Zydeco, from the French le zaricot or “snap beans” is a popular form of American folk music. It evolved in southwest Louisiana in the early 19th century from forms of Louisiana Creole music. Usually fast tempo and dominated by the button or piano accordion and a form of a washboard known as a vest frottoir, zydeco music was originally created at house dances, where families and friends gathered for socializing.

For 150 years, Louisiana Creoles enjoyed an insular lifestyle, prospering, educating themselves without the American government and building their invisible communities under the Code Noir. The French created the Code Noir in 1724 to establish rules for treatment of slaves, as well as restrictions and rights for gens de couleur libres, a growing class of free people of color who had the right to own land, something few blacks in the American South had at that time.

The music arose as a synthesis of traditional Creole music, some Cajun music influences, and African-American traditions, including blues and gospel. It was also often just called French music. Zydeco’s rural beginnings and the prevailing economic conditions at its inception are reflected in many of the song titles and lyrics.

It moved to rural dance halls and nightclubs. As a result, the music integrated waltzes, shuffles, two-steps, and most dance music forms of the era. Today, the tradition of change and evolution in the music continues. It stays current while integrating even more genres such as hip-hop, ska, rock, and other styles, in addition to the traditional zydeco forms.

An instrument used in Zydeco music is the vest frottoir. It is usually made from pressed, corrugated aluminium and is worn over the shoulders. Other instruments common in zydeco include the old world accordion which is found in folk and roots music globally.

A Green Man is a sculpture, drawing, or other representation of a face surrounded by or made from leaves. Branches or vines may sprout from the nose, mouth, nostrils or other parts of the face and these shoots may bear flowers or fruit. Commonly used as a decorative architectural ornament, Green Men are frequently found on carvings in churches and other buildings.

The Green Man motif has many variations. Found in many cultures around the world, the Green Man is often related to natural vegetative deities springing up in different cultures throughout the ages. Primarily it is interpreted as a symbol of rebirth, or renaissance, representing the cycle of growth each spring. Some speculate that the mythology of the Green Man developed independently in the traditions of separate ancient cultures and evolved into the wide variety of examples found throughout history.

The image of the Green Man has made a significant resurgence in modern times, with artists from around the world interweaving Green Man imagery into various modes of work. These artists and others have continued the path and tradition of the ancient Green Man imagery into modern times, a creation which has been called an instinctive expression of our relationship with nature. The modern images have often shown a marked divergence from the face-only images of traditional Green Men, and sometimes reveal a feminine nature.

Sand is a naturally occurring granular material composed of finely divided rock and mineral particles. The most common constituent of sand, in inland continental settings and non-tropical coastal settings, is silica, usually in the form of quartz, which because of its chemical inertness and considerable hardness is the most common mineral resistant to weathering.

The composition of sand is highly variable, depending on the local rock sources and conditions. The bright white sands found in tropical and subtropical coastal settings are eroded limestone and may contain coral and shell fragments in addition to other organic or organically derived fragmental material. The gypsum sand dunes of the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico are famous for their bright, white color.

Sands rich in magnetite are dark to black in color, as are sands derived from volcanic basalts and obsidian. Chlorite-glauconite bearing sands are typically green in color, as are sands derived from lava with a high olivine content. Many sands, especially those found extensively in Southern Europe, have iron impurities within the quartz crystals of the sand, giving a deep yellow color. Sand deposits in some areas contain garnets and other resistant minerals, including some small gemstones.

The study of individual grains can reveal much historical information as to the origin and kind of transport of the grain. Quartz sand that is recently weathered from granite or gneiss quartz crystals will be angular. It is called sharp sand in the building trade where it is preferred for concrete, and in gardening where it is used as a soil amendment to loosen clay soils. Sand that is transported long distances by water or wind will be rounded, with characteristic abrasion patterns on the grain surface. People who collect sand as a hobby are known as arenophiles or psammophiles.

A Ouija board is a flat board marked with letters, numbers, and other symbols, theoretically used to communicate with spirits. It uses a planchette or movable indicator to indicate the spirit’s message by spelling it out on the board during a seance. The fingers of the seance participants are placed on the planchette, which then moves about the board to spell out messages.

Users subconsciously direct the path of the triangle to produce a word that is in that person’s subconscious thought process. This subconscious behavior is known as ideomotor action, a term coined by William Carpenter in 1882. It is also known as automatism. Some people may be convinced that the powers of the ouija board are real because they are unaware that they are in fact moving the piece and therefore assume that the piece must be moving due to some other spiritual force.

The subconscious thought process may produce an answer that is different from what the user expected in their conscious thought process, thus perpetuating the idea that the board has mystical powers. One experiment was conducted using unbiased participants. Questions were asked of the late William Frawley with very strong answers. The participants were then blindfolded and the board was turned 180 degrees without their knowledge. With continued questioning, the planchette then traveled to bare areas of the board where the participants believed the Yes and No marks were located.

The first historical mention of a Ouija board is found in China around 1100 B.C., with a divination method known as fuji or planchette writing. Other sources claim that according to a Greek historical account of the philosopher Pythagoras, in 540 B.C. his sect would conduct seances at a mystic table, moving on wheels, moved towards signs, which the philosopher and his pupil, Philolaus, interpreted to the audience as being revelations supposedly from an unseen world.

There are several theories about the origin of the term Ouija. The Oxford English Dictionary states that the origin is unknown, but mentions three possibilities. According to one of these, the word is derived from the French oui and the German ja, both meaning yes. An alternative story suggests that the name was revealed to inventor Charles Kennard during a Ouija seance and was claimed to be an Ancient Egyptian word meaning good luck. It has also been suggested that the word was inspired by the name of the Moroccan city Oujda.

The yellow jacket is a common name in North America for predatory wasps of the generaVespula. Members of these genera are known simply as wasps in other English-speaking countries. Most of these are black-and-yellow, while others may have the abdomen background color red instead of black. They can be identified by their distinctive markings, small size, their occurrence only in colonies, and a characteristic, rapid, side to side flight pattern prior to landing.

Nests are built in trees, shrubs, or in protected places such as inside human-made structures, attics, hollow walls or flooring, in sheds, under porches and eaves of houses, or in soil cavities and mouse burrows. Nests are made from wood fiber chewed into a paper-like pulp.

In 1975, the German yellowjacket first appeared in Ohio and has now become the dominant species over the Eastern Yellow Jacket. It is bold and aggressive, and if provoked, it can sting repeatedly and painfully. The German yellowjacket builds its nests in cavities with the peak worker population between 1,000 and 3,000 individuals during May to August, each colony producing several thousand new reproductives after this point, through November.

The Eastern Yellow Jacket builds its nests underground. Nests are built entirely of wood fiber and are completely enclosed except for a small entrance at the bottom. The color of the paper is highly dependent on the source of the wood fibers used. The nests contain multiple, horizontal tiers of combs within. In the Southeastern United States, where southern yellowjacket nests may persist through the winter, colony sizes of this species may reach 100,000 adult wasps.

The yellowjacket’s most visible place in American culture is as the mascot of the Georgia Institute of Technology, Montana State University Billings, University of Rochester and Berkeley High School in California. In Columbus, Ohio, the Columbus Blue Jackets formerly used a logo featuring a “blue jacket” insect, based on the yellowjacket. This fictional “blue jacket” resembles a yellowjacket wearing a blue Civil War uniform.

The term intentionality was introduced by Jeremy Bentham as a principle of utility in his doctrine of consciousness for the purpose of distinguishing acts that are intentional and acts that are not. The term was later used by Edmund Husserl in his doctrine that consciousness is always intentional, a concept that he undertook in connection with theses set forth by Franz Brentano regarding the ontological and psychological status of objects of thought.

It has been defined as “aboutness”, and according to the Oxford English Dictionary it is “the distinguishing property of mental phenomena of being necessarily directed upon an object, whether real or imaginary”. It is in this sense and the usage of Husserl that the term is primarily used in contemporary philosophy. The concept of intentionality has its foundation in scholastic philosophy with the earliest theory being associated with St. Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God and his tenets distinguishing between objects that exist in understanding and objects that exist in reality.

A major problem within intentionality discourse is that participants often fail to make explicit whether or not they use the term to imply concepts such as agency or desire, or whether it involves teleology. Most philosophers use intentionality to mean something with no teleological import. Thus, a thought of a chair can be about a chair without any implication of an intention or even a belief relating to the chair. For philosophers of language, intentionality is largely an issue of how symbols can have meaning.

In current artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind, intentionality is a controversial subject and sometimes claimed to be something that a machine will never achieve. John Searle argued for this position with the Chinese room thought experiment, according to which no syntactic operations that occurred in a computer would provide it with semantic content. As he noted in the article, Searle’s view was a minority position in artificial intelligence and philosophy of mind.

The wild man or woodwose is a mythological figure that appears in the artwork and literature of medieval Europe. Images of wild men appear in the carved and painted roof where intersecting vaults meet in the Canterbury Cathedral, in positions where one is also likely to encounter the vegetal Green Man. The wild man, often armed with a club, was a link between civilized humans and the spirits of natural woodland.

The image of the wild man survived to appear as supporter for heraldic coats-of-arms, especially in Germany, well into the 16th century. Early engravers in Germany and Italy were particularly fond of wild men, wild women, and wild families, with examples from Martin Schongauer and Albrecht Dürer among others.

As the name implies, the key characteristic of the wild man is his wildness. Wild men were seen as beings of the wilderness, and as such represented the antithesis of civilization. Scholar Dorothy Yamamoto has noted that the “wilderness” inhabited by the wild man does not truly indicate a place totally beyond human reach, but rather the liminal zone at edge of civilization, the place inhabited by hunters, criminals, religious hermits, herdsmen, and others who frequent the margins of human activity.

Other characteristics developed or transmuted in different contexts. From the earliest times wild men were associated with hairiness. By the 12th century they were almost invariably described as having a coat of hair covering their entire bodies except for their hands, feet, faces above their long beards, and the breasts and chins of the females.

The medieval wild man concept also drew on lore about similar beings from the Classical world such as the Roman faun and Silvanus. There are several folk traditions about the wild man that correspond with ancient practices and beliefs. Notably, peasants tried to capture the wild man by getting him drunk and tying him up in hopes that he would give them his wisdom in exchange for freedom. This suggests a connection to an ancient tradition in which shepherds caught a forest being in the same fashion and for the same purpose.

The Mayten, or Maytenus boaria, is an evergreen tree native to South America. It grows up to 65 ft high with a 30 inch straight trunk. It occurs naturally in waterways of arid regions in Chile, Argentina and Peru. The name “mayten” comes from its Mapuche Indian name “mantun”, the local name for the species. It has been planted in the North Pacific Coast of the United States as far north as Seattle, Washington.

It is a slow-growing and drought resistant tree. It looks like a dainty weeping willow, but unlike the willow it is evergreen. A rare cold snap in the 20s will make it lose some of its leaves. The small, elliptical light green leaves have serrated edges and sit close together along long pendulous clusters that hang down from the branches. It grows at a medium pace until it becomes an attractive round-headed to spreading tree. It easily reaches 30 feet tall in about 15 years. 

The hard wood is used in tool handles and is grown as both an ornamental in gardens and for reforestation in Chile. Flowers combined with European bees produce a very delicious honey. Oil from its seeds is obtained in order to elaborate varnish. Its tender leaves are used to feed cattle, in fact the name boaria means bovine, because they enjoy feeding from them. It is fully naturalized in New Zealand. Many trees have been planted in gardens of California and private collections in Spain, and all of them have acclimatized in those lands.