When the Oliver House opened its doors in 1859, Toledo, with a population nearing ten thousand, was in the midst of progress.  As a railroad center and growing commercial metropolis, the city served as the county seat, boasted a telegraph line, and had erected a bridge to span the Maumee River.  When commissioned by Major William Oliver, renowned architect Isaiah Rogers designed a first class modern hotel for “one of the most delightful portions of the city”.  Located in the section of downtown referred to as the Middlegrounds, the hotel would have a main front overlooking a beautiful park with shade trees and private rooms that offered a view of the Maumee River.  Famous for his palace hotel designs, Rogers also gained national recognition as Chief of the Bureau of Construction in the U.S. Treasury Department, a position appointed to him by President Lincoln.  Advertisements proudly announced the million and a quarter bricks that went into the construction and the 171 rooms each with its own fireplace, running water, and gas lighting.  Beautiful furnishings such as rosewood chairs, a carved piano, and lace curtains decorated the interior of the Oliver House.  Guests enjoyed all the finest luxuries, including an omnibus that transported travelers from the railroad station to the hotel.  In 1919, Edward N. Riddle bought the Oliver House and converted it into an industrial plant for the Riddle Co., manufacturers of lighting fixtures.  The new plant required that the interior be totally gutted.  The only remnants of the grand hotel were two ornamental marble mantels, some wallpaper, and a black walnut and ash floor in the lobby area.  In 1947 the Oliver House changed owners again.  Used for industrial purposes once more, it housed an axel manufacturer called Toledo Wheel & Rim.  Twenty years later, in 1967, Successful Sales Co purchased the Oliver House, for show and storage of novelty items that the company sold.  At this time, the building was also occupied by various small businesses.  Today, the Oliver House stands as the only remaining hotel designed by Isaiah Rogers. Happily, it has been returned to the public once again as a place of social activity and entertainment.  See more plus pictures at:  http://www.theoliverhousetoledo.com/history.html 

A lawyer sentenced to prison for participating in stock fraud has lost a lawsuit seeking the right to a jigsaw puzzle in prison.  U.S. District Judge John Gleeson of Brooklyn ruled against inmate Alan Berkun’s First Amendment claim, the New York Post reports at:  http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/brooklyn/judge_lawyer_jigsaw_jail_has_puzzles_YvaZn3mprPH8BY4EJe05TK   “Berkun has failed to show that his possession of a jigsaw puzzle is expressive and therefore constitutionally protected,” Gleeson wrote.  ”Even if the reassembled image itself were protected by the First Amendment, Berkun has not shown how the act of assembling the pieces is in any way expressive conduct.”  Government lawyers said the prison was justified in banning the puzzle because it could “cause unnecessary clutter, pose a fire hazard, and/or limit Berkun’s living area,” according to a prior New York Post story at:  http://www.nypost.com/p/news/national/con_goes_to_pieces_over_jigsaw_p1rk4XjancsdauFpORNmtO#ixzz20RgykqK5.  Berkun ordered the puzzle from Amazon.com.  http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/a_puzzling_decision_judge_rules_against_lawyer-prisoners_first_amendment_ji/

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg took a break from her duties as a member of the high court to appear as the main attraction on a panel at the American Bar Association’s annual meeting in Chicago called, “Arias of Law: The Rule of Law at Work in Opera and the Supreme Court.”  “The founders of our country were great men with a vision,” Justice Ginsburg said. “They were held back from realizing their idea by the times in which they lived.  But, she added, their notion was that society would evolve and that the clauses of the Constitution would grow with society.  “The Constitution would always be in tune with society that the law is meant to serve.”  The panel included performances by members of the Ryan Opera Center and Lyric Opera of Chicago.  Among them, “I Accept Their Verdict” from Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd and “When I Went To The Bar,” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe.  Justice Ginsburg was joined on the panel by U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr. and Anthony Freud, the general director of the Chicago’s Lyric Opera, himself a trained attorney.  Craig Martin, a partner in the Chicago office of the law firm, Jenner & Block LLP, moderated the panel.  A hand-out for the panel kicked off the discussion by noting that some say lawyers are like opera singers because they love the sound of their own voices.  Justice Ginsburg’s love of the opera is quite well known, by the way.  She’s made cameo appearances in Washington National Opera productions. 

http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2012/08/03/justice-ginsburg-on-opera-and-constitution/  

See the panel discussion at:  http://www.scribd.com/doc/101957508/Arias-of-Law-Program

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Here in Washington State we have a town named Walla Walla ("place of many rivers") from a Sahaptian language word walla, meaning river.  Linguists call such repetition of a word reduplication.  Reduplication occurs when a word is formed by repeating another word, sometimes with a slight change in sound (for example, shilly-shally).  This repetition may be used to indicate plurality, to intensify the idea, to convey the idea of "etc." and so on.
chop-chop  (chop-chop)  adverb:  Quickly.  
From Chinese Pidgin English chop (fast).  Pidgin is a simplified language that develops when two groups that do not have a language in common come in contact, usually for trade.  Chinese Pidgin English was used in ports in southern China.  The word pidgin is said to have been formed from the Chinese pronunciation of the word business.  Earliest documented use:  1834.
froufrou  (FROO-froo)  noun:
1.  Something fancy, elaborate, and showy.
2.  A rustling sound, as of a silk dress.
From French, of imitative origin. Earliest documented use: 1870.
chichi  (SHEE-shee)
adjective:  Affectedly elegant.  noun:  Showy stylishness.
From French, of imitative origin. Earliest documented use: 1908.
chin-chin  (CHIN-chin)
noun:  A chat.  verb intr.:  To chat.
interjection: Used as a toast, greeting, or farewell.
From Chinese ching-ching (please-please). Earliest documented use:  1795.
yada yada  (YAH-duh YAH-duh)
adverb:  And so on.  noun:  Uninteresting, long-winded talk.
Of imitative origin.  The word is often mistaken for being Yiddish.  Earliest documented use: 1967.

Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets

August 12, 2012–January 7, 2013

Museum of Modern Art  11 West 53 Street New York  (212) 708-9400

This MoMA gallery exhibition and accompanying film retrospective will be the first presentation of the Quay Brothers' work in all their fields of creative activity.  Internationally renowned moving image artists and designers, the Quay Brothers were born outside Philadelphia and have worked from their London studio, Atelier Koninck, since the late 1970s.  For over 30 years, they have been in the avant-garde of stop-motion puppet animation and live-action movie-making in the Eastern European tradition of filmmakers like Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Svankmajer and the Russian Yuri Norstein, and have championed a design aesthetic influenced by the graphic surrealism of Polish poster artists of the 1950s and 1960s.  Beginning with their student films in 1971, the Quay Brothers have produced over 45 moving image works, including two features, music videos, dance films, documentaries, and signature personal works, including The Street of Crocodiles (1986), the Stille Nacht series (1988–2008), Institute Benjamenta (1995), and In Absentia (2000).  They have also designed sets and projections for opera, drama, and concert performances such as Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa (1991), Ionesco’s The Chairs (Tony-nominated design, 1997), Richard Ayre’s The Cricket Recovers (2005), and recent site-specific pieces based on the work of Bartók and Kafka.  http://www.moma.org/visit/calendar/exhibitions/1240 

Works by Olympians have been on display in London throughout the Games.  The pieces form part of the collection of the Art of the Olympians museum in Fort Myers, Fla., a two-year-old institution celebrating the creative talents of Olympians past and present.  It also pays homage to an often-forgotten piece of Olympic history:  Art was a competitive event in the early period of the Games, from 1912 to 1948.  Medals were given in architecture, literature, music, painting and sculpture.  In 2008, before the Fort Myers museum was completed, organizers sent 30 pieces to the Beijing Olympics.  But they were housed in a distant location and partly outdoors, prompting museum officials to send replicas instead of originals.  This year, most of the exhibit is at University College London (with additional pieces on display in Torbay, England), in the heart of the city.  It has drawn a few thousand visitors, organizers say. 

http://stream.wsj.com/story/london-olympics-2012/SS-2-13789/SS-2-44603/

Art of the Olympians Museum  1300 Hendry Street  Fort Myers, FL 33901  (239) 332-5055  http://www.artoftheolympians.org/meet-the-artists.html