Library celebrates 175 years 

In 1838, abolitionist and author Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery.  That same year, Charles Dickens published The Life and Adventures of Nickolas Nickelby; Edgar Allan Poe published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket; and The American Frugal Housewife came to print, containing tips for preserving food, cleaning, and creating home remedies on the homestead.  The year 1838 also marked the beginning of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library system.  TLCPL will be celebrating its 175th anniversary starting in mid-April, with the public kickoff on Sunday, April 14, 2013 and culminating the evening of September 7 with a gala dinner, featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning Author David McCullough.  

Seven Outdated Grammar Rules

1.  Never split an infinitive.
2.  Active verbs are always better than passive verbs.
3.  Never start a sentence with a conjunction (and, or, but).
4.  Never start a sentence with there are or there is.
5.  Never end a sentence with a preposition.
6.  Always use more than instead of over with numbers.
7.  Data is plural, so the verb must always be plural.
Find explanations and examples at:  http://www.ecoscribe.com/freestuff/sevenrules.htm

In 2000, Nathalie Miebach was studying both astronomy and basket weaving at the Harvard Extension School in Cambridge, Massachusetts.  She was constantly lugging her shears and clamps with her into the room where she’d study projections of stars and nebulas on the wall.  Understanding the science of space could be tricky, she found.  “What was so frustrating to me, as a very kinesthetic learner, is that astronomy is so incredibly fascinating, but there’s nothing really tactile about it,” says Miebach.  “You can’t go out and touch a star.”  Soon, something in the budding artist clicked.  Her solution?  Turn space data into visual art, so that she and other learners like her could grasp it.  Miebach’s final project for her basket weaving class was a sculpture based on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a well-known astronomy scatter plot measuring stars’ luminosities against their surface temperatures.  Temperature readings travel downward from left to right, and the wider the diameter of the star, the higher the luminosity.  The graph is used to track stars as they evolve, showing how they move along the diagram as shifts in their structure cause changes in temperature, size and luminosity.  The artist has taken this same approach with her latest project:  translating scientific data into musical scores.  When Miebach relocated from the coast of Maine to Omaha and then Boston in 2006, she realized the cityscape influenced weather dramatically, and not in the same way that the shoreline did.  “In an urban environment, you have infrastructure, you have heat bubbles that hover over cities, you have the lack of vegetation, and all these create very localized fluctuations in weather data that the weather instruments are very sensitive in picking up,” she says.  Miebach found that she could not accurately express in her basket weaving the subtle fluctuations in weather that cities foster.  Instead, she began experimenting with musical notation as a medium, which she says provided the flexibility she needed in artistically representing weather data at the street level.  See many pictures at:  http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/artscience/2013/03/transforming-raw-scientific-data-into-sculpture-and-song/   

Chicago’s northern suburbs are home to tens of thousands of Assyrians, Aramaic-speaking Christians driven from their Middle Eastern homelands by persecution and war.  Aramaic, a Semitic language related to Hebrew and Arabic, was the common tongue of the entire Middle East when the Middle East was the crossroads of the world.  People used it for commerce and government across territory stretching from Egypt and the Holy Land to India and China.  The number of Aramaic speakers alive today is difficult to calculate.  Though some estimates set the figure as high as a half-million, that number is misleading.  Because of its ancient lineage, lack of standardization and the isolation of speakers from one another, the modern tongue, known as Neo-Aramaic, has more than 100 dialects, most with no written analogue.  Many dialects are already extinct, and others are down to their last one or two speakers.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ideas-innovations/How-to-Save-a-Dying-Language-187947061.html?c=y&page=1   

In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales.  That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod.  Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined.  And on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale in an 1820 incident that had inspired Melville’s novel.  Captain George Pollard Jr. was just 29 years old when the Essex went down, and he survived and returned to Nantucket to captain a second whaling ship, Two Brothers.  But when that ship wrecked on a coral reef two years later, the captain was marked as unlucky at sea—a “Jonah”—and no owner would trust a ship to him again.  Pollard lived out his remaining years on land, as the village night watchman.  Read Captain Pollard's story at:  http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/history/2013/03/the-true-life-horror-that-inspired-moby-dick/

Restored Grant boyhood home to be rededicated April 6, 2013  Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's parents, Jesse and Hanna Grant, built the original portion of the home in 1823, when they moved to Georgetown, Ohio from Point Pleasant, Ohio, where Grant had been born the year before.  A large kitchen was added the following year.  About 1829, they built a new two-story home in front of, and attached to, the 1823 house.  While growing up there, Grant -- born Hiram Ulysses Grant -- went to school, worked in his father's tannery and spent hour upon hour in his favorite pastime:  working with horses.  Grant lived in the house in Georgetown with his parents and four siblings until 1839 when he left to attend West Point.  It was at West Point that, through a bureaucratic error, his name was listed as Ulysses Simpson Grant.  Georgetown's nationally-known wildlife artist, John Ruthven, and his late wife Judy, who was an active preservationist, bought the Grant Boyhood Home in 1977 to ensure its preservation.  The Ruthvens restored and furnished the house, with one room dedicated to Grant memorabilia.  It has been open to the public since 1982, when it was named a National Historic Landmark, the highest designation awarded to historic properties in the United States by the federal government (all National Historic Landmarks are also listed on the National Register of Historic Places).  In 2002, the Ruthvens donated the Grant Boyhood Home to the State of Ohio, which placed it under the auspices of the Ohio Historical Society.  Also in Georgetown is the Grant Schoolhouse.  http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/enews/042612e.shtml

U.S. Grant timelines  http://presidentusgrant.com/

A roasted egg is a traditional part of the Seder on Passover called the Beitzah.  Traditionally these eggs were cooked by being buried overnight in the embers of a fire.  These eggs have a deep, savory, roasted caramel flavor.  They’re way easy to prepare, and there are many ways to do so, including boiling the egg first, or roasting it over a grill.  I’m giving you a method from Paula Wolfert, author of Mediterranean Clay Pot Cooking.

8 whole eggs, at room temperature 

Preheat your oven to 225.  Place the eggs in warm water while preheating the oven.  When the oven is ready, remove the eggs from the water and set them directly in the oven’s middle rack.  Bake for 4-5 hours.  The eggs turn a rich, caramel color.  For a variety of shades, remove a few eggs at a time starting at the 4 hour mark.  Remove the eggs and let cool for a few minutes.  Gently roll and press the eggs to crackle the shells.  Place them into a bowl of cold water for at least five minutes.  Slip off the shells and arrange on a plate.  Serve with condiments of your choosing.  Tom Herndon 

http://www.hippkitchen.com/recipes/scrambled-just-the-start