Bureau of Labor Statistics: Real Earnings, September 2009
News release: Real average hourly earnings fell 0.1 percent from August to September, seasonally adjusted, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported. This decline stemmed from the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers (CPI-W), up by 0.2 percent, outpacing 0.1 percent growth in average hourly earnings for production and nonsupervisory workers. Real average weekly earnings fell 0.4 percent over the month, as a result of the decrease in real average hourly earnings and a 0.3 percent decrease in the average work week. Since reaching a recent high point in December 2008, real average weekly earnings have fallen by 1.9 percent.

Bureau of Labor Statistics: Consumer Price Index, September 2009
News release: On a seasonally adjusted basis, the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) rose 0.2 percent in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has reported. The increase was less than the 0.4 percent rise in August. The index has decreased 1.3 percent over the last 12 months on a not seasonally adjusted basis. The seasonally adjusted increase in the all items index was broad based, although tempered by a decline in the food index. The all items less food and energy index increased 0.2 percent in September after increasing 0.1 percent in each of the previous two months. Contributing to this increase were advances in the indexes for lodging away from home, medical care, new vehicles, used cars and trucks, and public transportation. The increase occurred despite declines in the indexes for rent and owners’ equivalent rent, the first decreases in those indexes since 1992. The energy index also increased in September, as increases in the indexes for gasoline, fuel oil and electricity more than offset a decline in the index for natural gas.

Fritters (printed by popular demand)
½ c. flour
½ tsp. baking powder
½ tsp. salt
1 egg, beaten
1/8 cup milk
1 tsp. vegetable oil
Mix dry ingredients and add wet ingredients. Drop spoonfuls in hot fat and fry about 3 minutes, turning once. Makes 10 small fritters.
Optional: Add 1 cup diced fruit or vegetables to dry ingredients.

Peering through thick fog, hundreds stood on the banks of the Mississippi River on October 13 and cheered as the latest piece of naval history cut through the haze and belched its horn. The onlookers waved flags at the New York, a freshly built 684-foot Navy warship slowly making its way to New York City, where it will be commissioned in early November and renamed the USS New York. The $1.2 billion ship, which is designed to launch cargo, troop transport ships and helicopters for warfare missions, is named for the city that suffered the first attacks of 9/11. Its bow stem was built with 7½ tons of scrap metal excavated from the World Trade Center ruins. The New York was built by Northrop Grumman Shipbuilding in Avondale, La., 10 miles upriver from New Orleans. http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2009-10-13-ship_N.htm

It's not quite a Grammy, but a piano-playing cat who became an Internet sensation has earned herself serious purr-aise. Nora, a 5-year-old gray tabby with a penchant for tickling the ivories, had been named Cat of the Year by the ASPCA. Adopted from a shelter by a piano teacher, Nora's prowess for pounding out tunes with her paws drew millions of viewers on YouTube. http://www.nydailynews.com/lifestyle/pets/2009/10/16/2009-10-16_nora.html

Prominent users of Twitter and Facebook won't be exempt from controversial new Federal Trade Commission guidelines that keep tabs on blogger freebies and giveaways, according to Richard Cleland, associate director for the FTC's advertising division. The agency absolutely plans to keep tabs on social networks as well as blogs in accordance with revised regulations that could see violators fined up to $11,000, he said. http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-10368064-36.html

Federal Trade Commission 16 CFR Part 255, Guides concerning the use of endorsements and testimonials in advertising, effective date December 1, 2009.
http://www.ftc.gov/os/2009/10/091005endorsementguidesfnnotice.pdf

European Union fact sheet
The Czech Republic and Slovakia are neighbouring countries in central Europe. Both states share borders with Austria and Poland. The Czech Republic also has a border with Germany, while Slovakia borders Hungary and Ukraine. The two countries were unified until 1993 as Czechoslovakia. Since they separated, both have undergone major economic and social reforms in their attempts to achieve EU membership. This became a reality in 2004 when both countries joined the club. During the Cold War, Czechoslovakia was under Communist rule and was an ally of the USSR through the Warsaw Pact. Soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the people of Czechoslovakia overthrew their Communist government in what was dubbed the 'Velvet Revolution'. Although Czechoslovakia remained a single country, the tensions between the majority Czech and minority Slovak populations made this situation unsustainable. On 1 January 1993, the two countries separated in a peaceful 'Velvet divorce'.
http://www.civitas.org.uk/eufacts/FSMS/MS11.htm

Selections from Best Free Reference Websites, eleventh annual list
Source: Reference & User Services Quarterly v. 49, #1, Fall 2009
BBC News—Country Profiles
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/country_profiles/default.stm
BookFinder indexes more than 150 million books for sale from the catalogs of sellers in 50 countries. http://www.bookfinder.com/
Lexicool has online bilingual and multilingual dictionaries. http://www.lexicool.com/
OnlineConversion “can convert just about anything to anything else.”
http://www.onlineconversion.com/
PDRHealth draws on Physicians’ Desk Reference
http://pdrhealth.com/home/home.aspx
Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) houses 200 free writing resources, including grammar, style, ESL, technical writing and research.
http://owl.english.purdue.edu/
Traffic.com provides real-time traffic information, road conditions, and drive time estimates. http://www.traffic.com/
World Health Organization lists articles, news, travel precautions and vaccination requirements. http://www.who.int/en/

Silent letters
deign, answer, honor, pneumonia

On October 19, 1765, the Stamp Act Congress, meeting in New York in the wake of Parliament's passage of the controversial Stamp Act imposing a tax for the upkeep of British troops in North America, approved a Declaration of Rights enumerating the rights and grievances of the American colonies. http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/thisday/
The London Beer Flood occurred on October 17, 1814. At 6:00 on a Monday evening, a torrent of beer came rushing through the streets of the St. Giles district of London. It started at the Horse Shoe Brewery at Tottenham Court and Oxford Street, where there were huge vats of porter perched on top of the roof. They contained beer, which had been fermenting right there for months. The wooden vats were enormous — some as tall as 22 feet—and were structurally supported by large iron hoops, dozens of them. They sat on the roof of the Meux Brewing Company, each of them containing hundreds of thousands of liters of beer. The largest vat had started to strain under the weight and pressure of all that porter, and on this day, around 6:00 p.m., one of the iron hoops gave way and all the porter in the 22-foot-tall vat came gushing out. There were about 600,000 liters of beer in there, and when the vat burst and all that beer came exploding out, there was a chain reaction and the surrounding vats on the roof also burst. More than a million liters of beer toppled the brewery's brick wall (it was 25 feet tall) and began flooding the streets of St. Giles. The Writer’s Almanac