The Century of Progress Architectural District, a part of the eastern unit of Indiana
Dunes National Lakeshore, is an historic district on Lake Front Drive in Beverly Shores, Porter County,
Indiana. The district comprises five buildings, all
from the Homes
of Tomorrow Exhibition during
the1933 Century of
Progress World's Fair which
took place in Chicago. Intended to display the future of housing, the
Century of Progress Homes reflect a variety of designs, experimental materials
and new technologies. On June 30, 1986,
the district was listed on the National
Register of Historic Places See
pictures and descriptions of the five houses at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_Progress_Architectural_District
The Chicago World's Fair was held on 427 acres (much of it landfill) on Lake Michigan, immediately
south of Chicago's downtown area, from 12th Street to 39th Street (now Pershing
Road). Today, Meigs Field and McCormick
Place occupy this site. A Century of
Progress officially opened on May 27, 1933 and closed on November 12 of that
year. Although originally planned for
the 1933 season only, it was extended for another year, reopening on May 26,
1934, and closing on October 31, 1934. This extension was due in part to the fair's
public popularity, but mainly as an effort to earn sufficient income to retire
its debts. http://www.chicagohs.org/history/century.html
The word 'doily' is an eponym, named after a certain Mr Doiley, Doyly or Doyley, who
kept a draper's shop in the Strand, according to one of the citations in the Oxford
English Dictionary. Draper is another
word not heard very often these days, but a draper is someone who sells
cloth. Originally doily meant a type of
cloth; as the OED puts it: "The
name of a woollen stuff, ‘at once cheap and genteel’, introduced for summer
wear in the latter part of the 17th century". What we now call a doily, started off with
the name 'doily-napkin'; in the 18th century it was spelt with a capital
D. The material was lacy and had holes
in it so that the good-quality of the wooden table under the doily was visible
to guests. When, in the 20th century
(the heyday was the 1950s), doilies began to be mass-produced out of
paper, the holey pattern was retained.
Back in 1964
a pair of Australian scientists, Isabel Joy Bear and R. G. Thomas, began
the scientific study of rain’s aroma in earnest with an article in Nature titled “Nature of Agrillaceous Odor.”
In it, they coined the term petrichor to
help explain the phenomenon, combining a pair of Greek roots: petra (stone) and ichor (the blood of gods in ancient
myth). In that study and subsequent research,
they determined that one of the main causes of this distinctive smell is a
blend of oils secreted by some plants during arid periods. When a rainstorm comes after a drought,
compounds from the oils—which accumulate over time in dry rocks and
soil—are mixed and released into the air.
The duo also observed that the oils inhibit seed germination, and
speculated that plants produce them to limit competition for scarce water
supplies during dry times. These
airborne oils combine with other compounds to produce the smell. In moist, forested areas in particular, a
common substance is geosmin, a chemical produced by a
soil-dwelling bacteria known as actinomycetes. The bacteria secrete the compound when they
produce spores, then the force of rain landing on the ground sends these spores
up into the air, and the moist air conveys the chemical into our noses. Joseph Stromberg http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/what-makes-rain-smell-so-good-13806085/?no-ist
Thank you, Muse reader.
Parcel has come to us via Old French from the post-classical
Latin particella, a part or portion. That makes part
and parcel a tautology, since both words in effect mean the
same thing. English loves this kind of
doublet: nooks and crannies, hale
and hearty, safe
and sound, rack and ruin, dribs and drabs.
Many derive from the ancient legal practice of including words of
closely similar meaning to make sure that the sense covers all eventualities: aid and abet, fit
and proper, all
and sundry. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-par3.htm
Ernest William Hornung (1866–1921) was an English author and poet known for
writing the A. J. Raffles series
of stories about a gentleman thief in
late 19th-century London. Hornung was
educated at Uppingham School; as a result of poor health
he left the school in December 1883 to travel to Sydney, where he stayed for
two years. He drew on his Australian
experiences as a background when he began writing, initially short stories and
later novels. In 1898 he wrote "In
the Chains of Crime", which introduced Raffles and his sidekick, Bunny Manders; the characters were based
partly on his friends Oscar Wilde and his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas,
and also on Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Aside from his Raffles stories, Hornung was a
prodigious writer of fiction, publishing numerous books from 1890, with A Bride from the Bush to
his 1914 novel The
Crime Doctor. Read more and see
pictures at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._W._Hornung
One of the most influential of all
Italian Renaissance buildings is perhaps the most diminutive and discreetly
located. On Rome’s Janiculum Hill, in
the courtyard of the monastery of S. Pietro in Montorio, is a tiny domed
structure, popularly known as the Tempietto (Italian for small temple).
Dating from ca. 1502, it was commissioned by Ferdinand and Isabella of
Spain to mark the traditional site of St. Peter’s crucifixion. The design of its architect, Donato Bramante
(1444-1514), consists of a dome supported on a two-tier drum, the bottom
portion of which is encircled by a Doric peristyle topped by a balustrade. This composition, which may have been
inspired by the ancient tholos form, has served as the prototype for countless
monumental domes throughout the Western World.
The Tempietto is also noteworthy as one of the few buildings of the
Renaissance to achieve published approbation by contemporary architects. Sabastiano Serlio (1475-1554) considered the
Tempietto important enough to include a plan, elevation, and section in his
famous treatise L’Architettura, published in installments beginning in
1537. It was Andrea Palladio who
recognized the true ingenuity of the design.
In Book IV of Quattro Libri (1570), the section where Palladio presented
his restoration drawings of ancient temples, we find a plan and elevation of
the Tempietto. Calder Loft
Find pictures of domes around the world, including the U.S. Capitol,
inspired by the Tempietto at http://blog.classicist.org/?p=5723
Probably America’s earliest
example of the application of full pedimented portico to a domestic work is Whitehall, near
Annapolis. Built in the 1760s for
Governor Horatio Sharp, the mansion’s central section is fronted by a finely
executed tetrastyle portico employing the
Corinthian
order. Whitehall was followed by James
Madison’s Montpelier, in Orange County, Virginia. Here, in the 1790s, Madison enlarged his
father’s colonial house and added a Tuscan portico to signal his growing
importance as a statesman. Montpelier’s
was one of the first truly monumental pedimented porticos to embellish an
American house. This expression of the Palladian
ideal was suggested here by Madison’s friend Thomas Jefferson. Calder Loft
See pictures of buildings in Virginia, Maryland and the District of
Columbia at https://jscholarship.library.jhu.edu/bitstream/handle/1774.2/32824/PalladioAmerica_FINAL.pdf
When
Will You Marry? (Tahitian: Nafea faa ipoipo?) is an oil
painting from 1892 by the French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin.
On loan to the Kunstmuseum in Basel, Switzerland for nearly
a half-century, it was sold privately by the family of Rudolf Staechelin to an unknown buyer, reportedly to Qatar Museums,
in February 2015 for close to $300 million, the
highest price ever paid for a work of art. See graphics at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Will_You_Marry%3F
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1255 February 11, 2015 On this date in 1812, Massachusetts governor Elbridge
Gerry "gerrymandered"
for the first time. On this date in
1938, BBC
Television produced the world's first ever science fiction television program,
an adaptation of a section of the Karel Čapek play R.U.R., that
coined the term "robot".
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