Iowa played in the nation’s first collegiate basketball game in 1896.
Two UI gymnasts created the first trampoline in 1934.
Iowa swimming coach David Armbruster invented the butterfly stroke in 1935.
The Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the nation’s first university-sponsored program in creative writing, was founded in 1936.
The UI granted the first master of fine arts degree in 1940.
The UI granted the first Ph.D. in mass communication in 1948.
The first and only international writing program in the world was founded at Iowa in 1967.
UI alum Lilia Abron became the first African American woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemical engineering in 1973.
KRUI, the UI’s student-run radio station, became the nation’s first fully digital college radio station in 1995.
Iowa was the first university outside of China to arrange for a corps of student volunteers at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. http://oniowa.uiowa.edu/content/iowa-innovations-0 See also http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/spec-coll/archives/faq/faqfirsts.htm
During the Great Depression, as part of an effort to boost employment for women,
the Works Progress Administration funded the Pack Horse Library Project of
Eastern Kentucky, which sent women out on horseback to deliver books to parts
of the Cumberland Mountains inaccessible to cars and trucks. You can learn more about the Pack Horse
Library and the women who made it possible in Kathi Appelt and Jeanne Cannella
Schmitzer’s recently-released Down Cut Shin Creek: The Pack Horse Librarians of Kentucky. Read
about libraries in unlikely places and see photos at http://bookriot.com/2013/10/14/finding-libraries-unexpected-places/
Spruce-up
(to make smart and trim) is just a little phrase, and is nothing to do with
sweeping with spruce brooms, as some have suggested. It has taken quite a journey to get to us in
its present state. The state it started
from was Prussia. The 14th century word spruce
is a variant of Pruce, which was itself a shortened version of Prussia.
Originally, things that were spruce were
those items brought from Prussia; for example, spruce fir trees and, more to
the point for this phrase, spruce leather. From the end of the 16th century, spruce was
used as a verb meaning 'to make trim and neat'. In The terrors of the night, or, a
discourse of apparitions, 1594, Thomas Nashe equates 'sprucing' with
'cleaning': [You shall] spend a whole
twelue month in spunging & sprucing. 'Spruce' moved from being an adjective,
describing leather and other goods from Prussia, to a verb, meaning 'make smart
and neat'. The first mention of
'sprucing-up' comes in Sir George Etherege's Restoration drama The Man of
Mode, 1676: "I took particular
notice of one that is alwaies spruc'd up with a deal of dirty Sky-colur'd
Ribband." In 20th century America,
the term 'spruce-up' took on a new lease of life, with a slightly modified
meaning. It began to be used there to
mean 'tidy-up; refurbish' - a counterpart to the English 'Spring-clean'. Up
until then 'sprucing-up' had been reserved for people and their clothes. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/spruce-up.html
Sweet and tangy as they are, pomegranates are undoubtedly the
"un-convenience" fruit. Few
other foods demand as much of the eater. Not only do you have to break through that
tough, leathery outer shell, but then you have to pry apart the pith to get to
the delicious, though admittedly seedy, edible parts. Even after all that, you may well wind up with
all of your clothes stained bright red. There's
an easy way to clean a pomegranate, though. Score the skin in quarters and open it up. Then put each quarter underwater and use your
fingers to ream the seeds from the inside. The pith is light and will float to the top;
the heavier seedy fruit will sink. Here's a video to show you how: http://www.latimes.com/videogallery/73398919/Food/Los-Angeles-Times-Test-Kitchen-Tip-Peeling-Pomegranate
Russ Parsons Find how to choose, prepare and store pomegranates
at: http://www.latimes.com/food/dailydish/la-dd-pomegranates-the-ultimate-in-inconvenience-until-you-learn-the-trick-20131011,0,6871293.story
Iceland is experiencing a book boom. This island
nation of just over 300,000 people has more writers, more books published and
more books read, per head, than anywhere else in the world.
It is hard to avoid
writers in Reykjavik. There is a phrase
in Icelandic, "ad ganga med bok I maganum", everyone gives birth to a
book. Literally, everyone "has a
book in their stomach". One in 10
Icelanders will publish one. "Does
it get rather competitive?" I ask the young novelist, Kristin
Eirikskdottir. "Yes. Especially as I live with my mother and
partner, who are also full-time writers. But we try to publish in alternate years so we
do not compete too much." Dating
from the 13th Century, Icelandic sagas tell the stories of the country's Norse
settlers, who began to arrive on the island in the late 9th Century. Sagas are written on napkins and coffee cups. Each geyser and waterfall we visit has a tale
of ancient heroes and heroines attached.
Public benches have barcodes so you listen to a story on your smartphone
as you sit. Reykjavik is rocking with
writers. It is book festival time. Man Booker Prize winner Kiran Desai and
Generation X author Douglas Coupland rub shoulders with Icelandic literary
superstars Gerdur Kristny and Sjon. Sjon
also pens lyrics for Bjork, Iceland's musical superstar. "Writers are respected here," Agla
Magnusdottir tells me. " They live well. Some even get a salary." Magnusdottir is head of the new Icelandic
Literature Centre, which offers state support for literature and its
translation. "They write everything
- modern sagas, poetry, children's books, literary and erotic fiction - but the
biggest boom is in crime writing," she says. That is perhaps no surprise in this Nordic nation.
But crime novel sales figures are
staggering - double that of any of its Nordic neighbours. Rosie
Goldsmith
Read more at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-24399599
Oct. 23, 2013 LA JOLLA, Calif.—On March 26, 2012, San Diego detective Meryl Bernstein
received a call that a 200-pound statue of a storybook character had
disappeared from the home of Audrey Geisel, widow of children's author Theodor
Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.
Detective Sergeant
Bernstein rushed to the hilltop estate, thinking, "We gotta find him. Who steals from Dr. Seuss?" The "him" was a bronze rendering of
the Lorax, a mustachioed creature who "speaks for the trees" in
"The Lorax," Dr. Seuss's 1971 classic about environmental harm and
corporate greed. Instead of the fanciful
Truffula Trees the literary Lorax tried to preserve, the 2-foot-tall sculpture
stood beneath a pine—a tree that inspired the one Dr. Seuss drew for his Horton
the elephant character to sit on in another book. When Sgt. Bernstein arrived at the gold-hued
Spanish-style house to investigate, she told the widow how sorry she was that
the Lorax had been "stolen." "Oh,
it wasn't stolen," replied Mrs. Geisel, who was then 90 years old. "Somebody
lifted the Lorax away." It wasn't
until Sgt. Bernstein bought a copy of "The Lorax" that she understood
Mrs. Geisel was quoting from the book. What's
more, the story's first drawing depicts a winding road that resembled the one
leading to the Geisel residence. "We
freaked out when we realized it was called 'The Street of the Lifted Lorax,'
" says Sgt. Bernstein, leafing recently through the book she carries in
her car. "I thought, if I read to
the end of the book, we'd solve the crime." "We decided the statue had been melted
down for the metal," says Captain Brian Ahearn, Sgt. Bernstein's boss. Two months later, he "inactivated"
the case. Still, he recalls, "the
Lorax never left our collective memory."
The break came this August, in Bozeman, Mont., where Detective Robert
Vanuka had sought peace and quiet after toiling for years in southern
California. He recalls, "my
sergeant walks in and says, 'I have a great one for you in the lobby.' " Mr. Vanuka escorted a clean-cut 22-year-old
in a Hawaiian T-shirt and flip-flops to an interview room. "I'd like to report that I have stolen
the Lorax," he says the man told him.
"I asked him, 'What do you mean? The movie? The DVD?' " "He's like, 'No, I went into the home of
Geisel and took the Lorax statue.' "
The man, who was from La Jolla, explained that in a drunken stupor on
his 21st birthday, it was he who had lifted the Lorax. He hoisted the statue over a chain-link fence,
dragged it to his car and put it in his trunk. But overcome by guilt moments later, he rolled
the Lorax down a ravine less than a mile from the Geisel house. The detective said it wasn't clear why the
man chose to confess in Montana. Detective
Gregg Goodman got on the phone with the suspect, using Google Earth to
help plot the Lorax's route. Mr. Goodman
and a colleague combed the canyon for about an hour on Aug. 16. No sign. On Aug. 21, he returned with Sgt. Bernstein
and three other detectives with rappelling ropes. After an hour of searching through brittle
shrubs, they had begun to pack up, when Mr. Goodman made an elementary
deduction. "If the guy was drunk,
maybe he was off by a few feet," he remembers thinking. He took one last look, further along the road.
There, resting on its side under a bush,
was the Lorax. Now, the Lorax stands in
an undisclosed spot, beneath the gaze of a security camera, atop a stump with a
plaque engraved, "Unless." That
is the word of warning the Lorax left before lifting away from a land denuded
of Truffula Trees. "Unless someone
like you cares a whole awful lot," Dr. Seuss wrote, "nothing is going
to get better. It's not." Miriam
Jordan http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304500404579125803736438082
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