What does a bagel have in common with lox or a maven with a golem?  They all are words that have come to us from Yiddish.  While Yiddish has words to describe almost everything its speakers need it for, there's no match to its stockpile of colorful words to describe people.  From schlemiel to schlimazel to schmo to schnook. 

luftmensch  (LOOFT-mensh)  noun  An impractical dreamer.  From Yiddish, from luft (air) + mensch (man, person), from German.  Earliest documented use:  1907.

ganef  (GAH-nuhf)  noun  A thief, swindler, or rascal.  From Yiddish, from Hebrew gannabh (thief).  Earliest documented use:  1920.

macher  (MAHKH-uhr)  noun  1.  A person of influence, one who gets things done.  2.  A self-important overbearing person.  From Yiddish makher, from German macher (maker or doer).  Earliest documented use:  1911.

kibitzer  (KIB-it-suhr) noun  An onlooker who offers unwanted advice or criticism, for example at a card game.  From Yiddish kibitsen, from German kiebitzen (to look on at cards), from Kiebitz (busybody, literally pewit or lapwing, a shorebird with a bad reputation as a meddler).  Earliest documented use:  1927.   A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day

From:  Jonathan Gellman  Subject:  ganef...gonoph  What the Dickens!  Actually, with the spelling gonoph, ganef has been in published English since Charles Dickens used it in Bleak House in 1853:  "He's as obstinate a young gonoph as I know."

From:  Barry Palevitz  Subject:  macher  The word macher is usually preceded by the word 'big'.  That is, a big macher.  It adds an additional connotation: somebody who's a big shot.

From:  Michael Barr   Subject:  kibitzer  Back when I played bridge, we recognized three kinds of onlookers:  kibitzers, dorbitzers, and tsitsitzers.  A kibitzer had permission of a player and is permitted to talk to that player but to no one else; a dorbitzer had permission from a kibitzer and could speak to that person but to no one else; a tsitsitzer had no one's permission and could speak to no one -- he could only sit there and say tsi-tsi.

Jules E. Mastbaum was a self-made movie tycoon who, by the early 1920s, owned more movie houses that anyone in the United States.  He named his business the Stanley Company of America in honor of his dead brother.  In 1923, Mastbaum visited Paris and began to buy pieces from every period of French sculptor Auguste Rodin's life.  In 1926, he hired architects to design a building and gardens on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia.  Mastbaum's  collection is in the Rodin Museum, opened in 1929.

Mona Lisa disappeared from the Louvre in 1911.  Two radical modernists were wrongly detained during trhe investigation, one of them, Pablo Picasso.  The real thief, Vincenzo Peruggia, a craftsman who helped build the wood and glass box that protected Mona Lisa, was convicted in 1914 and spent less than a year in prison.

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn painted or sketched more than sixty self-portraits.  They might have been considered forms of autobiographies or a way of promoting the artist.

North Carolina's original copy of the Bill of Rights, stolen in 1865, has had a long and checkered journey before it finally returned to the state in 2005.  

Read the history and link to a digital copy at http://ncpedia.org/bill-rights

Priceless:  How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures 

by Robert K. Wittman

Nicholson Baker was born in New York City on January 7, 1957.  Nicholson Baker is a Professor of Poetry at European Graduate School (EGS) and a celebrated writer of fiction and non-fiction.  As a novelist, Baker's work focuses on the thoughts of characters during otherwise inconsequential moments.  His novels generally de-emphasize narrative and focus instead on careful description and characterization.  From 1970 to 1975 Nicholson Baker studied at The School Without Walls in Rochester, New York.  In 1975 he studied briefly at the Eastman School of Music and received a B.A. in philosophy from Haverford College in Pennsylvania.  He lives with his family in South Berwick, Maine. Nicholson Baker is the great-grandson of Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ray Stannard Baker (1870-1946).  Nicholson Baker is also an activist for the protection and archiving of newspapers.  His campaign arose after he discovered that many major libraries destroy the paper originals once a microfilm copy has been made.  In 1997, Baker received the San Francisco–based James Madison Freedom of Information Award in recognition of these efforts.  In 1999, he established a non-profit corporation, the American Newspaper Repository, to rescue old newspapers from destruction by libraries.  These discoveries prompted Baker to write Double Fold:  Libraries and the Assault on Paper, a book that has received a great deal of media attention and for which he also received a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2001.  http://www.egs.edu/faculty/nicholson-baker/biography/

Sept. 29, 2014  WESTPORT, Conn.—They have blinking eyes and an unnerving way of looking quizzically in  the direction of whoever is speaking.  They walk, dance and can talk in 19 different languages. About the height of a toddler, they look like bigger, better-dressed cousins of Buzz Lightyear.  And soon, "Vincent" and "Nancy" will be buzzing around the Westport Library, where officials next week will announce the recent acquisition of the pair of humanoid "NAO Evolution" robots.  Their primary purpose:  to teach the kind of coding and computer-programming skills required to animate such machines.  While it isn't unusual for public libraries to offer instruction in programming or robotics, Westport is the first in the nation to do it with sophisticated humanoid bots made by the French robotics firm Aldebaran.  In a brief demonstration last week, Alex Giannini, the library's digital-experience manager, had Vincent kicking a small soccer ball, doing tai chi and taking bows.  Westport isn't the only public library with robots.  In May, the Chicago Public Library, in partnership with Google Inc.,  made 500 "Finch" robots available to patrons at six of its branches.  The dot-eyed, half-domed machines, the size of dinner plate on wheels, are also used to teach computer programming and coding.  Aldebaran said it has sold about 6,000 robots world-wide, mostly to museums and schools.  At nearly $8,000 a machine, the NAO Evolution models, which were acquired by Westport with private funds, cost considerably more than the Finch machines, which run $99 each.  But the Aldebaran robots are also more complex—equipped with two cameras, four microphones, motion sensors and sonar to detect walls.  Loretta Waldman  See pictures and read more at http://online.wsj.com/articles/coming-soon-to-the-library-humanoid-robots-1412015687

Q:  What is the National Radio Quiet Zone?
A:  It is 13,000 square miles straddling West Virginia and Virginia where radio transmissions have been restricted since 1958 to minimize interference with two federal listening posts about 30 miles apart.  One is the Robert C. Byrd Jr. National Radio Astronomy Observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, used by the National Science Foundation to study space.  The other is the Navy Information Operations Command at Sugar Grove, West Virginia, used by the National Security Agency to tap international communications in the eastern United States.  Most electronic devices, even musical greeting cards, can interfere with operations.  So, cellphones, Wi-Fi, most electronic devices, and radio transmissions of nearly all kinds are forbidden or restricted, especially in Pocahontas and Pendleton counties, home to about 15,000 West Virginians.  Pay telephones are plentiful.  Federal technicians seek to quiet all nearby radio transmissions, even those of spark plugs in a farmer’s tractor, an aging heating pad, and a broken toaster.  Wired, Slate, The New York Times  http://thecourier.com/opinion/columns/2014/09/22/what-is-the-radio-quiet-zone/

The first Man Booker prize to allow American nominees was on October 14, 2014 won by an Australian, with Richard Flanagan triumphing for a “magnificent novel of love and war” that tells the harrowing stories of prisoners and captors on the Burma railway.  Flanagan won for The Narrow Road to the Deep North as he became the third Australian to win the prize, following on from Thomas Keneally and Peter Carey.  The novel is an incredibly personal book for Flanagan, whose father was a survivor of Japan’s campaign to build the railway.  He died aged 98 on the day Flanagan emailed his final draft to his publisher.  “I grew up, as did my five siblings, as children of the Death Railway,” Flanagan said.  “We carried many incommunicable things and I realised at a certain point … that I would have to write this book.”  Over 12 years he wrote five drafts that he deemed deficient and burned, but he was intent on finishing before his father died.  Mark Brown

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/oct/14/richard-flanagan-wins-man-booker-prize-2014

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1204  October 15, 2014  On this date in 1764, Edward Gibbon observed a group of friars singing in the ruined Temple of Jupiter in Rome, which inspired him to begin work on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  On this date in 1878, the Edison Electric Light Company began operation.