Archive: August, 2010
You might expect that, as a former Maths teacher, I do not suffer from Arithmophobia – the fear of numbers. Indeed, one of the books that I brought with me when I cam out here 15 years ago was “The Penguin Dictionary of Curious and Interesting Numbers.” Oddly enough it has no entry for 57, [...]
Some years ago I was having lunch with a guide who had just returned from taking a group around Kyrgyzstan, and he was giving me a report on how it went. During the conversation the conversation was punctuated by gaps as he got out his notebook and started writing something in it. Intrigued, I asked [...]
It is said that everyone has at least one good book inside them … Apparently, research has shown that over 80% of Americans, for example, think that they have one … but very few actually get to the point of writing one – yet alone publishing it.
As I have said before, I enjoy “Trivial Pursuits” – not just the game itself, but simply gathering useless but gathering interesting and unusual facts. For example – Do you know: who won the first ever Gold Medal in the modern Olympic Games in 1896?, (for the record it was: James Connolly of the United [...]
The “Red Book” is a phrase used for a list of endangered species. The Red Data Book of the USSR (also known as the Krasnaya Kniga) was the Soviet Union’s contribution to the IUCN Red List maintained by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural resources (IUCN – www.redlist.org). The book took [...]
I was taken aback and intrigued by an email that arrived over the weekend. It really grabbed my attention. A film crew are preparing a documentary film on camels and I was asked if I had any advice for them.
In Britain, August is known as the “Silly Season” – the period during the summer months typified by the emergence of frivolous news stories in the media due to the “lack of hard news” as people are away on their holidays and governments and businesses close down for the holidays. It’s the same here. The [...]
Ramadan is the ninth month of the Islamic calendar and is considered a holy months, although the name itself probably comes from an earlier time. As the Islamic calendar is a lunar one, then the date of Ramadan according to the Gregorian Calendar changes each year.
On Wednesday of this week, I had a meeting with a friend and we had arranged to meet in a local cafe for a light lunch. When we had appointed the time and place for the meeting, we had only consulted our diaries to see when we would both be free … and so we [...]
A news item during the week attracted my attention: “Kyrgyz yachtsmen Ignatiev and Soleny won Royal race of 20 miles in Thailand“ Kyrgyz yachtsmen wining a race in a sailing regatta? … but Kyrgyzstan is a landlocked country. As it says in the CIA World Factbook: “Coastline: 0 km (landlocked);” It goes on to record under [...]
