A Toledo muse reader has reminded me that I wrote of MapsCompare at http://geshout.com/mapscompare/all.php and she has learned to use one its map features found separately at http://www.bing.com/. A couple of times, she has found maps at bing.com more accurate than Google. Bing has more than maps, including images, news and travel information. Thanks, Julie.

Census Bureau Releases 2008 American Community Survey Data
News release: "The U.S. Census Bureau has released the latest American Community Survey (ACS) data, providing a statistical portrait of the characteristics of the nation’s population in 2008. / Detailed tables / ACS Media Toolkit / 2008 ACS Questionnaire. According to the new snapshot, one-in-four people in Texas (24.1 percent) lacked health insurance in 2008, the highest rate in the nation. At the other end of the spectrum, fewer than one-in-20 Massachusetts residents (4.1 percent) lacked coverage."
"Five states—Arizona, California, Florida, Indiana and Michigan—saw real median household income fall between 2007 and 2008. Just one state had a decline between 2006 and 2007.
The total foreign-born population represented 12.5 percent of the population in 2008; it was 12.6 percent in 2007.
The percentage of women 15 and over who have never married was 28.1 percent in 2008, up from 27.6 percent in 2007 and 27.3 percent in 2006.
California homeowners with mortgages ($2,384) had the median housing costs in the nation ew Jersey had the second highest median housing cost ($2,360). Hawaii ($2,265) and the District of Columbia ($2,218) followed, but were not significantly different from each other. Rounding out the top six were Connecticut ($2,108) and Massachusetts ($2,105), which also were not significantly different from each other."

A peninsula is a piece of land that is nearly surrounded by water but connected to mainland via an isthmus. Word origin: Latin paenīnsula : paene, almost + īnsula, island. A peninsula can also be a headland, cape, island promontory, bill, point, or spit.[1]
Delmarva Peninsula, encompassing parts of Maryland and Virginia, and all of Delaware
Florida is a well-known example of a large peninsula, with its land area divided between the larger Florida peninsula and the smaller Florida panhandle on the north and west. It has several smaller peninsulas within it. Much of Tampa lies on a peninsula jutting out into Tampa Bay.
Long Island, was once a peninsula connected to North America during the Ice Ages.
Michigan is very distinguishable for its mitten-shaped Lower Peninsula of Michigan which includes:
Dyke Peninsula
Fountain Point
Leelanau Peninsula
Old Mission Peninsula
The Thumb
Woodtick Peninsula
The northern half of Michigan is called the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and contains:
Abbaye Peninsula
Garden Peninsula
Keweenaw Peninsula
Stonington Peninsula
New Jersey Peninsula - This state can be viewed as a peninsula surrounded by the Delaware River, Atlantic Ocean and the Delaware Bay
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_peninsulas#United_States

A hyphen connects, and a dash separates. The word hyphen is not used very much anymore, but you probably see them everyday, for instance slk-law.com or buckeye-express.com.

A Hyphen is Not a Dash by Tina Blue
When you need a dash, for whatever reason, you need a dash--not a hyphen. There are two kinds of dashes: the n-dash and the m-dash. The n-dash is called that because it is the same width as the letter "n". The m-dash is longer--the width of the letter "m". We use the n-dash for numerical ranges, as in "6-10 years." When we need a dash as a form of parenthetical punctuation in a sentence--as I have been using it rather freely already in this article--we use the m-dash. The problem is, most of us can't produce a dash on our typewriters or keyboards. Microsoft Word and other word processing programs will sometimes recognize two successive hyphens--typed with no space between them--as an m-dash and translate the double hyphen into a respectable dash. But at other times--and for no reason that I can fathom--it fails to make the translation and I end up with a double hyphen rather than a true dash. http://grammartips.homestead.com/dash.html

Note: On my keyboard, I use the key between 0 and = to produce a hyphen (-).
To produce a dash, I click on Insert on the tool bar, Symbol, General Punctuation, select an em dash (—), and, putting my cursor in the desired spot, click insert.

A harvest of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver so beautiful it brought tears to the eyes of one expert, has poured out of a Staffordshire field—the largest hoard of gold from the period ever found. The weapons and helmet decorations, coins and Christian crosses amount to more than 1500 pieces, with hundreds still embedded in blocks of soil. It adds up to 5kg of gold—three times the amount found in the famous Sutton Hoo ship burial in 1939—and 2.5kg of silver, and may be the swag from a spectacularly successful raiding party of warlike Mercians, some time around AD700. The first scraps of gold were found in July in a farm field by Terry Herbert, an amateur metal detector who lives alone in a council flat on disability benefit.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/sep/24/anglo-saxon-treasure-hoard-gold-staffordshire-metal-detector

Quote
And do as adversaries do in law,
Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends. http://shakespeare.mit.edu/taming_shrew/taming_shrew.1.2.html

On September 24, 1664, the Netherlands surrendered New Amsterdam to Great Britain, which changed the city's name to New York.
On September 24, 1789, Congress instituted a three-tiered federal judicial structure topped by a Supreme Court with the passage of "An Act to establish the Judicial Courts of the United States", later known as the Judiciary Act of 1789.
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/thisday/