Earls Court is a district in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in London, England  It is an inner-London district centred on Earl's Court Road and surrounding streets, located 3.1 miles (5 km) west south-west of Charing Cross.  Earls Court was once a rural area, covered with green fields and market gardens.  The Saxon Thegn Edwin held the lordship of the area prior to the Norman Conquest.  For over 500 years the land, part of the ancient manor of Kensington, was under the lordship of the Vere family, the Earls of Oxford and descendants of Aubrey de Vere I, who held the manor of Geoffrey de Montbray, bishop of Coutances, in Domesday Book in 1086.   The earls held their manorial court where Old Manor Yard is now, just by the London Underground station.  Earls Court Farm is visible on Greenwood's map of London dated 1827.   Some of the well-known people who have lived there are Howard Carter (1874–1939), English archaeologist, Egyptologist and primary discoverer of the tomb of Tutankhamun, lived at 19 Collingham Gardens; Benjamin Britten (1913–1976), English composer, conductor, violist and pianist; Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980), English filmmaker and producer; Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997), the first wife of Charles, Prince of Wales; Freddie Mercury (1946–91), flamboyant lead singer with the world-renowned rock group Queen; and Stewart Granger (1913–1993), Hollywood actor.  Earls Court was the setting for the 1941 novel 'Hangover Square:  A Tale of Darkest Earl's Court' by novelist and playwright Patrick Hamilton.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earls_Court 

Mind your Ps and Qs  Be on your best behaviour; be careful of your language.   Ps and Qs are just the plurals of the letters P and Q.  There is some disagreement amongst grammarians about how to spell Ps and Qs - either upper-case or lower-case and either with or without an apostrophe.  You may see the phrase as 'mind your p's and q's' or 'mind your Ps and Qs' or 'mind your P's and Q's' or (less often) as 'mind your ps and qs'.  Doubts also exist as to the original meaning. Francis Grose, in his 1785 edition of The Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, defines it like this:  "To mind one's P's and Q's; to be attentive to the main chance."  The date of the coinage of 'mind your Ps and Qs' is uncertain. There is a citation from Thomas Dekker's play, The Untrussing of the Humorous Poet, 1602, which appears to be the earliest use of the expression:

 

Afinius:  ...here's your cloak; I think it rains too.
Horace:  Hide my shoulders in't.
Afinius:  'Troth, so thou'dst need; for now thou art in thy Pee and Kue: thou hast such a villanous broad back...

Find five possible origins of the phrase at http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/mind-your-ps-and-qs.html 

Q:  Who was "Nanook of the North"?  A:  It wasn't a person, but a 1922 documentary, "Nanook of the North:  A Story Of Life and Love in the Actual Arctic."  Robert Flaherty's 79-minute silent classic follows Inuit hunter Allakariallak (Nanook) and his family for a year in the harsh Hudson Bay region of Canada.  The Criterion Collection.
Q:  Why is this season called "fall" and "autumn"?  A:  It used to have just one name, "harvest."  As Europeans moved into cities in the 1600s, they referred to it as "fall of the leaf," or "fall."  Etymologists don't know the origin of the word "autumn."  Chaucer used it in the 1300s and Shakespeare often used it, as in "A Midsummer's Night Dream" in 1595:  "The spring, the summer, the childing autumn, angry winter."   dictionary.com.   http://www.thecourier.com/Opinion/columns/2013/Oct/JU/ar_JU_102813.asp?d=102813,2013,Oct,28&c=c_13

“[D]on't ever apologize to an author for buying something in paperback, or taking it out from a library (that's what they're there for.  Use your library).  Don't apologize to this author for buying books second hand, or getting them from bookcrossing or borrowing a friend's copy.  What's important to me is that people read the books and enjoy them, and that, at some point in there, the book was bought by someone.  And that people who like things, tell other people. The most important thing is that people read... ”   “Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them.  And it's much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”   “Libraries are our friends.”  “I lived in books more than I lived anywhere else.”  “We owe it to each other to tell stories.”  “Writing's a lot like cooking.  Sometimes the cake won't rise, no matter what you do, and every now and again the cake tastes better than you ever could have dreamed it would.”  Quotes by Neil Gaiman  Source:  goodreads.com/quotes 

Inspired by the 10 rules for writing Elmore Leonard wrote for The New York Times, The Guardian decided to reach out and as a few other writers to share their expertise.  Here is what Neil Gaiman had to say:

1.  Write.

2.  Put one word after another.  Find the right word, put it down.

3.  Finish what you’re writing.  Whatever you have to do to finish it, finish it.
4.  Put it aside.  Read it pretending you’ve never read it before.  Show it to friends whose opinion you respect and who like the kind of thing that this is.
5.  Remember:  when people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right.  When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.
6.  Fix it.  Remember that, sooner or later, before it ever reaches perfection, you will have to let it go and move on and start to write the next thing.  Perfection is like chasing the horizon.  Keep moving.
7.  Laugh at your own jokes.
8.  The main rule of writing is that if you do it with enough assurance and confidence, you’re allowed to do whatever you like.  (That may be a rule for life as well as for writing.  But it’s definitely true for writing.)  So write your story as it needs to be written.  Write it ­honestly, and tell it as best you can. I’m not sure that there are any other rules.  Not ones that matter.  Writing is one of those things that some people do because they have something they’d like to say, and other people do because they have something they absolutely must say.  Some days are just putting words on paper and building that habit, building those muscles.  Other days, the days where you leave everything else aside and scale the castle walls with your bare hands to get a better shot at that dragon and bring it to the ground—those are the good writing days.  “Writing is flying in dreams.  When you remember.  When you can.  When it works.  It’s that easy.”

http://www.elephantjournal.com/2013/02/neil-gaimans-8-rules-for-writing/ 

Two email providers forced to close their services in the wake of theEdward Snowden revelations on mass surveillance have proposed a new open standard for secure email that would be harder for security services and others to eavesdrop upon.  The encrypted email service Lavabit, and Silent Circle, a firm also encrypting phone calls and texts, are the founding members of the Darkmail Alliance, a service that aims to prevent government agencies from listening in on the metadata of emails.  The metadata is the information bundled up with the content of an email such as that showing the sender, the recipient and date the message was sent.  Conventional email can never be made fully secure because the standard requires some metadata to be sent unencrypted.  Alex Hern  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/30/darkmail-encryption-inbox-silent-circle-lavabit 

Once observed mainly by people of Mexican heritage, Day of the Dead, or Dia de los Muertos, a venerable and quirky holiday that honors the departed with a blend of Aztec and Christian elements, is getting new life in the U.S. among a mainstream audience.  From museums to dolls to an animated Walt Disney Co.DIS inYour ValueYour Change Short position movie, los muertos and their annual day are on the rise in popular culture, a development that gratifies new fans, but irks some traditionalists.  According to Muertos tradition, on Nov. 1 and 2, the heavens open and the souls of the dead return to earth.  Their living relatives build altars with offerings of food, drink and even sports memorabilia to entice them to come down, dine and celebrate.  Miriam Jordan  http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303843104579167982472259344