John Quincy Adams took his presidential oath upon a "Volume of Laws" because, he wrote in a March 1825 diary entry, it was the Constitution he swore to preserve, protect and defend. Save for some presidents who were sworn in privately on a weekend or hastily upon their predecessor's death, all of the others have placed their hands on a Bible -- or at least on something considered holy. Lyndon B. Johnson took his oath upon a missal, a Catholic liturgical book. Sworn in aboard Air Force One after John F. Kennedy's assassination in 1963, Johnson used a copy found on a side table in the president's airplane bedroom.
When Barack Obama takes the presidential oath of office Tuesday, he will place his hand on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln used at his inauguration in 1861. Obama will be the first incoming president to use the 156-year-old Lincoln Bible, which is bound in burgundy velvet and has heavily gilded edges. The Constitution does not require a Bible, but like many practices on Inauguration Day, it's tradition. "So help me God," for example, is not part of the presidential oath, but many presidents add the words. Many historians think George Washington was the first to use the phrase, but Donald R. Kennon, a historian at the United States Capitol Historical Society, said there was little evidence to support the idea.
Well documented, however, is the Bible that the first president used for his oath. Four chief executives--Warren G. Harding, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush--have sworn upon the Bible that Washington used at the first presidential inauguration in 1789. The 1,280-page Bible used by Lincoln was purchased by Supreme Court clerk William Thomas Carroll. The cover bears a shield of gold wash over white metal with the words "Holy Bible." http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-inaug-religion18-2009jan18,0,5754606.story

Nerd and geek are both American words. "Nerd" was coined in 1950 by that great writer of children's nonsense verse Dr Seuss. "Geek" is the older being first recorded in 1916--long before it had any connection with obsessive computer game players. Back in those days a "geek" was a dumb, sideshow stooge--a bit wild and not very bright. And originally "nerd" was just a nonsense word with no particular meaning. Over time Americans came to use "nerd" to mean a bespectacled, studious square. According to the Longman's Dictionary of Contemporary English "nerd" now means "someone who seems only interested in computers and other technical things" and "geek" (which Longman's says is almost a synonym) mainly means someone who is desperately unfashionable.
http://www.abc.net.au/newsradio/txt/s2316933.htm

Best Free Reference Websites, selections from tenth annual list
Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy http://avalon.law.yale.edu/
Cooking Light http://www.cookinglight.com/
Europa—the European Union at a Glance http://europa.eu/abc/index_en.htm
FactCheck—Annenberg Political FactCheck http://www.factcheck.org/
Fodor’s www.fodors.com
National Public Radio http://www.npr.org/
The Political Graveyard http://politicalgraveyard.com/
Rotten Tomatoes http://www.rottentomatoes.com/
Yahoo Finance http://finance.yahoo.com/
Reference & User Services Quarterly Fall 2008

Poles began arriving in Toledo in large numbers beginning around 1890. They settled in two neighborhoods: Kuschwantz south along Nebraska Avenue and Lagrinka north along Lagrange Street. They were connected by a trolley line which some residents said must be the longest trolley line in the world because it stretched from “Pole to Pole.”
The economy was bleak in 1893, and Toledo cousins Adelbert L. and Celian M. Spitzer stopped construction on their new high-rise office building at Madison and Huron. The building sat idle until completion and opening in 1896. Edward Drummond Libbey’s Libbey Glass Company plant had not been profitable since he brought it to Toledo from New England in 1888. He gambled the company’s future spending a small fortune to develop a working model of a glass factory for the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. His exhibit and samples were a success and orders flooded in from all over the country and other parts of the world. Also, at the fair, the penny picture postal card was introduced—the cards were official souvenirs. They were so popular that they created a revolution in communications. The years 1907-1918 were the high point of the picture postcard, and Americans bought more than a billion cards annually. The postcard communication revolution was ended with increased use of pictures in newspapers and magazines, automobile travel, telephone and radio.
You Will Do Better in Toledo: From Frogtown to Glass City, a Toledo Retrospective in Postcards, 1893-1929

Quotes for today
I learned to slip back and forth between my black and white worlds, understanding that each possessed its own language and customs and structures of meaning, convinced that with a bit of translation on my part the two worlds would eventually cohere.
Barack Obama; Dreams From My Father; Times Books; 1995.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Martin Luther King, Jr, civil-rights leader (1929-1968)

January 17 is the birthday of Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston (1706). He was one of the most famous leaders of the American Revolution. He invented bifocals and the glass harmonica, he charted the Gulf Stream on his way across the Atlantic, he chased tornadoes on horseback, and he founded America's first circulating public library. And as the author, printer, and publisher of Poor Richard's Almanac, he circulated adages such as "Little strokes fell great oaks," and "Early to bed and early to rise, Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
January 18 is the birthday of physician and lexicographer Peter Mark Roget, (books by this author) born in London, England (1779). He was a working doctor for most of his life, but in his spare time he invented a slide rule and a method of water filtration that is still in use today. And he wrote papers on a variety of topics, including the kaleidoscope and Dante. He was a contributor to the early Encylopaedia Britannica.
He was 61 years old, and had just retired from his medical practice, when he decided to devote his retirement to publishing a system of classifying words into groups, based on their meanings. And that became the Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases, published in 1852. The word "thesaurus" means "treasury" in Greek. At the last minute, Roget decided to include an index. That index, which helped readers find synonyms, made Roget's thesaurus one of the most popular reference books of all time.
January 19 is the birthday of the man who coined the term "altruism" and who helped found the field of sociology: philosopher Auguste Comte, (books by this author) born in Montpellier, France (1798). His most famous work was Système de Politique Positive, published in four volumes between 1851 and 1854. It established a basis for sociology.
He said, "Everything is relative, and only that is absolute." The Writer’s Almanac