The American Library in Paris, a literary hangout in the expat days of Fitzgerald
and Hemingway, continues to thrive. Its
home is in a building close to the Eiffel Tower. The library was founded with books sent to U.S. soldiers
serving in World War I. Dorothy Reeder
was director of the library in 1940. She
defied the occupying Nazis by smuggling books to Jewish members who had been
banned from the building. With America's
entry into the war, Reeder was forced to depart and the Count and Countess de
Chambrun kept watch. The countess became
the head of the library and kept it open during the war. Charles Trueheart, a former Washington Post
correspondent in Paris is the current director of the library. Craig Turner
See six images at: http://www.chicagotribune.com/travel/la-tr-paris-american-library-20130826,0,244962.photogallery
In maritime
law, flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict
describe specific kinds of wreck. The words
have specific nautical meanings, with legal consequences in the law of admiralty
and marine
salvage. Flotsam is floating
wreckage of a ship or its cargo. Jetsam
is part of a ship, its equipment, or its cargo that is purposefully cast
overboard or jettisoned to lighten the load in time of distress and that sinks
or is washed ashore. Lagan (also
called ligan) is cargo
that is lying on the bottom of the ocean, sometimes marked by a buoy, which can be
reclaimed. Derelict is cargo that
is also on the bottom of the ocean, but which no one has any hope of
reclaiming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flotsam_and_jetsam
Louis Bromfield, born in 1896 in Mansfield Ohio, was
a World War I hero and journalist before writing his first novel, The
Green Bay Tree in 1924. He proceeded
to write 30 more novels and non-fiction works, including his Pulitzer-Prize
winning Early
Autumn.
The Farm: Louis
Bromfield returned to his native Mansfield in 1939 and purchased Malabar Farm,
where he would live until his death in 1956. Bromfield was a pioneer in sustainable farming, and created
one of the country's first truly organic farms at Malabar. The working farm was a mecca for his
Hollywood friends, including James Cagney, Shirley Temple, and Errol Flynn. The farm was the site of the 1945 wedding
between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Bromfield was the best man.
The Main House: The 32-room
"Main House" is a combination of traditional Western Reserve
architecture and French Provincial design elements. Designed by Bromfield with the assistance of
architect, Louis Lamoreux, the house is furnished with original paintings,
French antique furniture, custom wall paper, and many of Bromfield's personal
belongings. The house was the site of Lauren
Bacall and Humphrey Bogart's wedding and honeymoon as well as featured in the movie Shawshank
Redemption. The house is
preserved as he left it in 1956.
The Gift Shop and the Farm Market: The Gift Shop at Malabar Farm stocks
a full selection of works by Louis Bromfield. In addition, the shop sells locally made
honey, maple syrup, fudge, and other products. The Farm Market, is open
every day from May through October from 10am to 8pm and features a wide variety
of fresh fruit, vegetables, bird seed, and cut flowers.
Malabar Farm Restaurant:
The
restaurant at Malabar Farm is located in an early 19th century brick prairie
home, acquired by Bromfield in 1941. It
was Bromfield's plan to create a French restaurant out of the home. When that didn't happen, he included the
property in his farming plans. Today,
the restaurant is open seasonally, between March and December, and serves
hearty home-cooked lunches and dinners, featuring the produce and livestock of
the area.
Contact Information: Malabar Farm State Park, 4050 Bromfield Rd.,
Lucas, OH 44843
419 892-2784 http://cleveland.about.com/od/ohiostateparks/p/malabarfarm.htm
419 892-2784 http://cleveland.about.com/od/ohiostateparks/p/malabarfarm.htm
'Sleep tight'
didn't derive from either bedcoverings or ancient furniture and, in fact, isn't
a very old expression at all. The first
citation of it that I can find is from 1866.
In her diary Through Some Eventful Years, Susan Bradford Eppes
included: "All is ready and we
leave as soon as breakfast is over. Goodbye little Diary. ‘Sleep tight and wake bright,’ for I will need
you when I return." There aren't
many other known citations until the early 20th century and the OED lists none
until 1933, by which time the innerspring mattress had been invented and most
mattresses were supported by metal straps or springs. This puts the phrase out of general
circulation at the date that rope-strung beds were commonly used, which makes
the rope-stringing origin unlikely at best.
Susan Eppes' line, with its clear link between 'sleep tight' and 'sleep
well', leads us to the most probable explanation for the phrase. The word tightly, although not often used in
this way now, means 'soundly, properly, well'.
The earlier phrase 'tight asleep' derives from this meaning, as seen in
this example from Marie Beauchamp's novel Elizabeth and her German Garden,
1898: And once, when there was a storm
in the night, she complained loudly, and wanted to know why lieber Gott didn't
do the scolding in the daytime, as she had been so tight asleep. 'Tight asleep' just meant
'soundly asleep', or to put it another way 'fast asleep',
and 'sleep tight' just means 'sleep soundly'.
http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/sleep%20tight.html
Abraham Lincoln's favorite poem In
the 1830s, Dr. Jason Duncan introduced Lincoln to the poem
"Mortality" (sometimes called "Immortality" or "Oh,
Why Should the Spirit of Mortal be Proud?") by William Knox. Gradually Lincoln memorized the piece, but
did not know the author's identity until late in life. He became so identified with the poem that
some people thought he had written it.
He once remarked, "I would give all I am worth, and go in debt, to
be able to write so fine a piece as I think that is." The author, a descendant of reformer John
Knox, published the poem in a collection called The Songs of Israel in
1824, shortly before his death at age 36.
Lawrence Weldon, who traveled the law circuit with Lincoln, recalled
Lincoln reciting the poem in 1860. Read
the poem at: http://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/education/knox.htm
San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera sued the state of Nevada on Sept. 10,
2013, accusing it of deliberately giving almost 500 psychiatric patients at a
state-run hospital one-way bus tickets to California. San Francisco officials have suspected for
years that such tactics were exacerbating the city's homeless problem, but thus
far it has been difficult to prove. Nevada officials say the discharges were
proper and similar to a busing program San Francisco employs. The class-action lawsuit filed in San
Francisco Superior Court seeks a court order forbidding the transfer of
patients to California unless they are residents or prior arrangements have
been made for their care. It also seeks restitution for about $500,000 that the
city says it has spent providing medical care, housing and other services to 20
of 24 patients bused to San Francisco in recent years from the Rawson-Neal Psychiatric Hospital in Las Vegas, Nevada's primary state
mental facility. John
Coté
Sept. 11, 2013 Pop
star Nicki Minaj burned up dance floors last summer with her hit song
"Starships," which set a Billboard record for its stretch of 21
consecutive weeks in the Top 10.
Clive Tanaka, meanwhile,
is an underground artist who has cloaked himself in mystery. While his meticulously crafted electronic
music has won accolades, he's never performed in public. His fans don't know his real name or even
where he hails from. Now Tanaka, in a
lawsuit filed under the name of his company, is accusing the Trinidad-born
Minaj of stealing from his 2011 song "Neu Chicago" to create the
electro-pop hooks that drove her best-selling single. In a copyright infringement suit filed Sept. 10, 2013 in U.S.
District Court in Chicago, Tanaka said Minaj and several of her
"Starships" collaborators copied substantial portions of "Neu
Chicago," which Tanaka claims had already enjoyed widespread airplay in
the U.S. and hundreds of thousands of listens online by the time
"Starships" was written. Jason
Meisner http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/chi-nicki-minaj-lawsuit-20130910,0,5248749.story Court Case Number: 1:13-cv-06475
The Voyager-1 spacecraft has become the first manmade object to leave the
Solar System.
Scientists say the probe's
instruments indicate it has moved beyond the bubble of hot gas from our Sun and
is now moving in the space between the stars.
Launched in 1977, Voyager was sent initially to study the
outer planets, but then just kept on going.
Today, the veteran Nasa mission is almost 19 billion km (12 billion
miles) from home. This distance is so
vast that it takes 17 hours now for a radio signal sent from Voyager to reach
receivers here on Earth. Sensors on
Voyager had been indicating for some time that its local environment had
changed. The data that finally convinced the mission
team to call the jump to interstellar space came from the probe's Plasma Wave
Science (PWS) instrument. This can
measure the density of charged particles in Voyager's vicinity. When the
Voyager team put the new data together with information from the other
instruments onboard, they calculated the moment of escape to have occurred on
or about 25 August, 2012. This conclusion is contained in a report published by the journal Science. http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/09/11/science.1241681.abstract
"This is big; it's
really impressive - the first human-made object to make it out into
interstellar space," said Prof Don Gurnett from the University of Iowa and
the principal investigator on the PWS.
Voyager-1 departed Earth on 5 September 1977, a few days after its
sister spacecraft, Voyager-2. The pair's
primary objective was to survey the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune
- a task they completed in 1989. They
were then steered towards deep space. It
is expected that their plutonium power sources will stop supplying electricity
in about 10 years, at which point their instruments and their 20W transmitters
will die. Jonathan Amos http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24026153
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