In all probability, the Passenger Pigeon was once the most abundant bird on the planet.  Alexander Wilson, the father of scientific ornithology in America, estimated that one flock consisted of two billion birds.  Wilson's rival, John James Audubon, watched a flock pass overhead for three days and estimated that at times more than 300 million pigeons flew by him each hour.  Elongated nesting colonies several miles wide could reach a length of forty miles.  In these colonies, droppings were thick enough to kill the forest understory.  Passenger Pigeons were denizens of the once great deciduous forests of the eastern United States.  The birds provided an easily harvested resource for native Americans and early settlers.  As railroads penetrated the upper Middle West after the Civil War, many millions of pigeons were shipped to cities along the Atlantic seaboard, since, by then, clearing of oak and beech forests and hunting had already exterminated the birds on the East Coast.  Extinction of the Passenger Pigeon came with stunning rapidity.  Michigan was its last stronghold; about three million birds were shipped east from there by a single hunter in 1878.  Eleven years later, 1889, the species was extinct in that state.  Although small groups of pigeons were held in various places in captivity, efforts to maintain those flocks failed.  The last known individual of the species, a female named Martha, died in 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo and is now on display in the U.S. National Museum of Natural History.  http://www.stanford.edu/group/stanfordbirds/text/essays/Passenger_Pigeon.html  

See also The Second Cooing:  Raising Passenger Pigeons from the Dead at:  http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/scientists-aim-to-bring-the-passenger-pigeon-back-from-extinction-a-893744.html 

American poet and educator Carl Dennis was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on September 17, 1939.  Dennis attended Oberlin College and the University of Chicago before receiving his bachelor's degree from the University of Minnesota in 1961.  In 1966, Dennis received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of California, Berkeley.  That same year he became an assistant professor of English at University at Buffalo, where he has spent most of his career; in 2002, he became an artist-in-residence there.  Dennis has also served on the faculty of the graduate program at Warren Wilson College.  Dennis has received several prizes for his poetry in addition to the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, including a Fellowship at the Rockefeller Study Center in Bellagio, Italy, a Guggenheim Fellowship (1984), a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry (1988), and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize (2000).  Dennis is the brother of American composer Robert Dennis.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Dennis 

Find works of composer Robert Dennis (b. 1933) at:  http://ibdb.com/person.php?id=71753  NOTE that the Toledo Symphony Orchestra will play Blackbird Variations for Brass Quintet (1987) by Robert Dennis as a TSO premiere on Nov. 3, 2013. 

"Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird" is a poem from Wallace Stevens' first book of poetry, Harmonium.  The poem consists of thirteen short, separate sections, each of which mentions blackbirds in some way.  Although inspired by haiku, none of the sections are actually haiku.  It was first published in October 1917 by Alfred Kreymborg in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse and two months later in the December issue of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse.  The poem has inspired a number of musicians, including the American contemporary music ensemble eighth blackbird which derived their name from the poem's eighth stanza which makes references to "noble accents/And lucid, inescapable rhythms", and inspired several specific compositions as well:  "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", by Lukas Foss, Thirteen Ways, by Thomas Albert; "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird," by Louise Talma for Tenor/Soprano, Oboe/Flute, and Piano; "Thirteen Other Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" (Piano Sonata No. 2) by Charles Bestor; and Blackbirds, for Flute and Bassoon, Gregory Youtz.   Additionally, the title "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a..." has been endlessly paraphrased in articles (e.g. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackout",music album-titles (e.g. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Goldberg"),and anywhere else a particular topic seems to bear examination from a number of different perspectives.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirteen_Ways_of_Looking_at_a_Blackbird 

The best music is essentially there to provide you something to face the world with.

Bruce Springsteen, musician (b. 1949) 

Font of wisdom or fount of wisdom?  Fount is a poetic form of fountain.  The expression “fount of wisdom” immediately makes me think of this quotation from Alexander Pope:   A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:  Pope was writing for readers who knew their classics.  Pieria is a district of the Greek region of Macedonia just north of Mount Olympus, regarded as the home of the Muses in Greek and Roman mythology.  Hence:  of or relating to the Muses, or (by extension) poetry and learning; poetic.  Pierian spring--the fountain or source of poetic inspiration.  So, “fount of wisdom” is the only correct spelling for me.  Since even a “font of type” can be spelled as a “fount of type” in England, I don’t think that any hard and fast rule can apply.  Maeve Maddox  http://www.dailywritingtips.com/fount-of-wisdom/ 

Sumer (a region of Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq) was the birthplace of writing, the wheel, agriculture, the arch, the plow, irrigation and many other innovations, and is often referred to as the Cradle of Civilization.  The Sumerians developed the earliest known writing system - a pictographic writing system known as cuneiform script, using wedge-shaped characters inscribed on baked clay tablets - and this has meant that we actually have more knowledge of ancient Sumerian and Babylonian mathematics than of early Egyptian mathematics.  The Sumerian System, called "sexagesimal", combined a mundane 10... with a "celestial" 6, to obtain the base figure 60.  This system enabled Sumerians to divide into fractions and multiply into the million, to calculate roots or raise numbers several powers.  This was not only the first known mathematical system, but also one that gave us... the "place" concept:  Just as, (in the decimal system), 2 can be 2 or 20 or 200, depending on the digits place, so could a Sumerian 2 mean 2, or 120 (2 x 60), and so on, depending on the place.  The 360 degree circle, the foot and its 12 inches, and the "dozen" as a unit, are but a few examples of the vestiges of Sumerian mathematics, still evident in our daily lives.  Read how Sumerians used their fingers in counting at:  http://www.mathematicsmagazine.com/Articles/TheSumerianMathematicalSystem.php   NOTE that the Sumerian system of mathematics is explained in Civilization One by Christopher Knight and Alan Butler, and that the I Ching and the martial art of Pa Kua are based on base eight to sixty four.  Thanks for the information, Regina. 

Twitter Tweeter mixup by Chuck Mikolajczak  NEW YORK (Reuters)  Excitement for Twitter's coming IPO is running pretty high--so much so that some investors on Oct. 4 mistook the nearly worthless stock of long-dead electronics retailer Tweeter for the "tweeting" site, sending shares up more than 1,000 percent.  Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, a specialty consumer electronics company that went bankrupt in 2007, saw a its most active day of trading in more than six years even though it has nothing to do with the social media site.  The stock, which trades over the counter, closed Thursday at a price of less than a penny a share, and Friday hit a high of 15 cents a share on Friday, before paring gains to trade at 5 cents, a 669 percent rise.  More than 11.7 million shares had traded by midday.   http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/technology/sns-rt-us-tweeterhome-twitter-20131004,0,1881101.story  

Karaoke World Championships USA, LLC  KWCUSA is the only organization in the United States affiliated with the Karaoke World Championship organization.  Global operations for this international competition is managed by the KWC parent organization from their headquarters in Heinola, Finland.  Each year the KWC parent organization sponsors this grand showcase and competition of competition winners from partner nations around the world to select the recognized karaoke world champion.   http://kwcusa.net/about.htm  Black Oak Casino in Tuolumne, CA hosts the KWCUSA National Championships Oct. 3, 4, and 5th 2013.  One male and one female will be selected as winners and sent, with financial aid, to the world championships.  As of Oct. 7, I have not located a list of the two 2013 winners.