SEPTEMBER ANSWERS TO YESTERDAY'S QUESTIONS

(Blue Goose)

What is the national dish of Spain?

Paella

Paella is a rice dish originally from Valencia. For this reason, many non-Spaniards view it as Spain's national dish, but Spaniards almost unanimously consider it to be a dish from the Valencian Region. Valencians, in turn, regard paella as one of their identifying symbols. It is one of the best-known dishes in Spanish cuisine. The dish takes its name from the wide, shallow traditional pan used to cook the dish on an open fire, paella being the word for a frying pan in the Valencia's regional language.  As a dish it may have ancient roots, but in its modern form it is traced back to the mid-19th century, in the rural area around the Albufera lagoon adjacent to the city of Valencia, on the east coast of Spain.

Here are maps of Spain showing Valencia with the red pointer...

and another showing where Spain is located on a larger scale.

More information about this famous dish can be found here.  

Where is the Bermuda Triangle located?

In the western part of the North Atlantic Ocean, roughly bounded by Miami, Bermuda and Puerto Rico where dozens of ships and airplanes have disappeared.

(borrowed from the Wikipedia website)

Unexplained circumstances surround some of these disappearances, including one in which Flight 19, a squadron of five U.S. Navy bombers that became disoriented while flying over the area; the planes were never found. All 14 airman on the flight were lost, as were all 13 crew members of a navy flying boat which subsequently launched from Naval Air Station Banana River to search for Flight 19.

Other boats and planes have seemingly vanished from the area in good weather without even radioing distress messages.  

But although an extremely great number of fanciful theories have been proposed regarding the Bermuda Triangle, none of them prove that mysterious disappearances occur more frequently there than in other well-traveled sections of the ocean.  In fact, people navigate the area every day without incident.

The area referred to as the Bermuda Triangle, or Devil's Triangle, covers about 500,000 square miles of ocean off the southeastern tip of Florida.  When Christopher Columbus sailed through the area on his first voyage to the New World, he reported that a great flame of fire (probably a meteor) crashed into the sea one night, and that a strange light appeared in the distance a few weeks later.  He also wrote about erratic compass readings, perhaps because at that time a sliver of the Bermuda Triangle was one of the few places on Earth where true north and magnetic north lined up.

Another interesting story is that of 65 year old Joshua Slocum.  In 1909 and after gaining widespread fame as the first person to sail solo around the globe, Mr. Slocum disappeared in his 37 foot wooden sloop called "Spray".  He cast off from Martha's Vinyard in Massachussetts, as he had done hundreds of times before, and set sail for South America.  Besides being an experienced sailor, Mr. Slocum was also a world class author. Though it is unclear exactly what happened, many sources later attributed his death to the Bermuda Triangle.

My information came from here and also here.

This is for my Dad who was a big Tom and Jerry fan.  He has been gone many a year but I still remember his laughter watching that show.

Who developed the cartoon series of Tom and Jerry?

Answer: William Hanna and Joseph Barbera.  Hanna and Barbera also created Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, Top Cat and many more.

William Debney "Bill" Hanna, a native of Melrose, New Mexico.

Joseph Roland "Joe" Barbera, born of Italian heritage in New York City.  

This famous team first met at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) studio in 1939.  Both had worked at other studios since the early 1930s, and the two became a partnership that would last for 60 years. Their first cartoon together, the Oscar-nominated Puss Gets the Boot, featuring a cat named Jasper and an unnamed mouse, was released in 1940 and served as the first entry in the long-running theatrical short subject series Tom and Jerry.  

They became the producers in charge of the MGM animation studio's output.  

The duo's cartoon firm officially opened for business in rented offices on the lot of Kling Studios (formerly Charlie Chaplin Studios) on July 7, 1957, one year after the MGM animation studio closed.

You can read more about this duo here.

If you were eating du Barry, what would you be eating?

Something with Cauliflower.  

"An easy, rich and creamy soup was named after Madame Jeanne Bécu, Comtesse du Barry, a famous French beauty who was the last official mistress of the ill-fated king, Louis XV. At the time, it was a common practice to recognize royalty and other public figures in the naming of new culinary creations, so whenever you see the term du Barry, you know the dish includes cauliflower." 

This is a link to where I found the information, and a recipe.

What do FM and AM stand for?

Answer: Frequency Modulation and Amplitude Modulation.

Differences in Spectrum Range

AM radio ranges from 535 to 1705 kilohertz, whereas FM ranges in a higher spectrum from 88 to 108 megahertz.  For AM radio, stations are possible every 10 kHz and FM stations are possible eveery 200 kHz.

AM method of audio transmission was first successfully carried out in the mid 1870s to produce quality radio over telephone lines and the original method used for audio radio transmissions. FM radio was developed in the United states mainly by Edwin Armstrong in the 1930s.

More information can be found here.

When was the first Calendar made?

8,000BC

British archaeology experts have discovered what they believe to be the world's oldest 'calendar', created by hunter-gatherer societies and dating back to around 8,000 BC.

The Mesolithic monument was originally excavated in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, by the National Trust for Scotland in 2004. Now analysis by a team led by the University of Birmingham, published today (July 15, 2013) in the journal Internet Archaeology, sheds remarkable new light on the luni-solar device, which pre-dates the first formal time-measuring devices known to Man, found in the Near East, by nearly 5,000 years.

My information came from here.