More than a century ago, 29-year-old architect Robert Reamer designed a lodge for what would become our nation’s first national park in Yellowstone, Wyoming.  Siting it near the famous geyser, Old Faithful, the 1904 building made of logs and stones also made history:  The Old Faithful Inn became the first great lodge of the West.  Today, visitors who enter the inn and stand beneath its massive gabled roof are awed by ceilings that soar 85 feet into the air.  Its 40-foot-tall fireplace–made from 500 tons of lava rock–anchors a hall of log columns, gnarled railings and split-log staircases.  "It was the original inspiration for what would become the National Park Service Design of rustic architecture or what’s now called ‘parkitecture,’ " says Lee Whittlesey, a NPS historian who gives tours of the inn and the park.  "The Old Faithful Inn reflects the same philosophy espoused by the Arts-and-Crafts movement being embraced at that time in America," says Christine Barnes, in her book Great Lodges of the West.  "Simplicity, use of native handwork and blending of the building with the site are the movement’s fundamental principles."  http://www.loghome.com/parkitecture/

Tapas is not a starter.  If you start eating tapas, you finish eating tapas, and you don't stop until you're full.  Tapas is not a collection of small dishes brought out on a platter and eaten as a main course.  The Spanish have a word for this - 'tabla'.  A 'tapa' is a 'lid' or 'cover'.  In the early days of tapas, a slice of cheese or ham was given with your drink and placed over your drink.  There is some debate over why exactly this was done.   Keep out insects?  Hide smells?  A tapa today is invariably a small dish of something edible.   http://gospain.about.com/od/fooddrink/qt/tapasdefinition.htm

The concept of a National Statuary Hall originated in the middle 19th century, even before the completion of the present House wing of the U.S. Capitol in 1857.  At that time, the House of Representatives moved into its new larger chamber and the old vacant chamber became a thoroughfare between the Rotunda and the House wing.  Suggestions for the use of the chamber were made as early as 1853 by Gouverneur Kemble, a former member of the House, who pressed for its use as a gallery of historical paintings.  The space between the columns seemed too limited for this purpose, but it was well suited for the display of busts and statuary.  On April 19, 1864, Representative Justin S. Morrill asked:  "To what end more useful or grand, and at the same time simple and inexpensive, can we devote it [the Chamber] than to ordain that it shall be set apart for the reception of such statuary as each State shall elect to be deserving of in this lasting commemoration?"  His proposal to create a National Statuary Hall became law on July 2, 1864 (sec. 1814 of the Revised Statutes). It provides that:  ...the President is hereby authorized to invite each and all the States to provide and furnish statues, in marble or bronze, not exceeding two in number for each State, of deceased persons who have been citizens thereof, and illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military services such as each State may deem to be worthy of this national commemoration; and when so furnished the same shall be placed in the Old Hall of the House of Representatives, in the Capitol of the United States, which is set apart, or so much thereof as may be necessary, as a national statuary hall for the purpose herein indicated.  All state statues, in accordance with this law, were placed in National Statuary Hall.  However, the aesthetic appearance of the Hall began to suffer from overcrowding until, in 1933, the situation became unbearable.  At that time the Hall held 65 statues, which stood, in some cases, three deep.  More important, the structure of the chamber would not support the weight of any more statues.  Thus, on February 24, 1933, Congress passed House Concurrent Resolution No. 47 to provide for the relocation of statues and to govern the reception and placement of future additions (this resolution was enacted into law in 2000):

RESOLVED BY THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES (THE SENATE CONCURRING), that the Architect of the Capitol, upon the approval of the Joint Committee on the Library, with the advice of the Commission of Fine Arts, is hereby authorized and directed to relocate within the Capitol any of the statues already received and placed in Statuary Hall, and to provide for the reception and location of the statues received hereafter from the States.  Under authority of this resolution it was decided that only one statue from each state should be placed in Statuary Hall. The others would be given prominent locations in designated areas and corridors of the Capitol.  A second rearrangement of the statues was made in 1976 by authorization of the Joint Committee on the Library.  To improve the crowded appearance of the collection, 38 statues were rearranged in Statuary Hall according to height and material.  Statues representing 10 of the 13 original colonies were moved to the Central Hall of the East Front Extension on the first floor of the Capitol.  The remainder of the statues were distributed throughout the Capitol, mainly in the Hall of Columns and the connecting corridors of the House and Senate wings.  In 2008, the Joint Committee on the Library approved another relocation of statues to improve their display in numerous areas of the Capitol, including the Capitol Visitor Center. 

http://aoc.gov/capitol-hill/national-statuary-hall-collection/about-national-statuary-hall-collection  NOTE that Ohio's two current statues represent President James Garfield and Governor William Allen.  The statue of Allen will be replaced by one of Thomas Edison.

The U.S. Library of Congress said Jan. 4 that it has completed a process of collecting a full, ongoing stream of tweets, and that it has begun work to archive and organize more than 170 billion tweets.  Under an agreement struck between the government institution and Twitter in 2010, the microblogging company is providing the Library of Congress with a full stream of all public tweets, starting with 21 billion generated from between 2006 and April 2010, and now supplemented with about 150 billion more posted since then.  The library wrote that:   Twitter is a new kind of collection for the Library of Congress but an important one to its mission.  As society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing, and in some cases supplanting, letters, journals, serial publications, and other sources routinely collected by research libraries.  Though the Library has been building and stabilizing the archive and has not yet offered researchers access, we have nevertheless received approximately 400 inquiries from researchers all over the world.  Some broad topics of interest expressed by researchers run from patterns in the rise of citizen journalism and elected officials' communications to tracking vaccination rates and predicting stock market activity.  Daniel Terdiman  http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57562210-93/library-of-congress-digs-in-to-full-archive-of-170-billion-tweets/

See a photo by Carol M. Highsmith of the main reading room of the United States Library of Congress, located in the Thomas Jefferson Building, the oldest of its three buildings.  Constructed between 1890 and 1897, the Beaux-Arts style building is known for its classicizing facade and elaborately decorated interior, designed during the "American Renaissance".  Wikimedia Commons.