Each Saturday we highlight a humorous and sometimes poignant video, interview, comic, or skit concerning different professions and pastimes.  From W.C. Fields to Rowan Atkinson, from classic films and commercials to Monty Python—all and everything will be tapped for this look each week at the way popular culture has viewed various careers and pastimes (loosely defined). Some of the videos will carry a message, many are plain silly, and while most of them are obvious creatures of their time, all will share a common interest in making us laugh (and occasionally think).

Click here for all of the videos and careers highlighted to date.

And if so, why? 

Friday the 13th is widely hailed as the most common superstition in the world, whose roots trace back to antiquity. 

Mathematician and Britannica contributor Ian Stewart discusses number symbolism and our love-hate relationship with numbers, and even runs through the many cultural associations we have with numbers 1 - 20 and 100 in particular.

So click on the link above and read on (if you dare) …

Macbeth, New Zealand Opera (Photo by Alexia Sinclair)

Photographer Alexia Sinclair with cast of Macbeth, New Zealand Opera

In the following dish, you could easily eliminate the chicken and double the amount of lentils. The taste of the Moroccan-inspired spices adds a perfect kick that is definitely palate-pleasing.

Moroccan Chicken & Lentils

• 1 T. paprika
• 2 t. cumin
• 2 t. coriander
• 1 t. ground ginger
• 1/2 t. turmeric
• 1/2 t. black pepper
• 2 T. olive oil
• 1 large onion, sliced thin
• 5 cloves garlic, minced
• 1 – 1 1/2 lb. chicken breasts
• 1/2 lb. baby carrots or sliced carrots
• 1 1/4 c. chicken stock
• 1/2 c. dried lentils

1. In a small bowl, combine the 6 first ingredients to make the Moroccan spice blend. Set aside.

2. In a large skillet, heat olive oil. Add onions and garlic. Cook for 5 minutes over medium heat. Stir in spice blend and cook for an additional 3 minutes, stirring frquently so that the spices do not burn.

2. Add chicken, carrots and chicken stock to the skillet. Bring to a boil, cover, reduce heat and simmer. Cook at least until the chicken is fully cooked, about 20-25 minutes. Longer simmering will increase the flavor.

3. 20 minutes before you plan to eat (and after the chicken is fully cooked), remove chicken from skillet and set aside. Add lentils to the skillet, bring stock back to a boil, cover and simmer about 15 more minutes, until lentils are fully cooked but not mushy.

4. Shred or dice chicken and add back to the skillet. Stir to combine. Serve over rice or couscous.

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Kate Miller’s cooking posts appear every Friday at the Britannica Blog.

Click here for the other posts in this series.

In that spirit, and in a time of endless war and violence, here are two versions of Cat Stevens/Yusuf’s hopeful hymn “Peace Train,” in reverse chronological order, the first world-seasoned, the second youthfully exuberant. More next week.

Does the ability to buy giant bags of Froot Loops at cut-rate prices inspire economic growth? More likely, Wal-Mart is simply a smart, cautious investor. “Wal-Mart chooses to go places with a sizable middle class,” says Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian who just published a book on Wal-Mart’s rise. And Wal-Mart’s attention to middle-class growth could pay off for the company in the future. Next up for the Wal-Mart effect, Lichtenstein says: Russia and Eastern Europe.

The “Estrella del Mar” (”Star of the Sea,” pictured below) slept 16 passengers plus a crew of about 7. The boat was much nicer than I had imagined—ultra shiny wood floors throughout, a lounge with white leather couches, and a lovely dining room.

The cabins were small, but had comfy beds. The three course meals were amazing, plus everyday after returning from an excursion we were greeted by tuxedo-clad Herman, the waiter and all around manager of the boat, with plates of snacks like pizza or chicken wings.

I just didn’t think I would be met with food and tasty snacks again on my trip.

The Estrella del Mar (”Star of the Sea”) cruising the Galapagos 

(Photo by Lisa Lubin) 

I was on a tour, which was just one of many Galapagos Islands Tours, offered there. On our sea vessel it was another stew of folks from all over the globe: a cute young couple from Ireland, some loud overbearing Poles from Canada, two older lesbian lovers from France, and others from the Canary Islands of Spain, Japan, Brazil, England, Switzerland, and me, the sole Americano.

Sunset over the Galapagos (photo by Lisa Lubin)

After about four days (halfway through) I was just about getting used to the rocking sensation of the ocean. When the first group of folks left and the second arrived, I was happy to see a few more young people come aboard. On the other hand, part of me was a bit tired of making small talk with strangers. There’s the typical traveler chat: where we’ve been, where we’re going, how many months we were traveling, what to see, where to go, etc. But then also at the same time, I also started really relaxing, and getting to know the crew. They were a bunch of nice Ecuadorian guys some of whom love to hit on the solo chica traveler.

Pancho was the oldest. He was the chef, a musician, and all around bon vivant. He marveled us with meal after meal of fabulous gourmet fare—beautiful homemade soups, vegetable and meat dishes. My first day on board, I sat right down to a bowl of steaming chicken and rice soup. I slurped up the last drop thinking that was lunch. But, no, it was just the first course. Next came a plate of succulent chicken topped with a savory mushroom sauce, tasty green beans, and a small salad. And after, came a plate of fresh island fruits. And this was just lunch! Dinner was another three-course affair with dishes every night like filet mignon, calamari in a light tomato sauce, stuffed pepper with meat, vegetables, and eggplant cakes. It was all so good. My diet plan of losing weight on this trip was suddenly going by the ‘weigh’ side. The food was way more than I expected. Chef Pancho was a tiny wrinkled man. He spoke no English, but was perhaps the funniest of all the crew—doing little jigs here and there and taking bows on cue—a real character—just adorable.

Post-snorkeling pizza in the Galapagos (photo by Lisa Lubin)

Herman was the all around boat manager, bartender, chamber maid, and waiter. He was tiny and cute and they called him “Nato” which means little nose, which of course, he did not have. He was cute and friendly and always quick to joke when we asked what he was serving that it was ‘filet of pinguino’ or ‘turtle soup.’

The captain, Efran, was guess what? also a small, leathery faced older guy. He was perhaps around forty-five, but looked older due to the constant exposure to the equatorial sun. He let me steer the ship one day which was quite fun. He also led me snorkeling one day and would grab my hand to point out cool sea life. But the problem was he didn’t ever let go.

Hmmm. Do I pull it away forcefully and possibly offend the captain of the ship? This made me slightly uncomfortable, but others said he’d done the same with them—of course they were all women, though.

But things did get a bit strange one night when I was lying in a lounge chair on the top deck taking in the fresh air so as to not get seasick. He came up and laid next to me and helped me practice my Spanish. But, whereas I was lying on my back gazing at the stars above, he was curled on his side gazing into my face—more uncomfortable! Eventually I actually fell asleep only to awake to him draping me with a blanket. Finally, he fell asleep and I crept off to my cabin. The next day I casually avoided him and he began to give me the cold shoulder. Apparently he was hurt because the next evening I went ashore into town with another couple from the boat and Javier, our tour guide.

Javier was the ‘naturalista’ guide. The boats all come with different guides of varying degrees of knowledge. I chose this boat, which cost a little more because Javier was a Naturalista III, which meant he had a biology degree (in his case studied biology for 2 years) and spoke very good English. He was the biggest crew member—about six foot four, with a big build, big round face, and even bigger smile. Every evening he gave us a briefing of the next days activities. The way he over-pronunciated his English made me chuckle.

“Tomorrow we go on a rrrocky trail.” The way he said ‘rocky’ reminded me of Ed Sullivan and how he sounded like he spoke with a mouth full of marbles: “Right here on our stage…”

After each briefing, he would wrap up with “any comment? any question?” and then rang the dinner bell. I became sort of his assistant and he’d flirt with me off and on. It was harmless fun.

One day after an excursion on one of the islands, the crew took a break to play some fútbol (soccer) on a small dirt field just behind the beach. Javier kept bugging me to play. I really wasn’t going to as I’d never even played before (well maybe a few times way back in high school gym class), let alone even knew the rules of the game. Eventually, I and another girl, Sinead, who played on a team in Ireland, couldn’t resist their urging and joined it. It was so much fun! We were only playing on half the field and I realized I was running around a lot more than most of them. Amazingly, I somehow managed to score 3 goals, more than anyone on my team. They all thought I lied about my little soccer experience, but I think maybe the fact that I was playing in my bikini top was a strategic move on my part.

But really the show here was the animals. It was truly amazing. Most of the animals here are indigenous and found nowhere else in the world.  AND there are no predators here so none of the animals are afraid of us (although, looking at our motley bunch, they should be). We strolled by one hundred-year-old tortoises, swam up to sharks and penguins, and even snapped photos mere inches from sea lions basking in the sun.

Sea lions and author on the beach in the Galapagos (photo by Lisa Lubin)

The Galapagos archipelago is renowned for its unusual animal life and takes its name from its tortoises, the Old Spanish word for which is “galápagos.”

(Photo: AISA, Archivo Iconográfico, Barcelona, España)

This barren, volcanic group of islands lies directly on the equator about 1000 kilometers west of Ecuador. It was discovered by Peruvian Spaniards around the 1500s, but really hit the spotlight thanks to Charles Darwin. He visited the islands for three weeks in 1853 and what he discovered here eventually led him to write his theory of evolution. There are 13 major islands and many small ones and the whole lot of them is a national park so you must pay $100 cash just to get on. By the way, just a little trivia for you: The national currency of Ecuador is the US Dollar. That’s right—our greenbacks, with our presidents on them is the official dinero in these parts.

Every day on our 8 day cruise was another adventure. Javier would lead us around a different rocky volcanic island. Most islands are off limits to visitors unless you are escorted by a guide. Most of the islands very dry. It’s almost like a moonscape, but here life abounds. We saw hundreds of marine iguanas and lava lizards lying next to crabs and barking sea lions. We also got to snorkel nearly each day which I loved. We swam around rocky outcroppings and the waters teemed with beautiful colored schools of fish, star fish, blowfish, stingrays, and even a few white-tipped sharks.

The final evening was capped off with a song and dance by Pancho (as he ‘played’ the wonderful instrument…the cheese grater) and a wonderful buffet dinner. I was sad to leave my new friends and home at sea.

Back in Quito—I missed my life of sun and leisure in the Galapagos Islands. I went from amazing three course meals of fresh seafood, meats, and fruits to a dinner of Ritz crackers and Oreos. Nothing was open due to a holiday and I was stuck raiding the snacks in the hotel lobby. Back to the reality of a budget traveler, I guess.

Like his legendary ancestor, Popeye drew his strength from the earth, not directly in the manner of Atlas but indirectly through the consumption of a nutritionally supercharged foodstuff. In Hercules’s case, that foodstuff was garlic, which, according to a Popeye cartoon of 1954, the hero sniffed in times of need, which occurred to him much more often than they do to the rest of us. Alas, his archfoe Brutus knocked him into a spinach field during one of their frequent brawls, and Hercules chewed the green stuff instead of sniffing the white stuff, and, well, the rest is history, at least of a sort.

It took a hero to convince children of my generation to eat spinach, for the usual way Spinacia oleracea came to the table was sopping wet and near-black, always tasting of the can in which it had been housed. It was nasty stuff, and Popeye had to cajole and lie and keck-keck-keck endlessly in order to make the sale. Even as a child, I inclined toward the view espoused by the great philosopher Groucho Marx: “This would be a better world for children if the parents had to eat the spinach.”

Still, Popeye’s detestable ploy worked. In the 1930s, when the cartoon first became popular, spinach consumption increased by a third. The fact that there was a depression going on and many people could not afford to eat as much meat as before may have had something to do with it, too. No offense to the good people of Crystal City, Texas, who long ago erected a statue to Popeye and declared their town to be the Spinach Capital of the World—an event that they’re celebrating today, November 12, the opening day of an annual three-day festival devoted to the green stuff.

Two millennia and more ago, the spinach capital of the world lay somewhere on the vast Iranian Plateau, where the plant grew in wild abundance. The people of the region knew a good thing when they saw it, and spinach, which they called esfenakh or aspanakh, figured prominently in the local cuisine.

Traders brought spinach to the Mediterranean, whose cooking has never been the same since. (Mix some freshly sautéed spinach with some red pepper flakes, olive oil, garlic, and the ear-shaped pasta called orecchiette, and your life will be changed for the better.) Italian traders took the plant to France, where it became the épinard of culinary fame. The French passed it along to their neighbors, even the ones they didn’t like. For their part, the Spanish planted spinach almost as soon as they landed in the Americas, and in time it was growing in profusion, the better to put Crystal City on the map and the inhabitants of those lands in better health.

And there’s no mistaking it; spinach is good for a person, even if its legendarily high iron content was the product of a slip of the pen. Which is to say: in 1870, it seems, a German chemist calculated spinach’s undeniably high concentration of ferrous oxide, but in transferring his figures from notebook to journal article he located the decimal point in the wrong place, making it seem as if spinach had ten times its true wealth of iron. For the next seven decades, spinach bore the rubric “miracle vegetable” in health manuals in many languages, and it took six decades for other chemists realize their colleague’s error and correct the figure.

By that time Popeye had been out doing his propaganda work, and anyway, few people were inclined to banish spinach from the table on account of a little typo. Happy Spinach Fest!

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Portions excerpted from Gregory McNamee’s Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food.

The U.S. veterans population is projected at 23,442,000, according to information from the Veterans Administration, VA. Of that number, 8 percent are female. As of 9/30/08, the VA projected 2,583,000 living veterans of World War II with about 900 WWII vets passing away each day.

1st LT Fred Bahlau of Onsted, Michigan, was a member of the 101st Airborne during World War II. Fred went from life as a carefree teenager in Michigan in 1942 to the arduous life as a soldier training as a paratrooper in Toccoa, Georgia, to Normandy, France, where he landed on D-Day in 1944. Now a seasoned soldier and a sergeant, he fought the Germans in Holland and then in foxholes in a frozen forest around Bastogne, Belgium. After receiving two battlefield promotions, 1st LT Fred Bahlau’s final assignment as the war ended was guarding the Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden, Germany. He experienced a lifetime in a few short years.

1st LT Fred Bahlau holds the boots he wore home from World War II; at his office in Onsted, Michigan, on Nov. 9, 2009.

In a recent interview with Britannica’s Student News Net, which I publish, Fred recalled both humorous and horrific stories about his war experience.

After landing in France on D-Day, Fred led a group of soldiers with an objective to capture a bridge. One of his men disappeared for three hours and when he came back showed Fred the inside of his coat where he had pinned German badges from dead German soldiers. Fred scolded him and said if he was ever captured, the Germans would kill him. That’s exactly what happened when Fred’s unit was later fighting the Germans in Holland. Fred said the soldier’s body was found 20 years later when a farmer was digging behind a barn and hit the soldier’s helmet.

Fred and a buddy were on their way to Paris for a leave late in 1944 thinking the war was ending when they were abruptly ordered back to duty. Fred said he had never heard of Bastogne, Belgium but that’s where they were headed. Once there, Sgt. Fred Bahlau was in charge of a group of soldiers who were soon digging foxholes in the Ardennes Forest to defend Bastogne from a German offensive.

Fred Bahlau won his first Silver Star for his actions in this area in France, for securing a bridge shortly after D-Day.

Fred estimates they spent about 20 days in the foxholes with no heat and little food. They could not start a fire for fear of drawing attention to their position. But Fred said they did take a few twigs to start a small fire in their metal cups using snow from the trees to melt a portion of a very hard chocolate bar that was packed with vitamins. The only other source of food was a few small tin cans of K-rations.

As a sergeant, Fred was required to periodically report back to battalion headquarters about the number of men killed, missing and wounded. On his first trip to headquarters, Fred was given a green bottle. “I was cold,” Fred said so he took a swig of the bottle thinking it was wine. The next thing he knew he was on the floor kicking and trying to get his breath. Fred thinks the bottle contained a German liquor called Schnapps.

General McAuliffe was in charge of the troops defending Bastogne. When a German general sent him a letter demanding that he surrender, he replied with a one-word answer: “Nuts!” In Bastogne’s town square today, there is a statue of General McAuliffe, a U.S. tank and a restaurant called “Le Nuts.”

From Bastogne, Fred was ordered to Germany where his unit was assigned to guard Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden. Fred said when they got there, the British had bombed some of the area but to the right and left of the house were tunnels where Hitler had stored the loot he stole as he marched through Europe.

Fred is reminded daily of his service as he has dealt with lifelong pain in his legs, a direct result of his 20 days living in the bitterly cold foxholes around Bastogne. From his home in Onsted, he travels to the VA medical center in Ann Arbor, Michigan and has high praise for the care he is given. His VA benefits include an extra stipend for his service in Bastogne.

When asked what he would like to say to the younger generation, Fred said kids should talk to their grandparents to learn about their WWII experiences and schools should teach more about the war. Typical of a true hero, Fred said his words of encouragement to study the war are not to draw more attention to his service but to honor the fallen soldiers. Fred willingly speaks to schools when asked. “I’m glad to do it because of all the men we lost,” Fred said as his eyes watered and the interview concluded.

Of all of the medals Fred earned during his service, he is most proud of earning his paratrooper wings upon successfully completing training in Toccoa, Georgia. The two small stars on the wings note his jumps into Normandy and Holland.

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Author’s Note: I first met Fred Bahlau while covering the 65th anniversary of D-Day from Normandy, France, as part of the Stephen Ambrose D-Day to the Rhine Tour in June 2009.