Montmartre is a hill 130 metres high, in the north of Paris in the 18th arrondissement, a part of the Right Bank, primarily known for the white-domed Basilica of the Sacré Cœur on its summit and as a nightclub district. The other, older, church on the hill is Saint Pierre de Montmartre, which claims to be the location at which the Jesuit order of priests was founded. Many artists had studios or worked around the community of Montmartre such as Salvador Dalí, Claude Monet, Pablo Picasso and Vincent van Gogh. In the mid-1800s artists, such as Johan Jongkind and Camille Pissarro, came to inhabit Montmartre. By the end of the century, Montmartre and its counterpart on the Left Bank, Montparnasse, became the principal artistic centers of Paris. Composers, including Satie (who was a pianist at Le Chat Noir), also lived in the area. The Musée de Montmartre is in the house where the painter Maurice Utrillo lived and worked in a second-floor studio. The mansion in the garden at the back is the oldest hotel on Montmartre, and one of its first owners was Claude Roze, also known as Roze de Rosimond, who bought it in 1680. Roze was the actor, who replaced Molière, and like his predecessor, died on stage. The house was Pierre-Auguste Renoir's first Montmartre address and many other names moved through the premises. The movie Amélie is set in an exaggeratedly quaint version of contemporary Montmartre. http://www.montmartre-paris-france.com/english/montmartre-history.php

Featured private company: R. L. Polk & Co. is a worldwide provider of information, particularly automotive and demographic statistics, made available through published directories, custom reports, and online interactive computer services. In addition, Polk manages direct marketing programs and is one of the largest U.S. manufacturers of calendars and other advertising specialties. Polk's activities include publishing 1,300 city directories, compiling data covering 95 million consumer households, and reporting information about 197 million motor vehicles. R. L. Polk & Co. was established in 1870 by Ralph Lane Polk. After serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, Polk earned a living by selling patent medicines door-to-door. During his travels, he met an enumerator in Ohio who was collecting information for a directory publisher. Fascinated, Polk took a job with the publisher and served several years in the Midwest before he moved to Detroit, Michigan, at the age of 21 to establish his own company. http://www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/R-L-Polk-amp;-Co-Company-History.html

In its original sense, a shaggy dog story is an extremely long-winded tale featuring extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents, usually resulting in a pointless or absurd punchline. These stories are a special case of yarns, coming from the long tradition of campfire yarns. Shaggy dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of the art of joke telling. The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner. The commonly believed archetype of the shaggy dog story is a story that concerns a shaggy dog. The story builds up, repeatedly emphasizing how amazing the dog is. At the climax of the story, someone in the story reacts with, "That dog's not so shaggy." The expectations of the audience that have been built up by the presentation of the story, that the story will end with a punchline, are thus disappointed. A shaggy dog story derives its humor from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the story ends with a meaningless anticlimax. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story
I was reminded of shaggy dog stories when Norm McDonald told one recently on the Tonight Show, and the audience listened intently.

A bus driver returned a suitcase containing more than $460,000 to a passenger who left it on the vehicle while going to a bank in the western Argentine city of San Juan.
Bus driver Alberto Rios got an $80 reward for his efforts from the passenger, a business executive, who said he was under great stress after losing track of the money belonging to the company he works for. I started working with my father when I was 8. He always told me that what's yours is yours and what's not is not," Rios told the newspaper.
http://samachaar.in/International/Argentinian_driver_returns_dollar_460,000_to_passenger_89795/

Butter in the bogs A few thousand years ago, someone living in what is now Ireland made some butter, stuck it into an oak barrel, wandered out into a bog about 25 miles west of Dublin, and buried it. Somehow, that someone lost track of it, which two lucky archaeologists discovered when they dug up the stashed loot earlier this year in the Gilltown bog, between the Irish towns of Timahoe and Staplestown. But that wasn’t the first keg of butter that’s been preserved by the strange chemistry of the bog. More than 270 kegs of bog butter have been retrieved from the wetlands, along with dozens of ancient bodies, swords, and ornaments. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/bogosphere/

Tucked at the end of one of the shortest streets in Manhattan lies a well-regarded restaurant called Commerce, which opened early last year. On September 9, the restaurant adopted a new policy: it would no longer accept cash. That's right: it's credit and debit-cards only. WSJ Law Blog September 11, 2009

On September 14, 1901 then Vice President Theodore Roosevelt (books by this author) learned he had become the 26th president of the United States, after the death by assassination of President William McKinley. Roosevelt was on a camping trip in the Adirondacks when he got the news that McKinley was on his deathbed, and he rode a buckboard wagon down the mountain in the middle of the night to learn that he had become the youngest president of the United States. The Writer’s Almanac
On September 14, 1918, socialist and labor activist Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years in prison for violating the Espionage Act and opposing the entry of the United States into World War I.
On September 14 1960, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) was founded in Baghdad, Iraq. OPEC was created to promote higher crude oil prices for its members through the restriction of global supply. http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/thisday/