In 1939, historian and author Philip Van Doren Stern began imagining a tale about a small-town bank clerk who contemplates suicide on Christmas Eve, but pulls back when a guardian angel shows him how dark the world would be without him. Stern wrote a short story called “The Greatest Gift,” which he pitched to several magazines, without success. So in 1943, he printed 200 copies as 24-page pamphlets and sent them out as Christmas cards. One went to his agent, who immediately saw the movie potential and sold the film rights to RKO for $10,000. Screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett fleshed out Stern’s 4,000-word story into a movie. Critical reaction was generally positive, but It’s a Wonderful Life failed at the box office. It’s a Wonderful Life was forgotten, no one bothered to renew its 28-year copyright. So in 1974, it fell into the public domain, meaning that TV stations could show it for free—which they did, repeatedly. It quickly found an audience. Devotees began hosting parties to watch it, and video sales soared. In 1993, Republic Pictures, a company that took over distribution from the film’s producer, announced that it still held the rights to Stern’s original story. Fearful of being sued for copyright infringement, TV stations stopped showing the movie. Eventually NBC acquired exclusive broadcasting rights and now airs it twice a year, during prime time. http://www.theweek.com/article/index/91726/3/An_evergreen_Christmas_movie

Follow-up on golconda from A. Word.A.Day
From: Pankaj Sethi (neelpank yahoo.co.in)
The name Golconda itself is derived from "golla" (which means shepherd in the Telugu language spoken in these parts), and "konda" which means hill. So literally--shepherd's hill. The most famous of the diamonds mined at Golconda was the Koh-i-noor literally, "mountain of light", which travelled across the world from the Mughals to Persia (Nadir Shah), back to India (Maharaja Ranjit Singh of Punjab) and is now part of the British Crown Jewels.
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From: Suba Peddada (suba ti.com)
It is believed that the Hope diamond, on display at the Smithsonian, was most likely from the Golconda region. It weighs approximately 45 carats.
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From: Peter Ives (pives unm.edu)
Although your quotation referring to Golconda was recent, as a metaphor it flourished in the late 19th century and much of the 20th. A classic stock market history is "Once in Golconda: a True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938" (1969); another business history is "The Black Golconda: the Romance of Petroleum" (1924). Several hopeful mining companies in the USA have used the name and there are towns in Illinois and Nevada called Golconda.

Gregorian chant, named after Pope Gregory I (pope from A.D. 590-604), consists of a huge number of unaccompanied modal melodies which began to be written down in the 9th century, the oldest notated music and the earliest “early music” in the Western European tradition. In 1994, Angel released “Chant,” an album by the Benedictine monks of Santo Domingo de Silos in Spain, which quickly rose to the top of the classical chart, and was followed by numerous chant albums in the 1990s. Topping the Billboard classical chart in the summer of 2008 is an album of Gregorian chant (“Chant: Music for the Soul”) recorded for Universal by the Cistercian Monks of Stift Heiligenkreuz, an Austrian monastery near Vienna. http://earlymusic.org/press_releases/2008/08/gregorian-chant-tops-billboard-classical-chart-again
I’m a northerner, I’m a northerner, I’m a northerner This is what I tell myself when I look at the beautiful snow and walk in the piercing air. And oh, how I love the changing of the seasons.

The Delicious mind in 2008
http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/12/the-state-of-the-delicious-hive-mind-in-2008.html
Delicious—“biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe”
http://delicious.com/

GTC Roadshow AG announces the acquisition of the most expensive Tolkien book ever sold; a signed first edition of "The Lord of the Rings" dedicated to the "Queen of the Hobbits", for 104.000 USD. A further five lots were acquired in the same auction: the first translation of The Hobbit dedicated to E. Griffiths, a signed US first edition Lord of the Rings, P. Baynes' original art, a signed map of Middle-earth and a book dedicated to Tolkien's son Michael. The pieces will add to the largest Tolkien collection ever compiled and will be offered to the public in a unique exhibition.

The Evolution of Search: A look at the History, Vision, Innovators, and Future of Information Accessibility

Quote: The young have aspirations that never come to pass, the old have reminiscences of what never happened. Saki, (books by this author) born Hector Hugh Munro in Akyab, Burma (now known as Sittwe, Myanmar) (1870-1916)

Thumbs Race as Japan’s Best Sellers Go Cellular
The cellphone novel was born in 2000 after a home-page-making Web site, Maho no i-rando, realized that many users were writing novels on their blogs; it tinkered with its software to allow users to upload works in progress and readers to comment, creating the serialized cellphone novel. But the number of users uploading novels began booming only two to three years ago, and the number of novels listed on the site reached one million in late 2007, according to Maho no i-rando. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/20/world/asia/20japan.html?_r=1

Coming to Shumaker charity sale in Toledo
Rage by Jonathan Kellerman hardbound 365 pages
Book 19 in the Alex Delaware series
The Cardinal in the Kremlin by Tom Clancy paperbound 626 pages
sequel to The Hunt for Red October
Hunting Badger by Tony Hillerman softbound 381 pages
Joe Leaphorn And Jim Chee novel
The Juror by George Dawes Green hardbound 420 pages
“ . . . with a villain so perfectly evil, he makes Hannibal the Cannibal look like a vegetarian.” Scott Turow
Nothing to Lose by Lee Child hardbound 407 pages
Book 12 in the Jack Reacher series
Cross Country by James Patterson hardbound 406 pages
14th Alex Cross thriller
http://www.jamespatterson.com/books_alex_cross.html
Airframe by Michael Crichton hardbound 352 pages
Out of Sight by Elmore Leonard softbound 341 pages
1996 book (made into 1998 film with George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez) http://www.elmoreleonard.com/index.php?/filmandtv/out_of_sight/