What's New in THOMAS
News release: "Several changes have been made to THOMAS for the second session of the 111th Congress. These changes include: Bookmarking and Sharing Widget; Top Five Bills; New RSS feed: Bills Presented to the President; Contacting Members of Congress; Tip of the Week; Bill Text PDFs."

East Coast readers and travelers: The Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art closes January 17. The exhibition includes more than 125 paintings, drawings, watercolors, and sculptures by O’Keeffe as well as selected examples of Alfred Stieglitz’s famous photographic portrait series of O’Keeffe. http://www.whitney.org/Exhibitions/GeorgiaOKeeffe
In between Chinatown and Little Italy in Manhattan sits almost three thousand square feet of Chile. Puro, Chile is dedicated to promoting high-end Chilean handicrafts, groceries, and wines.
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/reviews/2010/01/11/100111goav_GOAT_avenue_marx#ixzz0c2xWvWQc

In 1946, RADM Grace Murray Hopper, USN, while as a research fellow in Harvard's Computation Laboratory, worked on the Navy's Mark II and Mark III computers. She coined the term "bug," when she removed a moth from the switching contacts of the Mark II. http://www.navsource.org/archives/05/01070.htm The USS Hopper, christened in 1996, is called "Amazing Grace." http://www.hopper.navy.mil/default.aspx Thanks, Linda.

Find a list of U.S. naval ships named for women at: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_US_Navy_ships_are_named_after_women

Art Clokey, the creator of the whimsical clay figure Gumby, died in his sleep January 8 at his home in Los Osos, Calif., after battling repeated bladder infections, his son Joseph said. He was 88. Clokey and his wife, Ruth, invented Gumby in the early 1950s at their Covina home shortly after Art had finished film school at USC. After a successful debut on "The Howdy Doody Show," Gumby soon became the star of its own hit television show, "The Adventures of Gumby," the first to use clay animation on television. After an initial run in the 1950s, Gumby enjoyed comebacks in the 1960s as a bendable children's toy, in the 1980s after comedian Eddie Murphy parodied the kindly Gumby as a crass, cigar-in-the-mouth character in a skit for "Saturday Night Live" and again in the '90s with the release of "Gumby the Movie." http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-me-art-clokey9-2010jan09,0,3938052.story

Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796) (also known as Rabbie Burns, Scotland's favourite son, the Ploughman Poet, the Bard of Ayrshire and in Scotland as simply The Bard[1][2]) was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is also in English and a "light" Scots dialect, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these pieces, his political or civil commentary is often at its most blunt. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Burns

Burns Suppers have been held in his honour for over 200 years. This site gives you the complete guide to Robert Burns the man, his poems, his travels, haggis, whisky and much more. http://www.rabbie-burns.com/

Haggis recipe http://www.gumbopages.com/food/scottish/haggis.html
(I swore I would never eat haggis, but when I smelled the peppery sausage in Edinburgh, I ate it anyway. I admit I liked it.)

Burns night: Haggis, Tatties and Neeps recipe
http://britishfood.about.com/od/menu/r/burnssupper.htm

Quotes
I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.
Contradiction is not a sign of falsity, nor the lack of contradiction a sign of truth.
Blaise Pascal, French philosopher and mathematician (1623-1662)