Ramblin' with Roger

A large group of families that are related, it’s from the Gaelic for “family”. Answer below.

Here’s something someone e-mailed me, with some modifications, about collective nouns:

We are all familiar with a

When I was growing up, Baghdad sounded wonderfully exotic and ancient. After all, it was in Mesopotamia, that area between the Tigris and Euphrates, which is “widely considered to be the cradle of civilization.”

The meaning of the city’s name may be a “Middle Persian compound of Bag ‘god’ + dād ‘given’, translating to ‘God-given’ or ‘God’s gift’…A less probable guess has been Persian compound Bağ ‘garden’ + dād ‘fair’, translating to ‘The fair Garden.’ Regardless of the derivation, I had believed for some time in my youth that there was a literal Garden of Eden at one point, and it was located somewhere around there.

I was feeling pretty lousy in the spring, worse in the summer, and not so great in the fall. Sneezing, scratchy throat, watery eyes, off and on for months. So I decided to visit my daughter’s allergist. After the doctor took my health history, a nurse treated my arms like pin cushions in trying to ascertain what, if anything, I was allergic to.

Zorro, which means, “the fox”, is a character, created nearly a century ago by writer Johnston McCulley, who “fought injustice in Spanish California’s Pueblo de Los Angeles.” There have been several iterations of the character, in literature, in film, and on television, as you can read here.

From the Wikipedia: “Zorro…is the secret identity of Don Diego de la Vega…a nobleman and master…The character has undergone changes through the years, but the typical image of him is a dashing black-clad masked outlaw who defends the people of the land against tyrannical officials and other villains. Not only is he much too cunning and foxlike for the bumbling authorities to catch, but he delights in publicly humiliating those same foes.”

The X-ray was discovered a little over a century ago. Getting an X-ray is something we take as commonplace at the dentist’s office or at a medical lab, but it was the quite amazing, and accidental, discovery. And it has helped produce some pretty nifty art effects such as The X-Ray Vision of Nick Veasey, from which this image was taken.

The first two Vice-Presidents became the second (Adams) and third (Jefferson) Presidents. Those elections, in 1796, when Adams was stuck with a VP of another party, and in 1800, when Jefferson and Aaron Burr had the same number of electoral votes, led to the passage of the 12th Amendment to the Constitution (1804), after which electors voted separately for President and Vice-President, rather than casting two votes for President, superceding a portion of Article II, section 1 of the Constitution.