The James Logan Courier

By Paul Tran, Courier Staff Writer

Potatoes are a wonderful, versatile food. You can boil them, mash them, or put them in stew. Discovered in America by colonists, the use of these easy growing vegetables has spread and they’ve become a staple food in many countries. Unfortunately modern methods used to prepare these roots are far too delicious. They’re often cooked in excessive oil and grease to make french fries or potato chips. These dishes are high in calories, fat, and sodium, and their popularity in the American diet has become a large cause of obesity.

In the past, potatoes were a staple food in Western civilization due to their year-round availability, difficulty to spoil, and high carbohydrate count, and were later picked up as a main food component by European countries for the same reasons. The importance of the potato in Eastern diets was shown by the Great Potato Famine where a potato blight struck Irish potato plants and caused 750,000 people to die from starvation and disease caused by lack of potatoes. Even more recently, mashed potatoes and baked potatoes are seen as parts of a classic family meal. However, potatoes have shifted into a far different purpose in the modern diet.

By Billy O'Keefe
McClatchy-Tribune (MCT)

It has always taken a special kind of person to truly appreciate the "Yakuza" series, which re-engineers flaws into points of endearment like few (if any) other series can.

"Yakuza: Dead Souls" takes that bizarre two-way affection into a whole new arena, but it never loses itself in doing so. An existing confluence of brawling and storytelling goes slightly nuts with the addition of zombies, firearms and more sustained action than has typically been present in these games, but everything that those earlier games comprised — including the weirdly wonderful tug-o-war between archaic and charming — remains intact.

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Patty Smith Hill (27 March 1868 — 25 May 1946) is perhaps best known for co-writing the tune which became popular as Happy Birthday to You. She was an American nursery school, kindergarten teacher, and key founder of the National Association Nursery Education (NANE) which now exists as the National Association For the Education of Young Children (NAEYC).

Patty Smith Hill was born in 1868 in Anchorage, Kentucky, just outside of Louisville. Her parents were passionate people who instilled in Patty and her siblings the importance of education, the value of play, and the necessity of advocating for others. Her father, William Wallace Hill, was born in Bath, Kentucky, graduated from Centre College in Danville, Kentucky in 1833, and earned a doctorate of Theology from Princeton University in 1838. He dedicated his entire life to ministry and education, which took the Hill family from Kentucky to Missouri to Texas. Her mother, Martha Jane Smith, was William’s second wife (his first died in childbirth), and was born in Pennsylvania, but as an adolescent moved with her brother to live with their aunt and uncle on their plantation in Danville. Martha Jane was intent on learning and passing along education to others, evidenced, for example, by the fact that she taught the slaves on the Grimes plantation to read and write.

Read an interview with Patty Smith Hill.

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