vade mecum vay-dee-MEE-kuhm; vah-dee-MAY-, noun:
1. A book for ready reference; a manual; a handbook.
2. A useful thing that one regularly carries about.

Vade mecum is from Latin, literally meaning “go with me.”

oh, and there’s a fresh combat beginning in the haiku arena.

since my poll,here Pygmies were believed to exist by fewer people than angels, aliens, psychics, ghosts, and demons.

I have to help to correct this error, and then go to bed.

Pygmies live in some of the most inhospitable forests of eastern Congo. They have been known to the western world since the Greek poet Homer wrote about them in the 8th century B.C. but it was only with the European conquest of Africa that they hit western consciousness in a big way.

Anthropologists define pygmies where full normal growth results in an average male height of less than 1.50 meters, or 59 inches. Folk thinking has automatically assumed that these hunter-gatherers, who live deep in the jungle, are the most primitive members of the human race, or even an earlier evolutionary stage. But archaeologists have never discovered races of true pygmy size in prehistory. They were the first known inhabitants of Congo, however, both the Bantu and the Nilotic tribes that make up the rest of the population coming after them.

Mortality among children is very high, and even among those who make it to adulthood, lifespans over 50 are rare. Pygmies are very communal – children are passed around the tribe to get to know all the adults intimately, and women sometimes call on each other to act as wet nurses for their children. The Efe pygmies near Epulu in Haut-Zaire province are known to other Congolese for being addicted to tobacco – they will often work three or four hours in a peasant’s field in exchange for one tobacco leaf. Pygmies speak a variety of languages, usually adapting the dialect of their neighboring settled tribes.

that said, I’m a going to bed.