April 5, 2014  Over the next two years, the North Coast sky will host a four-part series of total lunar eclipses -- sometimes called a “Blood Moon” -- starting on the evening of April 14.

Though lunar eclipses are quite common, Astronomers of Humboldt member Jeff Schmitt said this tetrad of eclipses is “kind of exciting.”  ”When you end up with several in a row like this, it's sort of unusual,” Schmitt said.  The first lunar eclipse in the tetrad will start at around 10 a.m. on April 14 for the West Coast, with a total phase occurring from around midnight to 1:30 p.m. on April 15.  Tetrads can be rare or common depending the time period, according to Astronomers of Humboldt Vice President Ken Yanosko.  ”It kind of goes through cycles,” he said.  “There are supposed to be eight or nine tetrads occurring this century, between now and 2100.”  According to the NASA website, several centuries can go by without any tetrads occurring, which was the case from 1600 to 1900.  A total lunar eclipse occurs when the moon is entirely covered by the shadow of the Earth.  Rather than being completely darkened by the shadow, Yanosko said, the moon glows an amber red due to sunlight that is refracted from the Earth's atmosphere.  Will Houston  http://www.times-standard.com/localnews/ci_25501789/4-blood-moons-first-astronomical-event-takes-place

Wrigley Field 100th anniversary by Mark Caro

"Go, Cubs, Go" is no longer the theme song, but since 2007 it has been played over the loudspeakers after each Cubs victory, becoming a singalong in the stands.  Perhaps it says something about Cubs fans' confidence level that they would sing "The Cubs are gonna to win today" only after the team already has won.  Eddie Vedder, the Pearl Jam singer who grew up partially in Evanston, debuted his own Cubs song, the shanty-style "All the Way," in 2007 and released a recording in 2008.  Sample lyric:  "When you're born in Chicago you're blessed and you're healed/ The first time you walk into Wrigley Field.  The ballpark also inspired one of Chicago's most enduring homegrown plays, "Bleacher Bums," which takes place in the Wrigley Field bleachers and premiered Aug. 2, 1977, in an Organic Theater Company production conceived by and co-starring Joe Mantegna and directed by Stuart Gordon.  Dennis Franz also starred in the original production, while Dennis Farina, George Wendt and Gary Sandy would join later casts.  In a defeat-the-point sort of way, a movie version that premiered at the Chicago International Film Festival in 2001 and played on Showtime the following year had to rename Wrigley Field as Lakeview Park and the Cubs as the Bruins due to a licensing dispute.  Though the 1949 comedy "It Happens Every Spring" was shot in part at a Los Angeles replica of Wrigley Field, and the Wrigley scenes from "The Natural" (1984) were filmed in Buffalo, the ballpark has been featured prominently on screen elsewhere.  It was a key setting in "The Blues Brothers" (1980, as the cops and Nazis converge there after Dan Aykroyd's Elwood lists his home address as 1060 W. Addison), "A League of Their Own" (1992), "The Babe" (1992, with John Goodman dramatizing Babe Ruth's "called shot" in the park), "Rookie of the Year" (1993) and "The Break-Up" (2006), as well as "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" (with "Save Ferris" on the marquee, and the title character catching a foul ball inside), "About Last Night…" and many TV shows.  http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/ct-wrigley-century-culture-20140328,0,2162897.column

LIBRARIANS PICK books they recommend to others.

Julie:  Carrots Love Tomatoes:  Secrets of Companion Planting for Successful Gardening

Think of this book as a seating chart for your fruits and veggies.  Author Louise Riotte explains what plants are beneficial to one another and therefore should be planted in proximity.  What plants to avoid placing near one another also is covered.  Ms. Riotte has a related book Roses Love Garlic.

Martha:  Bel Canto by Ann Patchett  An elegant and spellbinding novel where music, language, friendship, love and terror come together.   It was awarded both the Orange Prize for Fiction and PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. 

When Storm King Art Center in upstate New York commissioned a new work from Virginia Overton, she tapped into her Lebanon, Tenn., upbringing, particularly her farming family's use of topographic maps, which employ contour lines and symbols as a way of surveying land.  Ms. Overton found a topographic map of the Hudson Valley sculpture park's 500-acre expanse.  It depicted Storm King's features in lines, curves and circles and helped her envision a work that could serve as a three-dimensional drawing set against the landscape.  The result is an approximately 488-foot brass tube, 4 inches in diameter and perched on top of thin steel rods every 20 or 30 feet.  The tube is designed to rise and fall with the undulations of the land—much like a line on a topographic map.  The sculpture has its official debut May 3, along with sculptures and other works by the contemporary artist Zhang Huan, but the brass tube will be viewable by park visitors when it opens to the public on April 2.  The tube is also intended to be interactive:  Visitors can stand on either end and speak to each other, or simply listen to the sounds of the surrounding nature that it will capture and amplify.  "Even though it's a 500-foot-long thing, if you put your ear up to [it], whether hearing wind," Ms. Overton said, "or hearing a friend or someone, it all of a sudden becomes very intimate.  It's right there in your ear."  As the installation (she described it as "landscape-size") nears completion, Storm King's associate curator, Nora Lawrence, added that she continues to discover new ways of looking at it—for example in the morning, as the sunlight hits the brass tubing.  Jackie Bischof  http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303325204579467334155853654

The word "trump" derives from "trionfi" or "triumph", documented as the name of a card game in 1529 and which spawned the game Ruff and Honours, which in turn led to Whist.  Trionfo was also the name of the original card game for which tarot cards were designed, and in it the tarot cards had the role of what are now called trumps; later card game rules were designed to use one of the ordinary suits as a replacement for the tarots when a tarot pack was not available.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump

come up/turn up trumps  (British & Australian)  to complete an activity successfully or to produce a good result, especially when you were not expected to  http://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/come+turn+up+trumps

trumped-up  deliberately done or created to make someone appear to be guilty of a crime  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trumped-up

QUOTES by Joseph Addison (1672-1719) English essayist, poet, playwright

Husband a lie, and trump it up in some extraordinary emergency.

Music, the greatest good that mortals know, And all of heaven we have below.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.  http://www.miniwebtool.com/quote-search/by-author/?author=Joseph%20Addison

The average costs per mile of driving 2012 sedans determined by AAA:  10,000 miles driven annually:  78.3 cents; 15,000 miles:  60.8 cents; 20,000 miles:  51.9 cents.  Find details and cars studied at https://exchange.aaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Your-Driving-Costs-2013.pdf

April 8, 2014  Niijima Island, a volcanic island off the coast of Japan, continues to erupt and has swallowed part of a nearby island.  NASA recorded the dramatic event from space, showing smoke from the constant eruptions, streaming away from the growing island.  The volcanic island erupted from the waters of the Philippine Sea in November.  It was centered 1,600 feet from a similar feature, named Nishino Shima, which saw its last major eruption 40 years ago.  That feature, better known as Rosaio Island, first emerged above the water 10,000 years ago, but the island remained relatively small until 1974.  Both of the islands were located in the Ogasawara (or Bonin) Island chain, about 600 miles south of Tokyo.  This is part of the "Ring of Fire" that marks the presence of a large number of volcanoes.   Volcanic activity off the south-southeast coast of Nishino Shima resumed in November 2013. That activity formed Niijima soon after the eruptions began.  By December, the island stretched over nearly 14 acres, and stood 60 to 80 feet above sea level.  Geologists predicted the island would soon join with Nishino Shima, and the two finally met on Dec. 26.  James Maynard  http://www.techtimes.com/articles/5301/20140408/volcanic-island-of-nijima-in-japan-gulps-neighboring-island.htm

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1133  April 9, 2014  On this date in 1860, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville made the oldest known recording of an audible human voice on his phonautograph machine.  In 1865, American Civil War: Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia (26,765 troops) to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, effectively ending the war.  In 1867, the Senate ratified a treaty with Russia for the purchase of Alaska.  Opponents called it "Seward's Folly"