A penny dreadful (also called penny horrible, penny awful, penny number, and penny blood) was a type of British fiction publication in the 19th century that usually featured lurid serial stories appearing in parts over a number of weeks, each part costing one (old) penny.  The term, however, soon came to encompass a variety of publications that featured cheap sensational fiction, such as story papers and booklet "libraries".  The penny dreadfuls were printed on cheap pulp paper and were aimed primarily at working class adolescents.   These serials started in the 1830s, originally as a cheaper alternative to mainstream fictional part-works, such as those by Charles Dickens (which cost a shilling [twelve pennies]) for working class adults, but by the 1850s the serial stories were aimed exclusively at teenagers.  The stories themselves were reprints, or sometimes rewrites, of Gothic thrillers such as The Monk or The Castle of Otranto, as well as new stories about famous criminals.  Some of the most famous of these penny part-stories were The String of Pearls:  A Romance (introducing Sweeney Todd), The Mysteries of London (inspired by the French serial The Mysteries of Paris), and Varney the Vampire.  Highwaymen were popular heroes; Black Bess or the Knight of the Road, outlining the largely imaginary exploits of real-life English highwayman Dick Turpin, continued for 254 episodes.  Working class boys who could not afford a penny a week often formed clubs that would share the cost, passing the flimsy booklets from reader to reader.  Other enterprising youngsters would collect a number of consecutive parts, then rent the volume out to friends.  In 1866, Boys of England was introduced as a new type of publication, an eight-page magazine that featured serial stories as well as articles and shorts of interest.  It was printed on the same cheap paper, though it sported a larger format than the penny parts.  American dime novels were edited and rewritten for a British audience.  These appeared in booklet form, such as the Boy's First Rate Pocket Library.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_dreadful

shilling shocker  (UK, dated)  A cheap paperback book produced for the mass market in 19th century Britain.  A typical 'shilling shocker' often consolidated twelve to fifteen episodes of a serial novel whose chapters had previously been published separately as penny dreadful pamphlets.  http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/shilling_shocker  Best-known shilling shocker is probably Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera.

Penny Dreadful TV series, 2014-  "Victorian-era London is stalked by extraordinary characters from classic horror stories."  See episode titles and air dates at http://epguides.com/PennyDreadful/

Radio spectrum refers to the part of the electromagnetic spectrum corresponding to radio frequencies – that is, frequencies lower than around 300 GHz (or, equivalently, wavelengths longer than about 1 mm).  Electromagnetic waves in this frequency range, called radio waves, are used for radio communication and various other applications, such as heating.  The generation of radio waves is strictly regulated by the government in most countries, coordinated by an international standards body called the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).  Different parts of the radio spectrum are allocated for different radio transmission technologies and applications.  In some cases, parts of the radio spectrum is sold or licensed to operators of private radio transmission services (for example, cellular telephone operators or broadcast television stations).  Ranges of allocated frequencies are often referred to by their provisioned use (for example, cellular spectrum or television spectrum.  Find frequencies as designated by ITU, IEEE, EU, NATO and US ECM--and by application (for instance, broadcasting and radar) at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITU_Radio_Bands#ITU

A band is a small section of the spectrum of radio communication frequencies, in which channels are usually used or set aside for the same purpose.

US ECM= US Equity Capital Markets

ECMs=Electronic Counter Measures

English speakers love to create new words by blending existing ones together into "portmanteau words."  Sometimes a particular word gets pulled into so many portmanteaus that a fragment of that word becomes "liberated" to become an affix all by itself — but one that has a much more specific meaning than what you get with affixes like un-, -ly, or -ness.  The best example might be the suffix -gate, which jumped free of the name Watergate to embark on a successful career turning any noun into a scandal.  The linguist Arnold Zwicky coined the term libfix for these creations.  Neal Whitman  Find a list of libfixes including cation, erati, verse and zilla at https://theweek.com/article/index/249302/a-linguistic-tour-of-the-best-libfixes-from--ana-to--zilla  NOTE that the word Bridgegate is about the plan to create traffic gridlock at the George Washington Bridge in 2013, apparently as political payback.

Portmanteau is a literary device in which two or more words are joined together to coin a new word.  A portmanteau word is formed by blending parts of two or more words but it always refers to a single concept.  The coinage of portmanteau involves the linking and blending of two or more words and the new word formed in the process shares the same meanings as the original words.  It is different from a compound word in that it could have a completely different meaning from the words that it was coined from.  Portmanteau, on the other hand, shares the same semantic features.  For example, the word “brunch” is formed by splicing two words “breakfast” and “lunch”.  Find examples of portmanteau words including from the works of Charles Dickens and James Joyce at http://literarydevices.net/portmanteau/  NOTE that dinnerware and glassware are compound words.  From software--we have portmanteau words:  scareware, malware, spyware and shareware.

scape from landscape used as a libfix:  nightscape, dayscape, streetscape, cityscape, moonscape, seascape

Smithsonian Institution Research Information System  Search over 7.4. million records, with 568,1000 images, video and sound files  from Smithsonian museums, archives and libraries at http://siris.si.edu/

QUOTES from Wild Fire by Nelson DeMille  "Real men don't ask directions."  

"Today must be your annual smart day." 

In 1974, a young Professor of architecture in Budapest (Hungary) named Erno Rubik created an object that was not supposed to be possible.  His solid cube twisted and turned - and still it did not break or fall apart.  With colourful stickers on its sides, the Cube got scrambled and thus emerged the first “Rubik’s Cube”.  It took well over a month for Erno to work out the solution to his puzzle.  Little did he expect that Rubik’s Cube would become the world’s best-selling toy ever.  As a teacher, Erno was always looking for new, more exciting ways to present information, so he used the Cube’s first model to help him explain to his students about spatial relationships.  Erno has always thought of the Cube primarily as an object of art, a mobile sculpture symbolizing stark contrasts of the human condition: bewildering problems and triumphant intelligence; simplicity and complexity; stability and dynamism; order and chaos.For this magic object to become the most popular toy in history a few chance meetings had to take place.  As with many of the world’s greatest inventions it did not have an easy birth.  After presenting his prototype to his students and friends Erno began to realise the potential of his cube.  The next step was to get it manufactured.  The first cubes were made and distributed in Hungary by Politechnika.  These early Cubes, marketed as “Magic Cubes” (or “Buvos Kocka”), were twice the weight of the ones available later.  See a picture of the original cube and a timeline of the cube story at http://rubiks.com/history

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1151  May 21, 2014  On this date in 1881, the American Red Cross was established by Clara Barton in Washington, D.C.  

On this date in 1934, Oskaloosa, Iowa, became the first municipality in the United States to fingerprint all of its citizens.