Big Five  For more than three decades, Philadelphia Big 5 — LaSalle, Pennsylvania, St. Joseph’s, Temple and Villanova — waged college basketball’s biggest, most envied, unique, and frenetic, intracity rivalry.  No other city in the nation ever had as many major universities competing so feverishly for such a coveted title as did the City of Brotherly Love.  The Big 5 was housed at the Palestra, a venerable red brick building on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania.  That building hosted more fans at more games over more seasons than any other college arena in history.  This musty, high-ceilinged, 75-year-old arena is still regarded by many people as the best basketball facility in the country.  “The Palestra is to college basketball what Fenway Park and Wrigley Field are to baseball,” wrote John Feinstein in his book, A Season Inside.  “It is a place where you feel the game from the moment you step inside.” 

Read more at http://www.philadelphiabig5.org/history/

Big Ten Conference (B1G), formerly Western Conference and Big Nine Conference, is the oldest Division I collegiate athletic conference in the United States.  The conference competes in the NCAA's Division I; its football teams compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS), formerly known as Division I-A, the highest level of NCAA competition in that sport.  Find list of 14 members, 1 associate member and 1 former member at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Ten_Conference

The Pacific-12 Conference (Pac-12) is a collegiate athletic conference that operates in the Western United States.  It participates in the NCAA's Division I; its football teams compete in the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS; formerly Division I-A), the higher of two levels of NCAA Division I football competition.   Find list of 12 full members, affilitated members, former  and former affiliated members at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific-12_Conference

Guava is a tropical fruit rich in high-profile nutrients that fits in the new functional foods category, often called “super-fruits.”  It is an evergreen, tropical shrub or low-growing small tree probably originated in the central Americas.  Guavas actually thrive in both humid and dry climates and can tolerate brief periods of cold spells, but can survive only a few degrees of frost.  Botanically, the fruit belongs within the family of Myrtaceae, in the genus:  Psidium.  Scientific name:  Psidium guajava.  During each season, the guava tree bears numerous round, ovoid or pear-shaped fruits that are about 5-10 cm long and weigh around 50–200 g.  Different cultivar types of guava grown all over the world which, vary widely in flavor, pulp color, and seeds.  The fruit is soft when ripe with sweet musky aroma and creamy in texture.  Internally, its flesh varies in color depending up on the cultivar and may be white, pink, yellow, or red.  Ripe fruits have rich flavor with sweet-tart taste.  Each fruit contains numerous tiny, semi-hard edible seeds, concentrated especially at its center.  See picture at http://www.nutrition-and-you.com/guava.html  In a Toledo Lebanese/Mediterranian market, we can easily buy guava juice--it tastes like pear nectar.

The Best Ingredients in America's Best Sandwiches by Sharyn Jackson   Find recipes for fried plantains, lox, whiz, weck, huckleberry jam, Dutch crunch, breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches and more at https://www.yahoo.com/food/americas-best-sandwiches-75073994109.html

The Wayback Machine passes 400 billion indexed webpages

2006 – Archive-It launches, allowing libraries that subscribe to the service to create curated collections of Web content.

March 25, 2009 – The Internet Archive and Sun Microsystems launch a new datacenter that stores the whole Web archive and serves the Wayback Machine.  This 3 petabyte data center handled 500 requests per second from its home in a shipping container.

June 15, 2011 – The HTTP Archive becomes part of the Internet Archive, adding data about the performance of websites to the collection of website content.

May 28, 2012 – The Wayback Machine is available in China again, after being blocked for a few years without notice.

October 26, 2012 – the Internet Archive makes 80 terabytes of archived Web crawl data from 2011available for researchers, to explore how others might be able to interact with or learn from this content.

October 2013 – New features for the Wayback Machine are launched, including the ability to see newly crawled content an hour after it’s archived, a “Save Page” feature so that anyone can archive a page on demand, and an effort to fix broken links on the Web starting with WordPress.com and Wikipedia.org.

Also in October 2013 – The Wayback Machine provides access to important Federal Government sites that go dark during the Federal Government Shutdown.

Will The Way Back Machine have 500 billion webpages indexed by 2015?  We wouldn’t be surprised if it happened sooner.  http://thenextweb.com/insider/2014/05/09/wayback-machine-passes-400-billion-indexed-webpages-covering-web-late-1996-hours-ago/

We grew up hearing that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, and most were probably forced to eat a little something before leaving for school.  According to Emily Swanson, a recent University of Iowa graduate with a degree in Health and Human Physiology, breakfast is “essential for a productive day.”  Find recipes for Caprese Breakfast Sandwich, Bananas Foster Oatmeal—Overnight, Fruit, Yogurt and Granola Parfait and Spinach and Parmesan Eggs at http://collegelifestyles.org/iowa/2014/09/03/healthy-hawkeyes-top-4-brain-food-breakfasts/

Terrible and terrific are both formed off the same root:  terror.  Both started out a few hundred years ago with the meaning of terror-inducing.  But terrific took a strange turn at the beginning of the 20th century and ended up meaning really great, not terrible or terror-inducing at all.  This happened through a slow reshaping of the connections and connotations of terrific.  First it acquired the sense, not just of terror-inducing but of general intensity.  You could talk about a “terrific clamor,” meaning a whole lot of clamor.  This was a bit of hyperbole—“so much noise it was terror-inducing!”—that eventually got reduced to a general sense of “more intense than usual.”  Once a word like that gets established as a general intensifier, it may also be applied to positive experiences—terrific beauty, terrific joy—and from there the jump to a fully positive “terrific!” isn’t so unexpected.  The same thing happened to the word tremendous (“causing one to tremble in fear”).  It happened to formidable (fear-inducing) too, but only in French, where it means “really great!”  It hasn’t quite reached that stage in English, but it has acquired positive intensifier status (“a formidable talent”).  The path from fear to happy enthusiasm isn’t an inevitable one.  Awful also started as a fear word—“awe” used to have much stronger connotations of quaking with fear before powerful forces—and came to be a general intensifier (“that pie was awful good!”), but it hasn’t crossed over to the happy side.  On the other hand, its close relative, “awesome,” did make the jump.  The fully positive “awesome,” a child of the '80s, is a relatively recent innovation.  It began as slang, with a dash of irony or sarcasm to it.  That seems to be the crucial ingredient in these crossover words.  The positive “terrific” dates to the slang-heavy flapper era, where “killer” also became a playful positive.  “Egregious,” a word that made the opposite crossing from positive to negative (it used to mean notable, excellent), also appears to have arisen from an ironic use.  And we have plenty of very recent examples of slang crossover (Sick! Ill! Wicked! Bad!).  Crossover words are a tremendous testament to our awesome ability to shape the language as we use it.  Arika Okrent  http://mentalfloss.com/article/56865/why-does-terrible-mean-bad-and-terrific-mean-good

Serial is a podcast exploring a nonfiction story over multiple episodes.  First released in October 2014, it is a spinoff of the radio program This American Life.  Episodes vary in length and are available weekly.  It ranked number one on iTunes even before its debut and remained there for several weeks.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_%28podcast%29   Access the first 12 episodes of Serial on NPR at  http://serialpodcast.org/  See 5:41 "Christmas Serial" on Saturday Night Live at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATXbJjuZqbc

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1234  December 24, 2014  On this date in 1818, the first performance of "Silent Night" took place in the church of St. Nikolaus in Oberndorf, Austria.  On this date in 1851, the Library of Congress burned.  The  fire destroyed 35,000 books, about two–thirds of the Library's 55,000 book collection, including two–thirds of Jefferson's original transfer.