A blue hole is a cave (inland) or underwater sinkhole.  They are also called vertical caves.  There are many different blue holes located around the world, typically in low-lying coastal regions.  The best known examples can be found in Belize, the Bahamas, Guam, Australia (in the Great Barrier Reef), and Egypt (in the Red Sea).  Blue holes are roughly circular, steep-walled depressions, and so named for the dramatic contrast between the dark blue, deep waters of their depths and the lighter blue of the shallows around them.  Their water circulation is poor, and they are commonly anoxic below a certain depth; this environment is unfavorable for most sea life, but nonetheless can support large numbers of bacteria.  The deep blue color is caused by the high transparency of water and bright white carbonate sand.  Blue light is the most enduring part of the spectrum; other parts of the spectrum—red, yellow, and finally green—are absorbed during their path through water, but blue light manages to reach the white sand and return upon reflection.  The deepest blue hole in the world-at 392 meters (1,286 ft) is Pozzo del Merro in Italy.  The deepest blue hole in the world with underwater entrance—at 202 metres (663 ft)—is Dean's Blue Hole, located in a bay west of Clarence Town on Long Island, Bahamas.  

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

10 Biggest Sinkholes on the Planet   See wonderful pictures and descriptions at http://listsoplenty.com/blog/?p=5017

Geoffrey Edward West Household (1900-1988) was a prolific British novelist who specialised in thrillers.  He is best known for his novel Rogue Male.  He began to write in the 1920s.  His first short story, "The Salvation of Pisco Gabar" was published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1936.  His first novel The Terror of Villadonga was published that same year.  His first short story collection, The Salvation of Pisco Gabar and Other Stories, came out in 1938.  In all, he wrote twenty-eight novels (including four for young adults and a novella), seven short story collections and an autobiography, Against the Wind, published in 1958.  Many of his stories have scenes set in caves, and there is a science-fiction or supernatural element in some, although this is handled with restraint.  Indiana University holds a collection of Household's manuscripts and correspondence.  Find his bibliography at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Household  

NOTE:  Rogue Male (1939) was followed by Rogue Justice (1982).  You do not know the hero's name in the first book and discover it a few pages before the end of the second.

The Imagination Library by Dolly Parton   This program is one of the most important ways I know to improve the educational opportunities for children in your community.  When I was growing up in the hills of East Tennessee, I knew my dreams would come true.  I know there are children in your community with their own dreams.  They dream of becoming a doctor or an inventor or a minister.  Who knows, maybe there is a little girl whose dream is to be a writer and singer.  The seeds of these dreams are often found in books and the seeds you help plant in your community can grow across the world.  Register your child or find more information about the Imagination Library at http://usa.imaginationlibrary.com/

50 Google Search Tips & Tricks by Craig Lloyd  http://www.gottabemobile.com/2015/02/15/google-search-tips-tricks/

The bookwheel (also written book wheel and sometimes called a reading wheel) is a type of rotating bookcase designed to allow one person to read a variety of heavy books in one location with ease.  The books are rotated vertically similar to the motion of a water wheel, as opposed to rotating on a flat table surface.  The bookwheel, in its most commonly seen form, was invented by Italian military engineer Agostino Ramelli in 1588, presented as one of the 195 designs in Le diverse et artificiose machine del Capitano Agostino Ramelli (The various and ingenious machines of Captain Agostino Ramelli).  To ensure that the books remained at a constant angle, Ramelli incorporated an epicyclic gearing arrangement, a complex device that had only previously been used in astronomical clocks.  Ramelli's design is unnecessarily elaborate, as he likely understood that gravity could have worked just as effectively (as it does with a Ferris wheel, invented centuries later), but the gearing system allowed him to display his mathematical prowess.  While other people would go on to build bookwheels based on Ramelli's design, Ramelli did not in fact ever construct his own.   To what extent bookwheels were appreciated for their convenience versus their aesthetic qualities remains a matter of speculation according to modern American engineer Henry Petroski.  Ramelli himself described the bookwheel as a "beautiful and ingenious machine, very useful and convenient for anybody who takes pleasure in study, especially for those who are indisposed and tormented by gout."   Ramelli's reference to gout, a condition that impairs mobility, demonstrates the appeal of a device that allows access to several books while seated.  However, Petroski notes that Ramelli's illustration lacks space for writing and other scholarly work, and that the "fanciful wheel" may not have been appropriate for any activity beyond reading.  While the design of the bookwheel is commonly credited to Ramelli, some historians dispute that he was the first to invent such a device.  Joseph Needham, a historian of Chinese technology, stated that revolving bookcases, though not vertically oriented, had their origins in China "perhaps a thousand years before Ramelli's design was taken there."   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bookwheel

Red Cabbage with Fruit adapted from Good Housekeeping Cook Book, 1955  6 servings

1 large head red cabbage (about 2 pounds)

3/4 c. boiling water

2 cups sliced, pared apples, pears or peaches

3 tbsp. melted butter

1/4 c. vinegar

1 1/2 tsp. flour

1/4 c. brown sugar, packed

1 tsp. salt

speck pepper

Put shredded cabbage in pot, add boiling water, cook covered 10 min.  Add fruit, cook 10 min. or until tender.  Add rest of ingredients combined.  Heat.

Adults who have already mastered written English tend to forget about its many quirks.  But consider this:  English has 205 ways to spell 44 sounds.  And not only can the same sounds be represented in different ways, but the same letter or letter combinations can also correspond to different sounds.  Masha Bell, the vice chair of the English Spelling Society and author of the book Understanding English Spelling, analyzed the 7,000 most common English words and found that 60 percent of them had one or more unpredictably used letters.  No one knows for sure, but the Spelling Society speculates that English may just be the world’s most irregularly spelled language.  English spelling wasn’t always so convoluted; there was much more rhyme and reason to Old and even Middle English.  But the spoken language has evolved, as all languages are wont to do:  Pronunciations have changed and foreign words have been introduced, sometimes retaining the spelling conventions of their original languages.  Written English has also evolved—but mostly in ways unrelated to the changes in the spoken language, thanks in part to shenanigans and human error.  The first English printing press, in the 15th century, was operated by Belgians who didn’t know the language and made numerous spelling errors (such as "busy" in place of "bisy").  And because they were paid by the line, they sometimes padded words with extra letters; "frend," for example, became "friend."  In the next century, other non-English speakers in continental Europe printed the first English Bibles, introducing yet more errors.  Worse, those Bibles were then copied, and the writing became increasingly corrupted with each subsequent rendition.  English spelling became a chaotic mess, and successful attempts to simplify the spelling after that were offset by events that made the language harder to learn, such as the inclusion of many alternate spellings in Samuel Johnson’s influential English dictionary.  By contrast, languages such as Finnish and Korean have very regular spelling systems; rules govern the way words are written, with few exceptions. Finnish also has the added bonus of a nearly one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters, meaning fewer rules to learn.  So after Finnish children learn their alphabet, learning to read is pretty straightforward—they can read well within three months of starting formal learning, Bell says.  And it’s not just Finnish- and Korean-speaking children who are at a significant advantage:  A 2003 study found that English-speaking children typically needed about three years to master the basics of reading and writing, whereas their counterparts in most European countries needed a year or less.  Meanwhile, engineer and applied linguist Dmitry Orlov has come up with another solution:  Eliminate the need to learn English spelling, temporarily if not permanently.  The human brain is primed to memorize groups of speech sounds, not sequences of letters, he says.  With this in mind, he developed his own writing system, Unspell, which is more or less a phonetic rendition of spoken English.  It treats words as sequences of sounds rather than sequences of letters, so what you see is what you get:  How a word is written is how it’s pronounced, and vice versa.  Unspell has 13 basic symbols that also come in elongated versions; if needed, they can also be embellished by a voicing mark that looks like the accent mark in Spanish and/or a bar that means "say the sound with your mouth open wider."  There is one distinct way to represent each of the 38 English sounds that Orlov says are needed to distinguish the meanings of words.  Unspell is available in two versions to account for additional differences between North American and British English.  Luba Vangelova  http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/how-the-english-language-is-holding-kids-back/385291/

The writer Terry Pratchett, who took millions of readers on a madcap journey to the universe of Discworld, died aged 66 on Mar. 12, 2015.  With more than 75m copies sold around the world, Pratchett became one of the UK’s most-loved writers after the publication of his first Discworld novel, The Colour of Magic, in 1983.  The 40th, Raising Steam, was released last year, with the writer completing recent work using voice-recognition software.  He recently teamed up with the science fiction writer Stephen Baxter for the “Long Earth” series of novels, the fourth of which – The Long Utopia – is due out in the summer.  According to Neil Gaiman, who co-wrote 1990’s Good Omens with him, Pratchett’s writing is powered by “fury … it’s the fury that was the engine that powered Discworld.  It’s also the anger at the headmaster who would decide that six-year-old Terry Pratchett would never be smart enough for the 11-plus; anger at pompous critics, and at those who think serious is the opposite of funny; anger at his early American publishers who could not bring his books out successfully.”   Richard Lea and Caroline Davies  Read extensive article at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/12/terry-pratchett-author-of-the-discworld-series-dies-aged-66  

Good Omens, by Pratchett and Gaiman, is one of the few books I've read twice. 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1269  March 13, 2015  On this date in 1639, Harvard College was named after clergyman John Harvard.  On this date in 1781, William Herschel discovered Uranus.