Monthly Archives: December 2013

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,500 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it … Continue reading →

Latin America (some aspects unique) Kalman H, Silvert was the first president of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) and the leading figures in Latin American studies during his lifetime. They have 7,000 members, forty-five percent of whom reside outside … Continue reading →

Wine IT IS NOT KNOWN who first discovered wine. Vitis vinifera the species of vine which grows wine-grapes, is apparently a native of Persia. Certainly wine was drunk in ancient Persia, in ancient Egypt and in ancient Greece. It spread … Continue reading →

THE ROTHSCHILDS For the last 150 years, the history of the House of Rothschild has been to an amazing extent the back stage history of Western Europe. How the Rothschilds gained eminence and kept it to this day is a … Continue reading →

The World’s Forest Humanity has left its mark on the world’s forests, although much of it was hard to see. During this century, however, the scale and impact of our footprint has expanded, and the forests that we have always … Continue reading →