philadelphia please touch museum

The Philadelphia Please Touch Museum originally opened at the Academy of Natural Sciences on October 2, 1976, in a 2,200-square-foot space, and moved to another location on nearby Cherry Street two years later.  In 1983, the museum moved to 21st Street near the Franklin Institute.  On February 14, 2005, the museum received an 80-year lease for Memorial Hall (in Fairmount Park), the last major building left from the 1876 Centennial Exposition.  This came after plans to relocate the museum to a location at Penn's Landing fell through.  One of the features is the The Walking Piano by local kinetic artist Remo Saraceni, made famous in the film Big.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Please_Touch_Museum 

Famous people from Ohio  Neil Alden Armstrong astronaut, George Bellows painter, lithographer, Ambrose Bierce journalist, Erma Bombeck columnist, humorist, Bill Boyd / Hopalong Cassidy actor, William Jennings Bryan U.S. presidential candidate, Milton Caniff cartoonist, Hart Crane poet, George Armstrong Custer army officer, Dorothy Dandridge actress, Doris Day singer, actress, Clarence Seward Darrow lawyer, Ruby Dee actress, Hugh Downs TV broadcaster, Thomas Alva Edison inventor, Clark Gable actor, James Abram Garfield U.S. president, Cass Gilbert architect, Lillian Gish actress, John Herschel Glenn astronaut, senator, Ulysses Simpson Grant U.S. president, Zane Grey author, Warren Gamaliel Harding U.S. president, Rutherford Hayes U.S. president, Benjamin Harrison U.S. president, Robert Henri painter, William Dean Howells author, critic, Charles F. Kettering inventor, Maya Lin artist, sculptor, Dean Martin singer, actor, William McKinley U.S. president, Toni Morrison author, Paul Newman actor, Jack Nicklaus golfer, Annie Oakley markswoman, Tyrone Power actor, Judith Resnik astronaut, Eddie Rickenbacker aviator, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. historian, William Tecumseh Sherman army general, Steven Spielberg director, screenwriter, William H. Taft U.S. president, Tecumseh Shawnee Indian chief, James Thurber author, cartoonist, Orville Wright inventor, Cy Young baseball player  See more names at:  http://forums.footballguys.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=321964

Not on the above list:  Clarinetist Ted Lewis was born in Circleville, Ohio in 1890 and was playing leading bands in Ohio as early as 1910.  http://www.redhotjazz.com/tedlewis.html

Take a 1:25 tour of the Ted Lewis Museum at:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QltlgE13E-Y 

A red herring is a detail or remark inserted into a discussion, either intentionally or unintentionally, that sidetracks the discussion.  The red herring is invariably irrelevant and is often emotionally charged.  The participants in the discussion go after the red herring and forget what they were initially talking about; in fact, they may never get back to their original topic."
(Robert J. Gula, Nonsense: Red Herrings, Straw Men and Sacred Cows: How We Abuse Logic in Our Everyday Language. Axios, 2007) http://grammar.about.com/od/rs/g/redherrterm.htm 

A red letter day (or red-letter day):  In earlier times a church festival or saint's day; more recently, any special day.  This comes from the practise of marking the dates of church festivals on calendars in red.  The first explicit reference to the term in print that we have comes from America.  This is a simple use of the term "Red letter day" in the diary of Sarah Knight - The journals of Madam Knight, and Rev. Mr. Buckingham ... written in 1704 & 1710, which was published in American Speech in 1940.  The practice is much earlier than that though.  William Caxton, referred to it in The boke of Eneydos, translated and printed in 1490:  "We wryte yet in oure kalenders the hyghe festes wyth rede lettres of coloure of purpre."  The term came into wider use in 1549 when the first Book of Common Prayer included a calendar with holy days marked in red ink; for example, Annunciation (Lady Day), 25th March, was designated in the book as a red-letter day. 

http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/red-letter-day.html 

Gateway to Paradise on the South Island near Queenstown  Glenorchy is home to some of New Zealand’s finest scenery, paradise itself and the famous Routeburn Track; one of the top 10 classic hikes in the world.  Enjoy some of the best fly fishing in New Zealand, jetboat the Dart River and walk, mountain bike, fish and kayak in this outstanding natural environment.  See pictures and link to more information at:   http://www.glenorchy-nz.com/ 

The long-dead Jorge Luis Borges is a minor Internet star.  The Argentine short story writer, who died in 1986, left behind an unlikely legacy on YouTube and other sites: audio recordings and videos of his lectures, many recorded in Buenos Aires during a famous series of talks in 1977.  “People imagine the blind imprisoned in a world of black,” he says in his lecture on blindness  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vaom4uQ14w0   This, Borges says, is a common misconception.  He quotes a line from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets:  "Looking on the darkness which the blind do see.”  The Bard is wrong, Borges says, “if we understand darkness as blackness.”  He says, “For me, a person who was used to sleeping in darkness, one of the things that bothered me most was sleeping in that world of fog, of greenish and bluish fog … which is the world of the blind.” 

The New York Review of Books has a wonderful excerpt  http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jul/28/lecture-johnson-and-boswell/   this week from "Professor Borges," a talk entitled “A lecture on Johnson and Boswell.”  The lecture tells the story of the lexicographer Samuel Johnson (author of one the first great English dictionaries) and James Boswell, his biographer.  “Boswell gives himself the role of the ridiculous one, and he maintains it throughout the entire book,” Borges says.  “Yet, we feel a sincere friendship between the two... It is natural, as I have said, that this would be so; for Johnson was a famous man and alone, and of course he liked to feel by his side the friendship of a much younger man, who so obviously admired him.”  The second book published by New Directions is “Borges at Eighty: Conversations,” a collection of interviews from his 1980 trip to the United States.  “The man we see in these eleven interviews is a person made of books, a librarian who often remarked that his idea of paradise was an endless library — a sort of eternal busman’s holiday,” Mark O’Connell writes in The New Yorker  http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/07/two-new-books-about-borges.html    “He speaks of himself as a reader first and a writer only secondarily.”   Hector Tobar  http://www.latimes.com/features/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-jorge-luis-borges-blindess-and-books-20130731,0,3033494.story 

Why do you have to rain on my tirade?  Hi and Lois comic strip  August 10, 2013 

A meteor shower is a spike in the number of meteors or "shooting stars" that streak through the night sky.  Most meteor showers are spawned by comets.  As a comet orbits the Sun it sheds an icy, dusty debris stream along its orbit.  If Earth travels through this stream, we will see a meteor shower.  Although the meteors can appear anywhere in the sky, if you trace their paths, the meteors in each shower appear to "rain" into the sky from the same region.  Meteor showers are named for the constellation that coincides with this region in the sky, a spot known as the radiant.  The Perseid meteor shower, August 11 and 12 this year,  is so named because meteors appear to fall from a point in the constellation Perseus.  "Shooting stars" and "falling stars" are both names that describe meteors -- streaks of light across the night sky caused by small bits of interplanetary rock and debris called meteoroids vaporizing high in Earth's upper atmosphere.  Traveling at tens of thousands of miles an hour, meteoroids quickly ignite from the searing friction with the atmosphere, 30 to 80 miles above the ground.  Almost all are destroyed in this process; the rare few that survive and hit the ground are known as meteorites.  When a meteor appears, it seems to "shoot" quickly across the sky, and its small size and intense brightness might make you think it is a star.  See list of 2013 meteor showers at:  http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors