Make a list of 43 things I know very little about, & then learn at least 3 things about each of them

1. Ubuntu is a word with no English equivalent. One definition is: a person is a person through other persons. It is said to have South African origin, especially among the Bantu languages of southern Africa.

2. In Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s words: …It is the essence of being human. It speaks of the fact that my humanity is caught up and is inextricably bound up in yours. I am human because I belong. It speaks about wholeness, it speaks about compassion. A person with ubuntu is welcoming, hospitable, warm and generous, willing to share. Such people are open and available to others, willing to be vulnerable, affirming of others, do not feel threatened that others are able and good, for they have a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that they belong in a greater whole. They know that they are diminished when others are humiliated, diminished when others are oppressed, diminished when others are treated as if they were less than who they are. The quality of ubuntu gives people resilience, enabling them to survive and emerge still human despite all efforts to dehumanise them.

3. In Nelson Mandela’s words: A traveller through a country would stop at a village and he didn’t have to ask for food or for water. Once he stops, the people give him food, entertain him. That is one aspect of Ubuntu but it will have various aspects. Ubuntu does not mean that people should not address themselves. The question therefore is: Are you going to do so in order to enable the community around you to be able to improve?

Source: www.yourlifemanual.com

1. Jackfruit is the largest tree-borne fruit in the world, reaching 80 pounds in weight and up to 36 inches long and 20 inches in diameter.

2. Jackfruits mature 3 to 8 months from flowering. When mature, there is usually a change of fruit color from light green to yellow-brown. Spines, closely spaced, yield to moderate pressure, and there is a dull, hollow sound when the fruit is tapped. After ripening, they turn brown and deteriorate rather quickly. Cold storage trials indicate that ripe fruits can be kept for 3 to 6 weeks at 52° to 55° F and relative humidity of 85% to 95%. Immature fruit is boiled, fried, or roasted. Chunks are cooked in lightly salted water until tender and then served. The only handicap is copious gummy latex which accumulates on utensils and hands unless they are first rubbed with cooking oil. The seeds can also be boiled or roasted and eaten similar to chestnuts. In Southeast Asia dried slices of unripe jackfruit are sold in the markets. The ripe bulbs, fermented and then distilled, produce a potent liquor.

3. The jackfruit is believed indigenous to the rain forests of the Western Ghats of India. It spread early on to other parts of India, southeast Asia, the East Indies and ultimately the Philippines. It is often planted in central and eastern Africa and is fairly popular in Brazil and Surinam.

Source: www.crfg.org

A short list of things that have happened on this day in the past…

_Formal signing of the Declaration of Independence (1776)
_London Bridge opens (1831)
_Colorado becomes 38th state (1876)
_Wild Bill Hickcock shot dead (from behind) by Jack McCall while playing poker. He held a pair of Aces & a pair of 8’s (1876)
_Germany declares war on Russia in WW1 (1914)
_Paul Von Hindenburg dies at 86, Hitler takes over presidency (1934)
_Chubby Checker brings out “The Twist” (1960)
_MTV premiers (1981)
_[My birthday (1982)]
_Michael Andretti runs fastest Indy car race in history (171.49 MPH) (1987)
_Raymond Carver poet/short story writer (Furious Season), dies at 50 (1988)
_Iraq invades & occupies Kuwait (1990)
_NASDAQ computers crash – squirrel caused power outage (1994)
_Boeing buys out McDonnell-Douglas for $16.3 billion (1997)

Source: www.datesinhistory.com

1. The Ankh is defined as: The symbolic representation of both Physical and Eternal life. It is known as the original cross, which is a powerful symbol that was first created by Africans in Ancient Egypt. The Ankh symbolized eternal life and bestowed immortality on anyone who possessed it.

2. It is believed that life energy emanating from the Ankh can be absorbed by anyone within a certain proximity. An Ankh serves as an antenna or conduit for the divine power of life that permeates the universe. The amulet is a powerful talisman that provides the wearer with protection from the evil forces of decay and degeneration.

3. The Loop of the Anhk also represent the feminine discipline or the (Womb), while the elongated section represent the masculine discipline or the (Penis). These two sacred units then come together and form life.

Source: www.swagga.com

1. The buckeye is thought by many people in the eastern and southern United States to be a sure preventive of rheumatism, arthritis, or headache.

2. The buckeye tree (Aesculus glabra) is a relative of the chestnut and the horse-chestnut. The nut is the same rich, mellow warm-brown as a chestnut, but it is less readily edible, due to its high tannic acid content.

3. The “doctrine of signatures” – the magical belief that items from nature reveal their purpose or usefeulness by their shape, colour, or markings – may be what gives buckeyes their status as pocket pieces among men, for by “luck,” they mean good fortune in sexual matters, and buckeyes certainly recall in miniature the idealized, smooth, beautiful, firm testicles of men.

Source: www.luckymojo.com

1. Jupiter is the fifth planet from the Sun and by far the largest. Jupiter is more than twice as massive as all the other planets combined (the mass of Jupiter is 318 times that of Earth).

2. Jupiter is a gas planet, made up of 90% hydrogen and 10% helium. Like the other gas planets (Saturn, Neptune, Uranus), Jupiter has high velocity winds which are confined in wide bands of latitude. The winds blow in opposite directions in adjacent bands. Slight chemical and temperature differences between these bands are responsible for the colored bands that dominate the planet’s appearance.

3. Jupiter has 63 known satellites which are all named for other figures in the life of Zeus (mostly his numerous lovers).

Source: www.nineplanets.org

1. The male donkey is called jack or jackass. The female donkey is called the jenny. A mule is the offspring of a jackass (male donkey) and a mare (female horse). A hinny is the offspring of a stallion (male horse) and a jenny (female donkey). Mules and hinnies are usually sterile.

2. A donkey’s milk is higher both in sugar and protein content than cow’s milk.

3. The placement of a donkey’s eyes in its’ heads enables it to see all four feet at all times.

1. Shel Silverstein grew up in Chicago and created his first cartoons for the adult readers of “Pacific Stars and Stripes,” a Pacific based U.S. military publication, when he was a GI in Japan and Korea in the 1950’s. He also learned to play guitar and to write songs, including “A Boy Named Sue” for Johnny Cash.

2. He was hired as a staff cartoonist for “Playboy” in 1956. Silverstein contributed several poems including “The Winner,” “Rosalie’s Good Eats Cafe,” and “The Smoke-off” and wrote the books “Playboy’s Teevee Jeebies” and “More Playboy’s Teevee Jeebies: Do-It-Yourself Dialogue for the Late Late Show.”

3. Silverstein passed away on May 10, 1999 from a heart attack in Key West, Florida.

Source: faculty.weber.edu

1. Enchanted Rock is a spectacular granite pluton just west of State Highway 965 near the Gillespie-Llano county line in southern Llano County (Texas). The granite dome rises some 385 feet above the streambed of nearby Sandy Creek to a maximum elevation of 1,825 feet above mean sea level. This great granite monadnock is the second largest such mountain in the United States (the largest is Stone Mountain, Georgia).

2. In 1992 a University of Texas geophysics researcher, Ian W. D. Dalziel, linked Enchanted Rock geologically with granite peaks in Antarctica. The name Enchanted Rock derives from Spanish and Anglo-Texas interpretations of Indian legends and related folklore, which attribute magical and spiritual properties to the ancient landmark.

3. The first European to see Enchanted Rock was possibly Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who traveled through this area before 1536.

Source: www.tsha.utexas.edu

1. The Universal Product Code (UPC) is one of a wide variety of bar code languages called symbologies. The UPC was the original barcode widely used in the United States and Canada for items in stores. The first item to be placed under a UPC scanner in a retail store was a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Chewing Gum at a Marsh Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, on June 26, 1974.

2. The UPC is only numerals, with no letters or other characters. The first L, or left, digit is 0 for ordinary items, 3 for pharmaceuticals, 2 for random-weight items, and 5 for coupons (though stores often ignore this and use 000000 or 999999). The rest of L is the manufacturer code. The first five R (right) digits are the product code assigned by the manufacturer. The last digit R is a check digit, so that errors in scanning or manual entry can be detected.

3. EAN (European Article Number) was developed as a superset of UPC, adding an extra digit to the beginning so that there would be plenty of numbers for the entire world. The prefix digit 0 has been reserved for UPC, and in fact the Uniform Code Council had mandated all retail systems be able to recognize both UPC and EAN by January 1, 2005.

Source: www. wikipedia.com