Here’s another photo of a cute baby hippo, just six days old.

A new item for my book wishlist: A Thousand Years Over a Hot Stove by Laura Schenone is “A History of American Women Told Through Food, Recipes, and Remembrances.” Fifty recipes and numerous historical photos accompany the stories of women throughout the history of America, from various backgrounds, ethnicities, and eras.

Apparently my home state of Connecticut has attracted a number of boutique chocolate makers. The N.Y. Times rounded up five chocolate makers for an article titled “Home Sweet Home to Chocolate Makers.” Closest to my hometown are Deborah Anne’s Homemade Chocolates in Ridgefield where butter crunch, truffles, caramel and turtles are most popular, and Knipschildt Chocolatier in Norwalk where elegant ganache-filled truffles are available to wholesalers. Further afield are the Belgique Patisserie & Chocolatier in Kent, Bridgewater Chocolate in Brookfield and Munson’s Chocolates in Bolton. All hail the chocolate nutmeg state.

Filed under “questions I never thought to ask,” Yahoo responds to the query: Why is the “manila folder” called “manila”? Answer: they’re made from manila hemp, which is indigenous to the Philippines.

Car DVD players are not so rare nowadays. But why limit yourself to recorded videos? Now there’s a satellite dish you can stick on top of your car. TracVision gives you access to DirecTV satellite channels while you’re on the road, tracking satellites while you are in motion. It uses gyros and GPS to track the vehicle’s position and keep the signal. Hook it up to your in-car video system and your passengers can forget about playing punch buggy to keep themselves entertained. Current price for the equipment is $3,500, and maker KVH Industries is hoping to reduce that significantly in the years to come. But remember, it’s illegal to watch TV while you’re driving.

An enormous cushion-cut sapphire, formerly owned by Queen Marie of Romania, will be auctioned off by Christie’s on November 19 in Geneva. Weighing in at 478.68 carats, the gem is estimated to go for $860,000-$1,300,000. Christie’s claims it is the largest sapphire ever offered at auction. The same sale features two other significant sapphire jewels and a few D color, flawless diamonds as well. Bidders who haven’t depleted their funds can stay in town for Sotheby’s auction of a 103.83 carat flawless diamond the following day (reported here earlier).

With an original estimated schedule of twenty years, “the dictionary to end all dictionaries” was completed in sixty-eight. Simon Winchester’s new book The Meaning of Everything sets the scene for the void identified by the creators of the Oxford English Dictionary with a history of the English language and its unwieldy growth patterns, triggered by foreign invasions. The OED’s ambitious goals to catalog not only meanings of words, but also their histories, quotations, and synonyms brought a complexity to a project which ultimately outlived many of its creators. Project managers from all disciplines will relate to the pressures of budget, estimated schedule, and resources that plagued OED editor James Murray. The vast effort needed to properly catalog the English language proved the worth of the task itself.

Zookeepers in Milwaukee were surprised by a baby giraffe, born after a 15 month gestation period. Let’s assume mom giraffe was not as shocked as the zookeepers were to find a new animal in the pen. Baby will be sleeping a little more often than the 30 minutes adult giraffes need in 24 hours.

There will be a total lunar eclipse Saturday evening. The weather this week has been crisp, cold, and clear, just like autumn should be.

The Concorde arrived at the Museum of Flight on Wednesday. And it has a new hat: “the Concorde, when traveling at supersonic speeds, is heated by atmospheric friction. This causes the airframe to expand. Inside, the expansion is visible only as a gap that opens in the paneling behind the cockpit; then, as the aircraft slows and cools, the gap closes. So, while the jet streaked at 1,350 mph over Canada, one of the engineers aboard stuffed his hat into the gap. And there it remains.”