Yuan Tan
The Chinese New Year festival, known as Yuan Tan, is probably the most important event on the Chinese calendar. Some 370 million people in China travel home to celebrate the three-day public holiday with their relatives, and every four years are given twenty days official leave to visit their home towns or villages. The [more…]
Yuri Gagarin
Colonel Yuri Gagarin became the first human to fly in space when he orbited the Earth in 1961.
Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin was born on a collective farm in Smolensk, west of Moscow in March 1934. His father was a carpenter.
After attending his local school for six years and then various technical schools, Yuri joined the [more…]
Insurance Companies, UK
Life insurance companies devise tests to help them gauge how long their clients will live. So it is important to get it right.
Some questions examine whether their clients involve their minds in any activities.
It’s an eye-opener to see the huge extent to which mental performance, IQ and mind-sports related answers can account for a [more…]
Professor Arnold Scheibel
In a July 1994 Life magazine article by Daniel Golden, Building a Better Brain (download the full article below) he quotes Dr. Arnold Scheibel, former head of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute who said, “Anything that is intellectually challenging can probably serve as a stimulus for dendritic growth, which adds to the computational reserves in your [more…]
J R Stirzaker – Mt Waverley, Vic
“I am 78 years old and an Ex-Rat of Tobruk. I have found since I have been doing your crosswords that my memory has improved. I am able to retain the meaning of words that I have had to look up in the dictionary.”
Trudi Campbell – Sydney
“I first came into contact with Lovatts Crosswords during a stay in hospital. I was then ten years old. I was taken to Dubbo to have my appendix out and was placed in the childrens ward. I was the oldest by about seven years.
“I was scared and I was all alone with no one [more…]
Ventriloquism
Ventriloquism was a word originally associated with possession by an evil spirit.
The word comes from the Latin ventriloquus, which is a compound of venter ‘stomach’ and loqui, ‘speak’.
It originally referred literally to the phenomenon of speaking from the stomach, particularly as a sign of demonic possession.
The word was linked to the trick of throwing [more…]
Zany
Do you know someone called John or Jack who you would describe as zany?
This word meaning bizarre, way out or wacky comes from the Italian form of John, Giovanni.
The name John and its European counterparts such as Jean and Giovanni were very popular, they came to be used to denote the common man. Jack [more…]
