The need in Ethiopia is great but the vision and perseverance of Yohannes Gebregeorgis is greater, which helps explain why a new library worthy of any developed country opened August 20 in Mekele, the first of its kind in this small and grindingly poor city. The Segenat Children and Youth Library in the region of Tigray is located in a sturdy, free-standing building donated by the municipal authorities. It’s fully loaded with some 10,000 books and a computer room with 10 workstations; two e-book readers and 8,000 more books are on the way. A companion donkey-mobile regularly transports some 2,000 additional books to more distant parts of Tigray, powered by two beasts of burden named Sege and Nat.
http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/news/08232010/new-youth-library-ethiopia-makes-impossible-dream-reality

Singer Michael Feinstein is making his case for preserving great songwriting in a three-part series on PBS. Filled with rare archival film clips and recordings, and presented with a true believer's fervent passion, the program highlights the link between popular music on the radio and tunes from films and stage shows in the first half of the 20th century. It also reveals the unusual role the U.S. military played in American popular song during World War II, and the way that the era's racial troubles were reflected in the music of the time, even while the songs' creators and performers often worked together regardless of color. "Michael Feinstein's American Songbook" is also a funny, candid portrait of Feinstein himself on the road, in rehearsal and in a basement studio where he spends every spare moment transferring rare and fragile recordings into his digital archive for safekeeping. In the most memorable shot in the series, Feinstein stands next to the roaring traffic of I-405 in Los Angeles and explains that beneath its eight lanes are thousands of musical scores, dumped there as landfill by MGM in the 1960s. http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/thearts/2013030618_feinstein03.html

The traditional place for a retired soldier’s uniform is, perhaps, in a trunk in the attic. But a more creative option begins in a portable pulping machine belonging to Drew Matott, an artist who makes paper. Through the Combat Paper Project, founded by Mr. Matott, 32, and Drew Cameron, 28, an Iraq war veteran, in Burlington, Vt., in 2007, hundreds of veterans of World War II and of the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan and other conflicts have turned their uniforms into hangable works of art meant to convey something of their experiences. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/04/nyregion/04spotnj.html See also: http://www.combatpaper.org/about.html

The World Digital Library makes available, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world. Launched in 2009, its principal objectives are to promote international and intercultural understanding, and expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the internet. These cultural treasures include manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings. The library was developed by a team at the U.S. Library of Congress, with contributions by partner institutions in many countries, the support of UNESCO, and the financial support of a number of companies and private foundations. The collection is browsable by place, time, topic, type of item, and institution. Try it at: http://www.wdl.org/en/

The most famous fish stew of the Mediterranean is bouillabaisse, and its home is considered to be Marseilles, although it is made in every little port throughout the coastal regions of Provence. The apocryphal story of the origin of bouillabaisse told by the Marseillais is that Venus served bouillabaisse to her husband Vulcan in order to lull him to sleep while she consorted with Mars. Greek food writers have laid claim to inventing the precursor of bouillabaisse. They argue that when the Phocaeans, Greeks from Asia Minor, founded Marseilles in about 600 B.C. they brought with them a fish soup known as kakavia that was the basis to the future bouillabaisse. This can be said to be true only in the most general (and meaningless) sense. In fact, we have no idea whether such a soup was “brought” to the western Mediterranean. In the culinary writings of the ancient Greeks, especially as represented by Athenaeus (A.D. 170-230), there are many mentions of boiled fish, cooked in unspecified ways, as well as one fish stew made with grayfish, herbs, oil, caraway seeds, and salt. The most likely precursor to the Provençal bouillabaisse is likely to be an Italian fish stew and, in fact, the closest thing to a bouillabaisse that I have found in a medieval text is the brodecto de li dicti pisci that appears in an anonymous fifteenth-century Italian cookery book from southern Italy where sardines and anchovies are boiled in vino greco (a strong Neapolitan wine) with black pepper, saffron, and sugar with a little olive oil. There is also the matellotte du poisson recipe found in Jourdain Le Cointe's La cuisine de santé published in 1790 that Alan Davidson, author of Oxford Companion to Food believes is a relevant precursor. But given the obviousness and simplicity of boiling fish one cannot point to one location as a place of origin.
http://www.cliffordawright.com/caw/food/entries/display.php/id/70/ Praise for bouillabaisse http://www.petravillas.com/article_11.html and information plus pronunciation at http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/bouillabaisse

Jackrabbits are not rabbits, but hares Three major species of jackrabbits occur in North America. These hares are of the genus Lepus and are represented primarily by the blacktail jackrabbit, the whitetail jackrabbit, and the snowshoe hare. Other members of this genus include the antelope jackrabbit and the European hare. Hares have large, long ears, long legs, and a larger body size than rabbits. http://icwdm.org/handbook/mammals/mam_d81.pdf

Quadrivium (‘meeting place of four roads’), the four mathematical disciplines of astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and music which during the Middle Ages constituted the advanced part of the educational curriculum, known as the seven liberal arts. The trivium, the more elementary part, consisted of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. http://www.answers.com/topic/quadrivium