TREASURES OF THE RHINE, Part three
June 25-July 4: Heidelberg, Rudesheim (tour of Seigfried’s Mechanical Music Museum), cruise to Koblenz, Cochem, visit winery, walk in Cologne’s old town, sample beer,
arrive in Arnhem, visit Liberation Museum and Canadian Cemetery, canal cruise and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Utrecht, visit cheese farm, return to ship now docked in Schoonhoven, Dutch singers and dancers are evening entertainment, sail to Rotterdam,
walking tour and visit of porcelain factory in Delft, music quiz after dinner, arrive in Ghent (name comes from Celtic word for confluence of rivers) , full-day excursion to Brugges, movie after dinner, tour city of Antwerp and art museum, farewell cocktails with captain and crew, Captain’s Dinner. Wonderful weather, sights, people, music, food—a highly recommended cruise!

Global warming is dissolving the Alpine glaciers so rapidly that Italy and Switzerland have decided they must re-draw their national borders to take account of the new realities. The border has been fixed since 1861, when Italy became a unified state. But for the past century the surface area of the “cryosphere”, the zone of glaciers, permanent snow cover and permafrost, has been shrinking steadily, with dramatic acceleration in the past five years. This is the area over which the national frontier passes and the two countries have now agreed to have their experts sit down together and hash out where it ought to run now. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/melting-snow-prompts-border-change-between-switzerland-and-italy-1653181.html\

Dole Food Co. has filed a defamation suit in Los Angeles against two Swedish filmmakers whose recently screened documentary chronicles a lawsuit alleging that workers in Nicaragua were rendered sterile after being exposed to the pesticide DBCP on Dole's banana farms. The documentary—called Bananas —tells the tale of the first U.S. trial involving the pesticide claims against Dole. In 2007, a jury in Los Angeles awarded $5.8 million in damages to six Nicaraguan workers in Tellez v. Dole, No. BC312852 (Los Angeles Co., Calif., Super. Ct.). But in April, Los Angeles County, Calif., Superior Court Judge Victoria Chaney threw out two similar cases against Dole in Los Angeles after finding that the plaintiffs and their lawyers—particularly lead plaintiffs' attorney Juan J. Dominguez of the Law Offices of Juan J. Dominguez in Los Angeles—committed fraud in bringing the claims. Specifically, the judge found that plaintiffs and their lawyers had falsified work documents and claims of sterility and that evidence revealed a "truly heinous and repulsive" scheme of pervasive fraud involving Dominguez that was "cemented together by human greed and avarice," according to the complaint, which was filed on July 8. The suit was filed one day after a panel of the California 2d District Court of Appeal ruled that the Tellez judgment, which Dole had appealed, should be reviewed in lower court to determine whether it was tainted by potential fraud. http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202432119262&Dole_Food_sues_filmmakers_alleging_documentary_was_based_on_fraud_&slreturn=1

The Museum of the City of New York celebrates the four-hundredth anniversary of the settlement of the original Dutch colonies in New York with an exhibition of works by twelve Dutch photographers, most residents of the city, who explore our shared history. The result: “Dutch Seen: New York Rediscovered.” http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/notebook/2009/07/06/090706gonb_GOAT_notebook_aletti

Manu Dibango was one of countless people whose lives were changed by Michael Jackson’s music, although in Dibango’s case the changing was mutual. He was born and reared in Cameroon, and was already a local favorite when he recorded a song for the Cameroon soccer team. The result was a 1972 single called “Mouvement Ewondo,” but it was the B side—“Soul Makossa,” a honking, galloping funk track—that was the real hit, in Africa, in Europe, and in America, where it came to be seen as one of the first disco records. A generation of disk jockeys learned to wield the power of the song’s famous introduction: a hard beat, a single guitar chord, and Dibango’s low growl. He named his song after the makossa, a Cameroonian dance, but he stretched the word out, played with it: “Ma-mako, ma-ma-ssa, mako-makossa.” About a decade later, Dibango was in Paris, listening to the radio at his apartment, when he heard something familiar: those same syllables, more or less, in a very different context. The d.j. was playing “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’,” the unconventional first song from “Thriller.” The galloping rhythm sounds a bit like “Soul Makossa,” and near the end Jackson acknowledges the debt by singing words that many listeners mistook for nonsense: “Ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa.” Soon, Dibango’s phone started ringing. Friends and relatives were calling to offer their congratulations: Michael Jackson was singing his song! But Dibango’s pride turned to puzzlement when he bought the album, only to find that the song was credited to Michael Jackson and no one else. Dibango eventually worked out a financial agreement with Jackson, and he made his peace with “Thriller,” which might be (depending on how you keep score) the most popular album of all time.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2009/07/06/090706ta_talk_sanneh

The term "second string" (or the phrase 'to have more than one string to your bow') derives from the fact that medieval archers would carry a second string, in the event that their "first string" snapped. http://www.solarnavigator.net/sport/archery.htm

“Second wind” means that when you run very fast, you reach a point where you gasp for breath, slow down but keep on pushing and after a few seconds, you feel recovered and pick up the pace. Some people think that you just slow down and allow yourself enough time to recover from your oxygen debt, but research from the University of California in Berkeley may give another explanation. When you run fast, your muscles use large amounts of oxygen to burn carbohydrate, fat and protein for energy. If you run so fast that your lungs cannot supply all the oxygen that you need, you develop an oxygen debt that causes lactic acid to accumulate in your muscles to make them burn, and you gasp for air. The muscle burning and shortness of breath caused by the accumulation of lactic acid forces you to slow down. This recent research shows that the lactic acid that accumulates in muscles when you run very fast is actually the first choice of your muscles for fuel when you are running so fast that you can't get in all the oxygen that you need (American Journal of Physiology-Endocrinology and Metabolism, June 2006). So your muscles switch to burning more lactic acid for energy, you need less oxygen and then pick up the pace. http://ezinearticles.com/?Second-Wind:-A-New-Explanation&id=288592

July 9 is the birthday of Ann Radcliffe, (books by this author) born in London (1764). Her most famous novel was The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which is probably best remembered today because it is the book that Jane Austen satirized in Northanger Abbey (1818).
July 9 is the birthday of Matthew Lewis, (books by this author) born in London (1775). He wrote to his mother: "What do you think of my having written, in the space of 10 weeks, a romance of between three and four hundred pages octavo? It is called The Monk, and I am myself so pleased with it, that, if the booksellers will not buy it, I shall publish it myself." The Monk became a huge sensation and went through many editions, and from there on out, Matthew Lewis was called "Monk" Lewis.
July 9 is the birthday of the "Queen of Romance," a woman who wrote more than 700 books: Barbara Cartland, (books by this author) born in Birmingham, England (1901). The Writer’s Almanac