Wordology, Wamblecropt

It sounds just like it means. It means overcome with indigestion. You might have observed your stomach was wambling a bit. If the wambles (indigestion) got so bad you could not move, you were wamblecropt. Sad that such a descriptive word has gone out of favor.

Riot, Rout, Unlawful Assembly

Riot, rout, and unlawful assembly are related offenses, but are separate and distinct. A rout differs from a riot in that the persons involved do not actually execute their purpose, but merely move toward it. The degree of execution that converts a rout into a riot is often difficult to determine.
A riot is a form of civil disorder commonly characterized by a group lashing out in a violent public disturbance against authority, property, or people. To be considered a riot in England and Wales it must legally involve a minimum of twelve people. Under US federal law it is only three people, in New York, US ten people, Lynchburg, VA, US, three people, and in Nevada, US only two people can constitute a riot.

An unlawful assembly transpires when persons convene for a purpose, if executed would make them rioters, but who separate without performing any act in furtherance of their purpose.

Sticky Things

When measuring ingredients for cooking, like peanut butter, honey, etc. Spray the measuring cup with cooking spray first. It will make cleanup much easier.

Claddagh Rings

The Claddagh ring (Irish: fáinne Chladaigh) is a traditional Irish ring given which represents love, loyalty, and friendship. The hands represent friendship, the heart represents love, and the crown represents loyalty.

The design and customs associated with it originated in the Irish fishing village of Claddagh, located just outside the old city walls of Galway, now part of Galway City. The ring, as currently known, was first produced in the 17th century, but the name Claddagh ring was not used before the 1830s. In recent years it has been embellished with interlace designs and combined with other Celtic and Irish symbols.

The ring belongs to a group of European finger rings called "fede rings". The name "fede" derives from the Italian phrase mani in fede ("hands [joined] in faith" or "hands [joined] in loyalty"). These rings date from Roman times, when the gesture of clasped hands was a symbol of pledging vows, and they were used as engagement/wedding rings in medieval and Renaissance Europe.

Incidentally, "Top of the morning to you." "And the rest of the day to yourself." Both are Hollywood inventions and never used in Ireland.

New Spam

Yesterday I received a "thank you for your purchase" email supposedly from Apple iTunes for $99. There was no credit card info and when I hovered on the link, it was for a bitly web site. Other things I hovered on were also not from Apple. Bottom line, if there is no credit card info, delete the email after you mark it spam.

Happy Friday

If you season your friendships with joy you will taste the sweetness of life.

I always savor the sweetness of a Happy Friday!

Fastest Computer

It was not that many years ago that we were anxiously awaiting a computer that could do a million operations per second. Now we have the Sunway computer, which has a linkpack benchmark rate (the maximum speed at which it can operate) of 93 petaflops (a thousand trillion floating point operations per second). China has been building its next-generation high performance computer which will be at least 10 times faster than Sunway when the machine is finished during 2019.

Theater 4K HDR TV

Wow, 4K HDR just grew up. The same TV technology that is in living rooms just began in theaters. A few months ago, Samsung introduced its immense 34 foot Cinema TV LED Screen, an alternative to projectors.

This cinema display TV features digital cinema 4K resolution and about 500,000 more pixels than what you will find in a normal consumer 4K TV.

Typical projectors will lose color quality as brightness is increased, but the Cinema TV Screen maintains perfect color accuracy at peak brightness levels regardless of the ambient illumination, similar to those found in the 2017 QLED 4K TVs, which also achieve strong color volume at high brightness levels. The most remarkable aspect of Samsung’s screen is its brightness that is 10 times more than that offered by standard projector technologies. Makes me want to raise the ceiling in the living room to fit a larger screen.

Wordology, Knickerbockers

Knickers is actually a standard word for underwear, mainly in Britain. “Knickers” derives from “knickerbockers,” or “loose-fitting short pants gathered at the knee.” Because the city’s early Dutch settlers wore those pants, “New Yorkers” became known as “Knickerbockers.” The Knickerbockers, now more commonly “The Knicks” is the name of New York’s NBA team. It does not have a picture of knickerbockers in its logo.