Baron

Baron is a title of honour, often hereditary, and ranks as one of the lower titles in the various nobiliary systems of Europe. The female equivalent is Baroness.

Etymology

The word baron comes from the Old French baron, from a Late Latin baro "man; servant, soldier, mercenary" (so used in Salic Law; Alemannic Law has barus in the same sense). The scholar Isidore of Seville in the 7th century thought the word was from Greek βαρύς "heavy" (because of the "heavy work" done by mercenaries), but the word is presumably of Old Frankish origin, cognate with Old English beorn meaning "warrior, nobleman". Cornutus in the first century already reports a word barones which he took to be of Gaulish origin. He glosses it as meaning servos militum and explains it as meaning "stupid", by reference to classical Latin bārō "simpleton, dunce"; because of this early reference, the word has also been suggested to derive from an otherwise unknown Celtic *bar, but the Oxford English Dictionary takes this to be "a figment".

Soybean

The soybean in the U.S., also called the soya bean in Europe (Glycine max), is a species of legume native to East Asia, widely grown for its edible bean which has numerous uses. The plant is classed as an oilseed rather than a pulse by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

Fat-free (defatted) soybean meal is a significant and cheap source of protein for animal feeds and many packaged meals; soy vegetable oil is another product of processing the soybean crop. For example, soybean products such as textured vegetable protein (TVP) are ingredients in many meat and dairy analogues. Soybeans produce significantly more protein per acre than most other uses of land.

Traditional nonfermented food uses of soybeans include soy milk, from which tofu and tofu skin are made. Fermented foods include soy sauce, fermented bean paste, natto, and tempeh, among others. The oil is used in many industrial applications. The main producers of soy are the United States (36%), Brazil (36%), Argentina (18%), China (5%) and India (4%). The beans contain significant amounts of phytic acid, alpha-linolenic acid, and isoflavones.

Caramba

Caramba was a Swedish music group. They released one self-titled album in 1981. The album is chiefly notable due to the entire album being recorded in nonsense language. Songs which imitate certain regional styles of music generally imitate the phonemic structure of languages from the appropriate regions. It was produced by Michael B. Tretow, who is primarily famous for engineering ABBA's records, and featured vocals by another Polar Music artist, Ted Gärdestad. While a number of other noted Swedish musicians and singers are rumoured to have taken part in the Caramba recordings, Tretow and Gärdestad are the only ones that have actually been named.

The track "Hubba Hubba Zoot Zoot" has been re-issued as part of Michael B. Tretow's 1999 album Greatest Hits, the Ted Gärdestad 4-CD box set Solregn in 2001, and a number of other compilations of 1980s hits and Swedish novelty recordings, and the Caramba album was released on CD in 2011.

Members of the Group

The artists of Caramba all used pseudonyms. This is how they were credited on the album sleeve:

Del

Del, or nabla, is an operator used in mathematics, in particular, in vector calculus, as a vector differential operator, usually represented by the nabla symbol ∇. When applied to a function defined on a one-dimensional domain, it denotes its standard derivative as defined in calculus. When applied to a field (a function defined on a multi-dimensional domain), del may denote the gradient (locally steepest slope) of a scalar field (or sometimes of a vector field, as in the Navier–Stokes equations), the divergence of a vector field, or the curl (rotation) of a vector field, depending on the way it is applied.

Strictly speaking, del is not a specific operator, but rather a convenient mathematical notation for those three operators, that makes many equations easier to write and remember. The del symbol can be interpreted as a vector of partial derivative operators, and its three possible meanings—gradient, divergence, and curl—can be formally viewed as the product with a scalar, dot product, and cross product, respectively, of the del "operator" with the field. These formal products do not necessarily commute with other operators or products.

Nan Merriman

Katherine Ann "Nan" Merriman (April 28, 1920 – July 22, 2012) was an American operatic mezzo-soprano.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she studied singing in Los Angeles with Alexis Bassian and Lotte Lehmann. By the age of twenty she was singing on Hollywood film soundtracks and it was there that she was spotted by Laurence Olivier. He picked Merriman to accompany him and his wife, actress Vivien Leigh, on a tour of Romeo and Juliet, where she performed songs during the set changes.

Merriman sang many roles both live and on radio under the baton of Arturo Toscanini between 1944 and 1952, while he was conductor of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Among the roles she sang with him, were Maddalena in Act IV of Verdi's Rigoletto, Emilia in Verdi's Otello, Mistress Page in Verdi's Falstaff, and the trousers role of Orfeo in Act II of Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and also sang in his first and only studio recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, in 1952. She was also featured as Dorabella in a 1956 La Scala performance of Mozart's Così fan tutte, which was conducted by Toscanini's short-lived protégé, Guido Cantelli.