New York historic buildings 

* Before Gracie Mansion was built, the 1770 country residence of the Flatbush merchant Jacob Walton called Belvue Mansion was roughly on the same site.  Because it strategically overlooked Hell Gate (where the Harlem River, East River, and Long Island Sound meet), and featured a secret escape tunnel from the house to the East River shore.  Belvue Mansion was seized and commandeered by George Washington during the American Revolutionary War.  American troops put up a fort on the Walton lawn with a series of cannons facing the East River to guard the waterways.  The British destroyed this house on September 8, 1776, during the Revolutionary War, even though it was owned by a British Loyalist.  In 1798, the heirs of the Walton family reclaimed the property and sold it for $5,625 to Scottish immigrant, Archibald Gracie.  In 1799, Archibald Gracie built this two-story wooden mansion from his acquired wealth after founding a successful trading company.  Gracie used the Federal architectural styled mansion as his country home and enlarged it between 1810 and 1811.  The patent-yellow parlor is part of those additions to the mansion, which provided the Gracie family with more room in which to entertain their party guests. Gracie hosted elegant dinner parties at this country estate for his visitors which included Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, James Fenimore Cooper, Rufus King, Joseph Bonaparte, Marquis de Lafayette and Washington Irving.

* Manhattan's only lighthouse, the Little Red Lighthouse has sat on Jeffreys Hook since 1921, on the eastern pier of the George Washington Bridge in Fort Washington Park.  Jeffrey's Hook Lighthouse can be easily accessed by walking north through Riverside Park and Riverbank State Park or down a rather steep footpath just north of the bridge.  The Little Red Lighthouse was originally erected in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in 1880, it was first called the North Hook Beacon.  In 1917, the 40-ft. spark plug lighthouse was dismantled and moved four years later to Jeffreys Hook where the George Washington Bridge would be built over between 1927 and 1931.  The lighthouse operated until 1947, when the Coast Guard decided to extinguish its lamp because its function was no longer needed due to the bridges bright lights.  It was decommissioned and plans were made to auction it off before those plans were overturned by the power of the people.  The Little Red Lighthouse is a New York City landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  Hildegarde H. Swift's children's book Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge was first published in 1942.  The book shows that being small can still be important in this story of the building of NYC's George Washington Bridge.
* British Colonel Roger Morris and his rich American Tory wife, Mary Philipse, built the Palladian styled Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan's oldest house.  Eleven years before the Revolutionary War, in 1765, their 8,500-sq.-ft. summer mansion was built on Harlem Heights on a breezy hilltop by John Edward Pryor, and they called their new mansion Mount Morris.  The Morris's bought the land from Jacob and Yantie Dyckman with money from funds from Mary Philipse's dowry in 1758.  The second story balcony of the Morris's country home overlooked its 130 acres stretching from the Hudson to Harlem rivers.  The Morris-Jumel Mansion's strategic panoramic views of the Harlem River, the Bronx, and Long Island Sound to the east, NYC and its harbor to the south, and the Hudson River and Jersey Palisades to the west, made it the ideal headquarters to General Washington.  George Washington slept (and worked) here between September 14th and October 20th of 1776, after his army were forced to evacuate Brooklyn Heights, and before he forced a British retreat at the Battle of Harlem Heights. http://www.nychistorytours.com/

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

potpourri  (poh-poo-REE, POH-poo-ree) noun
1.  A mixture of dried flower petals, spices, herbs, etc., kept for fragrance.
2.  A musical medley.
3.  A mixture of incongruous things.
From French pot pourri, literally rotten pot (loan translation of Spanish olla podrida), from pot (pot) + pourri (rotten), from pourrir (to rot).  English has borrowed not only the loan translated term potpourri from French, but also the original Spanish olla podrida.  It has borrowed from other languages a whole bunch of terms to describe hodgepodge or miscellany, such as, from Swedish smorgasbord, from French salmagundi, and from Hungarian goulash.  
Earliest documented use:  1611.
blue blood  (BLOO bluhd)  noun
1.  An aristocratic or socially prominent lineage.
2.  A member of such a family.
Loan translation of Spanish sangre azul (blue blood).  The term arose from the visible veins of light-skinned royalty.  Earliest documented use:  1835.
deus ex machina  (DAY-uhs eks MAH-kuh-nuh, -nah, MAK-uh-nuh) noun
An unexpected or improbable person or event that saves a seemingly hopeless situation.
From Latin deus ex machina, deus (god) + ex (from) + machina (machine), loan translation of Greek theos apo mekhanes.  Earliest documented use:  1697.

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potpourri  Here in Jamaica we prepare a mixture of pickled/salted herring with seasonings especially scotch bonnet peppers.  This is served mainly on plain crackers usually at cocktail parties or wherever alcoholic drinks are served.  It is available commercially overseas also and is very popular.  We call this Solomon Gundy and some people say the name is derived from a person.  Now, of course, I do believe it is from the French salmagundi!  Interesting.

deus ex machina  In his book, Without Feathers, Woody Allen includes a one-act play called God.  In this hilarious spoof of a Greek comedy, when one of the actors, Diabetes is sentenced by the King to die, he calls upon the god Zeus to save him.  The actor playing Zeus is lowered down upon a wire to serve as the deus ex machina.  Through a horrible technical malfunction, he is strangled by the wire.  Only the comic genius of Woody Allen can conceive of a deus ex machina that can go so terribly wrong. 

Alexander Hamilton was born and raised in the West Indies and came to New York in 1772 at age 17 to study at King's College (now Columbia University). During his career, Hamilton was a military officer, lawyer, member of the United States Constitutional Convention, American political philosopher, author of the majority of the pivital and influential Federalist Papers, and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.

Hamilton Grange National Memorial is a National Park Service site in St. Nicholas Park, New York City that preserves the relocated home of U.S. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton commissioned architect John McComb Jr. to design a country home on Hamilton's 32 acres (13 ha) (0.13 km²) estate in upper Manhattan.  The two-story frame Federal style house was completed in 1802, just two years before Hamilton's death resulting from his duel with Aaron Burr on July 11, 1804.  The house was named "The Grange" after Hamilton's grandfather's estate in Scotland.  The Grange was the only home ever owned by Hamilton and it remained in his family for 30 years after his death.  The Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Harlem derived its name from Hamilton and the Grange.  See more plus images at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Grange_National_Memorial 

HealthCare.gov - Find Insurance Options

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Walk the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to the plaza before the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which Lord Dunsany called the most beautiful building in America.  The plaza, named for Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), the great Philadelphia painter who is best known for "The Gross Clinic" and "The Agnew Clinic," leads to three fountains.  The center fountain, dedicated to Washington, was erected by the Society of the Cincinnati of Pennsylvania.  The four figures and the animals overlooking the pools at the base represent four great waterways of America — the Mississippi, the Potomac, the Delaware and the Hudson.   http://www.ushistory.org/districts/parkway/eakin.htm   

A three-page AV-TEST study recently revealed that although search engine operators such as Google and Bing make a lot of effort to avoid doing so, they sometimes deliver websites infected with Trojans and similar malware among their top search results.  Other search engines do an even worse job.  Malware developers are now putting more and more effort into their work, for example in order to distribute their spyware programs or Trojans.  They therefore exploit search engines for their own purposes and sneak infected websites into the top results delivered to users.  The trick used by these criminals is actually very simple:  they first create a multitude of small websites and blogs before selecting the most frequently used search terms from top news stories and using backlinks to optimise these terms for search engines.  This process of optimising websites for search engines, known as SEO (search engine optimisation) for short, is used by all major website operators to ensure that their sites are easier to find.  The way to ensure that a web site is the quickest to be found is to achieve a place in the top ten search results delivered by Bing or Google."  Google achieved the best results in the study, followed by Bing.  Attention must, however, be drawn to the fact that Bing delivered five times as many websites containing malware as Google during the study.   Markus Selinger  Magdeburg, Germany, 6th April 2013  Please contact the team at AV-TEST GmbH if you have any questions.  E-mail: presse@av-test.de  Tel.: +49 (0)391 6075460  See the study at:   http://www.av-test.org/fileadmin/pdf/avtest_2013-03_search_engines_malware_english.pdf 

NOTE that AV-TEST is listed as "The Independent IT-Security Institute" at:   http://www.av-test.org/en/home/