to Ireland.



At 28-year, Edmund went to Ireland, where Grey crushed an Irish rebellion against the English, seized lands and gave Spenser about 3,000 acres, with hills, streams, and a castle to live on. Sweet deal.

Spenser worked for Grey for ten years and worked on a new epic poem.

Fellow poet and well known adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh lived nearby on his 12,000-acre estate and in 1589, Raleigh visited Spenser, who showed him his first three parts of his new epic, The Faerie Queene.

Raleigh thought that Spenser should present it personally to Queen Elizabeth. They traveled to England together that fall, and Spenser registered the poem for publication with a dedications to "the most mightie and magnificent empress Elizabeth."

Elizabeth heard him read his poem aloud and she did love it. He was hot in the circles of society again and hoped to receive enough patronage to stay in England.

Elizabeth suggested that Spenser be paid £100 but her chief advisor, Lord Burghley, who wasn't high on poetry or Spenser, objected. The story is that Elizabeth told him to pay the poet "what is reason."

Burghley didn't pay him at all.

After a few months, Spenser sent Elizabeth this short verse:

I was promised on a time
To have a reason for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season,
I received nor rhyme nor reason.

Spenser got his payment, and we got the phrase "rhyme or reason." Today it means "without purpose, order, or reason" as in "The statistics were so disorganized, that the conclusions were without rhyme or reason."


 

15 November 2012

Black Sabbath



BLACK SABBATH is the English heavy metal rock band from Birmingham formed in 1969, by Ozzy Osbourne (lead vocals), Tony Iommi (guitar), Geezer Butler (bass guitar), and Bill Ward (drums).


The band was earlier known as "Earth" and had a very different blues/hard rock sound. The band has had multiple line-up changes, with Tony Iommi the only constant presence in the band through the years.

Black Sabbath are cited as pioneers of heavy metal and helped define the genre with releases such as quadruple-platinum Paranoid, released in 1970.


They were ranked by MTV as the "Greatest Metal Band" of all time, and placed second in VH1's "100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock" list, behind Led Zeppelin.

Ozzy Osbourne's heavy drug usage led to his firing from the band in April 1979, after which he began a very successful solo music career, selling over 100 million albums and television celebrity.

The original line-up reunited with Osbourne in 1997 and released a live album Reunion. The line-up featuring Iommi, Butler, Dio, and Appice reformed in 2006 under the moniker Heaven & Hell until Dio's death in May 2010.



HISTORY:  While playing shows in England in 1969, the band discovered they were being mistaken for another English group also named Earth, and that summer they decided to change their name. A cinema across the street from the band's rehearsal room was showing the 1963 horror film Black Sabbath starring Boris Karloff.


Subsequently, Osbourne and Butler wrote the lyrics for a song called "Black Sabbath" (listen to track), which was inspired by the work of English occult writer Dennis Wheatley. Butler also claimed to have had a vision of a black silhouetted figure standing at the foot of his bed.The song uses the musical tritone, AKA "The Devil's Interval" along with an ominous sound and dark lyrics which became the themes for their musical sound.



Official Website: http://www.blacksabbath.com