The Klondike Gold Rush, also called the Yukon Gold Rush, the Alaska Gold Rush, the Alaska-Yukon Gold Rush and the Last Great Gold Rush, was a migration by an estimated 100,000 prospectors to the Klondike region of the Yukon in north-western Canada between 1896 and 1899.  Gold was discovered there on August 16, 1896 and, when news reached Seattle and San Francisco the following year, it triggered a stampede of prospectors.  The journey proved too hard for many, and only between 30,000 and 40,000 arrived.  Some became wealthy, but the majority went in vain and only around 4,000 struck gold.  The Klondike Gold Rush ended in 1899 after gold was discovered in Nome, prompting an exodus from the Klondike.  It has been immortalized by photographs, books and films.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klondike_Gold_Rush

The Literary Gold Rush:  Jack London and Robert Service by Catherine Watson  Realistic adventure tales have fallen out of literary fashion, just like heavy rhyme schemes.  But Jack London remains famous the world over for his, particularly for two novels of the north, "The Call of the Wild" and "White Fang," and for the short story that every high school kid on the continent has had to read at least once, "To Build a Fire."  In his short lifetime--1876 to 1916--London wrote about 250 short stories and nearly 50 books, the best of which drew on his own Gold Rush experiences and on real events that had become legends in the Klondike mining community.  Robert Service, who grew up in Scotland, had the risk-taking personality for the Gold Rush, but he didn't go with the herd.  Instead, he bummed around North America, riding rails, doing odd jobs, earning meals by singing songs he'd made up.  By the time he got to Dawson, the rush was over, the town had settled down, and he was in banking.  Service was aware of his literary failings.  "Rhyming has my ruin been," he once wrote; "with less deftness, I might have produced real poetry."  It wasn't much of a regret, though:  His Klondike poems are still in print, and they paid him enough in royalties to let him live nicely on the French Riviera for 40 years.  Read the opening of Service's poem "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," a Klondike classic at http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/travel/11277606.html

In 1913, a character in Jack London’s The Valley of the Moon bitterly complains, “We’re hornswoggled.  We’re backed to a standstill.  We’re double-crossed to a fare-you-well”.  Seven years later the young P G Wodehouse employed it in Little Warrior:  “Would she have the generosity to realize that a man ought not to be held accountable for what he says in the moment when he discovers that he has been cheated, deceived, robbed — in a word, hornswoggled?”  By then, the word had been in the language with that meaning for more than half a century, and even then it had been around for some decades with an older sense of “embarrass, disconcert or confuse”.  People had long since turned it into an exclamation of surprise or amazement:  “Well, I’ll be hornswoggled!”  Peter Watts argues in A Dictionary of the Old West that it comes from cowpunching.  A steer that has been lassoed around the neck will “hornswoggle”, wag and twist its head around frantically to try to slip free of the rope.  A cowboy who lets the animal get away with this is said to have been “hornswoggled”.  A nice idea, but nobody seems to have heard of hornswoggle in the cattle sense, and it may be a guess based on horn.  Nobody else has much idea either, though it’s often assumed to be one of those highfalutin words like absquatulate and rambunctiousthat frontier Americans were so fond of creating.  It’s sad to have to tag a word as “origin unknown” yet again, but that’s the long and the short of it.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-hor1.htm

Tasting France Through 5 Signature Dishes by Ann Mah  Travelers have been eating their way around France, at least, since the 1920s, when the French food writer Maurice Edmond Sailland — known by his pen name, Curnonsky — published “La France Gastronomique,” a multivolume guide to the country’s regional cuisine.  In the decade that followed, Les Accords de Matignon — a pet project of the Popular Front, the 1930s leftist political party led by Prime Minister Léon Blum — guaranteed two weeks’ paid vacation to French workers.  Working-class travelers took advantage of the new policy and government-sponsored train tickets, streaming south to resort towns previously the exclusive domain of the bourgeois.  Eventually the Guide Michelin replaced Curnonsky as the primary source for travelers, and hungry motorists ignited an interest in regional cuisine that became a French passion.  Explore through words and pictures:  Brittany:  Galettes and Crepes; Lyon:  Quenelle de Brochet; Languedoc-Roussillon and Midi-Pyrénées:  Cassoulet; Bouches-du-Rhône, and Provence:  Bouillabaisse; Alsace:  Choucroute Garnie at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/25/travel/tasting-france-through-5-signature-dishes.html?hpw&rref=travel

Ayn Rand’s Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone by Mallory Ortberg  Read the parody at http://the-toast.net/2014/05/27/ayn-rands-harry-potter-sorcerers-stone/?fb_action_ids=10101889719084670&fb_action_types=og.likes

Celebrating the Summer Season in Poetry by Bob & Margery Snyder  Mid-June and the planet is turning toward the summer solstice—longest day of the year in the Northern hemisphere, some people call it Midsummer and others say it marks the official calendar beginning of the summer season.  Read a selection of poems and link to a collection of summer poems at http://poetry.about.com/b/2013/06/12/celebrating-the-summer-season-in-poetry.htm

Short June Poems  Read the most popular short poems on or about June by PoetrySoup Members.  Link to long June poems and June quotes at http://www.poetrysoup.com/poems/short/june

Can a machine think?  In 1950, famed London scientist Alan Turing, considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence, published a paper that put forth that very question.  But as quickly he asked the question, he called it “absurd.”  The idea of thinking was too difficult to define. Instead, he devised a separate way to quantify mechanical “thinking.”  “I shall replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words,” he wrote in the study that some say represented the “beginning” of artificial intelligence.  “The new form of the problem can be described in terms of a game which we call the ‘imitation game.’”  What he meant was:  Can a computer trick a human into thinking it’s actually a fellow human?  That question gave birth to the “Turing Test” 65 years ago.  This weekend, for the first time, a computer passed that test.   “Passing,” however, doesn’t mean it did it with flying colors.  For a computer to pass the test, it must only dupe 30 percent of the human interrogators who converse with the computer for five minutes in a text conversation.  In the test, it’s up to the humans to separate the machines from their fellow sentient beings throughout their five-minute inquisition.  This go-round, a Russian-made program, which disguised itself as a 13-year-old boy named Eugene Goostman from Odessa, Ukraine, bamboozled 33 percent of human questioners.  Eugene was one of five supercomputers who entered the 2014 Turing Test.  “We are proud to declare that Alan Turing’s Test was passed for the first time on Saturday,” declared Kevin Warwick, a visiting professor at the University of Reading, which organized the event at the Royal Society in London.  There is some cause for concern, however.  For starters, convincing one-third of interrogators that you’re a teenager who’s speaking in a second language perhaps skews the test a bit.  Was the computer that smart?  Or was it a gimmick?  And then there is the concern that such technology can be used for cybercrime.  Terrence McCoy  http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/06/09/a-computer-just-passed-the-turing-test-in-landmark-trial/?hpid=z4

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1160  June 11, 2014  On this date in 1898, Spanish-American War:  U.S. war ships set sail for Cuba.  On this date in 1901, New Zealand annexed the Cook Islands.