The 50 States That Rhyme Song Tune: Turkey in the Straw See words and link to a class singing it at: http://www.mrsjonesroom.com/songs/50states.html

The 50 State Capitals Song Tune: Turkey in the Straw http://www.mrsjonesroom.com/songs/50capitals.html

A library provides a transformative environment.
Stephen Ferguson Assistant University Librarian for Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB” or “the Bureau”) is pleased to
submit to Congress its first annual report summarizing its activities to administer the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (“FDCPA” or “the Act”), 15 U.S.C. §§ 1692 et seq., during the past year. See the FDCPA ANNUAL REPORT 2012 at: http://files.consumerfinance.gov/f/201203_cfpb_FDCPA_annual_report.pdf

The America I love still exists at the front desks of our public libraries.
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) American author

The term “public domain” refers to creative materials that are not protected by intellectual property laws such as copyright, trademark, or patent laws. The public owns these works, not an individual author or artist. Anyone can use a public domain work without obtaining permission, but no one can ever own it. An important wrinkle to understand about public domain material is that, while each work belongs to the public, collections of public domain works may be protected by copyright. If, for example, someone has collected public domain images in a book or on a website, the collection as a whole may be protectible even though individual images are not. You are free to copy and use individual images but copying and distributing the complete collection may infringe what is known as the “collective works” copyright. Collections of public domain material will be protected if the person who created it has used creativity in the choices and organization of the public domain material. Copyright has expired for all works published in the United States before 1923. In other words, if the work was published in the U.S. before January 1, 1923, you are free to use it in the U.S. without permission. Because of legislation passed in 1998, no new works will fall into the public domain until 2019, when works published in 1923 will expire. In 2020, works published in 1924 will expire, and so on. For works published after 1977, if the work was written by a single author, the copyright will not expire until 70 years after the author’s death. If a work was written by several authors and published after 1977, it will not expire until 70 years after the last surviving author dies. http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter8/8-a.html

The curious art of diagramming sentences was invented 165 years ago by S.W. Clark, a schoolmaster in Homer, N.Y. His book, published in 1847, was called “A Practical Grammar: In which Words, Phrases, and Sentences Are Classified According to Their Offices and Their Various Relations to One Another.” His goal was to simplify the teaching of English grammar. It was more than 300 pages long, contained information on such things as unipersonal verbs and “rhetorico-grammatical figures,” and provided a long section on Prosody, which he defined as “that part of the Science of Language which treats of utterance.” It may have been unwieldy, but this formidable tome was also quite revolutionary: out of the general murk of its tiny print, incessant repetitions, maze of definitions and uplifting examples emerged the profoundly innovative, dazzlingly ingenious and rather whimsical idea of analyzing sentences by turning them into pictures. “A Practical Grammar” was a reaction against the way the subject had been taught in America since it began to be taught at all. Before diagramming, grammar was taught by means of its drabber older sibling, parsing. Parsing is a venerable method for teaching inflected languages like Latin; the word itself is schoolboy slang derived from pars orationis, Latin for “a part of speech.” Kitty Burns Florey See pictures at: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/26/a-picture-of-language/

The Wooden Bridge in Cambridge, England was built in 1749 by James Essex the Younger (1722-1784) to the design of William Etheridge (1709-1776). It has subsequently been rebuilt to the same design in 1866 and 1905. For those who have fallen prey to the baseless stories told by unscrupulous guides to gullible tourists, it is necessary to point out that Isaac Newton died in 1727 (biography), and therefore cannot possibly have had anything to do with this bridge. The joints of the present bridge are fastened by nuts and bolts. Earlier versions of the bridge used iron pins or screws at the joints, driven in from the outer elevation. http://www.quns.cam.ac.uk/queens/images/WinBridg.html

When in doubt, go the library.
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets J. K. Rowling 1999

I can hear the library humming in the night,
a choir of authors murmuring inside their books
along the unlit alphabetical shelves,
Giovani Pontano next to Pope, Dumas next to his son,
each one stitched into his own private coat,
together forming a low gigantic chord of language.
Billy Collins "Books" in The Apple That Astonished Paris. 1988