Christopher Reeve

“At first dreams seem impossible, then improbable, then inevitable.”

John Maynard Keynes

“The avoidance of taxes is the only intellectual pursuit that still carries any reward.”

Switzerland

In 1819, Francois-Louis Cailler developed the recipe that transforms cocoa beans into a chocolate bar and Rudolph Lindt, also Swiss, eventually perfected the process by adding cocoa butter. By the late 1860s, Jean Tobler formulated the Toblerone bar and in 1875 Daniel Peter combined cocoa powder with milk, creating milk chocolate. Henri Nestlé formed the Swiss Chocolate Society, which we now know as the Nestlé company.
Although there are larger countries whose population in the aggregate consume more chocolate, Switzerland is the country where on average, each Swiss citizen or resident eats more than 23 pounds of chocolate every year – the most of any country in the world on a per capita basis.
Curiously, and without implying there is any bias or favoritism, The New England Journal of Medicine once published a research study correlating chocolate consumption with the number of Nobel Prizes won by its citizens. According to the study, Switzerland comes in second, only behind Sweden, in Nobel prize winning laureates on a per capita.
How sweet is that?

Jean Giraudoux

“There is an invisible garment woven around us from our earliest years; it is made of the way we eat, the way we walk, the way we greet people.”

Yellowstone National Park

The oldest national park in the United States is Yellowstone National Park, located mostly in northwestern Wyoming and partially in Montana and Idaho. Established by legislation passed by the U.S. Congress and signed by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872, it is widely considered the first national park in the world
(Note: some have indicated there is evidence that Bogd Khan Mountain National Park in Mongolia was first dating back to 1778).
The United States has 63 national parks, all operated by the National Park Service, which is an agency of the U.S. Department of the Interior, and California has the largest number (9) of any state in the United States.

National Parks

What was America’s (and actually the world’s) first national park?

Why Winona, Of Course!

Winona Ryder was born, Winona Laura Horowitz, in Winona, Minnesota on October 29th (and, in the words of Robert Frost, “a diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman’s birthday but never remembers her age”).