Follow-up to Tecumseh, Michigan story
Tecumseh is having an Art Birdhouse Festival with work by over 60 local artists on display at area businesses through September 10. You may pick up a location guide at Tecumseh Center for the Arts at 400 North Maumee Street. All pieces will be auctioned on September 13 at the Tecumseh Country Club (2000 Milwaukee Road, 517/423-2070) or online http://www.thetca.org/flight_of_fancy/default.htm

Steady Increase in ID Thefts Recorded So Far For 2008
News release: The total number of breaches in the Identity Theft Resource Center’s (ITRC) 2008 breach list has surpassed the final total of 446 reported in 2007, more than 4 months before the end of 2008. As of 9:30 a.m. August 22nd, the number of confirmed data breaches in 2008 stood at 449. The actual number of breaches is most likely higher, due to under-reporting and the fact that some of the breaches reported, which affect multiple businesses, are listed as single events.
ITRC 2008 Breach List
2008 ITRC Breach report
2008 ITRC Breach Stats Report broken down by categories

The federal government established Fannie Mae in 1938 to expand the flow of mortgage funds across the nation and to help lower the costs to buy a home. Thirty years later, it was reconstituted by Congress as a shareholder-owned company. In 1970, the federal government created Freddie Mac to provide liquidity, stability and affordability to the housing market. Freddie Mac, a stockholder-owned company, makes loans and loan guarantees.
Wall Street has been buzzing the last few days about a possible takeover by the federal government of beleaguered mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which together hold or guarantee half the mortgage debt in the United States. In the wake of having gobbled up mortgage loans that went into default, the government-sponsored companies have seen a combined $3.1-billion loss from April to June.
http://www.newsday.com/business/ny-bzmort225811388aug22,0,6961630.story

Dashes function in some ways like parentheses (used in pairs to set off a comment within a larger sentence) and in some ways like colons (used to introduce material illustrating or emphasizing the immediately preceding statement). Comments set off with a pair of dashes appear less subordinate to the main sentence than do comments in parentheses. Material introduced after a single dash may be more emphatic and may serve a greater variety of rhetorical purposes than material introduced with a colon.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/g_overvw.html

Chicago’s “Marble Palace” has been turned into a stunning new downtown museum
Richard H. Driehaus lavished upon the storied Nickerson Mansion resulted in a remarkable new museum that has just opened. Driehaus first saw the inside of the sprawling 1883 sandstone house at the corner of Erie and Wabash when he visited an art gallery there, hunting for a statue of Abraham Lincoln. The consultant who accompanied him said, "You don't want to buy the statue . . . you should buy the house." With multimillion-dollar restoration efforts complete, M. Kirby Talley Jr, implemented Driehaus' vision for the museum. Downstairs he restored and re-covered original pieces of furniture (which had miraculously stayed in the house), and returned as many chairs and sofas to their original settings as possible. Period objects from Driehaus' collection—including museum-quality works of art—completed the rooms.
Upstairs, he created galleries to display additional objects from the collection. One room is devoted to Tiffany lamps. Another displays historical photographs of the mansion.
Today, with the antique furnishings back in place and chandeliers glowing in nearly every room, the Richard H. Driehaus Museum stands ready for visitors.
http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2008/september-october/nickerson.html

The SS United States was one of the greatest—if not the greatest—ocean liners of the 20th century. To cut such a trail in the water a ship has to be fast, and there was no ocean liner faster than the one known to enthusiasts as the "Big U." Although four city blocks long and 17 stories high, the United States could slice through water at 44 knots, or more than 50 mph—14 knots faster than today's largest cruise ship, the Queen Mary 2. During her maiden voyage in 1952, the ship set records on both the east and westbound crossings; the latter, three days, 12 hours and 12 minutes at an average speed of 34.5 knots, has never been broken. Because the ship was heavily compartmentalized, she could remain afloat even if half of the hull filled with water. With the exception of a grand piano and some butcher's blocks, not a single item aboard was made of wood. The largest passenger ship ever built in America is languishing at Pier 82, on a bend in the Delaware River, just north of downtown Philadelphia.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/transportation/4263478.html

'Fantasia On A Theme of Thomas Tallis' by Ralph Vaughan Williams was first performed at the Gloucester Festival in 1910.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A398937
In the audience at the first performance was the composer Herbert Howells, then aged eighteen. He, like many others, had gone to Gloucester to hear Edward Elgar conduct The Dream of Gerontius. But interposed between the audience and its Elgar was a new work, to be conducted by its composer, a tall, handsome, black-haired young man from Chelsea. From the very first chords of the Tallis Fantasia, Howells was spellbound and afterwards he and his friend Ivor Gurney walked the streets of Gloucester unable to sleep.
http://www.philharmonia.co.uk/_downloads/File/Vaughan%20Williams%20notes/vaughan_williams_tallis_fantasia_formatted.pdf?PHPSESSID=pf74fnqnv263gd70
“The land without music”—that is how nineteenth-century European musicians referred to England. They did not mean that there was no performance, nor that there was no love of music, but rather that English composers were inferior to their contemporaries on the continent. The greatest British composers prior to the twentieth century were Henry Purcell (1659–1695), John Bull (1563–1628), John Dowland (1563–1626), Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625), William Byrd (1543–1623), Thomas Morley (1557–1603), and Thomas Tallis (1505–1585). There were virtually no British composers of international importance for a period of nearly 200 years. This eclipse of talent came to an end as several young English composers showed exceptional gifts toward the end of the nineteenth century. They included Edward Elgar (1857–1934), Frederick Delius (1862–1934), and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958).
http://www.cincinnatisymphony.org/PDF/ProgramNotes/CSO15_0506.pdf

To your health Before corn came to Europe, there was polenta and before polenta, there was puls and pulmentum. Roman armies had a porridge that was similar to polenta, made with millet, chestnut flour, chickpea flour, roasted barley, buckwheat and other grains. Polenta is coarse cornmeal.
http://www.istrianet.org/istria/gastronomy/articles/polenta1.htm

August 30 is the birthday of Warren Buffet, born in Omaha, Nebraska (1930). In February 2008, he was ranked by Forbes as the richest person in the world, worth about $62 billion. Despite his massive wealth, he lives relatively frugally, still residing in the home he bought in 1958 for $31,500, driving his own car, and allotting himself an annual salary from his investment company of about $100,000. In 1988, he said: "There's nothing material I want very much. And I'm going to give virtually all of those claim checks to charity when my wife and I die." In 2006, he announced his plans to give 83 percent of his fortune to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he began transferring stocks from his company to their foundation. He also said, "If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians."
September 1 is the birthday of one of the most popular pulp fiction writers in American history, Edgar Rice Burroughs, (books by this author) born in Chicago (1875). He had read Darwin's book Descent of Man back in 1899, and he was fascinated by the idea that human beings were related to apes. He began to wonder what might happen if a child from an excessively noble, well-bred family were somehow left in the jungle to be raised by apes. The result was his story "Tarzan of the Apes," which filled an entire issue of All-Story magazine in October of 1912.
On September 2, 1666, a small fire broke out in a baker's shop on Puddling Lane in London. The flames soon spread, and within hours all of London was ablaze. When it was all over the Great Fire of London destroyed more than 80 percent of the city, including over thirteen thousand houses. The diarist Samuel Pepys watched the fire from across the Thames River, after burying his wine and Parmesan cheese to keep them safe from the fire. After the fire was over, the architect Christopher Wren was hired to rebuild the more than eighty churches destroyed by the blaze, including St. Paul's Cathedral.
The Writer’s Almanac