The Toledo Museum of Art has defeated 62 other contenders, making it to the final round of America's Favorite Art Museum tournament. It's facing off with the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, in a bragging-rights contest that's accepting votes through 5 p.m. Sunday, August 29. Starting with 64 museums (it's patterned after the March Madness/NCAA basketball tournament brackets) selected by art writer Tyler Green with input from two other writers, people can vote for their favorite art palace at http://blogs.artinfo.com/modernartnotes/ http://www.toledoblade.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100826/ART01/100829795

Oregon places recently visited
Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area: Bonneville Lock and Dam, a National Historic Landmark serving the Northwest, Multnomah Falls, Crown Point and Vista House*, an octagonal building built in 1916 where the Historic Columbia River Highway was dedicated. The Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act, P.L. 99-663, creating the 295,000-acre area, was signed on November 17, 1986 by President Ronald Reagan.

Crater Lake, formed inside a caldera about 7,700 years ago when Mount Mazama, a volcano collapsed, is the deepest lake in the U.S.--and considered to be the cleanest lake in the world. The lake is 1,943 feet deep and 4.5 to 6 miles wide.

Portland: Central Library is a three-story public library branch in downtown Portland, Oregon, United States. Opened in 1913, it serves as the main branch of the Multnomah County Library system. The Georgian style building was added to the National Register of Historic Places as the Central Building, Public Library in 1979. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Library_(Portland,_Oregon)
Japanese Garden, 5 1/2 acres with 5 different garden styles and International Rose Test Garden, the oldest official continuously operated public rose test gardens in the U.S. http://www.travelportland.com/visitors/gardens.html
Pittock Mansion 16,000 sq. ft mansion built by founder of The Oregonian http://pittockmansion.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittock_Mansion

Stoller's, first Gold LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design)-certified winery in the U.S.--constructed on the grounds of the former largest turkey farm in Oregon, 400 acres

The Dalles-Wasco County Public Library (Dalles is the plural form of the French dalle, usually translated as a flagstone or paving-stone but with other meanings, including a drain-gutter on the bridge of a ship. In the combination dalles des morts it usually means a gravestone. In voyageur French, it came to mean a rapids or narrows on a river. Its most famous application is for The Dalles, Oregon, which is at the site of the former Grandes Dalles de la Columbia.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dalles

Timberline Lodge, on the south flank of Mt. Hood and funded by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), dedicated by President Roosevelt on September 28, 1937 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
* We visited Vista House on the one day of the year when park rangers baked cookies for visitors--I selected a ranger cookie. to be continued

Certain expectations come with working at an elite corporate law firm: long hours, good pay, and an office largely free from the smell of grilled hamburgers. Steptoe & Johnson has gone to court in a quest to rid itself of hamburger fumes. The powerhouse D.C. firm filed suit claiming that Rogue States, A Burger Company has been piping hamburger exhaust into the firm’s air intake system, causing firm employees to suffer “headaches, nausea, dizziness, watery and itchy eyes, drowsiness and distraction.” D.C. Judge John Mott this week ordered the restaurant to stop emitting the odors within 30 days, http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2010/08/26/law-firm-hamburger-war-heats-up/?mod=djemlawblog_h

On August 24, a team of stargazers using the European Southern Observatory in the high Chilean desert announced they'd detected a system of at least five, and maybe as many as seven, planets circling a star known as HD 10180, about 127 light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Hydrus. On August 26, a paper appeared in Science trumpeting the discovery of a multiplanetary system circling a star called Kepler-9, 2,000 light-years away in the constellation Lyra. The latter solar system has only two or three worlds — but the space telescope that found it is so powerful that this discovery is just a hint of the other worlds and other solar systems it may discover in the next few months. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2014024,00.html

Top 5 astronomy hoaxes
1. Mars "Second Moon"
2. Sun-believable Discoveries
3. Letter of Toledo
4. "War of the Worlds"
5. 36 Hours of Darkness
See descriptions at: http://www.aolnews.com/surge-desk/article/mars-as-big-as-the-moon-tonight-and-other-great-astronomy-hoaxes/19610111