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Cake day: December 27th, 2025

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  • Without doubt, the turkey. Buckle up, it’s a wild ride: The North American bird is named after the Eurasian country because it reminded settlers from Europe of an African bird, the guinea fowl. Allegedly, they called the guinea fowl “turkey fowl” because it was first imported to Europe through Turkey.

    That’d be crazy enough, if it stopped there. The French call it dinde, as in d’Inde, or Indian fowl, because it came from a land originally confused with India. The Dutch, though, call it kalkoen, which derives from “fowl of Calicut,” which is a city in India now called Kozhikode. Lots of other languages use a derivation of this word. Apparently, they got turkeys from India after Portuguese traders brought them from the Americas. I say Americas, because the Portuguese name is perú, a South American name that they used to refer to Spanish settlements in the Americas, generally. The Spanish, on the other hand, call the bird pavo, derived from the Latin word for peafowl, which actually are from India.

    Germans, at least, call it Truthuhn, or Pute, onomatopoetic names based on the birds’ calls.










  • It may be a science, but that doesn’t place it in some rarefied air of infallibility, any more than any other science. It’s only ever as good as how it’s applied, and how any science is applied is always subject to human fallibility. Traffic engineering is especially bad in that respect, routinely and as a matter of course being subverted by political considerations, not least by the fundamental choices about who and what matters, and who and what does not matter. It does not deserve much respect as a practice.

    But with that said, in this case, even the traffic engineers agreed that a stop sign was an appropriate treatment for this intersection when they rejected it on the basis that the traffic volume wasn’t high enough to warrant installing one. Presumably, if there were more cars, it would be fine. So, yes, we can say confidently that this man made the area safer.