The monograph, "Lawn Tennis Tournaments, The True Method of Assigning Prizes with a Proof of the Fallacy of the Present Method," by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, a 19th century mathematician better known by his pen name, Lewis Carroll, is a proposal for a better way to conduct a sports tournament. Let's get one thing straight: Carroll didn't invent the bracket. In writing this nine-page plan, his only goal was to make it better. In Carroll's system, the draw would be assigned alphabetically with no attention paid to skill. If a player won his first-round match, Carroll proposed, he would advance to play other winners. But the losers would not be eliminated. Rather, they would move on to play other losers. The only way any player could be eliminated, he wrote, was after they had amassed three "superiors." He defined a superior as any player who has beaten you, or any player who has beaten a player who has beaten you. In a nutshell: Lots of competitors can advance in any given round, even if they don't win. Losing a single match to anyone won't kill you, so long as you keep winning. The only way to be knocked out is if the player who beats you drops two more matches along the way. In the monograph, Carroll sketched out a 32-player tournament using letters instead of names, and showed how a winner could be determined, using this approach, in nine rounds. Rachel Bachman http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577297821444746352.html

Corsica lies approximately 112 miles south of the main French coast, and is itself about 115 miles long by about 52 miles wide, maximum dimensions. With 5,500 square miles, it is the third largest island in the western Mediterranean, and about a third of the surface area of Sardinia, its Italian neighbour to the south. Its coastline extends to over 600 miles and it rises to nearly 9,000 feet - the highest island in the Mediterranean. French is the official language, and is spoken by everybody but you will hear Corsican spoken everywhere, in the villages in particular. The Corsican language derives from the Genoese occupation and is close to Italian. Dialects vary from area to area - even from village to village. http://www.directcorsica.com/cpbookweb.pdf

Few travellers have not succumbed to Corsica's potent scenery and showered it with
epithets - lIe de Beaute, the Scented Isle, the Mountain of the Sea, the Granite Island. See pictures at: http://www.alpinejournal.org.uk/Contents/Contents_1995_files/AJ%201995%20123-130%20Harding%20Corsica.pdf

The Wild Maquis of Corsica by Sibylle Hechtel
I’d read stories about Corsica’s maquis, but the mixture of fragrances that greeted me when I arrived overwhelmed me. Corsica’s scented maquis reaches from the sea up to 3,000 feet. In appearance, it resembles California’s chaparral, but the similarity ends there. Even after one visit, if you put me on an airplane blindfolded and took me to Corsica, I would know with utter certainty that I stood in the maquis. Imagine standing on a fragrant hillside surrounded by eucalyptus, juniper, laurel, rosemary, highly scented shrubs of the rock rose family, heather, myrtle, sage, mint, thyme and lavender. Add to that more than a dozen aromatic flowers that grow only in Corsica and you’ll get an idea of the heady, clean aroma that infuses the island’s air. More than 2,500 species of wildflowers grow in Corsica, and about 250 of these are native to the island. http://www.herbcompanion.com/Gardening/The-Wild-Maquis-of-Corsica.aspx

John Newbery published a compilation of English rhymes, Mother Goose's Melody, or, Sonnets for the Cradl 1791 edition of Mother Goose's Melody which switched the focus from fairy tales to nursery rhymes, and in English this was until recently the primary connotation for Mother Goose. A book of poems for children entitled Mother Goose's Melody was published in England in 1781, and the name "Mother Goose" has been associated with children's poetry ever since. In music, Maurice Ravel wrote Ma mère l'oye, a suite for the piano, which he then orchestrated for a ballet. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Goose

Humpty Dumpty is a character in an English language nursery rhyme, probably originally a riddle and one of the best known in the English-speaking world. Though not explicitly mentioned, he is typically portrayed as an egg and has appeared or been referred to in a large number of works of literature and popular culture. According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale in the seventeenth century. The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person. The riddle may depend on the assumption that, whereas a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, an egg would be. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known. Similar riddles have been recorded by folklorists in other languages, such as "Boule Boule" in French, or "Lille Trille" in Swedish and Norwegian; though none is as widely known as Humpty Dumpty is in English. In addition to his appearance in Through the Looking-Glass, as a character Humpty Dumpty has been used in a large range of literary works, including L. Frank Baum's Mother Goose in Prose (1901), where the rhyming riddle is devised by the daughter of the king, having witnessed Humpty's "death" and her father's soldiers' efforts to save him. Robert Rankin used Humpty Dumpty as one victim of a serial fairy-tale character murderer in The Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocalypse (2002). Jasper Fforde included Humpty Dumpty in two of his novels, The Well of Lost Plots (2003) and The Big Over Easy (2005), which use him respectively as a ringleader of dissatisfied nursery rhyme characters threatening to strike and as the victim of a murder. See images of Humpty by William Wallace Denslow and John Tenniel at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty

Musée de Cluny du Moyen Âge (National Museum of the Middle Ages) sits in Paris's 5th arrondissement. The museum houses many notable medieval artifacts, including sculptures from the 7th and 8th century, important manuscripts, gold and ivory pieces, and many antique furnishings. The museum also owns a fine collection of tapestries of that era, including "The Lady and the Unicorn", a series woven in Flanders and made of wool and silk. These are often considered among the finest works of art from medieval Europe. The museum is housed in building known as the Hôtel de Cluny. Not a hotel in its most commonly known form but rather a expansive house, the Hôtel de Cluny was - in the early 14th century - owned by the abbots of Cluny, who headed a powerful Benedictine order. The complex also once included a college for religious education, but that is no longer standing. http://www.aviewoncities.com/paris/museedecluny.htm

Venice continues to sink an average of one to two millimeters (0.04 to 0.08 inches) a year. "It’s a small effect, but it’s important," Yehuda Bock, a research geodesist with Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, Calif., said. With the Adriatic rising in the Venetian lagoon at the same rate, the combined effect is a 4mm (0.16 inches) a year increase in sea level. This means that Venice could sink up to 80 mm (3.2 inches) by 2032. The study, which will be published March 28 in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, a journal of the American Geophysical Union, also found that the City of Water in north-east Italy is listing one millimeter or two (0.04 to 0.08 inches) eastward per year. http://news.discovery.com/earth/venice-sinking-120326.html