Joanne Siegel, who as a Cleveland teenager during the Depression hired herself out as a model to an aspiring comic book artist, Joe Shuster, and thus became the first physical incarnation of Lois Lane, Superman’s love interest, died on February 12 in Santa Monica, Calif. She was 93. Ms. Siegel was married to Shuster’s partner and Superman co-creator, the writer Jerry Siegel. Their daughter, Laura Siegel Larson, confirmed her death. Ms. Larson said that her mother’s irrepressibility, ambition and spunk informed her father’s development of the character: “My dad always said he wrote Lois with my mom’s personality in mind.” Much of Joanne Siegel's life was taken up trying to reclaim the original Superman copyright that Shuster and her husband sold to Detective Comics in 1937 for $130. The story of the plight of Shuster and Siegel, whose lives were marked by privation, is one of the cautionary tales in the annals of intellectual property. In a series of legal and public relations battles that began in 1947, the families eventually won some compensation from DC Comics (the successor to Detective Comics), and in 2008 a federal judge restored Siegel’s co-authorship share of the original Superman copyrights, though how much money the Siegel family is entitled to is still being adjudicated. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/arts/16siegel.html

Racewalking, or race walking, is a long-distance athletic event. Although it is a foot race, it is different from running in that one foot must appear to be in contact with the ground at all times. Stride length is reduced, so to achieve competitive speeds, racewalkers must attain cadence rates comparable to those achieved by Olympic 400-meter runners—and they must do so for hours at a time since the Olympic events are the 20 kilometer race walk and 50-kilometer (31 mi) race walk. There are two rules that govern racewalking. The first dictates that the athlete's back toe cannot leave the ground until the heel of the front foot has touched. Violation of this rule is known as loss of contact. The second rule requires that the supporting leg must straighten from the point of contact with the ground and remain straightened until the body passes directly over it. These rules are judged by the human eye, which creates controversy at today's high speeds. Athletes may sometimes lose contact for a few milliseconds per stride which can be caught on high-speed film, but such a short flight phase is undetectable to the human eye. Athletes stay low to the ground by keeping their arms pumping low, close to their hips. If one sees a racewalker's shoulders rising, it may be a sign that the athlete is losing contact with the ground. What appears to be an exaggerated swivel to the hip is, in fact, a full rotation of the pelvis. Athletes aim to move the pelvis forward, and to minimize sideways motion in order to achieve maximum forward propulsion. Speed is achieved by stepping quickly with the aim of rapid turnover. This minimizes the risk of the feet leaving the ground. Strides are short and quick, with pushoff coming forward from the ball of the foot, again to minimize the risk of losing contact with the ground. World-class racewalkers (male and female) can average under seven and eight minutes per mile (or under four and five minutes per kilometre, respectively), in a 20 km (12.4 mile) racewalk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racewalking

For Londoner Sean Roberts, a recent morning walk down Oxford Street, from the London Underground to his office four blocks away, was the usual obstacle course. Heading east, he wove around a group of backpack-toting tourists halted in front of a jewelry-store window. He dodged a crew of construction workers, only to run up against a troupe of chanting Hare Krishna monks. "I understand people who get road rage," said Mr. Roberts, 27. Sidewalk rage may be closer to the point, and an alliance of local landlords and retailers believes it has an antidote. On behalf of London pedestrians who are sick of dodging Oxford Street's tourist hordes and texting teens, they're ready to draw the line. A pretend line, anyway. New West End Company, a group of 600 business owners in the district around Oxford Street, is planning to direct slow movers to walk in a "shopper lane" along store fronts, so that hurried residents and workers can proceed without opposition on the sidewalk's edges. The concept echoes a gag played in New York City in May 2010, when pranksters laid a chalk line down a sidewalk on Manhattan's busy Fifth Avenue, with one lane reserved for "tourists" and another for "New Yorkers." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704164004575547701061890026.html

I thought it was a myth. It's a dyed-in-the-wool reality. There really are two speeds when you're walking the streets of New York: "New Yorker" and "Tourist." This has become abundantly clear to me as I walk to and from my new office in Times Square, and occasionally walk through the Rockefeller Center area to have lunch with the misses near her office. Both areas are chocked full of tourists. In less than three weeks, I've already been in the background of 18,433 photos of family members visiting Times Square, including four where I actually held up "bunny ear" fingers behind people I didn't even know. Walking to and from my office--as I come to work, go to lunch, and head for home--I bump into tourists. Literally. I'm usually walking at a fast clip rushing to find a quick sandwich shop or hot dog vendor so I can get back to my desk; they're usually staring up at the NASDAQ sign on the ABC News studio. (My office is directly above the ABC set where they broadcast Good Morning America.) So invariably you have to learn the pedestrian equivalent of defensive driving- you anticipate what's going to happen and plan escape routes for when a tourist stops in mid-sidewalk or inexplicably reverses course because they want to get just one more picture of the huge "Lion King" sign. http://progressivepeach.typepad.com/manhattanhillbilly/walking/

When visiting the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History in 2010, we were blocked from easy viewing as groups took pictures of objects and the labels that described them.

Till as noun
boulder clay (unstratified soil deposited by a glacier; consists of sand and clay and gravel and boulders mixed together)
public treasury, trough (a treasury for government funds)
cashbox, money box (a strongbox for holding cash)
Till as verb
work land as by ploughing, harrowing, and manuring, in order to make it ready for cultivation "till the soil" http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=till

To measure really long distances, people use a unit called a light year. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second (300,000 kilometers per second). Therefore, a light second is 186,000 miles (300,000 kilometers). A light year is the distance that light can travel in a year. Using a light year as a distance measurement has another advantage -- it helps you determine age. Let's say that a star is 1 million light years away. The light from that star has traveled at the speed of light to reach us. Therefore, it has taken the star's light 1 million years to get here, and the light we are seeing was created 1 million years ago. So the star we are seeing is really how the star looked a million years ago, not how it looks today. http://science.howstuffworks.com/dictionary/astronomy-terms/question94.htm
In the year 987 an obscure bookseller in the city of Baghdad put the finishing touches on his life's work, a huge book that contained descriptions of the thousands of books known to him. Ibn al-Nadim called his masterpiece the "Fihrist," a word that simply means "catalog" in Arabic. But this was not a mere inventory. Ibn al-Nadim listed no book that he hadn't personally seen and touched. And he commented on the books, often inserting wry observations or diverting anecdotes. It was an immense accomplishment. The "Fihrist" systematically lists title after title in 10 elaborate chapters—six devoted to Islamic subjects, four to "foreign sciences," from astronomy to zoology, with Aristotelian philosophy and logic thrown in for good measure. Books about books—bibliographical autobiographies, as it were—form a distinct literary category. Many rely on the earliest memories. In his essay "The Lost Childhood," Graham Greene remarked that "perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives." The reason, he thought, was that "in childhood all books are books of divination, telling us about the future." Is this why, as we get older, we turn more and more to books about the past? Greene doesn't say. Marcel Proust felt the same about his early reading, noting that "there are no days of my childhood which I lived so fully perhaps as those I thought I had left behind without living them, those I spent with a favorite book." An interesting feature of such reminiscences is how strongly they depend upon the physical nature of the book. The printed book's physicality presents a challenge to e-books, however convenient they are. We tend to remember the look and heft of a book that we fell in love with. In "Literary Pleasure," Jorge Luis Borges revealed his childhood passion for old detective novels, Greek mythology and the 1,001 Nights, which he calls "the first serial novel." His touchstone for great books is pleasure, pure and simple . In "The Total Library," he evoked a "vast, contradictory Library whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny and confuse everything like a delirious god"—a bibliographic apocalypse by the greatest and most original of modern readers. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704858404576134063766563784.html?mod=WSJ_topics_obama

Art Project: Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces. http://www.googleartproject.com/

The air fern is a name given to both the resurrection fern and the skeleton of a species of coral called the Sertularia. Ships collect the Sertularia, treat them with chemicals and dye them green in order to make them look like ferns. They are then sold, often with claims that the air fern does not need to be watered or fertilized. Vendors also call the Sertularia air moss and air plant. http://www.gardenguides.com/101217-air-fern.html