Barack Obama has specific family ties with the Luo tribe, whose members in 1994, said Ethnologue.com, numbered 3,185,000 in Kenya and 280,000 in Tanzania.e Luo people are also known as Dholuo and Nilotic Kavrirondo and are the third-largest ethnic group in Kenya (13 percent of the population, according to the CIA World Factbook). (More)

Garlic, crosses and daylight are banes to vampires. Another would be two other timely deadlines that delayed this column at Halloween. But if you listened closely Oct. 31, you heard the music of the creatures of the night. (More)

Biden, McCain, Obama, Palin. Which other names are on your mind this Sunday morning before Election Day? (More)

As my train left the Gare du Nord behind, the buildings gradually shed their Parisian frills. Within minutes, the architecture was as ordinary as anywhere else in the world. (More)

Among the mind-bending images of Dutch artist M.C. Escher is a print showing, according to an article in the July 30, 2002, New York Times, "people marching around a circle of stairs that manage, through a trick of geometry, to always go up." (More)

According to "Rick Steves' Paris 2008," American servicemen during World War II gave Paris' Pigalle district the nickname, "Pig Alley." (More)

On my first day in Paris, a woman in a many-colored skirt approached me in the Gare St. Lazare train station. "Do you speak English?" she asked. New in town, I answered, "Yes," and she handed me a card stating that she was a Bosnian refugee whose family had been killed, who had no place to sleep and nothing to eat. Knowing full well I'd been scammed, I gave the woman a couple of coins. (More)

The line at the taxi stand at the Gare de Lyon rivaled those at the Paris Disneyland. When at last my turn came, an eccentric fellow grabbed my luggage, whispering as he pranced over to the cab. (More)

I thought I knew what the Lyon train station reminded me of. "There's the Sydney Opera House," I exclaimed on entering what the French call "le parking." (More)

En route to the Lyon train station, Peter Humphries told me about his hometown of Beaufort, Victoria, Australia. (More)

The French folks at the big Beauforts Reunion dinner dance took their dancing seriously. Person for person, they were the sharpest group of nonprofessional hoofers I have ever seen. What is more, they danced the night away, never tiring out. (More)

When the exception proves the rule, it doesn't necessarily validate the concept. What the exception does is put the rule to the test, for "prove" comes from Latin "probare" ("to test," from "probus," good). (More)

Y'a du boulot," said the Beauforts Reunion guidebook in countrified French, "on va tâcher moyen d'y faire en une paire de jours." -- "There be plenty of work to do, so we'll try to find a way to do it in a couple of days." (More)

Riding back from the South Carolina Library Association Fall Conference in Columbia, my library director, two branch managers and I discussed many heady topics. We touched on the role of instant messaging at library reference desks. We delved into new trends in teen services. And, most important of all, we wondered at the origin and true meaning of the word, "thingie." (More)

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget (whitehouse.gov/omb/) said that "From the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s, worker productivity rose at only 1.5 percent a year on average. In the mid-1990s, average productivity growth accelerated to around 2.5 percent per year. Since 2001 the rate of productivity growth has accelerated again to 3.4 percent per year." No wonder I have so little time to get together with friends I first met in the 1980s! (More)