The search engine wars took a dramatic turn October 21, with Google and Microsoft both announcing real-time search deals with Twitter. Additionally, Microsoft struck a deal with Facebook to index status updates on its Bing search engine, and Google introduced Social Search, which integrates your friends' social networking information directly into search results. http://www.pcworld.com/article/174138/social_search_from_google_and_bing_my_8_big_concerns.html

Tax Foundation: Updated State and Local Option Sales Tax
Updated State and Local Option Sales Tax, by Kail Padgitt, Fiscal Fact No. 196
"Sales taxes are paradoxically transparent and non-transparent. A taxpayer can easily see how high the tax is by looking at the receipt for any purchase. It's hard to imagine a more transparent tax. However, due to the wide variety of local option sales taxes among municipalities, a taxpayer can be puzzled by the many different tax rates his receipts show in various parts of the state. Making use of newly available data sources, we are now able to update information on average local sales taxes more regularly. Table 1 and the accompanying map show current state sales taxes, average local sales taxes, and the combined rate and state rank."

The Middle Ages of European history (adjectivial form medieval or mediæval) is a period of European history covering roughly a millennium in the 5th century through 16th centuries. It is commonly dated from the fall of the Western Roman Empire, http://wapedia.mobi/en/Middle_Ages

Propaganda is communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda.
Propaganda is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels." Richard Alan Nelson, A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States, 1996
The English term is an 18th century coinage, from the Latin feminine gerund of propagare "to propagate", originally in Congregatio de Propaganda Fide "Congregation for Propagating the Faith," a committee of cardinals established 1622 by Gregory XV. In its turn, the word propagare is related to the word propages, "a slip, a cutting of a vine"[1] and refers to the gardener's practice to disseminate plants by planting shoots. [2]
The term is not pejorative in origin, the political sense dates to World War I.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda

Meadow Brook Hall is often described as an American castle. It is the former residence of Oakland University founders Matilda Dodge Wilson, widow of automobile pioneer John Dodge, and her second husband, lumber broker Alfred G. Wilson. Meadow Brook Hall was completed in 1929 at a cost of nearly $4 million. The housewarming party, attended by 850 people, was held Nov. 19, 1929, just three weeks after the stock market crash that started the Great Depression. The exterior combines various textures and patterns using American materials of brick, sandstone, wood timbers and a roof of clay shingle tile. The house also features 39 uniquely designed brick chimneys that distinguish the picturesque roofline. Interiors of the house are elaborately detailed with carved wood and stone, handmade hardware and ceramic art tile, ornately molded and carved plaster ceilings, stained glass window insets, crystal and art glass lighting fixtures, and gold-plated bathroom fittings. And while the interiors reflect various historic styles, the house is equipped with every modern amenity available in the late 1920s. It was fully electric with a central heating system, two elevators, four kitchens and a full size home theatre. In 1957, the Wilsons donated their residence, its collections, the estate's 1,500 acres and $2 million to found what would become Oakland University. Meadow Brook Hall was opened to the public in 1971, four years after Matilda’s death. http://www.oakland.edu/?id=3089&sid=87

Wayside in Sudbury Longfellow's Wayside Inn near Sudbury, Mass., a leafy village about 20 miles west of Boston, is the genuine article. It's said to be America's oldest operating inn, but "operating" is the key word. Aside from a 36-year hiatus at the end of the 19th century, the Wayside has offered "food and lodging for man and beast" since 1716, when David and Hebzibah Howe opened their two-room house to weary travelers on the old Boston Post Road. The inn, just off what is now Massachusetts Highway 20, occupies a stately red-frame building by a rush-fringed pond, brook and meadow full of purple clover. Innkeeper David Howe died in 1759, and his son Ezekiel had taken over several years earlier. Ezekiel Howe enlarged the hostelry, then known as Howe's Tavern. Four generations of the family ran the inn until Lyman Howe died in 1861, and it became a sort of boarding house. It received a famous visitor the next year: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in mourning for his wife, Frances, who had died in a fire. The old place captured his imagination, inspiring his 1863 book, "Tales of a Wayside Inn," which includes "The Landlord's Tale." Its opening lines are etched in American memory:
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.
After that, Howe's Tavern became Longfellow's Wayside Inn. In 1923, when a later innkeeper was forced to sell, Henry Ford toured the property and fell in love with it. "I'll take it all," he said, according to "As Ancient Is This Hostelry: The Story of the Wayside Inn," by Curtis F. Garfield and Alison R. Ridley.
http://travel.latimes.com/articles/la-trw-wayside19-2009jul19

Wayside in Concord By the time Nathaniel Hawthorne bought The Wayside in 1852, his masterpieces had been published; The Scarlet Letter in 1850, and The House of the Seven Gables in 1851; his short story collections; Mosses from an Old Manse, 1846 and Twice-Told Tales, 1837. Yet, as a pioneer of American Literature, Hawthorne's writing did not bring him great wealth, and The Wayside was the only home he ever had. http://www.nps.gov/archive/mima/wayside/Hawth.htm

Keeper—a book I would read again
My Life in France by Julia Child with Alex Prud’homme
“There are only four great arts: music, painting, sculpture, and ornamental pastry—
architecture being perhaps the least banal derivative of the latter.”
From Chef Max Bugnard:
Scrambled eggs Add salt and pepper to eggs, and blend gently. Smear bottom and sides of frying pan with butter and gently put in eggs. Keep heat low. After eggs thicken (about three minutes) stir rapidly with fork, sliding the pan on and off the burner. “Keep them loose.” Add cream or butter to stop the cooking, turn eggs onto a plate and sprinkle with a bit of parsley.
Roast veal Add salt and pepper, wrap in thin salt pork blanket, add thinly sliced carrots and onions, and put a tablespoon of butter on top. Baste while roasting.

Comparing Alliteration, Assonance and Consonance:
There is an example of all three of these terms in one line of the poem, “The Raven,” written by Edgar Allan Poe:
And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
This line clearly contains all three, and can show the difference between assonance, consonance and alliteration.
Assonance is the repetition of the ur sound in "purple" and "curtain."
Consonance is the repetition of the s sound within "uncertain" and "rustling."
Alliteration is the repetition of the s sound at the start of "silked" and "sad." http://ezinearticles.com/?Alliteration,-Assonance-and-Consonance&id=675686

Figures of speech
anadiplosis: repetition of a word at the end of a clause at the beginning of another
anaphora: repetition of the same word or group of words at the beginning of successive clauses
anastrophe: inversion of the usual word order
See many more at:
http://cms.cerritos.edu/browse/browse.asp?WID=20040008&DID=20060201

San Francisco is seven miles long by seven miles wide. http://www.timeout.com/san-francisco/features/328/san-francisco-area-guide
Manhattan island: length = 13 miles, width = mostly around 2.0 - 2.3 miles
http://www.roberts-1.com/sk8hv/r/from_nyc/index.htm

Another fact-checking Web site: http://www.factcheck.org/