There is a lawsuit out of Cook County, Ill., in which a management company filed a $50,000 lawsuit over a tenant's “malicious and defamatory” Twitter tweet. Tweets have a maximum length of 140 characters. And yes, apparently they can lead to defamation lawsuits. The tweet was made by the tenant, Amanda Bonnen, in reference to the state of her apartment to her 20 followers. “You should just come anyway,” it read. “Who said sleeping in a moldy apartment was bad for you? Horizon Realty thinks it's OK.” Click here for the story, from Chicago Bar-Tender. The complaint notes that because Bonnen's account was public, “anybody in the world can view the account holder's tweets.” The complaint says that because the “statement damaged the plaintiff's reputation in its business, the statement is liable per se.” WSJ Law Blog July 28, 2009

Answers to your health reform questions by Anna Wilde Mathews
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203609204574318132550338334.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

The Northeast Kingdom is a term used to describe the northeast corner of the U.S. state of Vermont, comprising—approximately—Essex, Orleans and Caledonia Counties. In Vermont, the written term "NEK" is often used. The term is attributed to the late George D. Aiken, former Governor of Vermont (1937-1941) and a U.S. Senator at the time of a 1949 speech, the first recorded use of the term. The area is often referred to by Vermonters simply as "The Kingdom." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Kingdom

Retronyms (neologism created for an existing object or concept because the exact meaning of the original term used for it has become ambiguous)
Landline phone, snail mail, cloth diapers, push lawnmower
Although the term is new, the practice is old. Before the invasion of Poland in 1939, the global war that took place between 1914 and 1918 was known as “The Great War,” or the “14/18 War.” There had to be a WWII before there could be a WWI. World War I is a retronym. http://www.dailywritingtips.com/whats-a-retronym/

Although perhaps not as jolting as an alarm clock, a cat’s “soliciting purr” can still pry its owner from sleep. And, when sufficiently annoying, the sound may actually coerce them from bed to fill a food bowl. This particular meow mix—an embedding of her cat’s high-frequency natural cry within a more pleasant, low-frequency purr—often awakens Karen McComb, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Sussex in the U.K. and lead author of a paper about that sound published in Current Biology. “Solicitation purring is probably more acceptable to humans than overt meowing, which is likely to get cats ejected from the bedroom,” McComb said in a statement. To understand just how cats vocally manipulate owners, McComb and her team set up a series of experiments. First they recorded the purrs of 10 cats; some were recorded when a cat was actively soliciting food and others in a non-solicitation setting. Fifty people then listened to the sounds at the same volume. Individuals judged pleading purrs as more urgent and less pleasant than normal purrs. When the researchers played the purrs re-synthesized to exclude the hungry cries, leaving all else the same, the volunteers perceived the purrs as far less urgent. http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=the-manipulative-meow-cats-learn-to-2009-07-13

Icon: overused but useful noun
An image, picture, or other representation
A religious painting, often done on wooden panels
A person or thing that is the best example of a certain profession or some doing
A small picture which represents something (such as an icon on a computer screen which when clicked performs some function)
(linguistics): A type of noun whereby the form reflects and is determined by the referent; onomatopoetic words are necessarily all icons
Etymology: From Latin, icon Ancient Greek (polytonic, á) (eikÅn) "likeness, image, portrait". Eastern Orthodox Church sense is attested from 1833. Computing sense first recorded in 1982. http://www.allwords.com/query.php?SearchType=3&Keyword=icon&goquery=Find+it%21&Language=ENG

This year's Librarian Book Cart Drill Championships were held recently in Chicago.
Five teams of librarians—dressed in costumes ranging from Vikings to Elvis Presley—competed for the coveted gold book cart. They marched in drill-team formation, equipped with metal book carts.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=106561675&sc=nl&cc=es-20090728
I always remember seeing a parade in Detroit when a great roar went up from the spectators. It was not a sports hero, but a drill team of men dressed in suits marching with their briefcases