The Pope-Leighey House, formerly known as the Loren Pope Residence, is one of three suburban homes in Virginia designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The house, which belongs to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has been relocated twice and sits on the grounds of Woodlawn Plantation, Alexandria, Virginia. Along with the Andrew B. Cooke House and the Luis Marden House, it is one of three Frank Lloyd Wright designs in Virginia. Commissioned in 1939 by journalist Loren Pope and his wife Charlotte Pope, the design followed Wright's Usonian principles and was completed in 1941 at an initial cost of $7,000 — at 1005 Locust Street, Falls Church, Virginia. Loren Pope, at the time a writer for the Washington Evening Star had grown interested in Wright after studying his Wasmuth Portfolio, a 1938 Time Magazine article and Wright's recently published autobiography. Pope met Wright in 1938 when the architect made a presentation in D.C. while working on another project that would remain un-built. Pope approached Wright at his presentation, indicating he'd like Wright to design his home. Wright indicated that he did not design speculative work, rather only designed homes for “people who deserved them.” Pope subsequently wrote the architect, beginning his letter “Dear Mr. Wright, There are certain things a man wants during life, and of life. Material things and things of the spirit. The writer has one fervent wish that includes both. It is a house created by you.” After Wright agreed, Pope subsequently visited another Usonian home of Wright's design and met Wright at Taliesin. The architect originally designing a house of 1,800 square feet (170 m2), Mr. Pope at the time making $50 per week. Borrowing the money for the house proved difficult, with one lender counseling Pope the home would be a "white elephant." Pope's employer, the Evening Star, eventually offered a loan of $5,700 and construction commenced after Wright sized the plan down from 1800 sf to 1200 sf. Pope and his family lived in the house for 6 years, moving in 1946 to a 365 acre farm in Loudon County, planning to subsequently build a larger Wright-designed home. Limitations on his income precluded Pope from affording the new home until 1959, when Wright was busy with the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope-Leighey_House
See picture of Pope-Leighey house at: http://popeleighey1940.org/

Early manuscripts had no punctuation at all, and those from the medieval period suggest haphazard innovation, with more than 30 different marks. The modern repertoire of punctuation emerged as printers in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Parentheses were first used around 1500, having been observed by English writers and printers in Italian books. Commas were not employed until the 16th century; in early printed books in English one sees a virgule (a slash like this /), which the comma replaced around 1520. Another mark, now obscure, is the point d'ironie, sometimes known as a "snark." A back-to-front question mark, it was deployed by the 16th-century printer Henry Denham to signal rhetorical questions, and in 1899 the French poet Alcanter de Brahm suggested reviving it. More recently, the difficulty of detecting irony and sarcasm in electronic communication has prompted fresh calls for a revival of the point d'ironie. But the chances are slim that it will make a comeback. Though it is not unusual to hear calls for new punctuation, the marks proposed tend to cannibalize existing ones. In this vein, you may have encountered the interrobang, which signals excited disbelief. Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech. One manifestation of this is the advance of the dash. It imitates the jagged urgency of conversation, in which we change direction sharply and with punch. Dashes became common only in the 18th century. Their appeal is visual, their shape dramatic. That's what a modern, talky style of writing seems to demand. By contrast, use of the semicolon is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the 17th century. The hyphen, traditionally, has been used to link two halves of a compound noun and has suggested that a new coinage is on probation. But now the noun is split (fig leaf, hobby horse) or rendered without a hyphen (crybaby, bumblebee). It may be that the hyphen's last outpost will be in emoticons, where it plays a leading role. Henry Hitchings See a chart showing pilcrow, interrobang, hedera, exlamation comma, question comma, and snark at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204618704576641182784805212.html

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135°W to 155°W and 35°N to 42°N. The patch extends over an indeterminate area, with estimates ranging very widely depending on the degree of plastic concentration used to define the affected area. The Patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. The existence of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was predicted in a 1988 paper published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States. The prediction was based on results obtained by several Alaska-based researchers between 1985 and 1988 that measured neustonic plastic in the North Pacific Ocean. This research found high concentrations of marine debris accumulating in regions governed by ocean currents. Extrapolating from findings in the Sea of Japan, the researchers hypothesized that similar conditions would occur in other parts of the Pacific where prevailing currents were favorable to the creation of relatively stable waters. They specifically indicated the North Pacific Gyre. Charles J. Moore, returning home through the North Pacific Gyre after competing in the Transpac sailing race in 1997, came upon an enormous stretch of floating debris. Moore alerted the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who subsequently dubbed the region the "Eastern Garbage Patch" (EGP). The area is frequently featured in media reports as an exceptional example of marine pollution. Moore's claim of having discovered a large, visible debris field is, however, a mischaracterization of the polluted region overall, since it consists primarily of particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye. It is thought that, like other areas of concentrated marine debris in the world's oceans, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch formed gradually as a result of marine pollution gathered by oceanic currents. The garbage patch occupies a large and relatively stationary region of the North Pacific Ocean bound by the North Pacific Gyre (a remote area commonly referred to as the horse latitudes). The gyre's rotational pattern draws in waste material from across the North Pacific Ocean, including coastal waters off North America and Japan. As material is captured in the currents, wind-driven surface currents gradually move floating debris toward the center, trapping it in the region. The size of the patch is unknown, as large items readily visible from a boat deck are uncommon. Most debris consists of small plastic particles suspended at or just below the surface, making it impossible to detect by aircraft or satellite. Instead, the size of the patch is determined by sampling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

The North Atlantic Garbage Patch is an area of marine debris found floating within the North Atlantic Gyre, originally documented in 1972. The patch is estimated to be hundreds of kilometers across in size, with a density of over 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer. The debris zone shifts by as much as 1,600 km (990 mi) north and south seasonally, and drifts even farther south during the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, according to the NOAA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Garbage_Patch

The Indian Ocean Garbage Patch, discovered in 2010, is a gyre of marine litter suspended in the upper water column of the central Indian Ocean, specifically the Indian Ocean Gyre, one of the five major oceanic gyres. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_Garbage_Patch

The five oceanic gyres are: South Atlantic, South Pacific, and Indian Ocean, North Pacific and North Atlantic.

The most dangerous animal in North America isn't the bear or the shark, but may well be the deer, and the deadliest time of year is fall. On average, more collisions between cars and deer occur in November than in any other month, according to State Farm Insurance. This is because late October through early December is mating season for North American deer, reports Rob Found, a biologist from the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there are about 1 million car accidents with deer each year that kill 200 Americans, cause more than 10,000 personal injuries, and result in $1 billion in vehicle damage. By comparison, sharks have killed 10 people in the USA in the past 10 years, according to the International Shark Attack File. As for bears, a list of known attacks maintained by Bearplanet.org says about 28 people have been killed by bears the past decade.
For the fifth year in a row, West Virginia tops the list of states where a driver is most likely to run into a deer, State Farm reports. The other states in the top 10 are Iowa, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Montana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and Wyoming.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-31/deer-car-accidents-rise/51019604/1