The United States Secret Service is responsible for maintaining the integrity of the nation's financial infrastructure and payment systems. As a part of this mission, the Secret Service constantly implements and evaluates prevention and response measures to guard against electronic crimes as well as other computer related fraud. The Secret Service derives its authority to investigate specified criminal violations from Title 18 of the United States Code, Section 3056. The counterfeiting of money is one of the oldest crimes in history. At some periods in early history, it was considered treasonous and was punishable by death. During the American Revolution, the British counterfeited U.S. currency in such large amounts that the Continental currency soon became worthless. "Not worth a Continental" became a popular expression of the era. During the Civil War, one-third to one-half of the currency in circulation was counterfeit. At that time, approximately 1,600 state banks designed and printed their own bills. Each bill carried a different design, making it difficult to detect counterfeit bills from the 7,000 varieties of real bills. While a national currency was adopted in 1862 to resolve the counterfeiting problem, it was soon counterfeited and circulated so extensively that it became necessary to take enforcement measures. As a result, on July 5, 1865, the United States Secret Service was established to suppress the widespread counterfeiting of the nation's currency. http://www.secretservice.gov/criminal.shtml

Find links to Conlangs (constructed languages) Esperanto, Ido, Interlingua, Solresol, Volapük, Other IALs, Tolkien's languages, Star Trek languages and D'ni at: http://www.omniglot.com/links/conlangs.htm

MEAN KITTY--words of Bucky Katt in comic strip Get Fuzzy
12/21/11 unsmartness
1/21/12 I feel oddly comforted in that I'm comforted and you're odd.
3/22/12 I know nothing about anything.

Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965) Author of stories for the young at heart of all ages, the most well known of her creations are probably the lyrics to the song Morning Has Broken, written in 1931 for an old Gaelic tune, and highly popularized by the Cat Stevens rendition of it in 1971. Her father encouraged her writing from the age of five, and at 18 she wrote the lyrics for an operetta "Floretta" to the music created by her older brother, Harry Farjeon, who became a well respected composer. She had a wide range of friends with great literary talent including D.H. Lawrence, Walter de la Mare, and Robert Frost. One of her most notable works Martin Pippin in the Apple Orchard was written as a gift to the poet Edward Thomas. In 1956 she won the Hans Christian Andersen Award for her contributions to children's literature. http://www.biographybase.com/biography/farjeon_eleanor.html

Taxpayers will have until Tuesday, April 17, to file their 2011 tax returns and pay any tax due because April 15 falls on a Sunday, and Emancipation Day, a holiday observed in the District of Columbia, falls this year on Monday, April 16. According to federal law, District of Columbia holidays impact tax deadlines in the same way that federal holidays do; therefore, all taxpayers will have two extra days to file this year. Taxpayers requesting an extension will have until Oct. 15 to file their 2012 tax returns. http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=251825,00.html

Nearly everything about the Foxwoods Resort Casino is improbable, beginning with its scale. It is the largest casino in the Western Hemisphere — a gigantic, labyrinthine wonderland set down in a cedar forest and swamp in an otherwise sleepy corner of southeastern Connecticut. Forty thousand patrons pack into Foxwoods on weekend days. The place has 6,300 slot machines. Ten thousand employees. If you include everything — hotel space, bars and restaurants, theaters and ballrooms, spa, bowling alley — Foxwoods measures about 6.7 million square feet, more than the Pentagon. The owner of this enterprise is the Mashantucket Pequot Tribal Nation. The Pequots misjudged the market, borrowed too much and expanded unwisely. Foxwoods’s debt is on a scale befitting the size of the property — $2.3 billion. It would be easy to look at what has occurred at Foxwoods and think, Here are people who fell into money and didn’t know how to handle it. Which happens to be true. But how the casino reached this point, and the challenges its owners and operators now confront, is part of a much larger story — one involving the gradual relaxation of moral prohibitions against gambling, a desperate search for new revenue by state governments and the proliferation of new casinos across America. Casino gambling has become a commodity, available within a day’s drive to the vast majority of U.S. residents. Some in the industry talk of there being an oversupply, as if their product were lumber or soybeans. Foxwoods has had its own in-state competition since 1996 from the Mohegan Sun, which lies just west, across the Thames River. Owned by the Mohegan Tribe, it is a more modest property, though only by comparison — Mohegan is the second-largest casino in the hemisphere. In October, a casino opened at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens with 4,500 slot machines, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo is pushing an expansion plan for the site that includes a hotel and what would be the nation’s largest convention center. Michael Sokolove http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/magazine/mike-sokolove-foxwood-casinos.html

Guy Murchie (Jr.) (1907 1997), the son of Ethel A. and Guy Murchie Sr., was a Chicago Tribune photographer, staff artist and reporter, who had served as a war correspondent in England and Iceland from 1940 to 1942. His books included Men on the Horizon (1932), Song of the Sky (1954), Music of the Spheres (1961), and The Seven Mysteries of Life (1978). Murchie also illustrated his books with etchings and woodcuts of his own design. The American Museum of Natural History awarded him the John Burroughs Medal in 1956 for Song of the Sky. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Murchie

Sonnets were published along with the music for The Four Seasons (which Vivaldi composed based on four paintings of the seasons by Marco Ricci.) The poems are generally thought to be written by Vivaldi himself -- based on comments he made in the margins of his sheet music, but there is some question over the attribution. Vivaldi was a prolific composer, writing 46 operas and over 500 concerti. His works, such as The Four Seasons, were much anticipated in their day, but dropped out of style and were figuratively and literally lost until the early 20th century when most of his work was 're-discovered' and popularized by several artists and musicians including the poet Ezra Pound. Read the sonnets at: http://theotherpages.org/poems/part2/vivaldi01.html

"Happy Birthday to You", also known more simply as "Happy Birthday", is a song that is traditionally sung to celebrate the anniversary of a person's birth. According to the 1998 Guinness Book of World Records, "Happy Birthday to You" is the most recognized song in the English language, followed by "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow". The melody of "Happy Birthday to You" was written and composed by American siblings Patty Hill and Mildred J. Hill in 1893. Patty was a kindergarten principal in Louisville, Kentucky, developing various teaching methods at what is now the Little Loomhouse; Mildred was a pianist and composer. The sisters created "Good Morning to All" as a song that would be easy to be sung by young children. The combination of melody and lyrics in "Happy Birthday to You" first appeared in print in 1978, and probably existed even earlier. None of these early appearances included credits or copyright notices. In the European Union, the copyright of the song will expire on December 31, 2016. The actual American copyright status of "Happy Birthday to You" began to draw more attention with the passage of the Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998. When the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Act in Eldred v. Ashcroft in 2003, Associate Justice Stephen Breyer specifically mentioned "Happy Birthday to You" in his dissenting opinion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday_to_You