Wednesday, March 5, 2014


The first steps toward building President Barack Obama’s library and museum were announced in January 2014 with the launch of a foundation to oversee the competitive selection process with the target date of picking a site early in 2015.  Incorporation papers for the newly created Barack H. Obama Foundation were filed Jan. 31, 2014 in Washington, D.C.  In May, the foundation will issue “Request for Proposals,” which is the call for comprehensive packages to be submitted with a decision made by the start of 2015.  Lynn Sweet   http://www.suntimes.com/news/metro/25302166-418/foundation-launched-to-pick-site-for-obama-presidential-library.html

Obsolete words
limbeck   to wear yourself out in your effort to come up with a new idea.
magnolious  a slang word for great, splendid, magnificent.
grate  pleasing.  It is the root for the word grateful .
in the mebby-scales  to waver between two opinions.  http://obsoleteword.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html

Library Consortium Tests Interlibrary Loans of e-Books by Jennifer Howard  Duke University’s libraries lend printed books to students and faculty members at other institutions all the time via interlibrary loan.  But the university’s 900,000 e-books are off limits to anyone beyond the campus.  Robert L. Byrd, Duke’s associate university librarian for collections and user services, would love to lend out those e-books.  But he can’t even share them with users at nearby North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  Because of technical and licensing restrictions, library patrons at those universities—Duke’s partners in the Triangle Research Libraries Network—can see e-books in the library catalog, but they must visit Duke’s campus to read them.  Worried about security and sales, many publishers and vendors permit individual e-book chapters to be shared but don’t routinely include the lending of whole e-books in library contracts.  Even when licenses do allow e-book lending, libraries typically lack the technology to make it work.  But lending e-books may soon get easier. This spring a pilot project called Occam’s Reader will test software custom-built to make it both easy and secure for libraries to share e-book files while keeping publishers happy—or so the software’s creators hope.  The Greater Western Library Alliance, a consortium of 33 academic libraries, came up with the idea. Developers at Texas Tech University and the University of Hawaii-Manoa, both members of the alliance, created the software, and the publisher Springer agreed to let its e-books be guinea pigs in the experiment.
Scheduled to begin in March 2014, the pilot will run for a year.  If it works well enough, the library alliance hopes to make Occam’s Reader available to other academic libraries and perhaps to persuade other publishers to join in.  http://chronicle.com/article/Library-Consortium-Tests/144743/

A metaphor, as defined in our glossary, is a figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something important in common.  The word metaphor itself is a metaphor, coming from a Greek word meaning to "transfer" or "carry across."  Metaphors "carry" meaning from one word, image, or idea to another.  Life is a journey is a familiar metaphor used in advertisements and poetry.  Richard Nordquist  See examples and link to 99 metaphors of love at http://grammar.about.com/od/qaaboutrhetoric/f/faqmetaphor07.htm

AN OCCURRENCE AT OWL CREEK BRIDGE by Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914) THE MILLENNIUM FULCRUM EDITION, 1988  The Project Gutenberg Etext  [This was the #1 rated Twilight Zone episode of all time]  #2 in our Ambrose Bierce series  http://archive.org/stream/anoccurrenceatow00375gut/owlcr10.txt  Find Ambrose Bierce biography and bibliography at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/ambrose-bierce

Occurrence at Owl Street Ridge, 1999 by John Shirley (b. 1953) appears in Strange Attraction, ed. Edward E. Kramer, Bereshith/ShadowLands Press 2000  Find John Shirley Web site at http://www.darkecho.com/JohnShirley/

Pun-based titles, such as Occurrence at Owl Street Ridge, are frequent.  Link to such titles by clicking on Literature at http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PunBasedTitle

On Feb. 27, 2014, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposed to update the Nutrition Facts label for packaged foods to reflect the latest scientific information, including the link between diet and chronic diseases such as obesity and heart disease.  The proposed label also would replace out-of-date serving sizes to better align with how much people really eat, and it would feature a fresh design to highlight key parts of the label such as calories and serving sizes.  Find proposed changes and more information at http://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm387418.htm

Mar. 3, 2014  Know your snow  ‘Snirt,’ a combination of snow and dirt, is that crusty, dusty, yucky-looking stuff along the edges of highways and byways.  Earlier this winter, many farm fields in the area resembled white sand dunes with what are known as ripples — marks on the surface of snow, similar to ripples in sand, caused by wind.  Then there’s the handy dandy blizzard of snowy words online at Scrabble Finder:  snowblowers, snowboard, snowbrushes, snowmobiles, snowblinks, snowdrifts, snowflakes, snowmakers, snowscapes, snowshoe, snowslides, snowstorms, snowballs, snowbanks, snowbelts, snowbound, snowdrift, snowfall, snowfield, snowmaker, snowmelt, snowmold, snowplows, snowcaps.  Janet Romaker  http://www.toledoblade.com/local/2014/03/03/As-winter-plows-on-know-your-snow-terms.html

Issue 1118  March 5, 2014  On this date in 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club had its first meeting.  On this date in 1981, the ZX81, a pioneering British home computer, was launched by Sinclair Research and would go on to sell over 1.5 million units around the world

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