Baldness

According to the Ancient Greek historian Herodotus, Egyptian men never became bald. The reason for this was that, as children, the Ancient Egyptian males had their heads shaved, and their scalps were continually exposed to the health-giving rays of the sun.

Ancient Indians believed that doing handstands would cure baldness.

Julius Caesar was very self conscious of his lack of hair (baldness was considered a deformity by the Romans and he was sensitive of it). Fortunately he was given permission by the Roman senate to wear his laurel wreath all of the time to hide his baldness. He had his facial hairs individually plucked out with tweezers every day.

Charles "the Bald" was a 9th-century king of West Francia (843–877), king of Italy (875–877) and emperor of the Carolingian Empire (875–877). He was actually very hairy. Many historians think it was an ironic nickname.

The phrase "as bald as a coot" originated in the 15th century. It refers to the common coot, a water bird, which has a white bill that extends to form a conspicuous white plate on its forehead, which has given it the name of 'bald coot.'

Louis XIII of France became bald prematurely. He first used a few artificial strands to supplement his own sparse growth, but as his baldness increased, he had to don a complete covering wig. As a consequence, upper-class Frenchmen of the 17th century adopted the king's practice of wearing wigs.

His successor, Louis XIV, also suffered from a lack of hair. He was very conscious of his baldness, never permitting anyone to see his naked head, for which reason his wig was his constant companion.

In the 19th century, treatments and cures for baldness were concocted of substances as varied as bear's grease, beef marrow, onion juice, butter, and flower water. They were sometimes such toxic substances as sulfur or mercury.

The actor Patrick Stewart lost all his hair at 18 and believed that no woman would ever be interested in him again.

The English Olympic gold-winning cyclist Joanna Rowsell Shand has had alopecia areata, a condition resulting in hair loss, since she was ten. She says there are some positives such as not needing to constantly shave her legs like other cyclists, or struggle to fit her helmet over her hair.

Hair on the head grows for between 2-6 years before being replaced. In the case of baldness, the dormant hair is not replaced with new hair.

Statistically speaking, men have a 50% chance of being bald by the time they're 50 years old.

Josephine Baker

Josephine Baker was born Freda Josephine Macdonald in St. Louis, Missouri, on June 3, 1906. She was nicknamed "Trumpy" as a child.

Baker dropped out of school at the age of 12 and lived as a street child in the slums of St. Louis; by the age of fifteen she was playing vaudeville.

She danced in the 1921 black revue Shuffle Along and at the Cotton Club in Harlem, New York City.  

Josephine Baker settled in Paris in 1925. That same year she first performed her famous banana dance at the Folies Bergere. Baker quickly became a favorite of the French, and her fame grew.

Josephine Baker dancing the Charleston, 1926

The first black superstar, Baker was the first African American female to star in a major motion picture, and to integrate an American concert hall.

Josephine Baker once had a rejected (and dejected) suitor kill himself at her feet. 

Pablo Picasso said of her: "Tall, coffee skin, ebony eyes, legs of paradise, a smile to end all smiles."

Georges Simenon, the Belgian author and inventor of Inspector "Maigret," had a short relationship with Josephine Baker in 1925. He couldn't stand it however that she was more in the spotlight then him, and called himself "Mr. Josephine".

Baker had 12 children through adoption. She bore only one child herself, stillborn in 1941, an incident which precipitated an emergency hysterectomy.

Baker’s affection for France was so great that when World War II broke out, she volunteered to spy for her adopted country. She assisted the French Resistance during the war, and became the first American-born woman to receive the French military honor, the Croix de guerre.

After retiring in 1956, Baker supported the orphanage she had established. 

Baker was noted for her contributions to the Civil Rights Movement in the United States (she was offered the unofficial leadership of the movement by Coretta Scott King in 1968 following Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination, but turned it down).

Baker had a veritable menagerie of animals at her Paris home including a snake (which she wore like a necklace) and a cheetah named Chiquita, which accompanied Josephine on walks down the Champs-Elysees, on a lead with a diamond-studded collar.

Among her nicknames were Bronze Venus", the "Black Pearl", and the "Créole Goddess."

Josephine Baker in Havana, Cuba, 1950

Josephine Baker died in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital, aged 68, on April 12, 1975 after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage. She received a full Roman Catholic funeral which was held at L'Église de la Madeleine and was the only American-born woman to receive full French military honors at her funeral, After a family service at Saint-Charles Church in Monte Carlo, Baker was interred at Monaco's Cimetière de Monaco.

On August 23, 2021, it was announced that in November 2021 Baker would be interred in the Panthéon in Paris, the first black woman to receive one of the highest honors in France.

Here are two songs about Josephine Baker:

Josephine Baker by Al Stewart

Josephine Baker by Sailor

Source Wikipedia

Baker

A standard way of achieving the necessary mix of barley and yeast to brew beer in ancient Egypt was to allow mashed barley bread to ferment. So brewing became, in those early times, part of the baker's trade.

The Roman emperor Constantine The Great passed laws making the occupations of butcher and baker hereditary.

In 1266 English bakers were ordered to mark each loaf of bread so that if a faulty one turns up, "it will be knowne in whom the faulte lies." These bakers' marks were among the first trademarks.

In medieval times, a heavy penalty was inflicted for short weight and bakers used to give a surplus number of loaves to avoid incurring the fine. The thirteenth loaf was called the vantage loaf (as in the loaf allowed for profit). From this comes the phrase, 'Baker's Dozen.'

The Great Fire of London broke out on September 2, 1666, beginning at the house of Thomas Farynor, the king's baker in Pudding Lane. London.

Marie Antoinette, the wife of Louis XVI of France was nicknamed The Baker's Wife' after her husband distributed bread to the starving Parisians during a bread shortage. On being told that the people had no bread to eat she proclaimed "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche" ("let them eat cake.")

During World War II, bakers in the United States were ordered to stop selling sliced bread for the duration of the war. Only whole loaves were made available to the public. It was never explained how this action helped the war effort.

Bill Emerson baking bread at the Sawyer Stoll Mill 

The modern frisbee was invented by students at Yale University in 1947, who played with aluminium pie plates. These came from a Bridgeport baker, Joseph Frisbie, whose Frisbie Pie Company was a regular supplier to the university.

A bakery in Chester, England, created in 2013, what is reportedly the world's most expensive wedding cake, valued at $52.7 million. The eight-tiered confection is decorated with more than 4,000 diamonds.

Until 2015, a French law prohibited bakers in Paris from taking vacations at the same time in order to prevent bread shortages.

In France, by law a bakery has to make all the bread it sells from scratch in order to have the right to be called a bakery.

Baked beans

The Native Indians in America used to flavor their beans with maple syrup and bear fat, and bake them in earthenware pots placed in a pit and covered with hot rocks. When the Pilgrims arrived, they learnt the slow cooking technique for making baked beans from the Indians. They substituted molasses and pork fat for the maple syrup and bear fat. 

The earliest reference to baked beans was in 1832 in a book called American Frugal Housewife.

Henry J Heinz started making baked beans in 1895. He advertised them as “oven-baked beans in a pork and tomato sauce”.

The 1967 album The Who Sell Out by The Who featured on its cover a picture of their vocalist Roger Daltrey sitting in a tub full of baked beans. One of its tracks is “Heinz Baked Beans.”

On September 15, 1986, computer technician Barry Kirk, 32, of Port Talbot, Wales, completed the first mega ‘Beanathon’ — sitting in a bath of cold baked beans for 100 hours.

The record for the most baked beans eaten with a cocktail stick in five minutes is 271. The feat was achieved in 2014 by serial record breaker Ashrita Furman, a New Yorker who has set more than 500 world records since 1979.

The world record for eating six pounds of baked beans is 1min 48sec by New Yorker Don Lerman.

There are approximately 465 beans in a standard 415gm can of Heinz beans.

In 2008, Heinz Baked Beans became "Heinz Beanz" because the company thought the original name "a bit of a mouthful."

Baked beans are actually not baked, but stewed.

Every hour 38.5 tons of baked beans are eaten in Britain.

The average Briton eats four times as many baked beans as the average American but the Irish eat the most of all. 

Beans on toast is a teatime favorite in both Britain and Ireland.

Source Food For Thought: Extraordinary Little Chronicles of the World by Ed Pearce, Daily Express

John Logie Baird

The son of a Scottish minister, John Logie Baird, was born in Helensburgh, a small coastal town in the west of Scotland on August 13, 1888.

An inventor from a young age as a boy, Baird installed not only a telephone exchange in his father’s manse but also a system of electric lighting, even entangling passing traffic in the wires.

Some of Baird's early inventions were not fully successful. He was forced to resign from his post of a supervising engineer for an electrical supply company in Glasgow when he apparently blacked out half of the city following a failed attempt to manufacture diamonds from coal dust.

Baird also invented an unsuccessful cure for piles which left him in severe pain for a week but made a good deal of money out of his 'Baird patent Undersock', damp-proof socks for cold Scottish feet.

Baird in 1917

Before Baird demonstrated his television, he had set up an unsuccessful jam factory in Trinidad.

Baird made the world's first television transmission above a shop in Hastings on the south coast of England in 1924. He constructed a receiver from an old electric motor, a tea chest, a biscuit tin, an old hat box, piano wire, string, sealing wax, glue, a cycle lamp lens and some darning needles.

On October 2, 1925, Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image in his laboratory at 22 Frith Street in the Soho district of London. It was the head of two ventriloquist's dummies named "James" and "Stooky Bill" (see below). Baird went downstairs and fetched an office worker, 20-year-old William Edward Taynton, to see what a human face would look like, and Taynton became the first person to be televised in a full tonal range.

Baird gave the first public display of his television on January 26, 1926 in his Soho lab in front of members from the Royal Institution and a journalist from The Times. Although the pictures were small, measuring just 3.5 by 2 inches, the process was revolutionary.

His first pictures were formed of only 30 lines repeated approximately 10 times a second. The results were crude but it was the start of television as a practical technology.

By 1928 Baird had succeeded in demonstrating color television.

Baird made the first transatlantic television broadcast between Britain and the USA in 1928 when signals transmitted from the Baird station in Coulson, Kent, were picked up by a receiver in Hartsdale, New York.

In 1936, when BBC started their public television service, Baird's system was threatened by one promoted by Marconi-EMI. The following year it was dropped in favor of the Marconi electronic system, which gave a better definition.

Baird gave the world's first demonstration on August 16, 1944 of a fully electronic color television display. His 600-line color system used triple interlacing, using six scans to build each picture. Baird's Telechrome was not only the first single-tube color television display, it could also display stereoscopic (3D) images.

Baird lived at 1 Station Road, Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex from December 1944. He caught a cold over Christmas 1945, and suffered a stroke in February 1946. Baird was ordered bedridden but refused to stay there, and continued to deteriorate until his death on June 14, 1946. He is buried with his mother, father and wife in Helensburgh Cemetery.

Baird's Station Road house was demolished in 2007 and the site is now apartments named Baird Court.

Source Hutchinson Encyclopedia  RM 2012. Helicon Publishing is division of RM.

Bahrain

Bahrain is an archipelago of 33 islands, the largest being Bahrain Island in the Persian Gulf, between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Bahrain has a total area of 665 km2 (257 sq mi), which is slightly larger than the Isle of Man, though it is smaller than the nearby King Fahd International Airport near Dammam, Saudi Arabia.

The population of Bahrain in 2020 stood at 1,501,635, including 789,273 non-nationals.

Bahrain is the fourth most densely populated sovereign state in the world with a population density of 1,646 people per km2 in 2010.

Most of the population of Bahrain is concentrated in the two principal cities; its capital Manama and Al Muharraq.

In Arabic, bahrayn is the dual form of bahr ("sea"), so al-Bahrayn means "the Two Seas". However, which two seas were originally intended remains in dispute. It is unclear when the term began to refer exclusively to the Awal islands, but it was probably after the 15th century.

In 1820, Bahrain signed a general maritime treaty with the British Empire. Following successive treaties with the British, Bahrain became a protectorate of the United Kingdom in the late 1880s.

In 1971, Bahrain declared independence. The United Kingdom recognized Bahrain's independence on December 16, 1971. This is commemorated annually as Bahrain's National Day.

The earliest known flags of Bahrain were plain red.  After signing general maritime treaty with the British Empire, a white stripe was added to the flag to signify the treaty and to distinguish it from the flags commonly used by pirates. In 1932, a serrated edge was added to the flag in order to differentiate it from those of its neighbors.

The flag originally had twenty-eight white points, but this was reduced to five on February 14, 2002, so that each of the points could stand for one of the Five Pillars of Islam.

The King Fahd Causeway is a series of bridges and causeways connecting Saudi Arabia and Bahrain. At 25 km (15.5 mi), it is the world's longest marine causeway.

92% of Bahrain is desert with periodic droughts and dust storms the main natural hazards for Bahrainis.

Bahrain is the most prolific book publisher in the Arab world, with 132 books published in 2005 for a population of 700,000. In comparison, the 2005 average for the entire Arab world was seven books published per one million people.

Bahrain has a Formula One race-track, which hosted the inaugural Gulf Air Grand Prix on April 4, 2004, the first in an Arab country.

The first lap of the 2008 Bahrain Grand Prix. Emily Faulk from Saudi Arabia. Wikipedia Commons

On September 1, 2006, Bahrain changed its weekend from being Thursdays and Fridays to Fridays and Saturdays, in order to have a day of the weekend shared with the rest of the world. The previous weekend system, with Thursday as a holiday, was seen as a hindrance to business and trade, as it meant that Bahrain was closed on a day when many other countries were open. The new weekend system, with Friday as a holiday, is now in line with most other countries in the world. It has helped to improve the country's business and trading relations, and has made it more attractive to foreign investors.

The Bahrain World Trade Center, a 240-metre-high (787 ft) 50-floor, twin tower complex located in Manama, Bahrain, was completed on April 8, 2008. It was the world's first building to integrate wind turbines.

 

The three wind turbines at the centre of the two skyscrapers. By Conor McCabe - Wikipedia Commons

Bahrain won its first ever Olympic medal in London in 2012. Four years later, it followed it up with their first gold medal in Rio when Ruth Jebet won the 3,000-metres steeplechase.

Source Wikipedia

The Bahamas

The Bahamas consists of more than 700 islands, cays, and islets in the Atlantic Ocean. It lies north of Cuba, northwest of the Turks and Caicos Islands; southeast of Florida and east of the Florida Keys.

The name “Bahamas” comes from the Spanish “baja mar” meaning “low tide” or “shallow sea”.

The Bahamas were originally inhabited by the Lucayan, a branch of the Arawakan-speaking Taino people.

Watling Island, an island of The Bahamas that the natives called Guanahani, was the site of Christopher Columbus' first landfall in the New World on October 12, 1492; he named it San Salvador after Christ the Savior.

Landing of Columbus on San Salvador

Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de León reached the northern end of The Bahamas on his first voyage to Florida on Easter Sunday, March 27, 1513 (see below).

The Spanish shipped the native Lucayans to slavery in Hispaniola (the Dominican Republic and Haiti).

The Bahamas were mostly deserted from 1513 until 1648, when English colonists from Bermuda settled on the island of Eleuthera.

The Bahamas became a British Crown colony in 1718 (a type of colonial administration of the English and later British Empire.) The first Governor was a former pirate named Woodes Rogers.

The United States Marine Corps was founded as the Continental Marines by a resolution of the Second Continental Congress in 1775 during the American Revolutionary War. The first Marine landing on a hostile shore was New Province Island in the Bahamas under Capt. Samuel Nicholas the following March.

After the American War of Independence, the Crown resettled thousands of American Loyalists in the Bahamas; they brought their slaves with them and established plantations on land grants. Later, the islands became a haven for freed black slaves.

Slavery in the Bahamas was abolished in 1834. Today the descendants of slaves and free Africans make up nearly 90 percent of the population.

After British Captain D'Arcy Rutherford had watched water skiing on the French Riviera, he started practicing it himself at Nassau, in the Bahamas in the early 1920s. Americans there were attracted so much by it that they introduced it, in turn, to the United States.

Snow fell on January 19, 1977 in the Bahamas.

towndock.net-

Diana Nyad becomes the first person to swim from the Bahamas to Florida in 1979. She swam from North Bimini, The Bahamas, to Juno Beach, Florida, a distance of 102 miles.

Total area of the islands is 13,939 square kilometers (5382 square miles).

Only about 40 of the islands are inhabited. 

The Bahamas has an estimated population of 385,637 (2018) . 

The capital of The Bahamas is Nassau on the island of New Providence. With a population of 274,400 as of 2016, it contains just over 70% of the entire population of The Bahamas. 

Possessing a pleasant subtropical climate and splendid beaches, the Bahamas is one of the most popular year-round resorts in the western hemisphere, visited annually by more than 5.8 million tourists. Tourism represents about 50% of the gross domestic product and also employs about 50% of the work force. 

Of the 5.8 million visitors in 2012, more than 70% were cruise visitors.

The prime minister of The Bahamas, Perry Christie, won a bronze medal for triple jump at the 1962 Central American and Caribbean Games.

Sources Wikipedia, Daily Express

The Baha’i faith

The Baha’i religion was founded in the 19th century from a Muslim splinter group, Babism, by the Persian mystic Mirza Hoseyn Ali Nuri, later known as Baha’u’llah.(Arabic, "the Splendor of God"). 

The Persian government, which had been persistently persecuting the Babists, in 1852 carried out a massacre in which an estimated 20,000 died. Baha’u’llah was exiled to Baghdad, then under Turkish control. A political prisoner for the rest of his life, he was sent by the Turks, with his family and followers, on successive marches from Baghdad to Constantinople to Adrianople and finally to a penal colony in Acre, Palestine. He died there in 1893 after 40 years of exile and imprisonment for his beliefs.

Years in the Bahá'í calendar are counted from Thursday, March 21, 1844, the beginning of the Bahá'í Era (abbreviated BE).Year 1 BE thus began at sundown March 20, 1844. It is annually celebrated by members of the Bahá'í Faith as the Bahá'í New Year or Náw-Rúz.

World headquarters is in Israel, on the slopes of Mount Carmel overlooking Haifa and Acre; there, a shrine of the Bab, an archives building, and an administrative center have been built. 

Iranian teenager Mona Mahmudnizhad along with nine other women were hanged because of their membership in the Bahá'í Faith on June 18, 1983. The official charges ranged from “misleading children and youth” because she was teaching children who had been expelled from school for their beliefs and serving in an orphanage, to being a "Zionist" because the Bahá'í World Centre is located in Israel.

Mona Mahmudnizhad

The message of Baha’u’llah, in essence, was that all great religious leaders are manifestations of the unknowable God and all scriptures are sacred.

There is no priesthood: all Baha'is are expected to teach, and to work towards world unification. Administration is carried out by an elected body, the Universal House of Justice.  Any male Bahá'í, 21 years or older, is eligible to be elected to the Universal House of Justice; all other positions are open to male and female Bahá'ís.

Baha'is are expected to pray daily, but there is no set prayer. During 2–20 March, adults under 70 fast from sunrise to sunset.

Baha'i temple

The World Christian Encyclopedia estimated 7.3 million Bahá'ís in the world in 2010, representing 218 countries.

The world's largest Baháʼí population lives in India, which is home to about 1,880,700 Baháʼís.

The Bahá'í religion was ranked by the Foreign Policy magazine as the world's second fastest growing religion by percentage (1.7%) in 2007.

Sources Funk & Wagnells Encyclopedia,  Hutchinson Encyclopedia RM 2012. Helicon Publishing is division of RM.

Bagpipes

Bagpipes were known to the civilizations of ancient Greece, Rome, and Persia, and throughout history virtually every country fashioned its own version of the instrument. Bagpipes are mentioned in the book of Daniel in the Bible, and shown on Hittite carvings dated 1000 BC They were known as well in India, and even China.

Early instruments had bags made of the skins of small animals, such as goats or sheep, or of the stomach of a larger animal.

A favorite instrument in classical Greece and Rome, bagpipes' rhythm paced the Roman foot soldiers' march. They were often used as shepherd's instruments.

According to tradition, it was the Romans who brought the first bagpipes to Britain. By 1500 the bagpipe had displaced the harp as the instrument of choice in the Scottish Highlands.

The use of the bagpipes as a military instrument inspired the Highlanders in their fight so much that after the 1746 Battle of Culloden, bagpipes were banned by the English. During this period carrying a bagpipe was considered to be as much a crime as carrying arms as it was classified an "instrument of war".

When a reckless piper broke this law, a court ruled that “no highland regiment ever marched without a piper” and that therefore in the eyes of the law, his bagpipe was an instrument of war. He was executed on November 6, 1746.

At the Alamo, Davy Crockett on fiddle and John McGregor on bagpipes tried to drown out the Mexican troops' song of death.

The German philosopher Nietzsche wrote: "What trifles constitute happiness! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music life would be a mistake!"

Bill Millin was a Scottish soldier who walked up and down the beaches of Normandy on D-Day playing the bagpipes. Two captured German snipers later revealed why the piper at the front hadn’t been shot at. They said it was because they thought he was ‘dummkopf’, a foolhardy idiot.

The Euro 96 football organizers put bagpipes on a list of offensive stadium weapons, along with fireworks and gas cannisters.

The world record for the largest bagpipe ensemble consisted of 333 participants at an event organized by the Art of Living Foundation in the National Palace of Culture in Sofia, Bulgaria, on May 16, 2012. The attempt used traditional Bulgarian "kaba gaida" bagpipes which are from the Rhodope region of Bulgaria.

A fungal infection known as 'brytococcus neoformans' can fester inside bagpipes and cause disease in the player's lungs.

The U.S. has more bagpipe bands than Scotland does.

When she is in London, Queen Elizabeth II is awoken by a bagpiper playing outside her window.

Jonathan Davis, lead singer for the rock group Korn, played in his high school bagpipe band.

In 2011, Bob Dylan purchased a set of bagpipes from Glasgow's National Piping Centre. Proving he was serious about the instrument, he bought not only Highland Bagpipe Tutor Book one, but also Book two. 

Three famous modern day songs with bagpipes:
Mull of Kintyre by Wings
It's A Long Way To The Top (If You Wanna Rock 'N' Roll) by AC/DC
Biko by Peter Gabriel

Bagpiper in Edinburgh 001

Sources Oxford Music Online, Microsoft® Encarta® 99 Encyclopedia. © 1993-1998 Microsoft Corporation

Baghdad

Al-Mansur, the Caliph of Islam, founded the city of Baghdad to be the capital of the Islamic empire under the Abbasids in on July 30, 762 AD. The city was designed as a circle about 2 km in diameter, leading it to be known as the "Round City".

The first tar-paved roads appeared in Baghdad in the eighth century.

When the scholar Rhazes (854–925 AD) was tasked with choosing the location of a new hospital in Baghdad, he hung meat at points around the city, and chose the location where it rotted the slowest.

Baghdad was likely the largest city in the world from shortly after its foundation until the 930s, when it was tied by Córdoba. Several estimates suggest that the city contained over a million inhabitants at its peak.

Many of the One Thousand and One Nights tales are set in 9th century Baghdad.

The Middle East had a "cold period" in the 900s-1000s and in the winter the Tigris river would freeze and they would have thick snow on the ground for months in Baghdad. 

Baghdad was overrun on February 10, 1258 by the Mongols, who destroyed the irrigation system. The resulting decline lasted for many centuries due to frequent plagues and multiple successive empires.

After the sack of Baghdad, the Caliph, Al-Musta'sim, was surrendered to the Mongols on the belief that their practices prevented them from shedding the blood of a man of such a high royal and religious status. Sure enough, the Mongols kept to their custom by wrapping him in a rug and trampling him to death on February 20, 1258.

Siege of Baghdad by the Mongols led by Hulagu Khan in 1258.

In 1534, Baghdad was captured by the Ottoman Turks. Under the Ottomans, Baghdad continued its decline, partially as a result of the enmity between its rulers and Iranian Safavids, which did not accept the Sunni control of the city.

Baghdad fell to Anglo-Indian forces commanded by General Stanley Maude on March 11, 1917 during the World War I Mesopotamian Campaign.

Baghdad in 1930

The 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq caused significant damage to Baghdad's transportation, power, and sanitary infrastructure as the US-led coalition forces launched massive aerial assaults in the city in the two wars.

Disney's 1992 film Aladdin was originally to be set in Baghdad but the studio was forced to change it due to the outbreak of the Gulf War. They scrambled the letters in Baghdad to create the fictional city of Agrabah.

The toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue (see below) in the city's Firdos Square on April 9, 2003 shortly after the Iraq War invasion marked the symbolic capture of Baghdad by the Coalition forces.

The population of Baghdad as of 2018 was approximately 8,126,755.

It is the second largest city in the Arab World (after Cairo, Egypt), and the second largest city in Western Asia (after Tehran, Iran).

In an annual survey of the world’s most livable major cities conducted in 2013, Baghdad ranked dead last at number 223 on the list.

Source Wikipedia

Bagel

The word 'bagel' comes from the Yiddish word 'beygal,' which itself is derived from the German dialect word 'beugel,' meaning 'ring' or 'bracelet.'

The first printed mention of bagels was recorded in the Community Regulations of Krakow, Poland in 1610. It states that bagels will be given as a gift to any woman in childbirth.

The basic roll-with-a-hole design is hundreds of years old and provides for a more even cooking and baking of the dough.

Its hole can be used to thread string or dowels through groups of bagels, allowing for easier handling and transportation and more appealing seller displays.

Bagels were brought to the United States by immigrant Polish-Jews. By the 20th century a thriving business was developing in New York City.

The “International Beigel Bakers’ Union” was formed in New York in 1907 by Eastern Europeans.

The largest ever bagel weighed 868 lbs and was made by American Brueggers Bagels and shown at the New York state fair in 2004.

Canadian-born astronaut Gregory Chamitoff became the first person to take a batch of bagels into space when he brought 18 sesame seed bagels with him on his 2008 Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station. They came from his cousin’s bakery in Montreal.

National Bagel Day was long celebrated in the US on February 9, which happens to be the same day as National Pizza Day. Thanks to an initiative by English muffin company, Thomas’ Breads, bagels now have a day of their very own on January 15.

Bagels differ from other breads as the dough is first boiled before being baked.

New York City places a special tax on prepared foods. This means that sliced bagels are taxed once as food and again as prepared food, hence creating a sliced bagel tax.

One bagel has the content of 10 per cent of an average person’s daily carb intake.

Singer Barry Manilow had a dog named Bagel. (It's offspring was called Biscuit).

Source Daily Express

Bag

Duffel bags are named after a town of Duffel, Belgium, where they were first made.

Luther Crowell patented a machine to make paper bags in 1867, and five years later, a machine to make square-bottomed paper bags as we know them today. He also made numerous other improvements in terms of design. The Cape Cod inventor, held over 280 patents in his lifetime. 

Walter Deubener and his wife, Lydia, owned and operated the S. S. Kruesge grocery store on Seventh Street in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota. After noticing that his customers were having a difficult time carrying their groceries by hand, Deubener came up with the first shopping bag with handles. The package consisted of a paper bag with string reinforcing the bottom and running up the sides through holes and over the top to create handles. Deubner named his new product after himself, calling it the "Deubner Shopping Bag," and sold it for five cents.

The Deubener couple were issued a patent for their bag on May 21, 1929, sold their store and went into the shopping bag business full-time.

During the Depression, people used cotton flour bags and feed sacks to make clothes and household items. Manufacturers got wind of their bags’ other uses and began decorating them. Color and patterns added a little style and joy to the common sack dress.

Swedish engineer Sten Gustaf Thulin developed a method of forming a simple one-piece bag by folding, welding and die-cutting a flat tube of plastic in the early 1960s. Swedish packaging company Celloplast patented Thulin's plastic bag worldwide in 1965.

In 2018 Spalding Grammar School in England banned students from bringing bags into classes. 17-year-old student Jacob Ford, protested his school's ban by bringing his books to class inside of a microwave oven. His mother supported his peaceful protest, but the school suspended him and chastised the mother for supporting him.

To cancel out the negative environmental impact of one plastic bag, a cotton bag would need to be reused 131 times. (While plastic bags can also be reused but people just don't).

Baffin Island

Baffin Island is in the Canadian territory of Nunavut, situated across the entrance to Hudson Bay.

At about 1600 km (about 1000 mi) long and an area of 507,451 sq km (195,928 sq mi), Baffin Island is the fifth-largest island in the world. It has an estimated population of 13,148 (2016), mainly Inuit (Eskimo).

Baffin Island

It is likely that the island was known to the Norse of Greenland and Iceland prior to Christopher Columbus's discovery of America.

The English explorer Martin Frobisher created a gold metal in England in 1578 when he returned from Baffin Island with 200 tons of what he though was glittering gold ore. It turned out the ore was merely iron pyrite (“fool’s gold”). It was eventually crushed and used for road repair.

The island is named after English explorer and navigator William Baffin, who was pilot on several expeditions in search of the Northwest Passage. He was amongst the first Europeans to find Baffin Bay in 1615.

Baffin Island has an arctic climate, is treeless, and has many freshwater lakes. 

The east coast is deeply indented, with many fjords. The central interior is dominated by ice-capped mountains rising to 2057 m (6750 ft). 

The eastern community of Clyde River has twilight instead of night from April 26 until May 13, continuous sunlight for 2½ months from May 14 to July 28, then twilight instead of night from July 29 until August 16. This gives the community just over 3½ months without true night.

Mount Thor, located in Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island is famous for its vertical drop of 4,101 feet (1,250 meters) and is considered to have the greatest sheer vertical drop on Earth. It's a popular destination for experienced rock climbers who come to challenge themselves on the world's highest sheer cliff face.

Baffin Island is becoming popular amongst the BASE jumping community as a hotspot due to a wide array of 3,000 to 3,900 ft tall cliffs scattered around the island.

Badminton

Badminton came from a child's game called battledore and shuttlecock, in which two players hit a feathered shuttlecock back and forth with tiny rackets. Some form of the sport was played long ago in ancient Greece and Egypt.

Shuttlecock became a most fashionable pastime in England during the reign of James I (1603-1625) so much so that a writer could say, "to play Shuttlecok methinkes is the game now."

English army officers, serving in India in the 1860s, were very much taken by a game, which was similar, and yet far superior, to shuttlecock, known as Poona. They took it home, together with some of the Indian equipment, chiefly shuttlecocks. In 1873 it was played at a party given by the duke of Beaufort at Badminton House, his estate, and became known as "the Badminton game."

As early as 1878 there was a Badminton Club in New York with the membership consisting of men and 'good-looking' single girls.

Badminton was first admitted as an Olympic sport in the 1992 summer games in Barcelona, Spain. 

Today, badminton is played by two or four players, either indoors or outdoors, on a marked-out area 44 ft (13.41 m) long by 20 ft (6.10 m) wide for the four-player and 17 ft (5.18 m) wide for the two-player game. Across the middle of the court a net is fixed, with the top edge 5 ft (1.52 m) from the ground at the center and 5 ft 1 in. (1.55 m) at the posts. 

The fastest moving object hit by a player in any sport is the badminton shuttlecock. It can easily reach speeds of 112 mph (180 km/h) during a match.

Shuttlecocks used in professional badminton are made of stabilizing feathers from the left wing of a goose. Feathers from the right wing make them spin the wrong way.

Malaysian badminton player Tan Boon heong holds the record for the fastest ever shot made in badminton with a 306 mph smash.

The longest badminton match, ever played, lasted 161 minutes. In the 2016 Badminton Asian Championships women's doubles semi-finals Japan's Kurumi Yonao and Naoko Fukuman defeated Indonesia's Greysia Polii and Nitya Krishinda Maheswari 13-21, 21-19, 24-22  in 161 minutes.

Sources Compton's Interactive Encyclopedia © 1998 The Learning Company, Inc, Funk & Wagnells Encyclopedia

Badger

An older meaning of the noun 'badger' was as a word for a peddler or trader. The verb 'to badger' originally meant to haggle (like a peddler) and only later came to mean to irritate, like a badger.

The earliest recorded use of the word “badger” for the animal was in 1523. Before that, it was called a “brock” or “bauson”.

Their name refers to the white badge-like mark on the forehead. 

The word “badger” does not appear in any of Shakespeare's play but Twelfth Night mentions “brock” once.

A male badger is a boar, a female is a sow and the young are called cubs.

The honey badger has the reputation of being the most fearless and vicious of all mammals. When attacking a male of another species, the honey badger is said to go for the genitals. It is not really a badger at all but is more closely related to the polecat.

The skin of a Honey Badger is so tough it can resist several machete blows and is almost impervious to machete blows, arrows and spears.

The honey badger can withstand hundreds of African bee stings that would kill any other animal.

Honey badger

There are around 350,000 badgers in Britain. In December 2011 it was announced that in the following year, up to 100,000 of them could be slaughtered in a cull to prevent the spread of Bovine TB.

Mainly a woodland animal, the badger is nocturnal, and spends the day in a system of burrows called a ‘sett.’

Setts can be centuries old and are used by many generations of badgers.

Badgers are very clean-living and will not defecate in their setts but have communal latrines elsewhere.

Earthworms make up 90% of the badger's diet but it also feeds on roots, a variety of fruits and nuts, insects, mice, and young rabbits.

Badgers are omnivorous and will eat several hundred earthworms every night.

Badgers have very strong jaws capable of delivering a bite powerful enough to crush bones.

Their long, sharp claws can also inflict serious injury.

Badgers are fiercely territorial in the wild and attack when they feel threatened.

They can run at up to 19mph over short distances.

While on a railroad tour of the American West, President Theodore Roosevelt's train rolled into Sharon Springs, Kansas. There he was approached by a 12-year-old girl who asked if he would like to have a badger. Expecting to humor her, he agreed, and the girl came back with a two-week-old badger. President Roosevelt named him Josiah and he became one of the presidential pets.

Keeping one as a pet is illegal in the United Kingdom under the 1992 Protection of Badgers Act.

Badgers don’t usually hibernate, but sometimes they will sleep for a few days or weeks in their dens during the coldest part of winter.

The dachshund dog breed has a history with badgers; "dachs" is the German word for badger, and dachshunds were originally bred to be badger hounds.

Sources Hutchinson Encyclopedia, Daily Express, Daily Mail