Friday, October 25, 2013

University of Iowa Firsts
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 

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 EarthGOOG inYour ValueYour Change Short position 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

No comments: