It’s hard to describe St. Louis’s City Museum to people who haven’t been there, but calling it a giant playground is a good place to start.  The 600,000 square foot building, formerly home to the International Shoe Factory, was purchased in 1995 by Bob Cassilly (who died last year while creating a new, similarly whimsical tourist attraction, Cementland).  The classically-trained sculptor set out to make a funhouse for young and old out of unique, reclaimed objects found within the city’s municipal borders.  Today, the museum accepts things from all over.  A giant praying mantis sculpture is on top of the building.  Erin McCarthy  See pictures, including a pipe organ, a ferris wheel and the largest pencil in the world at http://mentalfloss.com/article/13063/11-awesomely-unexpected-things-st-louis%E2%80%99s-city-museum  

How Americans Value Public Libraries in Their Communities by Kathryn Zickuhr, Lee Rainie, Kristen Purcell and Maeve Duggan   Some 90% of Americans ages 16 and older said that the closing of their local public library would have an impact on their community, with 63% saying it would have a “major” impact.  Asked about the personal impact of a public library closing, two-thirds (67%) of Americans said it would affect them and their families, including 29% who said it would have a major impact.  Read much more in the Pew Internet study released Dec. 11, 2013 at http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2013/12/11/libraries-in-communities/ 

Shakespeare’s play The Tempest is a story rich with magical characters.  The main character Prospero and his daughter Miranda have been living on a primitive island for some time.  The play is infused with illusion and magic.  Prospero has become a King on the island and is in control of Ariel, an airy spirit and Caliban a monster.  When a ship wreaks on the island, caused by the tempest, who was raised by Ariel by Prospero’s order, the action begins.  Susan Kingston  Read about parallels in the films Forbidden Planet (1956 science fiction) and Prospero's Books (1991) at http://www2.cedarcrest.edu/academic/eng/lfletcher/tempest/papers/SKingston.htm

Forbidden Planet was made inside MGM studios (except for a handful of shots) and used a 10,000 foot circular painting as a backdrop.  One oddity about Forbidden Planet is that the film we see today is more or less an unfinished rough cut.  What happened is that experimental composers Louis and Bebe Barron had been asked to supply the music for the film.  (They'd previously only scored a few avant-garde shorts.)  It would turn out to be a landmark score, utilizing only generated sounds (no conventional instruments like violins or pianos) and paved the way for both new forms of film scoring and for a more open approach to music.  But the studio was a bit uneasy about the eerie score so they arranged a sneak preview to see how audiences would react. The response was so positive that MGM decided to release the film as it was, not even letting the editor tighten up the pacing or rework some rough patches.  The producer/writer/special effects team of Allen Adler and Irving Block ran a popular optical effects company, working on numerous schlock films but also classics like The Night of the Hunter (1955).  They came up with the idea for something called Fatal Planet as a potential project for one of the B-movie studios.  Instead they pitched it to the high-rollers at MGM, a process that required the duo to act out the story, including an impersonation of the invisible monster, for the benefit of the investors.  To everybody's surprise, the studio decided to make this their first science fiction film and budgeted the film at $1 million, later expanding it to almost double that amount.  For the script they enlisted novelist Cyril Hume, a descendant of philosopher David Hume whose main claim to film was writing screenplays for the popular Tarzan series.  Luckily, Hume's script for Forbidden Planet brings unusual depth to what might have been yet another tacky science fiction film.  It also has its down side: MGM insisted Hume add several "humorous" scenes revolving around the ship's cook, Cookie (played by Earl Holliman).  It's Hollywood executive decisions like this that lead some viewers to agree with literary historian James Kincaid's famous essay, "Who Is Relieved by Comic Relief?"  Robby the Robot was such a hit that he was used again the following year for The Invisible Boy (1957) but then vanished from the screen until a cameo in 1984's Gremlins (where he reuses some dialogue from Forbidden Planet).  The 6-foot, 11-inch creation required a person inside to man the controls as well as some outside electronic manipulation, none of which kept Robby from occasionally toppling over.  http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/18630%7C0/Forbidden-Planet.html

Return to the Forbidden Planet is a Jukebox musical by playwright Bob Carlton based on Shakespeare's The Tempest and the 1950s science fiction film Forbidden Planet .  Return to the Forbidden Planet started life with the Bubble Theatre Company as a production for open-air performance in a tent.  A revised version of the musical opened, indoors, at the Everyman Theatre in Liverpool in the mid-1980s.  It later moved to the Tricycle Theatre in London.  After some rework a final version opened the Cambridge Theatre in London's West End in September 1989.  It won the Olivier Award for Best New Musical for both 1989 and 1990.  The high energy show features a bevy of 1950s and 1960s rock and roll classics, performed on stage by the cast.  The campy sci-fi setting consists of silvered space suit costumes and space ship sets concealing keyboards and drums. The robot, Ariel, is performed by an actor on roller skates.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_to_the_Forbidden_Planet

Good reading
baseball fiction:  http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/baseball-fiction 

math fiction:  http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/math-fiction 
historical fiction  http://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/historical-fiction
military history:  books by Antony Beevor and Bruce Catton
history and literature:  anything by Helen Hooven Santmyer

Santmyer was born in 1895 and lived in Xenia, Ohio.  In addition to her career as a writer, she worked as an English professor, a dean of women, and a librarian.  She was 87 when her novel "And Ladies of the Club" was published as a Book of the Month, and passed away at the age of 90 in February of 1986.  She was inducted into the Ohio Women's Hall of Fame in 1996.  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/92881.Helen_Hooven_Santmyer 

Paraphrase from Making Money by Terry Pratchett

The dark organ music appeared to be "Cantata and Fugue for Someone Who Has Trouble with the Pedals."  As the last note died, the player spun around.  "Sorry about that, I have two left feet sometimes."

The Biggest Pinocchios of 2013 by Glenn Kessler  http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fact-checker/wp/2013/12/16/the-biggest-pinocchios-of-2013/?hpid=z3 

Harold Camping, a Christian radio evangelist whose brimstone-ridden sermons stoked an international media frenzy in 2011 after his Armageddon prophecies coursed through the Internet and social media, died Dec. 15 at his home in Alameda, Calif.  He was 92. That life on Earth continued after May 21, 2011, was a crushing disappointment to Mr. Camping, his legion of devout followers and millions of listeners on his Family Radio network.  He reportedly spent tens of millions of dollars to spread his doomsday message.  His May 21 prediction was plastered on more than 5,000 billboards across the country.  He had 100 million pamphlets  printed in 61 languages, including some that read, “The End of the World is Almost Here!”  After May 21 came and went, Mr. Camping emerged from his California home in the following days “flabbergasted.”  He called May 21 an “invisible Judgment Day” and said his calculations had been off by six months.  The real Armageddon, he said, would come on Oct. 21, 2011.  When that prediction did not come true, Mr. Camping retired from his radio work.  T. Rees Shapiro  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/harold-camping-radio-evangelist-who-predicted-doomsday-dies-at-92/2012/05/16/gJQAlgpxAp_story.html?hpid=z4