Evan Hunter (1926-2005) was an American author and screenwriter. Born Salvatore Albert Lombino, he legally adopted the name Evan Hunter in 1952. While successful and well-known as Evan Hunter, he was even better known as Ed McBain, a name he used for most of his crime fiction, beginning in 1956. Lombino served in the Navy in World War II, writing several short stories while serving aboard a destroyer in the Pacific. However, none of these stories were published until after he had established himself as an author in the 1950s. After the war, Lombino returned to New York and attended Hunter College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, majoring in English and Psychology, with minors in dramatics and education. He published a weekly column in the Hunter College newspaper as "S.A. Lombino". In 1981, Hunter was inducted into the Hunter College Hall of Fame where he was honored for outstanding professional achievement. While looking to start a career as a writer, Lombino took a variety of jobs, including 17 days as a teacher at Bronx Vocational High School in September 1950. This experience would later form the basis for his 1954 novel The Blackboard Jungle. In 1951, Lombino took a job as an Executive Editor for the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, working with authors such as Arthur C. Clarke, P.G. Wodehouse, Lester del Rey, Poul Anderson, and Richard S. Prather, among others. He made his first professional short-story sale that same year, a science-fiction tale entitled "Welcome Martians", credited to S.A. Lombino. Soon after his initial sale, Lombino sold stories under the pen names "Evan Hunter" and "Hunt Collins". The name "Evan Hunter" is generally believed to have been derived from two schools he attended, Evander Childs High School and Hunter College, although the author himself would never confirm that. (He did confirm that the name "Hunt Collins" was derived from Hunter College.) Lombino legally changed his name to Evan Hunter in May 1952, after an editor told him that a novel he wrote would sell more copies if credited to "Evan Hunter" than it would if it were credited to "S.A. Lombino". Thereafter, he used the name Evan Hunter both personally and professionally. As Evan Hunter, he gained fame with his 1954 novel The Blackboard Jungle, which dealt with juvenile crime and the New York City public school system. In 1955, the book was made into a movie. He was advised by his agents that publishing too much fiction under the Hunter byline, or publishing any crime fiction as Evan Hunter, might weaken his literary reputation. As a consequence, during the 1950s Hunter used the pseudonyms Curt Cannon, Hunt Collins, and Richard Marsten for much of his crime fiction. A prolific author in several genres, Hunter also published approximately two dozen science fiction stories and four SF novels between 1951 and 1956 under the names S.A. Lombino, Evan Hunter, Richard Marsten, D.A. Addams and Ted Taine. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evan_Hunter

A table listing Evan Hunter's bibliography can be sorted to show the novels in chronological order, or arranged alphabetically by title, or by author credit, or by series at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography_of_Evan_Hunter
Following the table is a list of his collections, plays, screenplays, teleplays, works as editor, film adaptations, and one uncompleted novel, Becca in Jeopardy.

“Golf is an inherently complicated game, and the concepts of simplicity and fairness very often pull in diametrically opposed directions,” said David Rickman, the director for rules and equipment for the R&A, formerly the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, the sport’s ruling body in much of the world. The R&A, along with the United States Golf Association, which administers the game in this country, amended nine principal regulations from the Rules of Golf http://www.randa.org/en/RandA/News/News/2011/October/Rules-of-Golf.aspx, the bible of the game. No longer will a player be penalized a stroke if the wind moves his ball while his club is near it. And if he or she smoothes the sand before playing a shot from a bunker, and in doing so does not gain an advantage, well, that’s O.K., too. For serious golfers, the changes may as well have come inscribed on a pair of tablets delivered from a mountaintop. They will affect everyone, from tour professionals competing for millions to municipal golfers with a $2 bet on the line. The game’s officials insist the changes — at least one 267 years in the making — were not influenced by recent events, but it probably did not hurt that in recent years a few professionals lost lots of money and a chance at a title or two after violating these very rules. What began as 13 rules authored by a Scottish golf club in 1744 are now 34 regulations and procedures. The 155-page book resembles a car manual, and probably gets as much use.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/sports/golf/golf-adjusts-some-penalties-and-it-only-took-centuries.html

Kentucky can continue giving official credit for its homeland security to Almighty God, the Kentucky Court of Appeals ruled October 28 in a decision overturning a lower-court ruling. A three-judge panel, in a split decision, rejected the 2009 ruling of Franklin Circuit Judge Thomas Wingate, who declared legislation requiring credit to the Almighty to have “created an official government position on God.” Judge Laurance B. VanMeter wrote in his majority opinion that the appeals court disagrees with Wingate’s “assertion that the legislation seeks to place an affirmative duty upon the Commonwealth’s citizenry to rely on ‘Almighty God’ for protection of the Commonwealth.” “The legislation merely pays lip service to a commonly held belief in the puissance (power) of God,” VanMeter said in an opinion joined by Judge Thomas Wine. “The legislation complained of here does not seek to advance religion, nor does it have the effect of advancing religion, but instead seeks to recognize the historical reliance on God for protection.” Such a reference couldn’t be unconstitutional, the opinion added, because “that rationale would place this section at odds with the (Kentucky) Constitution’s Preamble,” which itself thanks “Almighty God” for the welfare and freedom of the commonwealth. At issue are two related laws passed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A 2002 “legislative finding” said the “safety and security of the commonwealth cannot be achieved apart from reliance upon Almighty God.” And a 2006 act creating the state’s Office of Homeland Security requires its executive director to publicize this “dependence on Almighty God” in agency training and educational materials and through a plaque at the entrance to its emergency operations center. Senior Judge Ann O’Malley Shake dissented from her colleagues, saying that Wingate was correct in saying the legislation has an “impermissible effect of endorsing religion because it was enacted for a predominantly religious purpose and conveyed a message of mandatory religious belief.” The majority compared the case to that of an Ohio law, upheld by a federal appeals court in 2001, establishing a state motto, “With God, All Things Are Possible.” That ruling, the Kentucky appeals court said, harmonized with a long history of “all three government branches recognizing the role of religion in American life.” But Shake said the Ohio motto is a “passive aphorism that places a duty upon no one,” while the Kentucky legislation requires requires the Homeland Security director to be “stressing to the public that dependence upon Almighty God is vital.” The laws, she said, are a “direct affront” to religious freedom. “I’m a little stunned by the move toward a theocracy,” said Kagin, of Union, Ky. “The reasoning of Judge Shake was so accurate and so compelling.”
http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20111028/NEWS01/310280054/Court-Appeals-Kentucky-can-credit-Almighty-God-homeland-security?odyssey=nav%7Chead

Feedback from muse reader: My favorite song rhyme, which is one of your imperfect rhymes, comes from Cry Me a River. Who would have thought you could rhyme plebeian, even imperfectly?
You told me love was too plebeian
Told me you were through with me and

Facebook is to build a multi-million 'mini town' on the edge of the Arctic circle to house all its computer servers, which would us as much electricity as a town of 50,000 people. The enormous server farm facility in Luleå, northern Sweden, is the first time that the social networking giant has chosen to locate a server farm outside the US. "The climate will allow them to just use only air for cooling the servers," said Mats Engman, chief executive of the Aurorum Science Park, which is leading the push to turn the city into a 'Node Pole', luring in other international computing giants. "If you take the statistics, the temperature has not been above 30C [86F] for more than 24 hours since 1961. If you take the average temperature, it's around 2C [35.6F]." Luleå is situated at the northern tip of the Baltic Sea, just over 62 miles South of the Arctic Circle. Taking advantage of the rock bottom temperatures, Facebook plans to build three giant server halls covering an area the size of 11 football fields. Even though they will rely on air cooling, keeping the servers humming will still require 120MW of power, enough to supply 16,000 detached homes, and costing some £45m a year. These power needs will be met by renewable electricity generated by dams on the nearby Luleå river. "The Luleå river produces twice as much electricity as the Hoover Dam does, so 50 per cent is exported from our region. There is a surplus of energy, and we can supply more data centres in this area easily," Engman said. He said Facebook's engineers had also been attracted by the reliability of the local power grid, which has been built to supply the area's thriving iron, steel and paper industries, and also by Sweden's dense fibre-optic network.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/facebook/8850575/Facebook-to-build-server-farm-on-edge-of-Arctic-Circle.html
Historian Nicholas Rogers, exploring the origins of Halloween, notes that while "some folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia, it is more typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain, whose original spelling was Samuin (pronounced sow-an or sow-in)". The name of the festival historically kept by the Gaels and celts in the British Isles which is derived from Old Irish and means roughly "summer's end". The word Halloween is first attested in the 16th century and represents a Scottish variant of the fuller All-Hallows-Even ("evening"), that is, the night before All Hallows Day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween

The practice of decorating “jack-o’-lanterns”—the name comes from an Irish folktale about a man named Stingy Jack—originated in Ireland, where large turnips and potatoes served as an early canvas. Irish immigrants brought the tradition to America, home of the pumpkin, and it became an integral part of Halloween festivities. http://www.history.com/topics/jack-olantern-history