Last spring, Julie Johnstone, a librarian at the Scottish Poetry Library in Edinburgh, was wandering through a reading room when she saw, sitting alone on a random table, a little tree. It was made of twisted paper and was mounted on a book. Gorgeously crafted, it came with a gold-leafed eggshell broken in two, each half filled with little strips of paper with phrases on them. When reassembled properly, the strips became a poem about birds, "A Trace of Wings" by Edwin Morgan. Then, it happened again. This time, a coffin, topped by a large gramophone showed up suddenly at The National Library of Scotland. The scene was carved from a book, a mystery novel by Ian Rankin, one of Britain's bestselling crime writers. It seemed like a visual pun, because the book's title was Exit Music. Just as the news cycle was about to hit boil, The Edinburgh Evening News announced it had cracked the case. It turns out, they said, their own former music librarian, a Mr. Garry Gale, had figured it out. Mr. Gale said when he saw the sculptures he realized they looked exactly like a paper sculpture he had bought a year or so earlier from a certain artist that he didn't name, but the styles were so unerringly similar it had to be the same artist who was dropping these little gifts on major cultural centers in Edinburgh. Instead of having Mr. Gale immediately identify the perpetrator, the Evening News decided to take a poll: Do you really want to know, it asked its readers, who made these gorgeous teacups and dragons and magnifying glasses, or would you rather honor the artist, and let him/her remain anonymous? The readers wrote in. And according to Central Station, a Scottish website, "the general view is that We Don't Want To Know." Presumably a significant number of respondents said they would rather not learn the identity of the sculptor and it would be best if those who know just not tell. Read the rest of the story with accompanying pictures at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/10/28/141795907/who-left-a-tree-then-a-coffin-in-the-library?ft=3&f=111787346&sc=nl&cc=es-20111106



Feedback to A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg
From: Helen Hileman Subject: chintzy, but proud
Def: 1. Decorated with chintz. 2. Cheap; gaudy; inferior. 3. Stingy.
I am 79 years old but I can vividly remember wearing the chintz feedsack skirts made from the feedsack material our animal feed came in. They may have been chintzy to some, but we loved our new clothes and we whirled around so our gathered skirts would whirl too.
From: Simon Jarvis Subject: Chintzy
There is a lovely example of chintz fabric on some furniture in Queen Victoria's bedroom in Osborne House -- her beloved holiday home -- on the Isle of Wight, UK. Looking carefully, you can see that both her and Prince Albert's profiles are cleverly printed onto the fabric as plant tendrils. Definitely not cheap, gaudy or inferior!
From: Bernice Colman Subject: Chintzy
It is curious that a word describing a fabric that was one of the most labor intensive to produce should come to mean the opposite. Chintz was also one of the biggest players in the European industrial revolution. Its import caused a panic and prompted all sorts of sumptuary laws. True it was less costly than woven silks or wools from India but it caused a great stir. Nothing chintzy about it.

Sumptuary laws (from Latin sumptuariae leges) are laws that attempt to regulate habits of consumption. Black's Law Dictionary defines them as "Laws made for the purpose of restraining luxury or extravagance, particularly against inordinate expenditures in the matter of apparel, food, furniture, etc." Traditionally, they were laws that regulated and reinforced social hierarchies and morals through restrictions on clothing, food, and luxury expenditures. In most times and places, they were ineffectual. Throughout history, societies have used sumptuary laws for a variety of purposes. They attempted to regulate the balance of trade by limiting the market for expensive imported goods. They were also an easy way to identify social rank and privilege and often were used for social discrimination. As early as 1860, Anthony Trollope, writing about his experiences in Maine under the state's prohibition law, stated, "This law (prohibition), like all sumptuary laws, must fail." In 1918, William Howard Taft decried prohibition in the United States as a bad sumptuary law, stating that one of his reasons for opposing prohibition was his belief that "sumptuary laws are matters for parochial adjustment." Taft later repeated this concern. The Supreme Court of Indiana also discussed alcohol prohibition as a sumptuary law in its 1855 decision Herman v. State. During state conventions on the ratification of the 21st Amendment in 1933, numerous delegates throughout the United States decried prohibition as having been an improper sumptuary law that never should have been included in the Constitution of the United States. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law

Since Biblical times, gardens have been horizontal, with flowers and plants sprouting out of the ground. Patrick Blanc has turned that whole notion on its side, literally. Mr. Blanc is the inventor of the vertical garden, also known as the living (or green) wall. Mr. Blanc, 58, is a botanist with France's National Center for Scientific Research, the country's giant science and technology agency. He also has a private practice designing gardens. Among the more than 250 he has installed around the world, his most famous are at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the Caixa Forum Museum in Madrid and the French embassy in New Delhi. A celebrity among horticulturalists, he's even got a new kind of begonia named after him, Begonia blancii, after discovering it two years ago while trekking through a rainforest in the Philippines. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204394804577010012002153138.html

15 Incredible Vertical Gardens Around the World
http://twistedsifter.com/2011/10/incredible-vertical-gardens-patrick-blanc/

Used restaurant grease has become a hot item for thieves, who siphon it from barrels behind restaurants to sell on the booming biofuels market. Restaurants and grease recyclers have been forced to move barrels inside, lock them up, or install surveillance cameras, according to Tom Cook, president of the National Renderers Association in Alexandria, Va. "It's become the new copper," a commodity that also attracts thieves, Cook tells NPR's food blog, The Salt. Yellow grease, the proper name for cooking oil that's had the food and trash filtered out of it, is selling for about 40 cents a pound, almost five times what it was a decade ago. That means a gallon of yellow grease today sells for more than $3 a gallon — on par with a gallon of milk. Used restaurant grease has long been used in animal feed, but it's also now in demand as a fuel for vehicles. Thieves sell it to a renderer or recycler because the stuff needs to be processed before it can be used as fuel or feed. After the grease has been processed, brokers buy it from renderers and sell it on the commodities market, where it can eventually end up in the transportation sector. New standards published earlier this year by the Environmental Protection Agency expanded requirements for use of renewable fuels in the transportation industry. So when crude oil prices rise, yellow grease prices rise, too. Still, grease rustling isn't a brand new: NPR's Bryant Park Project reported on the problem in 2008. And the 1998 season of "The Simpsons" opened with the episode "The Lard of the Dance", with Homer and Bart hatching a scheme to steal grease from the school cafeteria. http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2011/11/03/141986455/restaurant-grease-as-good-as-gold-to-biofuel-thieves?sc=tw&cc=share

Find list of NPR blogs at: http://www.npr.org/blogs/

The online social networking and messaging service Twitter (also referred to as a micro-blogging tool) was launched on July 15, 2006. By 2011, it was reported to have around 200 million global users. And as of June 2011, 13% of online Americans reported using Twitter, according to data from the Pew Internet & American Life Project, up from sharply from 8% in November 2010. The confines of the tool, not unlike text messaging (SMS or Short Message Service), are its most distinguishing feature. Individual “tweets” are limited to 140 characters, truncating what any one individual, organization, institution or brand can communicate in a single post. Anyone can search and find Twitter feeds that might interest them either by searching by name, by topic or by “hashtags,” a designated topic code that users can assign to a topic or event. Users can also choose to “follow” a Twitter feed, which means they receive all of the posts from that outlet or individual. In the news context, this allows users to curate their own news. If a user “retweets” the post (essentially placing someone else’s post in their own Twitter feed), the ultimate reach of the original post can potentially multiply many times over. Read the 25-page report, How Mainstream Media Outlets Use Twitter, at: http://www.journalism.org/sites/journalism.org/files/How%20Mainstream%20Media%20Outlets%20Use%20Twitter.pdf

Viral Spiral: FAQ from FactCheck.org
Just because you read it on somebody’s blog or in an email from a friend or relative doesn’t mean it’s true. It’s probably not, as we advised in our special report “Is this chain e-mail true?” back on March 18, 2008. On this page we feature a list of the false or misleading viral rumors we’re asked about most often, and a brief summary of the facts. Click on the links to read the full articles. There is a lot more detail in each answer. http://factcheck.org/hot-topics/ Click on home at top left to go to the page where claims made by or about politicians are examined.