A ham is a pork cut that's taken from a hog's upper hind leg.  There are three types of American hams:  city hams, country hams, and fresh hams.  City hams are the most common.  They're soaked in brine (or injected with it) and then boiled or lightly smoked.  Country hams are dry-cured and then smoked and aged for added flavor.  Fresh hams aren't cured at all and need to be cooked.  America also imports several dry-cured hams from abroad, including prosciutto, Bayonne ham, Serrano ham, Black Forest ham, Westphalian ham, York ham, and Ardennes ham.  See descriptions and pictures at http://www.foodsubs.com/MeatcureHams.html

Collage derives its name from the French verb coller, to glue.  The work of art is made by gluing things to the surface.  Collage became an art form during the Synthetic Cubist period of Picasso and Braque.  At first, Pablo Picasso glued oil cloth to his surface of Still Life with Chair Caning in May of 1912.  He glued a rope around the edge of the oval canvas. Georges Braque then glued imitation wood-grained wallpaper to his Fruit Dish and Glass (September 1912).  Braque's work is called papier collé (glued or pasted paper), a specific type of collage.  During the Dada movement, Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978) glued bits of photographs from magazines and advertising in such works as Cut with a Kitchen Knife, (1919-20).  Fellow Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (German, 1887-1948) also glued bits of paper he found in newspapers, advertisements and other discarded matter beginning in 1919.  Schwitters called his collages and assemblages Merzbilder, a word derived from the German word "Kommerz" (Commerce, as in banking) which had been on a fragment of an advertisement in his first work, and bilder ("pictures").  The exclusive use of photos in collage is called photomontage.  http://arthistory.about.com/od/glossary_c/a/c_collage.htm

For more than 50 years, Werner Pfeiffer (German-American, born 1937) has experimented with the multiple uses of paper as both a canvas and a structural material.  Much of his work as a sculptor, printmaker and painter suggests an attraction to machines and machine-like constructions.  His drawings are schematic, his dimensional works project into space claiming their own territory and his complex artist books have moving parts.  He is fascinated by puzzles and contradictions, metaphors and wordplay, and this curiosity inspires works that are thought-provoking in themselves.  A prodigious artist, Mr. Pfeiffer's works on paper have been shown and collected internationally.  The nearly 200 unique and limited-edition works of Pfeiffer's art in the exhibition at The Toledo Museum of Art from Feb. 6-May 3, 2015 included drawings, dimensional prints, 3D collage, and sculptural and experimental books.  His award-winning designs have been widely published in magazines such as Print, Modern Publicity and Art Direction.  His work can be found in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, the 9/11 Memorial Museum and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), among others.  http://explorepaper.toledomuseum.org/  

What impacted Werner Pfeiffer most as a young boy in World War II Germany was the scarcity.  There was no paper; there was no books,”  Mr. Pfeiffer said. “I grew up with a real respect for paper and it has affected me all my life.”  “Digital life has brought a kind of sterility.  Everything we do on a computer is going through one system, and that’s fingers on a keyboard, whether you make a drawing, write music, whatever it is,” Mr. Pfeiffer said.  “When you think of paper, the sense of richness, of surfaces, even of sound when you crinkle it, that’s something completely void in the digital world.  It really makes people kind of starved for the touch and feel of paper.”  http://toledomuseum.tumblr.com/post/108283896888/the-possibilities-of-paper

O Brother, Where Art Thou? is a 2000 adventure comedy film written, produced, edited, and directed by Joel and Ethan Coen, and starring George Clooney, John Turturro, and Tim Blake Nelson, with John Goodman, Holly Hunter, and Charles Durning in supporting roles.  Set in 1937 rural Mississippi during the Great Depression, the film's story is a modern satire loosely based on Homer’s epic poem, Odyssey.  Despite the fact that Ethan described the Odyssey as "one of my favorite storyline schemes" neither of the brothers had read the epic and were only familiar with its content through adaptations and numerous references to the Odyssey in popular culture.   According to the brothers, Nelson (who has a degree in classics from Brown University) was the only person on the set who had read the Odyssey.  The title of the film is a reference to the 1941 film Sullivan's Travels, in which the protagonist (a director) wants to film a fictional book about the Great Depression called O Brother, Where Art Thou?  Much of the music used in the film is period folk music.  This was the fifth film collaboration between the Coen Brothers and Deakins, and it was slated to be shot in Mississippi at a time of year when the foliage, grass, trees, and bushes would be a lush green.  It was filmed near locations in Canton, Mississippi and Florence, South Carolina in the summer of 1999.  After shooting tests, including film bipack and bleach bypass techniques, Deakins suggested digital mastering be used.  Deakins subsequently spent 11 weeks fine-tuning the look, mainly targeting the greens, making them a burnt yellow and desaturating the overall image timing the digital files.  This made it the first feature film to be entirely color corrected by digital means.  The Soggy Bottom Boys, the musical group that the main characters form, serve as accompaniment for the film.  The name is a homage to the Foggy Mountain Boys, a bluegrass band led by Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs.  In the film, the songs credited to the band are lip-synched by the actors, except that Tim Blake Nelson does sing his own vocals on "In the Jailhouse Now".  The actual musicians are Dan Tyminski (guitar and lead vocals), Harley Allen, and Pat Enright.  The band's hit single is Dick Burnett's "Man of Constant Sorrow", a song that had already enjoyed much success in real life. After the film's release, the fictitious band became so popular that the country and folk musicians who were dubbed into the film, such as Ralph Stanley, John Hartford, Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch, Chris Sharp, and others, all got together and performed the music from the film in a Down from the Mountain concert tour which was filmed for TV and DVD.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Brother,_Where_Art_Thou%3F

Toe the line is the survivor of a set of phrases that were common in the nineteenth century; others were toe the mark, toe the scratch, toe the crack, or toe the trig.  In every case, the image was that of men lining up with the tips of their toes touching some line.  They might be on parade, or preparing to undertake some task, or in readiness for a race or fight.  The earliest recorded form is dated 1813, in a book by Hector Bull-Us (a pseudonym of James Kirke Paulding) with the title The Diverting History of John Bull and Brother Jonathan.  This already had the modern figurative sense of conforming to the usual standards or rules:  “He began to think it was high time to toe the mark”.  Many early examples are from the British Navy, which is where it may have originated.  Toe the crack is an American form of the 1820s in reference to a crack in the floorboards that delineates a straight line.  Toe the scratch is from prize fighting, where scratch was the line drawn across the ring (often in the earth of an informal outdoor ring) to which the fighters were brought ready for the contest—it’s a close relative of to come up to scratch.  In toe the trig, trig is an old term for a boundary or centre line in various sports.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-toe2.htm

May 20, 2015  A group of travel websites claims that Delta Air Lines Inc. is cutting them and their users off from its data, adding to industry tensions over the way consumers shop for flights on the Internet.  Delta has removed its schedule and fare information from over a dozen sites, including TripAdvisor Inc., Hipmunk Inc. and CheapOair.com, saying it didn’t authorize the sites to use its data, according to a report to be released on Wednesday by the Travel Technology Association, a trade group for the sites.  The group said Delta’s move is part of a broader push by airlines to restrict how—and whether—sites can use their fare and schedule data.  The group says carriers including American Airlines Group Inc. and United Continental Holdings Inc. have recently adopted policies allowing them to limit how the sites use their data.  The spat marks the latest chapter in the struggle for control over airfare searches and seat purchases online.  Carriers increasingly are pushing fliers to their own sites, partly to improve sales of add-on products such as extra legroom and frequent-flier points.  And they have butted heads with the travel sites over booking fees.  In a dust-up last August, American temporarily withdrew its flight information from sites operated by Orbitz Worldwide Inc.  While the sites affected by Delta’s recent actions account for a relatively small share of total flight searches, the trade group says its members, which include the biggest travel websites, broadly fear that airlines are laying the groundwork for a gradual exodus from fare-comparison websites, a move that they say would make it easier for airlines to raise fares.

Jack Nicas  http://www.wsj.com/articles/travel-websites-allege-delta-air-lines-is-shutting-them-out-1432094461

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1299  May 20, 2015  On this date in 1609, Shakespeare's sonnets were first published in London, perhaps illicitly, by the publisher Thomas Thorpe.  On this date in 1873, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis received a U.S. patent for blue jeans with copper rivets.