COFFEE: QUIZ
• Ludwig Roselius had a father who was a professional coffee taster in Germany in the 1800s. His father died young. Ludwig thought his father’s death was due to ingesting too much caffeine. At the time, the process of decaffeinating coffee made it lose most of its flavor. • Ludwig opened a coffee business of his own, and in 1903 a ship filled with coffee beans destined for his store flooded and the entire load was soaked with seawater. Ludwig gave this ruined coffee to his researchers, asking them to experiment with decaffeination. Surprisingly, they found that the soaked beans were easy to decaffeinate. The key was to raise the moisture content of the beans before subjecting them to the chemical process.
• You might be surprised to learn that the fax machine was invented in the 19th century. In 1843, a man named Alexander Bain patented Bain's Telegraph, which was able to • In the African nation of Swa- transmit an exact copy of lines, ziland, it is illegal for a witch letters and shapes to chemically to fly a broomstick at an alti- treated paper on the other end of the line. tude above 150 meters. • If you're like 91 percent of • In 2013, for the first time, the Americans, you sometimes eat United States offered a larger market for wine than France. breakfast for dinner. • You may have been unaware of it for the past 11 months, but 2014 has been the International Year of Family Farming, so declared by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. • Place-names sometimes enter the English language through roundabout means. Take Arkansas, for instance: That state's name comes from the word akansa, which is a French pronunciation of an
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Thought for the Day: All one's life as a young woman one is on show, a focus of attention, people notice you. You set yourself up to be noticed and admired. And then, not expecting it, you become middle-aged and anonymous. No one notices you. You achieve a wonderful freedom. It's a positive thing. You can move about unnoticed and invisible. -- Doris Lessing © 2014 King Features Synd., Inc.
• He set up a new business, marketing his coffee in Europe until the war ended. He needed a new name for his coffee so he chose a contraction of the French words ‘sans caffeine’ meaning ‘without caffeine.’ • He returned to America in 1923, and nine years later General Foods bought him out. Meanwhile, the company that he lost during the war went out of business. • The modern decaffeination process is still based on his accidental discovery, and his company was purchased by Kraft foods. What is it called? (Answer at top of next page)
Answer
• As the holidays and the inevitable family gatherings approach, you might want to prepare yourself to engage in logomachy -- a battle fought with words.
Weekly SUDOKU
Algonquin name for the Native American Quapaw people. The original word means either "people of the south wind" or "downriver people."
Answer
• It was beloved American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson who made the following sage observation: Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.
King CROSSWORD
by Samantha Weaver
• Ludwig patented the process and moved to America in 1914, setting up a coffee trading company called Kaffe-HAG, with HAG being an acronym for the German words meaning Coffee Trading Company. When World War I began, his business was seized under the U.S. Alien Property Custodian Act and handed over to Americans. Ludwig lost everything, including the trademarked name of his coffee.