His passion for painting burned so hot, it fueled two roundtrip walks from Ohio to New York City, three stints studying in Europe, and 62 years of intense creativity and teaching. Karl Kappes, born to German immigrants in Zanesville six weeks after the first shots of the Civil War were fired, liked to quote a Chinese saying that no man is an artist until he’s painted 10,000 pictures. "I am an artist," he would then declare. We’ll never know whether his grand claim was true, but he churned out oils, watercolors, and pencil drawings until he died in 1943 at 82 in his crammed, walk-up apartment/studio at 1822 Adams St. in Toledo. Still in the studio six years later, his widow said, "How can a person be lonely when she has more than 2,000 paintings to keep her company?" Kappes’ productivity, along with an enduring appreciation for his talent, has earned him a berth among the region’s best artists. Fifty of his pieces are displayed in Karl Kappes: Ohio Painter, 1861-1943, through Jan. 28 at the Zanesville Museum of Art, 190 miles southeast of Toledo.
http://www.toledoblade.com/Art/2011/12/25/Ohio-museum-celebrates-work-of-late-Toledo-artist.html

In most jurisdictions, the state's court of last resort is called the supreme court. This name differs in some jurisdictions, however. For example, the court of last resort in New York is the New York Court of Appeals, while the trial-level court is called the Supreme Court. In Texas, the court of last resort for civil trials is the Texas Supreme Court, but the highest court for criminal appeals is the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The state of Texas is rather unusual because it employs two courts of last resort to hear appeals. West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Last+resort

Valentine Davies (1905-1961) was an American film and television writer, producer, and director. His credits included Miracle on 34th Street (1947), Chicken Every Sunday (1949), The Bridges at Toko-Ri (1954), and The Benny Goodman Story (1955). He was nominated for the 1954 Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for The Glenn Miller Story. Davies was born in New York City, served in the Coast Guard, and graduated from the University of Michigan. He wrote a number of Broadway plays and was president of the Screen Writers Guild and general chairman of the Academy Awards program. Davies' 1947 novel Miracle on 34th Street was adapted for the screen the same year, earning the author the Academy Award for Best Story. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valentine_Davies Read more at: http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/contributor/1800034499/bio and http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0204016/

Leading is the space between lines of text. (The term is pronounced “led-ing,” after the strips of lead used to separate lines of type.) Kerning and tracking both address the spacing between letters. Kerning refers to the space between any two letters in a line. Tracking refers to the space between all of the letters in a line. Read more and see examples at:
Understanding Typography Concepts by Adobe Systems Incorporated. http://collaborgator.pbworks.com/f/indesign_typography.pdf

Top ten new restaurants in New York by Sam Sifton
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/28/dining/sam-siftons-top-10-new-restaurants-of-2011.html

Puritans were contemptuous of Christmas, nicknaming it "Foolstide" and banning their flock from any celebration of it throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. The upper classes in ancient Rome celebrated Dec. 25 as the birthday of the sun god Mithra. The date fell right in the middle of Saturnalia, a monthlong holiday dedicated to food, drink, and revelry, and Pope Julius I is said to have chosen that day to celebrate Christ's birth as a way of co-opting the pagan rituals. Beyond that, the Puritans considered it historically inaccurate to place the Messiah's arrival on Dec. 25. Puritans in the English Parliament eliminated Christmas as a national holiday in 1645, amid widespread anti-Christmas sentiment. Settlers in New England went even further, outlawing Christmas celebrations entirely in 1659. Anyone caught shirking their work duties or feasting was forced to pay a significant penalty of five shillings. Christmas returned to England in 1660, but in New England it remained banned until the 1680s. Colonial New Englanders began to associate Christmas with royal officialdom, and refused to mark it as a holiday. It was only in the following decades that disdain for the holiday slowly ebbed away. Clement Clarke Moore's poem "A Visit From St. Nicholas" — aka "'Twas the Night Before Christmas" — was published in New York in 1823 to enormous success. In 1836, Alabama became the first state to declare Christmas a public holiday, and other states soon followed suit. But New England remained defiantly Scrooge-like; as late as 1850, schools and markets remained open on Christmas Day. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow finally noted a "transition state about Christmas" in New England in 1856. "The old Puritan feeling prevents it from being a cheerful, hearty holiday; though every year makes it more so," he wrote. Christmas Day was formally declared a federal holiday by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1870.
http://theweek.com/article/index/222676/when-americans-banned-christmas

Scuffles have broken out between rival groups of Greek Orthodox and Armenian clerics in a turf war at Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity. Bemused tourists looked on as about 100 priests fought with brooms while cleaning the church in preparation for Orthodox Christmas, on 7 January. Palestinian police armed with batons and shields broke up the clashes. 1,700-year-old church, one of the holiest sites in Christianity, is in a bad state of repair, largely because the priests cannot agree on who should pay for its upkeep.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-16347418

Dec. 29 anniversaries
1170 – Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, is assassinated inside Canterbury Cathedral by followers of King Henry II; he subsequently becomes a saint and martyr in the Anglican Church and the Roman Catholic Church.
1813 – British soldiers burn Buffalo, New York during the War of 1812.
1835 – The Treaty of New Echota is signed, ceding all the lands of the Cherokee east of the Mississippi River to the United States.
1845 – According with International Boundary delimitation, U.S.A annexes the Mexican state of Texas, following the Manifest Destiny doctrine. For others, the Republic of Texas, which had been independent since the Texas Revolution of 1836, is admitted as the 28th U.S. state.
1890 – United States soldiers kill more than 200 Oglala Lakota people with four Hotchkiss guns in the Wounded Knee Massacre.
1911 – Sun Yat-sen becomes the provisional President of the Republic of China; he formally takes office on January 1, 1912.
1911 – Mongolia gains independence from the Qing dynasty.
1914 – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the first novel by James Joyce, is serialised in The Egoist.
1937 – The Irish Free State is replaced by a new state called Ireland with the adoption of a new constitution.
1959 – Physicist Richard Feynman gives a speech entitled "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom", which is regarded as the birth of nanotechnology.
2003 – The last known speaker of Akkala Sami dies, rendering the language extinct.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/December_29