The Lipari Islands, often called the Aeolian Islands (as the domain of Aeolus, god of the winds), are a volcanic archipelago visible from Sicily's eastern Tyrrhenian coast, easily accessible by ferry or hydrofoil from Milazzo and also Messina.  The principal islands are Lipari, Salina, Filicudi, Alicudi, Stromboli, Panarea and Vulcano.  The volcanoes on Stromboli and appropriately-named Vulcano erupt fairly frequently; Filicudi, Alicudi and Salina are without volcanic activity in historical memory.  Over the ages, the history of the Lipari Islands mirrors that of Sicily and nearby Calabria.  Settled in Neolithic times, the islands were formally and extensively colonized by the Greeks in 575 BC (BCE), though far earlier traces of the civilization of the Mycenaeans have been found here.  The islands were much contested by the Romans in their conquest of Sicily.  Salina, named for its salt mines, is the second-largest of the islands, and also the greenest, with extensive viticulture.  Salina was the setting of the Massimo Troisi film Il Postino.  Stromboli is closer to the Calabrian coast than it is to Sicily, and was the setting for a famous movie, the eponymous Stromboli of Roberto Rosselini.

http://www.bestofsicily.com/lipari.htm

What's a diving bell? by Charles W. Bryant  Since man has walked the Earth, it seems like we've been fascinated with two things we weren't built to do -- fly like birds and swim like fish.  We've all seen grainy black and white footage of some of the early flying machines, most of which involved mimicking the flight of birds by attaching wings to a human in some fashion.  What doesn't exist so readily are images of our early attempts to become fishlike. This is mostly due to the lack of availability of underwater filming techniques at the time.  But we do have some record of our quest for going underwater and staying there for prolonged periods.  The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote about man's desire to spend time under the sea way back in the 4th century B.C.  The first real innovation to the diving bell came when Frenchman Denis Papin figured out how to get fresh air into them in 1689.  The next obstacle was to figure out how to get pressurized air into the bell, something Englishman Edmund Halley did just a year later.  English scientist John Smeaton invented the diving air pump in 1788.  Smeaton also was one of the first to make the bells square, calling them "diving chests."  Other improvements over the years included adding electric lighting inside, thick convex lenses as windows, and increasing the interior space so that as many as 12 men could descend at a time.  Find four-page article with pictures at http://adventure.howstuffworks.com/outdoor-activities/water-sports/diving-bell.htm

Beskuit, known as "rusks" in English, is made from dough, broken or cut into chunks or slices after baking, and then slowly dried in an oven.  It is usually briefly dipped into a warm drink such as coffee, tea, or rooibos tea before being eaten.  Find recipes at http://www.rainbowcooking.co.nz/rusks  See also South African Rusks recipe from Julie at http://www.food.com/recipe/south-african-rusks-11415

Rooibos, meaning "red bush"; scientific name Aspalathus linearis) is a broom-like member of the legume family of plants growing in South Africa.  The leaves are used to make a herbal tea called rooibos or bush tea (especially in Southern Africa) or sometimes red tea (especially in England).  The product has been popular in Southern Africa for generations and is now consumed in many countries.  It is sometimes spelled rooibosch in accordance with the old Dutch etymology.

See pictures at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooibos

The rules concerning the use of apostrophes in written English are very simple:

1.  They are used to denote a missing letter or letters, for example:  I can't instead of I cannot

2.  They are used to denote possession, for example:  the dog's bone

http://www.apostrophe.org.uk/page2.html

The apostrophe is almost never used in modern Spanish.  Its use is limited to words of foreign origin (usually names) and, very rarely, poetry or poetic literature.  Here are some examples of uses of the apostrophe for words or names of foreign origin:  (1)  Me siento vieja.  Pero, c'est la vie.  I feel old.  But such is life.  (2)  Un jack-o'-lantern es una calabaza tallada a mano, asociada a la festividad de Halloween.  A jack-o'-lantern is a pumpkin carved by hand and associated with Halloween festivities.  (3)  Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor es una cantante nacida en Dublín, Irlanda.  Sinéad Marie Bernadette O'Connor is a singer born in Dublin, Ireland.  The apostrophe can occasionally be found in centuries-old poetry or literature as a way of showing that letters have been omitted.  Such use is very rarely found in modern writing, and then only for literary effect.  One exception in modern usage is the slang spellings of m'ijo and m'ija for mi hijo and mi hija ("my son" and "my daughter," respectively).  Such a spelling should not be used in formal writing.  Gerald Erichsen  http://spanish.about.com/od/writtenspanish/a/apostrophe.htm

Charles Pierre Baudelaire (1821–1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist, art critic, and pioneering translator of Edgar Allan Poe.  His most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal (The Flowers of Evil), expresses the changing nature of beauty in modern, industrializing Paris during the 19th century.  Baudelaire's highly original style of prose-poetry influenced a whole generation of poets including Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé among many others.  He is credited with coining the term "modernity" (modernité) to designate the fleeting, ephemeral experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has to capture that experience.  Read more and see pictures at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire

TELEGRAMMATIC/TELEGRAPHIC  Come home quick.  Hamster ill.  Vet worried.  Love Mum.  This is the kind of language people used to use when sending a telegram.  You had to pay for every word, you see, so people left out all the little words, and just put the important ones in.  People don’t send telegrams much now, but the style is still sometimes used in writing where you have to ‘pay by the word’ (for instance, when you send an ad to a newspaper), and of course we often see sentences with parts left out in texting and tweeting.  The words at the top of this entry are telegrammatic speech, not telegrammatic writing.  Who would ever speak remotely like this?  The answer is:  young children in the early stages of learning sentence structure.

http://www.davidcrystal.community.librios.com/?id=3158  The term telegraphic speech was coined by Roger Brown and Colin Fraser in "The Acquisition of Syntax" (Verbal Behavior and Learning:  Problems and Processes, ed. by C. Cofer and B. Musgrave, 1963). http://grammar.about.com/od/tz/g/Telegraphic-Speech-term.htm  Lee Earle "James" Ellroy (born March 4, 1948) is an American crime fiction writer and essayist.  Ellroy has become known for a telegrammatic prose style in his most recent work, wherein he frequently omits connecting words and uses only short, staccato sentences, and in particular for the novels The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988), L.A. Confidential (1990), White Jazz (1992), American Tabloid (1995), The Cold Six Thousand (2001), and Blood's a Rover (2009).  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Ellroy

Physicist and author Freeman Dyson:  “Let me tell you the story of how I discovered Turing, which was in 1941,” he says.  “I was just browsing in the library in Cambridge.  I hit that 1936 paper.  I never heard of this guy Turing, but I saw that paper and immediately I said this is something absolutely great.  Computable numbers, that was something that was obviously great.”  “But it never occurred to me that it would have any practical importance.”  Oh yes, “On Computable Numbers, With An Application to the Entscheidungsproblem,” had practical importance, for it was arguably the founding document of the computer age.

 Turing — that would be Alan Turing (1912-1954) — did as much as anyone to create the digital revolution that continues to erupt around us.  In reality, Turing’s greatest breakthrough wasn’t mechanical, but theoretical — that 1936 paper that Dyson was talking about.  “On Computable Numbers,” written in England, was published in the proceedings of the London Mathematical Society after Turing arrived at Princeton, where he would spend two academic years earning a Ph.D.  Amid the paper’s thicket of equations and mathematical theories lay a powerful idea:  that it would be possible to build a machine that could compute anything that a human could compute.  Turing was addressing a question of logic, but in the process he clearly described a real machine that someone could build, one that would use 0s and 1s for computation.  “He invented the idea of software, essentially,” Dyson says.  “It’s software that’s really the important invention.  We had computers before. They were mechanical devices.  What we never had before was software.  Joel Achenbach   http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/what-imitation-game-didnt-tell-you-about-alan-turings-greatest-triumph/2015/02/20/ffd210b6-b606-11e4-9423-f3d0a1ec335c_story.html

Follow-up to Feb. 18, 2015 ice stories:  Niagara Falls is ice-covered, but Lake Erie keeps flowing underneath.  Even with bitter cold, winds and waves have reduced the amount of solid ice on the Great Lakes.

Oscars 2015:  the full list of winners and nominees

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/feb/23/oscars-2015-list-of-winners

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1260  February 23, 2015  On this date in 1861, President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrived secretly in Washington, D.C., after the thwarting of an alleged assassination plot in Baltimore, Maryland.  On this date in 1886, Charles Martin Hall produced the first samples of man-made aluminum, after several years of intensive work.  He was assisted in this project by his older sister Julia Brainerd Hall.