31. I ran into Carmen, one of my Spanish teachers, and as I was telling her about my holidays in Spanish, the same discussion was going through my head in Arabic.

32. Cheap chocolate, while not as creamy or quite as delicious as expensive chocolate, gives me roughly the same happy buzz.

33. George Lucas donated (yes, DONATED) the story rights to Star Wars to KUSC-FM, the NPR affiliate located at University of Southern California, where he attended college. (Rhys got the CDs of it for Christmas -- EXCELLENT)

34. Arabic taught me to gist, which is an incredibly useful skill.

35. The word pesto refers to the preparation of the sauce, not the ingredients, which means that you can have whatever you want in your pesto, as long as it's ground up. (pesto, pestle -- get it?)

36. Starbucks is indeed named for the character in Moby Dick, which, when not read in a class, is a highly entertaining adventure story.

37. While you may have your own opinion of Taylor Swift, I am grateful to her for her Romeo and Juliet song. I inadvertently amused a woman at Target this summer by telling Radhika Shakespeare's story so that she didn't think that the two of them lived happily ever after (which of course they do in the song). Radhika was not amused.

38. Poinsettia plants are named for the first American ambassador to Mexico (1825-1829), Joel Roberts Poinsett, who went on to found what is now the Smithsonian.

39. Poinsettia sap was used by the Aztecs as a medicine to combat fevers.

40. The botanical name for poinsettias, Euphorbia pulcherrima, means "the most beautiful euphorbia". The Latin word pulcherrima is the root for the English word, "pulchritude" meaning beautiful.