The making of footballs  Since 1941 Wilson has provide the official NFL game ball and since 1955 those balls have been laced and branded in a single manufacturing plant in Ada, Ohio.  The only dedicated football plant worldwide pumps out more than 700,000 balls. each year.  A single cowhide results in ten footballs, each constructed of four panels and a single piece of lace woven through 16 holes (don't tell us you really thought it was pigskin?).  http://www.popsci.com/node/31638 

The making of baseballs  For 10 hours a day, workers at the world's only factory authorized to supply Major League Baseball, in the town of Turrialba in central Costa Rica, sit at desks yanking strands of waxy red fiber to form each baseball's 108 stitches.  In professional games the balls quickly become too dirty and scuffed by bats to use, or get lost in the crowd on a foul ball or home run.  To feed the demand, the factory turns out as many as 2.4 million baseballs a year, all assembled by hand.  The cork and rubber cores, Tennessee Holstein cowhide and gray New Zealand sheep's wool yarn are shipped tax-free to the plant where more than 300 workers sit in neat rows to sew, their arms rhythmically rising and falling like a rowing team.  The finished balls are boxed up and shipped to Miami.  http://www.reuters.com/article/2010/03/09/us-costarica-baseballs-idUSTRE62831Z20100309 

The making of tennis balls The first stage in the life of a tennis ball is a big sheet of rubber.  This sheet of rubber is fed through a machine that stamps out little plugs of rubber.  These are called slugs.  The slugs are melted in a machine and poured into molds.  The molds are a hollow half-sphere shape, just like a bowl.  Each slug forms one of these bowl shapes called half-shells.  The half-shells are then fed into a machine where they are shaken until they are all facing the same direction, with the open side up.  The half-shells are dropped into trays where glue is applied to the rim. Then the half-shells go into a press.  Other trays of half-shells are flipped upside down and placed on top, gluing the two sides together.  The press closes, squeezing the two sides together and forming a perfect sphere.  The cores are then sent to a machine that roughens up the surface of the ball by scuffing it.  Having a rougher surface allows glue to stick to it better.  Meanwhile, felt is cut to wrap around the ball.  The felt is cut into peanut-shaped strips.  When two of these strips are wrapped together around the core, they link up perfectly and there are no overlapping or empty spots.  http://www.ehow.com/how-does_4899206_how-tennis-balls-made.html 

From:  Anu Garg (words at wordsmith.org)  Subject:  Dispatches from Japan - Part 2  (See part 1 at:  http://wordsmith.org/awad/awadmail584.html)  Last month, on Aug 6, as I sat under a pavilion that protected people from oppressive heat, it was hard to imagine that that place was much much hotter exactly 68 years ago.  I was in Hiroshima, the place that has the dubious distinction of being the first city to experience an atomic bomb.  Every year, the day is observed with a Peace Memorial Ceremony.  At 8:15 am, the time when the bomb was dropped, a peace bell is rung.  There's a large gathering and addresses by the Prime Minister of Japan, the Mayor of Hiroshima, and atomic bomb survivors among others.  The theme remains the same:  peace.  Every time a country conducts an atomic weapon test, the mayor of Hiroshima sends a letter of protest.  After the ceremony I walked around the park.  There are many memorials, but the most touching is of a 12-year-old girl named Sadako Sasaki.  She was about a mile from the hypocenter when the bomb dropped and her exposure to the radiation resulted in leukemia.  While in hospital, she heard the Japanese legend that anyone who folds a thousand paper cranes gets a wish.  She started folding cranes, she folded more than a thousand cranes, but she still died.  In her memory, schoolchildren around the world still send countless strings of paper cranes to Hiroshima.  (There's a statue of Sadako in Seattle as well.)  I went inside the Peace Museum and attended a presentation by a hibakusha (survivor of an atomic blast) relate her experience.  During the hour-long talk, I tried to detect any trace of bitterness without success.  Later in the day, I visited Hiroshima Castle.  On the castle grounds I met a man, now retired, who volunteered as a guide.  He showed me a eucalyptus tree that was scorched by the nuclear blast but is now thriving.  Before taking leave, I asked the man what he thought of Americans considering the US turned their city into a cemetery.  He told me, "Hate war, not hate people."  Dispatches from Japan Part 3  The former capital, Kyoto (literally, "capital city") and modern capital Tokyo (literally, "eastern capital") are anagrams of each other.  Tokyo Metropolitan Police has its own mascot. In fact, police in each of the 47 prefectures in Japan have their own cartoon mascots.  In the Hiroshima Peace Museum, I saw a man with a tattoo in binary code on his leg.  There's a vending machine at each street corner. No, let me be more precise. There are multiple vending machines on each street corner, selling dozens of hot & cold drinks, including tea, coffee, beer, and even Coke and Pepsi. If you don't find what you are looking for, chances are it'll be in the vending machine a few feet down.  See Part 4 at:  http://wordsmith.org.awad/awadmail587. html

The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington is a new center for cutting-edge and compelling scholarship about George Washington, Colonial America, and the Revolutionary Era.   Link to hours and directions, calendar of events, the collection, FAQs, photos and more at:  http://www.mountvernon.org/library 

A List of Early Maps and Surveys Drawn or Annotated by George Washington  http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/gwmlst.html 

Places named for George Washington   In addition to the state of Washington, find many places--both in and out of the United States-- named for the first president at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_named_for_George_Washington 

Sept. 27, 2013  Emoticons started 31 years ago, when a joke about a fake mercury spill at Carnegie Mellon University was posted on a digital message board and mistaken for a genuine safety warning.  The board's users cast about for a means to distinguish humorous posts from serious content.  On Sept. 19, 1982, faculty member Scott E. Fahlman entered the debate with the following message:  I propose that [sic] the following character sequence for joke markers:  :-)  Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use:  :-(   The rest is Internet history.  Dr. Fahlman's expressive, minimal icons became an integral part of online communication, if not always a welcome one.  These "smileys," as they came to be known, were effectively the first online irony marks.  Keith Houston,  the author of "Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols & Other Typographical Marks" (W.W. Norton) from which this is adapted.  Read more history of emoticons at:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304213904579093661814158946.html?mod=djemITP_h 

Sept. 28, 2013  The Southern California Independent Booksellers Assn.--SCIBA--celebrated its favorite books of the last year and got to know some writers with books on the way Sept. 27 at its 2013 Authors Feast.  Bestselling thriller writer Jeffery Deaver, whose book "The October List" debuts next week, gave the keynote address.  To be eligible for the awards, books must in some way reflect the Southern California experience, and the author must live in the region, Mexican border north to Morro Bay. Winners were:  Fiction:  "Mary Coin" by Marisa Silver; Nonfiction:  "Little Flower: Recipes from the Cafe" by Christine Moore; Glen Goldman Art, Architecture and Photography:  "Rock 'n' Roll Billboards of the Sunset Strip" by Robert Landau; T. Jefferson Parker Mystery Award:  "What the Heart Remembers" by Debra Ginsberg; Young Adult Fiction:  "Far Far Away" by Tom McNeal; Middle Grade Fiction:  "Write This Book" by Pseudonymous Bosch; Picture Book:  "The Dark" by John Klassen and Lemony Snicket.  Carolyn Kellogg  http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-so-cal-independent-booksellers-celebrate-their-2013-favorites-20130928,0,6459824.story 

Sept. 24, 2013  What would you do if you went to the library in search of "The Adventures of Captain Underpants" for your child, or to re-read Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Beloved" only to find that the book had been pulled from the shelves because another patron objected to its content?  It happens in the United States more often than many realize.  At least 464 formal complaints were filed in 2012 seeking to remove books from libraries or schools, according to the American Library Association, a sponsor of Banned Books Week, Sept. 22-28. in 2013.  Its mission is to celebrate the freedom to read and highlight the pitfalls of censorship.  The annual event started in 1982, the same year the Supreme Court ruled that students' First Amendment rights were violated when Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" and eight other books were removed from school libraries.  Despite the legal precedent, schools and libraries still receive formal challenges to remove books from library shelves or nix them from reading lists to protect children from material some see as inappropriate.  Just this month, a North Carolina school board voted to ban Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" based on complaints from the parent of an 11th-grader.  The board is reportedly scheduled to reconsider its decision.  Emanuella Grinberg and CNN Library  http://www.cnn.com/2013/09/24/living/banned-books-week/index.html