6 April: Ram Dass Quotes

Ram Dass (aka Richard Alpert), the spiritual teacher, was born on this date in 1931. 10 pearls of wisdom from him:

1. It is important to expect nothing, to take every experience, including the negative ones, as merely steps on the path, and to proceed.
2. The quieter you become, the more you can hear.
3. Your problem is you're too busy holding onto your unworthiness.
4. If you think you're free, there's no escape possible.
5. Inspiration is God making contact with itself.
6. Only that in you which is me can hear what I’m saying.
7. As long as you have certain desires about how it ought to be you can’t see how it is.
8. You may protest if you can love the person you are protesting against as much as you love yourself.
9. If you think you’re enlightened go spend a week with your family.
10. We’re fascinated by the words–but where we meet is in the silence behind them.

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5 April: Caramel Day

Today is Caramel Day. so here are some facts about caramel.

1. The word caramel was first recorded in the English language in 1725. It comes from a Spanish word, “caramelo.” Where that word comes from is less clear but three possibilities have been suggested: the Arabic kora-mokhalla meaning 'ball of sweet'; the Medieval Latin cannamella, meaning 'cane' and 'honey'; but most likely it comes from Late Latin calamellus, meaning 'sugar cane'.
2. The first caramels were made in America by settlers who would heat sugar beet juice and water together to make a hard candy. The ingredients were readily available and cheap, and they kept well. Somewhere along the line someone had the idea of adding milk and fat to the mix.
3. The Hershey company is known for its Chocolate, but Milton Hershey started out making caramel. His first company was Lancaster Caramel Company. He only got into chocolate after experimenting with it as a potential coating for his caramels.
4. To make caramel sugar is heated to around 170 °C (338 °F). They chemistry behind why this turns it into caramel is complicated but in a nutshell the molecules break down and re-form into compounds with a characteristic taste and colour.
5. 69 grams of commercially prepared butterscotch or caramel topping contains 103 calories and is mostly sugar and fat - but the good news is that there is no cholesterol.
6. Salted caramel is a relatively recent invention dating back to the late 1970s. A French chocolatier called Henri Le Roux had opened a new shop in Brittany, and wanted a new product to distinguish himself from all the other chocolate makers in the area. Salted Butter was a local product which Le Roux decided to experiment with. After a few months, he came up with a salted butter caramel with crushed nuts for texture. His creation went on to win the "Best Sweet in France" award in 1980.
7. Why is salted caramel so nice? We like sweet things and salty things because our bodies need salt and the energy from calories. Layering the two together enhances the flavour of both - but the amount of salt has to be just right. Too much salt and it will taste disgusting.
8. It can be used as a flavouring in puddings and desserts, as a filling in bonbons, or as a topping for Ice cream and custard. It is used to make brittles, nougats, pralines, crème brûlée, crème caramel, and caramel Apples. Ice cream is sometimes flavoured with swirls of caramel. Caramel sauce is made by mixing caramelized sugar with cream.
9. Somewhere between 10 and 50% of the sugar in commercially produced caramel today is glucose (from corn syrup or Wheat), which stops the product from crystallizing.
10. There are songs by Corinne Bailey Rae, Suzanne Vega, City High, Booba and Blur entitled Caramel.

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4 April: NATO

On this date in 1949 The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) was formed in Washington DC, USA. Here are ten facts about NATO.

1. NATO stands for North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
2. It was formed in 1949 as a counterweight to the threat of militant European nationalism, amid concerns about the Cold War and the possibility of a Russian invasion.
3. In the beginning there were 12 member states, from across Europe and North America. Now there are 29, including the most recent country to join, Montenegro in June 2017. Bosnia/Herzegovina, Georgia, and Macedonia are aspiring members. NATO has an "Open Door" policy which means any country in the Euro-Atlantic area is free to join NATO if it is prepared to meet the standards and obligations of membership, contributes to the security of the Alliance, and shares NATO's values of democracy, reform, and the rule of law.
4. France withdrew in 1966 for 30 years amid doubts that the NATO defences against Soviet Russia would be effective enough.
5. At the time, NATO's headquarters were located in Porte Dauphine in Paris, so when France withdrew they had to move. They moved to Brussels, into a hastily constructed building in 1967. Because the new HQ was a bit of a rush job it became necessary to build a new one - construction began in 2010, was completed in summer 2016, and the new HQ was dedicated on 25 May 2017. The 250,000 square metre (2,700,000 sq ft) complex was designed by Jo Palma and cost €750 million to build. The address is Boulevard Léopold III/Leopold III-laan, B-1110 Brussels.
6. The first Secretary General of NATO was Lord Ismay, of the United Kingdom. At time of writing, the post is held by Jens Stoltenberg of Norway.
7. NATO has an operating budget of 200 billion euros (£171 billion) a year. Members of NATO are supposed to contribute at least 2% of their respective GDPs, but not many countries actually do that - the UK and the US are two of the nations that do.
8. Article 5 of the Treaty states that an attack on one member is an attack on all. This article has only been invoked once, on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the 9/11 attacks.
9. NATO has led to standardisation of military terminology, procedures, and technology among its members, which has meant many European countries adopting US practices. One NATO standard we're all familiar with is the NATO phonetic alphabet (Alpha, Bravo, Charlie etc).
10. One of NATO's priorities for the future is to guard against cyber attacks. NATO recognises cyberspace as an 'operational domain' – the same as land, sea or air. They help by sharing information about threats, providing training, and having a team of experts who can be sent to any member which is experiencing a cyber attack.

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3 April: Find a Rainbow Day

Today is National Find-A-Rainbow Day. Here are some things you might not know about rainbows.

1. “Rainbow” comes from the Latin arcus pluvius, meaning “rainy arch.”
2. The Greeks associated rainbows with the goddess Iris - they said she created them as a path linking us to the immortals. Even today, some of that mythology survives as "crossing the rainbow bridge," a euphemism for death, especially the deaths of animals. Iris also lent her name to the Iris flower, the iris in your eye, the chemical iridium, and the word “iridescent.”
3. There are seven colours in a rainbow, right? Well, maybe. How many colours you see depends on your culture (in particular the number of words for colours in your language) and how good your eyes are at distinguishing colours. In the western world we tend to see seven, thanks to Isaac Newton, although Newton himself originally only saw five - Red, Yellow, Green, Blue and violet. He added Orange and indigo later so that the spectrum would have seven colours to match the number of notes in a musical scale, the days of the week and the number of known objects in the Solar System at the time. The Greek poet Homer thought rainbows were made up of just one colour - Purple. The philosophers Aristotle and Xenophanes argued for three colours - purple, yellow-green, and red. During the Renaissance, they settled on four - red, blue, green, and yellow. In actual fact, each colour blends into the next, so you could argue that a rainbow contains hundreds of hues. Chances are you've been taught there are seven colours, and the way to remember the order they come in: "Richard of York Gave Battle In Vain."
4. If you see a rainbow and point it out to a friend, you'll both be seeing a different rainbow. In fact, each of your eyes sees a different rainbow as well. No two people are seeing the same rainbow because they are created from reflection of light on water droplets at an angle of 42 degrees from the direction opposite the light source. A rainbow is not a physical object that can be approached or touched, but it isn't strictly speaking an illusion either, because you can take photographs of them. Rainbows are like holograms. Each drop of rain creates a tiny rainbow of its own while contributing to the larger one.
5. A rainbow is always a full circle of light. We see them as arcs when standing on the ground, which is more often than not where you'll be when you see one. However, if you're in an aeroplane or on top of an extremely tall building, looking down on one, you'll see a full circle.
6. Sometimes, light reflects off droplets more than once, and that's when you get a double rainbow. The colours are reversed in the second one, and there is a darker band of sky between them. The dark band actually has a name - Alexander's band, after Alexander of Aphrodisias who first described it in 200 AD. You may also have noticed that the sky under a rainbow is brighter than the sky above it. This is to do with how the light reflects off the raindrops to your eyes. Raindrops are falling throughout the sky, but only at the 42 degree angle do they produce the colours. Below that, they are reflecting White light, which makes the sky look brighter; above that, the light is reflected, but misses our eyes, so it appears darker. While triple and quadruple rainbows are possible, they are rarely seen - one study claimed that in 250 years of research only four had been reliably spotted, and none of those people had a camera with them to record the event.
7. Rainbows aren't only produced by sun and rain. The light of the Moon can produce a "moonbow" which is the same phenomenon - a moonbow appears white because the human eye cannot see colours as well in the dark. The colours are still there, but are too faint for our eyes to see. Fogbows are much broader than a rainbow, with very faint colours.
8. The world’s longest-lasting (or longest-observed, anyway) rainbow was seen over Sheffield, England on March 14, 1994 – it lasted from 9am to 3pm. The place in the world which is generally believed to get the most rainbows is the US state of Hawaii.
9. Scientists think there may be rainbows on Saturn's moon Titan, as it has a wet surface and humid clouds. These exotic rainbows would differ from those on our planet because they would be seen at an angle of 49 degrees, not 42, and many of them would be infrared rainbows, which would require night goggles in order to see them.
10. So what about this pot of Gold, then? It's a common myth that the end of the rainbow is where the Leprechauns keep their gold. Of course, because a rainbow is an optical phenomenon that cannot be approached, it is impossible to ever reach it, even in the case of that Sheffield rainbow. This myth didn't originate with leprechauns, though. The myth originated in Silesia, a region of old Eastern Europe. People there believed the angels put the gold there, and it could only be retrieved by a naked man who could run fast enough to get there before the rainbow faded away. A lesser known, related myth is that if a person passes underneath a rainbow they will change from a man to a woman, or vice versa.

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2nd April: Charlemange

Born on this date in 742: Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor often dubbed "the Father of Europe". Here are 10 things you might not know about him.

1. While historians are fairly sure Charlemagne celebrated his birthday on 2 April, they're not absolutely sure which year he was born. The date usually quoted, 742, pre-dated the marriage of his parents, Pepin the Short and Bertrada of Laon. They're not sure exactly where he was born either, but have narrowed it down to Aachen in modern-day Germany, or Liège in modern-day Belgium.
2. Pepin the Short wasn't king, at least, not at first. He held a position called the Mayor of the House. The kings of the Merovingian dynasty generally had mayors to take care of affairs of state while they were away fighting each other - which was a lot. So much so that the Pope eventually named Pepin king of the Frankish kingdom.
3. When Pepin died, the kingdom was divided between Charlemagne and his younger brother Carloman. There was considerable rivalry between the brothers - Charlemagne actually married his first wife, Desiderata, daughter of the king of the Lombard Kingdom of northern Italy, in order to get one up on Carloman. When Carloman died suddenly in 771, Charlemagne became king of the entire kingdom - and the same year, Charlemagne divorced Desiderata and sent her home to Italy, so he could marry Hildegard, daughter of Count Gerold of Vinzgau, who was just 13.
4. His given name was Charles, after his grandfather, Charles Martel. The name Charlemagne is a contraction of Charles le Magne (Charles the Great).
5. His empire was known as the Carolingian Empire, and Charlemagne made sure it kept expanding, and the Christian religion with it. He defeated the Muslims in Spain and Saxons in Saxony; defeated his former-father in-law in northern Italy, forcibly annexed Bavaria and defeated the Avars in modern-day Austria and Hungary. Charlemagne’s conquests united most of Western Europe for the first time since the fall of the Roman Empire in the 5th-century, and ensured the survival of Christianity in the West.
6. Being Holy Roman Emperor, though, wasn't one of his ambitions. He went to Saint Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Day in 800 just to attend Mass. He claimed he would not have gone there that day if he'd known the Pope was planning a coronation.
7. Scholarship, literature, art, and architecture flourished under his reign and the period is known as the Carolingian Renaissance. A prestigious European prize, the Charlemagne Prize, dating back to 1950, was named for him and is awarded in Aachen to people who promote the idea of western unity by their political, economic and literary endeavors. However, historians believe that although Charlemagne probably spoke Latin and Greek as well as his native language, the Rhenish Franconian dialect which would later evolve into German, he probably couldn't read or write. Nevertheless he is credited with playing a key role in preserving much of the literary heritage of ancient Rome.
8. So what was he like? Studies of his bones show he was six feet/1.84m tall, in the top 1% for the time. He is described in contemporary accounts as being well-built, with a round head, lively eyes, a slightly large nose and white hair. He had a short, fat neck and a cheerful expression. Until the last years of his life, when he suffered from fevers and dragged one leg, he enjoyed good health.
9. He didn't constantly throw banquets, but when he did, on special occasions, they were usually lavish. His hobbies included horseback riding, swimming, bathing in natural hot springs, and hunting. He suffered from insomnia and would often have restless nights, which meant there were times when he stayed in his bedchamber for days on end. If there was a dispute to be solved during those times, rather than get up and deal with it, he would summon those involved to his bedroom in order to tell them what to do. His favourite food was roast meat, which he refused to give up in later years despite advice from his doctors, who thought he should switch to boiled meat.
10. Charlemagne died on 28 January 814 of pleurisy. He was succeeded by his son Louis I, also known as Louis the Pious.

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1st April: The Letter L

The first L-Day was on this date in 1945. 10 things you might not know about the letter L.

1. L-Day was originally "Landing Day"- 1 April 1945, the day Operation Iceberg (the invasion of Okinawa) began.
2. It is the 12th letter of the English alphabet. It is often silent, in worlds like walk, talk, could, would, palm and psalm.
3. The letter L evolved from the Phoenician letter Lamedh and the Greek Lambda. Lamedh itself may have evolved from a pictogram of an ox goad, cattle prod or shepherd's crook.
4. The Roman numeral Ⅼ represents the number 50.
5. In the NATO phonetic alphabet, it's Lima. In Morse Code, it's ·–··.
6. A speech impediment which means a person cannot pronounce the letter "L" properly is known as lambdacism.
7. A large red L on a white background displayed on a UK road vehicle means the driver is under instruction - a "learner". Tearing up L plates is a common symbol to show that someone has passed their driving test. They are sometimes worn as a joke by the bride to be on a hen night.
8. A capital L is the currency sign for the Albanian lek and the Honduran lempira. The pound sign (£) is based on a handwritten capital L.
9. The problem with L is that the lowercase l can be hard to distinguish between an uppercase "I" or a number "1". Fonts used for things like road signs tend to use fonts where the lower case "l" curves to the right to prevent confusion.
10. Forming a letter L with the hand, particularly when raised to the forehead, is an insulting gesture meaning "Loser".

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31 March: Oklahoma! The Musical

On this date in 1943, Rodgers and Hammerstein's musical Oklahoma! opened on Broadway. Here are some facts you may not know about the show:

1. The musical Oklahoma! is based on a 1931 play called Green Grow the Lilacs, by Lynn Riggs, a part-Cherokee playwright who was born in Oklahoma. The play wasn't a massive success, but ten years later in 1941, Theresa Helburn, a theatre producer, saw its potential as a musical.
2. It was the first musical written by composer Richard Rodgers and librettist Oscar Hammerstein II. When Theresa Helburn first contacted Rodgers about the project, he was working with Lorenz Hart. Oscar Hammerstein had been keen to set the play to music before, without any success, and told Rodgers if Hart ever dropped out, he'd be happy to collaborate instead. As it turned out, Hart wasn't very interested in the play - he wasn't inspired by the rural setting, and was in any case unwell. So Hammerstein took over.
3. The musical is set outside town of Claremore, Oklahoma Territory, in 1906. The plot concerns a farm girl named Laurie Williams trying to make her mind up between two men, cowboy Curly McLain and the sinister farmhand Jud Fry. There is a sub plot concerning the romance between cowboy Will Parker and his fiancée, Ado Annie.
4. The title wasn't always Oklahoma! - at first, it was Away We Go!. A couple of pre-Broadway tryout productions didn't seem promising. Hammerstein's previous six shows had been flops; there were no famous people in it and while the audiences liked it, the reviews were mediocre. Rodgers and Hammerstein had faith in the show, however and decided to tweak it a little before the Broadway production. Away We Go! didn't feature the song Oklahoma!, but that song was added, and the show was re-named for it. It was a Broadway box-office smash and ran for an unprecedented 2,212 performances.
5. Most of the reviews of the Broadway show were glowing. Only the New York Post was negative about it. "It all seemed just a trifle too cute", their critic wrote. She thought the score consisted of "a flock of Mr. Rodgers's songs that are pleasant enough, but still manage to sound quite a bit alike ... without much variety in the presentation," and the show was "very picturesque in a studied fashion, reminding us that life on a farm is apt to become a little tiresome."
6. Oklahoma! was the first of a post-war wave of Broadway musicals to reach London's West End. It opened at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane on April 30, 1947 and ran for 1,543 performances. The British production, too wasn't without its teething troubles. A pre-London run opened a day late at the Manchester Opera House, after the ship carrying the cast, scenery, and costumes ran aground on a sandbank off Southampton.
7. Actors who have appeared in productions of Oklahoma! include Howard Keel, Hugh Jackman, Alfred Molina, Patty Duke, Margaret Hamilton, Maureen Lipman and Louise Plowright.
8. The title song became the official state song of the state of Oklahoma in 1953.
9. The 1955 film adaptation featured Shirley Jones in her film debut. It was directed by Fred Zinnemann and choreographed by Agnes de Mille.
10. It was the first film for which a soundtrack album was produced, although the first edition didn't feature all the songs. It sold over a million copies.

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