CRANBERRIES
What would Thanksgiving dinner be without cranberries? Here’s the lowdown on this little fruit, a member of the heaher family. • Cranberries grow on creeping shrubs and vines that are about 7 feet long and 2 to 8 inches in height. They flourish in sandy bogs and marshes, requiring at least a ton of vines per acre to plant a bog.
© 2014 King Features Synd., Inc.
• Just 5% of the cranberry crop is sold as fresh, with the other 95% turned into other products, such as juice and sauce. These little berries are ingredients in more than 1,000 food and beverage products sold.
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• American novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs was the oldest war correspondent of World War II, flying with the 7th Air Force on bombing runs in the Pacific at the age • In September of 2007, a law of 66. was enacted in China that • Otters float while they made it illegal for a living sleep, and in order to keep Buddha to reincarnate without from floating away from each permission from the govern- other while dozing, they hold ment. So far there's no word hands. on what the punishment for • It's been reported that on breaking the law might be. his deathbed, noted French • Pretty much everyone has Enlightenment figure Volseen shellac on a piece of taire was enjoined by a priest furniture or perhaps a guitar to renounce Satan. The phi-- it's used to give wood that losopher is said to have adrich shine. You might be sur- monished the priest, saying, prised to learn that shellac is "Now, now, my good man. derived from a substance that This is no time for making is excreted by a tiny red insect enemies." found almost exclusively in *** the forests of Thailand. You might be even more surprised Thought for the Day: "Life to learn that shellac isn't just is to be lived. If you have found on wood; the next time to support yourself, you had you eat jelly beans or take a bloody well better find some bite of a bright-red apple you way that is going to be interbought in a grocery store, you esting. And you don't do that can thank the Kerria lacca in- by sitting around." -- Katharine Hepburn sect for that lovely shine. • It was beloved American author Mark Twain who made the following sage observation: "Always do right -- this will gratify some and astonish the rest."
King CROSSWORD
by Samantha Weaver
• The cranberry is one of three fruits native to North America, along with the Concord grape and the blueberry. Long before the arrival of Europeans to the New World, the Native Americans were using cranberries for food, as a dye for fabrics, rugs, and blankets, and for medicinal purposes. They mixed deer meat with mashed berries to make pemmican, a food that kept for long periods of time. The tribes’ medicine man used cranberries in a poultice to draw out poison from wounds. Some tribes called the little berries “sassamanesh,” while others named them “ibimi,” meaning “bitter berry.” When German and Dutch settlers arrived, they called them “crane berries,” because the plant’s blossoms looked like the head of a sandhill crane. The word “cranberries” is first recorded in 1647 in a letter written by John Eliot, who was a missionary to the Native Americans. Eliot, who was also the translator of the first Bible printed in America, asked in his letter, “Why are strawberries sweet and cranberries sour?”