What Is the World Heritage List?  Administered by the United Nations Educational and Scientific Organization, or UNESCO, the World Heritage List is an official roster of properties associated with the world’s cultural and natural heritage that the World Heritage Committee regards as having outstanding universal value.  Currently there are 981 properties worldwide on the list, among them the Great Wall of China, Taj Mahal, Acropolis, Chartres Cathedral and Stonehenge.  The World Heritage List currently includes 21 sites in the United States, among them Independence Hall, the Statue of Liberty, Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site and Everglades, Grand Canyon, Yellowstone and Yosemite national parks.  The Ohio Historical Society is collaborating with the National Park Service’s Hopewell Culture National Historical Park, Ohio State University’s Newark Earthworks Center and the University of Cincinnati’s Center for the Electronic Reconstruction of Historic and Archaeological Sites to have a number of sites in Licking, Ross and Warren counties collectively known as the Hopewell Ceremonial Earthworks added to the World Heritage List. http://www.ohiohistory.org/publications/ohio-histore-news/2013/september-27-2013/world-heritage

Vegetable Heaven, written and illustrated by Mollie Katzen should be available at your public library--if not, the library will probably get it for you on interlibrary loan.  This book is chock-full of recipes for roasted vegetables, pickled vegetables, simple pastas and grains, salads, soups  and more.  From the book:

·         A good soup attracts chairs--African proverb

·         The word basmati means queen of fragrance.

·         Hominy is the name given to dried whole corn kernels that have been boiled with lye or lime to remove the outer skin.  Grits traditionally were made from ground hominy, but nowadays, the word grits usually refers to coarse white cornmeal. 

·         A native American vegetable, the sunchoke (also called Jerusalem artichoke) is the tuber of a pretty yellow sunflower. 

chock-full adjective (never before noun)  informal

very full, especially with things that are pleasant or enjoyable  Example:  a book that's chock-full of delicious recipes  http://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/chock-full 

The High Line is a 1-mile (1.6 km)  New York City linear park built on a 1.45-mile (2.33 km) section of the former elevated New York Central Railroad spur called the West Side Line, which runs along the lower west side of Manhattan; it has been redesigned and planted as an aerial greenway.  A similar project in Paris (the nearly 3 mile Promenade plantée, completed in 1993) was the inspiration for this project.  The High Line currently runs from Gansevoort Street, three blocks below West 14th Street, in the Meatpacking District, up to 30th Street, through the neighborhood of Chelsea to the West Side Yard, near the Javits Convention Center.  Read of its its use in popular culture at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Line_(New_York_City)  Find hours, access and more at:  http://www.thehighline.org/about/park-information 

DO NOT use an apostrophe to pluralize a proper name or other capitalized noun:
Many Pakistanis have immigrated to the U.S. (not Pakistani’s); I’ll be occupied for the next three Thursdays. (not Thursday’s); The Jeffersons live here. (not the Jefferson’s)

NOTE:  The Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) suggests that if you want to pluralize an awkward name like Waters or Rogers, you may want to reword the sentence to avoid writing the Waterses or Rogerses.

DO NOT use an apostrophe to form the plural of capital letters used as words, abbreviations that contain no interior periods, and numerals used as nouns:
the three Rs; the 1990s; lengthy URLs

DO use the apostrophe to form the plural of an abbreviation that combines upper and lowercase letters or has interior periods:
The department graduated five M.A.’s and two Ph.D.’s this year.

NOTE:  If you leave out the periods, you can write MAs but you’d still have to write PhD’s.

DO use the apostrophe to form the plural of lowercase letters:  Mind your p’s and q’s.

DO NOT use an apostrophe to form the plural of a number:
The 1920s were noted for excess; I bowled two 300s and two 238s.; Source:  Chicago Manual of Style, paragraphs 7.9, 7.12, 7,14, 7.15, 7.16, 7.65, 9.59.  Read much more at:  http://www.dailywritingtips.com/when-to-form-a-plural-with-an-apostrophe/ 

The 5 most surprising provisions in the debt deal by Steve Almasy

Read the article and link to the text of the appropriations bill passed by the Senate at http://www.cnn.com/2013/10/17/politics/new-debt-deal-pork/ 

Oct. 17, 2013  Running on a mere 2½ hours of sleep and exactly 12 hours after winning the Man Booker Prize for her novel “The Luminaries,” Eleanor Catton sat down for an interview with the Guardian's Charlotte Higgins.  The 28-year-old novelist from New Zealand, the youngest ever to win the prize, addressed the critics who have approached her complex novel with trite assumptions about gender.  Catton said the "people whose negative reaction [to 'The Luminaries'] has been most vehement have all been men over about 45."  She went on to say that there seems to be a misconception by some men of a certain generation that her gender and relative youth have bearing on the book -- more than 800 pages long -- itself.  There is, she said, "a sense of irritation from some critics -- that I have been so audacious to have taken up people's time by writing a long book.  There's a sense in there of:  'Who do you think you are?  You can't do that.' ”  Other young women whose literary achievements have catapulted them into the spotlight have faced similar biases.  In 2000, Zadie Smith, whose first book, “White Teeth”, was published when she was 25, was dubbed an international “Girl Wonder.”  "I have observed that male writers tend to get asked what they think and women what they feel," Catton says.  "In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are -- about luck and identity and how the idea struck them.  The interviews much more seldom engage with the woman as a serious thinker, a philosopher, as a person with preoccupations that are going to sustain them for their lifetime."  Her comments echo the minor storm that followed a Publisher's Weekly interview with Claire Messud earlier this year in which the author was asked about the likability of the protagonist of "The Woman Upstairs." Messud's startled reply, which included a list of indelible, unlikable male literary characters (Humbert Humbert, Hamlet and Oscar Wao), sparked a discussion of the different expectations put on male and female writers and the characters they create.  “The Luminaries” is the longest book to win the Man Booker; Catton, the prize's youngest winner, has created a work of complexity her critics didn't expect.  She told the Guardian, "There's a feeling of: 'All right, we can tolerate [this] from a man over 50, but we are not going to be spoken to like that by you.' "  Emily Keeler   http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-et-jc-man-booker-prize-winner-eleanor-catton-sexism-20131017,0,7685465.story 

October 18 events

1356 – Basel earthquake, the most significant historic seismological event north of the Alps, destroys the town of Basel, Switzerland.

1386 – Opening of the University of Heidelberg.
1648 – Boston Shoemakers form first U.S. labor organization.
1851 – Herman Melville's Moby-Dick is first published as The Whale by Richard Bentley of London.
1867 – United States takes possession of Alaska after purchasing it from Russia for $7.2 million. Celebrated annually in the state as Alaska Day.
1898 – United States takes possession of Puerto Rico.
1954 – Texas Instruments announces the first Transistor radio.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_18