manger noun
1. (Life Sciences & Allied Applications / Agriculture) a trough or box in a stable, barn, etc., from which horses or cattle feed
2. (Transport / Nautical Terms) Nautical a basin-like construction in the bows of a vessel for catching water draining from an anchor rode or coming in through the hawseholes
[from Old French maingeure food trough, from mangier to eat, ultimately from Latin mandūcāre to chew] http://www.thefreedictionary.com/manger

Cornelius McGillicuddy, Sr. (December 22, 1862 – February 8, 1956), better known as Connie Mack, was an American professional baseball player, manager, and team owner. The longest-serving manager in Major League Baseball history, he holds records for wins (3,731), losses (3,948), and games managed (7,755), with his victory total being almost 1,000 more than any other manager. He managed the Philadelphia Athletics for the club's first 50 seasons of play before retiring at age 87 following the 1950 season, and was at least part-owner from 1901 to 1954. He was the first manager to win the World Series three times, and is the only manager to win consecutive Series on separate occasions (1910–11, 1929–30); his five Series titles remain the third most by any manager, and his nine American League pennants rank second in league history. However, constant financial struggles forced repeated rebuilding of the roster, and Mack's teams also finished in last place 17 times. Mack was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connie_Mack

The Asian tiger prawn, a foot-long crustacean with a voracious appetite and a proclivity for disease, has invaded the northern Gulf, threatening prized native species, from crabs and oysters to smaller brown and white shrimp. Though no one is sure what the ecological impact will be, scientists fear a tiger prawn takeover could knock nature's balance out of whack and turn a healthy, diverse marine habitat into one dominated by a single invasive species. The tiger prawns from the western Pacific - which can grow up to 13 inches long - have been spreading along the Gulf Coast since 2006, but their numbers took off this year. Shrimpers pulled one from Texas waters for the first time in June.
http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Giant-shrimp-raises-big-concern-as-it-invades-the-2424242.php

An exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York through February 5 traces the tangled roots of "Auld Lang Syne," using printed books and manuscripts, including Burns's letter to Mrs. Dunlop, to illuminate the genesis of Burns's poem and the melody we sing it to today. In the process it throws up questions—about the extent of Burns's authorship, and the aesthetic and political considerations behind the deliberate "intermixing" of Scots and English—that add resonance to the old song, even as they remain unanswerable. By the time Burns wrote to Mrs. Dunlop, he had become a passionate collector of his native folk songs. He was the chief contributor to two anthologies, the workmanlike "Scots Musical Museum" by James Johnson and the much more ambitious "Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice" by George Thomson, who commissioned musical settings from composers across Europe, including Haydn, Hummel and Pleyel, "the most agreeable composer living" in Thomson's view. (The manuscript draft of a setting he commissioned from the less agreeable Beethoven is also on show.) In 1793, Burns sent the text of "Auld Lang Syne" to Thomson, presenting it as "the old Song of the olden times, & which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man singing." But, as Christine Nelson, the Morgan's curator of literary and historical manuscripts, notes, Burns made no secret of the fact that he reshaped, amended and edited much of the material he sent in. "Did Burns really just write down what he heard an old man sing or did he entirely rewrite the song?" Ms. Nelson asks. Among the evidence on display are two other songs sharing the opening line "should old acquaintance be forgot." The first, cited in a songbook of 1667, "is much more in reference to a love relationship gone bad than friendship," Ms. Nelson says. Burns's fame, already considerable during his short lifetime, became a cult after his death. The Morgan's exhibit contains a memento of Keats's pilgrimage to Burns's tomb in Dumfries, Scotland; a tribute by Sir Walter Scott; and a gushing letter by Sophia Hawthorne. There's also a modest bunch of pressed wildflowers she and Nathaniel picked on Burns's Mossgiel Farm—the wild daisies, or gowans, of "Auld Lang Syne." Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204464404577115072207414162.html?mod=ITP_personaljournal_2

Follow-up to the words snackage, websterize and wordage coined by Bucky Katt in Get Fuzzy comic strip August 5, 2011 December 21, 2011: Bucky, a feline meanie, coins see-worthy and critisults.

Reader feedback to "You're better than perfect. You're good." (T. Jefferson Parker)
Le mieux est l'ennemi du bien. The better is the enemy of the good.
La Bégueule by Voltaire (1772)
Variant translations:
The perfect is the enemy of the good. The best is the enemy of the good.
Note: This quotation also appears in Italian (Il meglio è l'inimico del bene) in the Questions sur l'Encyclopédie article, "Dramatic Art" (1764) Thanks, Paul.
The name "Voltaire", which the author adopted in 1718, is an anagram of "AROVET LI," the Latinized spelling of his surname, Arouet, and the initial letters of "le jeune" ("the younger"). The name also echoes in reverse order the syllables of the name of a family château in the Poitou region: "Airvault". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voltaire

Q: Why do most peninsulas on the globe point south? From the southern continents to Scandinavia, Italy, Iberia, all seem to point in a southerly direction. Is there a geological explanation of this striking fact?
Reply by Dr Ted Nield (Editor, Geoscientist) Thank you for your interesting inquiry about the apparent tendency of continents to taper, and peninsulas to point, south. It is a fascinating question, which I can see raises all kinds of different explanations, from geology to cognition, human psychology, cartographic conventions and even fractal geometry. Let us start with the southern continents and their southerly taper. The former southern supercontinent Gondwanaland, began to split up about 250 million years ago and gave rise to wedge-shaped pieces like segments of a pie. This was because the cracks in Gondwana tended to follow intersecting courses. This is not hard to understand, since when objects crack their fractures are dominated by geometry. Cracks in dinner-plates are usually radial, and cracks in a continental lithospheric plate on a globe will similarly follow great circles. Read more at: http://www.geolsoc.org.uk/gsl/pid/6197;jsessionid=1F2834CB5EA7F58740E5251BAC2AEB33 Thanks, Paul.