A blackwater river is a river with a deep, slow-moving channel that flows through forested swamps and wetlands. As vegetation decays in the water, tannins are leached out, resulting in transparent, acidic water that is darkly stained, resembling tea or coffee. Most major blackwater rivers are in the Amazon River system and the Southern United States. The term "blackwater" here is an agreed-upon technical one in fluvial studies, geology, geography and ecology/biology. Not all dark-colored rivers are true blackwater rivers in the technical sense. Some rivers in temperate regions, which drain or flow through areas of dark black loam, are colored black due to the color of the soil. These types of rivers can be referred to as black mud rivers; there are also black mud estuaries. See list of blackwater rivers of the world at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackwater_river

Five bandmates, one guitar: Walk Off the Earth's Joel Cassady, Gianni Luminati, Sarah Blackwood, Ryan Marshall and Mike Taylor play a guitar as one on 'Somebody That I Used to Know.' For Walk Off the Earth's version of Somebody That I Used to Know, the five members of the Ontario band crowded together to play the entire song on a single acoustic guitar: Three pluck the strings and one plays percussion on the body while another supports the guitar by its headstock and occasionally strums the strings between the nut and the tuning pegs. That video, posted Jan. 5, has generated 58 million views. ERIN O'CONNEL
http://www.usatoday.com/life/music/story/2012-02-20/somebody-that-i-used-to-know/53181898/1

Created before his masterpieces The Last Supper and Mona Lisa, Leonardo da Vinci's iconic Vitruvian Man is considered one of the world's most reproduced images. Today, more than 500 years since da Vinci inked that figure on a 13½-by-9⅝-inch piece of paper, the image can be seen on T-shirts, coffee mugs, posters, jewelry, fridge magnets, ties and the face of the Italian 1-euro coin, not to mention in The Simpsons and Mickey Mouse parodies. Author Toby Lester calls it "the world's most famous drawing." But Vitruvian Man represents much more than da Vinci's 1490s perspective of the perfect human form. After all, the image didn't emerge fully rendered from da Vinci's genius. And that back story is the fascinating tale this book tells. But Da Vinci's Ghost is a much larger, more complex mosaic, combining centuries and layers of relevant religion, architecture, art, early science and personalities, plus a rich variety of historic illustrations, to trace the influences that may have led da Vinci to that moment when he penned the famous drawing. Beginning with the Roman engineer Vitruvius, who in the 20s B.C. described the ideal human body fitting inside a circle (the divine) and a square (the temporal), Lester speculates on a host of likely forerunners and influences to the microcosmic-man drawing, from eighth-century scholar the Venerable Bede and 12th-century visionary Hildegard of Bingen to the Renaissance dome-builder Filippo Brunelleschi and 15th-century anatomy mapper Leon Battista Alberti. At the heart of the book, Lester fleshes out a pointed biography of da Vinci — not a cradle-to-grave chronicle, but rather the events and episodes in the context of the Vitruvian Man timeline. DON OLDENBUG http://books.usatoday.com/book/toby-lester-da-vincis-ghost-genius-obsession-and-how-leonardo-created-the-world-in-his-own-image/r630277

Rocking back in his office chair several weeks ago, Jack Azizo seemed stunned. "That was done here?" asked the 57-year-old co-owner of Jimmy Sales Corp., a men's-accessories company based in Manhattan. Mr. Azizo had just been told that the very first jazz phonograph record was made in his company's 12th-floor office space on Feb. 26, 1917. "I can't believe this—I love jazz," he said. If New Orleans is the cradle of jazz, then New York's Garment District is where jazz spoke its first words. Ninety-five years ago, members of the Original Dixieland Jass Band (ODJB) boarded the freight elevator at 46 W. 38th St. and rode to the top floor. When the five musicians arrived at the new studio of Victor Talking Machine Co., the quintet set up their instruments and recorded two songs—"Dixieland Jass Band One-Step" and "Livery Stable Blues." Released weeks later, the 78-rpm record became an overnight sensation—and a fitting start to jazz's future. On one side was a blues and on the other a dance number—two forms that jazz would rely on for decades to come. "These songs by the ODJB were terrific, expressive tunes that changed popular music overnight," said Dan Morgenstern, a jazz historian and author of "Living With Jazz." "The impact of their syncopated approach can only be compared to records by Elvis Presley in the mid-1950s. Everything changed after their release." Despite the band's boastful name, the Original Dixieland Jass Band wasn't quite as original as it claimed. "Black musicians in New Orleans had been playing the music that would come to be called jazz as early as 1906," said Bruce Raeburn, curator of Tulane University's Hogan Jazz Archive. "The idea to form a group and take the show on the road wasn't really theirs either." That honor belongs to a Northern promoter, who in 1916 convinced several white musicians from New Orleans to form a pre-ODJB band and relocate to Chicago. Another New Orleans dance band—Tom Brown's Band From Dixieland—had already had success playing there at local restaurants. Shortly after the musicians arrived, they were renamed the ODJB and met Max Hart, Al Jolson's agent. He booked them into a New York restaurant near Columbus Circle in January 1917. MARC MYERS
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204740904577195080015884786.html

The instantaneous transmission of news and information across the globe was made possible in the 1830s by the invention of the telegraph, the invention that gave rise to the word "telecommunications". The electric telegraph machine was created through efforts of Morse, Wheatstone and Cooke, and telegraphy began in England in 1837. In the early days of cross-national communication, messages were encoded on a telegraph machine and sent to the bordering country for transcription, usually by a national post office, and then sent to their destination. Messages could not be sent directly from a source in one country to a receiver in another country because a common code was not used. The need for technical standardization was recognized by Prussia and Austria and in October l849, these two countries made the first attempt to link telegraph systems with a common code. One year later, an agreement between these two countries, Bavaria and Saxony created the Austro-German Telegraph Union. The success of this first union gave rise to additional unions such as the International Telegraph Union, then later to the International Radio Conferences, and finally, in 1865, the to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU). Today, the ITU is the sole regulating institution with power to regulate the transfer of data throughout the world. In 1947 the ITU became an agency in the United Nations. One hundred and sixty countries within the United Nations (UN) have representatives in the ITU. Each of these countries gets one vote on ITU decisions. The general meeting of the ITU is held once every few years and is called the Plenipotentiary Conference. The chief objective of this conference is to review and revise the ITU Convention, which is the governing document of the Union. The one-country, one-vote format often leads to voting blocks based on country alliances, and creates the political nature of the ITU. The voting blocks and the tenets of the new World Information Order threaten the existence of the ITU. Many developing countries in the UN want to break the dominant flow of information from Northern industrialized countries to Southern developing countries. The Northern industrialized countries want to continue the "free flow" of information while the developing countries in the South want a balanced flow to ensure control of socio-cultural development. A second aspect that threatens the existence of the ITU is the fact that the speed at which technological changes occur is greater than the ITU's international standards process can accommodate. Thus, several other standards organizations have developed such as the T1 Committee of the Exchange Carriers Standards Association in the United States, the Telecommunications Technology Committee (TTC) in Japan, and the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI). These regional standards organizations (RSOs) offer a more homogeneous membership than the ITU which makes the standardization process quicker. http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=international

CORRECTION
Glass artist Baker O'Brien bought the Dominic Labino studio and 80 acres from Mrs. Labino in 1991. See this interesting site: http://www.labinostudio.com/about.htm

Two lawyers are taking on legal database providers Westlaw and LexisNexis with what appears to be a novel interpretation of copyright law. Edward L. White, a Oklahoma City, Okla., lawyer, and Kenneth Elan, claim WestLaw and LexisNexis have engaged in “unabashed wholesale copying of thousands of copyright-protected works created by, and owned by, the attorneys and law firms who authored them” — namely publicly filed briefs, motions and other legal documents. In the lawsuit filed in Manhattan federal court Feb. 22, White and Elan are hoping to represent two classes of lawyers: ones who have obtained copyright registration of their works and ones who haven’t done so. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/02/22/keep-your-hands-off-my-briefs-lawyers-sue-westlaw-lexis/?mod=djemlawblog_h See the class action complaint at:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/82495562/022212-West