Q:  Why do we call it “soccer” and the rest of the world calls it “football”?  A:  Since the 1800s, soccer has been known as socca, socker, association football, and football.  When introduced here in the early 1900s, we already were playing our football, so soccer stuck.  Italians call it calcio, from calciare, meaning “to kick.”  South Africans call it soccer or sokker, and the Japanese call it sakka and futtoboru.  Malaysia and Indonesia break it down to just foot and ball, and call it bola sepak and sepak bola, respectively. — dictionary.com.
Q:  What happened to the Venus de Milo’s arms?  A:  No one knows.  They were not with the rest of her when French naval officer Olivier Voutier, on shore leave on the Aegean island of Melos in 1820, came upon peasants digging her up.  The French bought the statue cheaply.  King Louis XVIII gave her to the Louvre, where she stands, her halves joined at the hips.  She is believed to come from about 100 B.C.  She depicts Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love and beauty, who was Venus to the Romans. — history.com.  http://thecourier.com/opinion/columns/2015/07/13/why-do-i-75-barriers-only-extend-to-cygnet/

Semolina is the coarse, purified wheat middlings of durum wheat used in making pasta, breakfast cereals, puddings, and couscous.  The term semolina is also used to designate coarse middlings from other varieties of wheat, and from other grains, such as rice and maize.  Semolina is derived from the Italian word semola, meaning 'bran'.  This is derived from the ancient Latin simila, meaning 'flour', itself a borrowing from Greek (semidalis), "groats".  Semolina made from durum wheat is yellow in color.  Broadly speaking, meal produced from grains other than wheat may also be referred to as semolina: rice semolina, or corn semolina (more commonly known as grits in the U.S.)  When semolina comes from softer types of wheats, it is white in color.  In this case, the correct name is flour, not semolina.  In the United States, coarser meal coming from softer types of wheats is known also as farina.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semolina

Cramming is the illegal act of placing unauthorized charges on your wireline, wireless, or bundled services telephone bill.  The FCC has estimated that cramming has harmed tens of millions of American households.  Crammers often rely on confusing telephone bills to trick consumers into paying for services they did not authorize or receive, or that cost more than the consumer was led to believe.  Wireless consumers should be particularly vigilant.  The more your mobile phone bill begins to resemble a credit card bill, the more difficult it may become to spot unauthorized charges.  Cramming most often occurs when telephone companies allow other providers of goods or services to place charges on their customers' telephone bills, enabling a telephone number to be used like a credit or debit card account number for vendors.  Crammers may attempt to place a charge on a consumer's phone bill having nothing other than an active telephone number, which can be obtained from a telephone directory.  Read more at https://www.fcc.gov/guides/cramming-unauthorized-misleading-or-deceptive-charges-placed-your-telephone-bill

What poem contains these phrases:  The paths of glory lead but to the grave . . . storied urn or animated bust . . . Far from the madding crowd's ignoble strife . . .  Find the answer and the poem at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173564

Q.  Johnson grass and rabbit-tobacco grow in the Radley yard.  Why does Harper Lee make a point telling us that?  A.  These two plants are considered to be scrub or weeds.  A properly kept Southern yard in town would not have "weeds" of this nature in it.  The Radley place has fallen into a type of decline or neglect.  During this time period a Southern yard in town was swept...no grass only soft dirt that was literally swept with a broom each day...under the shade of live oak trees or magnolia trees was considered a proper yard.  You may have seen Johnson grass.  It's tall about 3 feet high and has a big tassel on top sort of like corn.  This is the grass that you may see farmers stick in their mouths on television commercials.  Rabbit tobacco is a type of weed in the lobelia family.  Youngsters would chew this or even smoke it during the 1930s or 1940s to pretend to be "big" like the grown-ups.  It did not get one high.  http://www.enotes.com/homework-help/1-johnson-grass-rabbit-tobacco-grow-radley-yard-74883

Live oak or evergreen oak is a general term for a number of unrelated oaks in several different sections of the genus Quercus that share the characteristic of evergreen foliage.  Link to information on the southern live oak (common live oak) in the southern United States at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_oak

July 30, 2015  One morning this week, five members of Spread Love, a New Orleans-style street band, gathered at one of Washington’s busiest intersections, pulled out four trombones, a drum set and a tips bucket and began playing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy.”  The band’s brassy riffs at 15th Street and New York Avenue NW always delight the hordes of tourists heading toward the White House.  But the very spot that’s proved so profitable for Spread Love to pull in tips has also earned it the enmity of employees at two major Washington institutions:  the Treasury Department and the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom.  The conflict, which began this spring and was first chronicled by the Above the Law blog, pits two very different slices of Washington against each other:  the super-educated strivers working at the upper echelons of government and law against a group of exuberant street buskers who make a living off Mall-bound tourists.  “We have to relocate our conference calls.  We can’t have meetings in that corner of the building anymore.  It’s like they’re playing music in the building,” said one Treasury Department employee, who, true to Washington form, would speak only on the condition of anonymity and be identified only as an “employee.”  Over at Skadden Arps, Mitchell S. Ettinger, who leads the Washington office, wrote an e-mail in late May to the staff apologizing for the “inconvenience” of the band, which was “making it difficult for people . . . to work.”  The firm reached out to the Secret Service and D.C. police, he wrote, but the agencies said the musicians’ performances were legal and that “there was nothing that could be done to have them removed.”  Ettinger added that Skadden Arps tried negotiating with Spread Love to relocate but failed.  Ian Shapira  http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-street-bands-brassy-riffs-earn-it-tips-from-tourists--and-enmity-from-the-high-powered/2015/07/30/7fde663a-349a-11e5-8e66-07b4603ec92a_story.html

Anne Bradstreet (born Anne Dudley 1612–1672) was the most prominent of early English poets of North America and first female writer in the British North American colonies to be published.  Anne was born in Northampton, England, 1612, the daughter of Thomas Dudley, a steward of the Earl of Lincoln, and Dorothy Yorke.  At the age of sixteen she married Simon Bradstreet.  Both Anne's father and husband were later to serve as governors of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Anne and Simon, along with Anne's parents, emigrated to America aboard the Arbella as part of the Winthrop Fleet of Puritan emigrants in 1630.  She first touched American soil on June 14, 1630 at what is now Pioneer Village (Salem, Massachusetts) with Simon, her parents and other voyagers as part of the Puritan migration to New England (1620–1640).  Due to the illness and starvation of Gov. John Endecott and other residents of the village, their stay was very brief.  Most moved immediately south along the coast to Charlestown, Massachusetts for another short stay before moving south along the Charles River to found "the City on the Hill," Boston, Massachusetts.  The Bradstreet family soon moved again, this time to what is now Cambridge, Massachusetts.  In the early 1640s, Simon once again pressed his wife, pregnant with her sixth child, to move for the sixth time, from Ipswich, Massachusetts to Andover Parish.  North Andover is that original town founded in 1646 by the Stevens, Osgood, Johnson, Farnum, Barker and Bradstreet families among others.  Anne and her family resided in the Old Center of North Andover, Massachusetts.  They never lived in what is now known as "Andover" to the south.  Both Anne's father and her husband were instrumental in the founding of Harvard in 1636.  In 1650, Rev. John Woodbridge had The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America composed by "A Gentlewoman from Those Parts" published in London, making Anne the first female poet ever published in both England and the New World.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bradstreet

August 3, 2015  Temperature, a cinematic ‘tale of high comedy’ written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1939, has been discovered in the archives of Princeton University and finally been published, 75 years after the author of The Great Gatsby died of a heart attack, aged 44.  Andrew Gulli, who runs the Strand magazine, came across Fitzgerald’s 8,000-word story Temperature while digging through his papers at Princeton.  He published it for the first time in the new issue of the Strand, alongside works by Ian Rankin and T Jefferson Parker.  Temperature is set in Los Angeles. Fitzgerald had moved to Hollywood in 1937 with a contract with MGM.  When this was dropped in 1938, he worked as a freelance script writer and wrote short stories for Esquire, as well as starting on the uncompleted novel The Love of the Last Tycoon in 1939.  Alison Flood   http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/03/unreleased-f-scott-fitzgerald-great-gatsby-story-published

Although it may not technically be a “blue moon” per se, the second full moon of July was a sight to see for many on July 31, 2015, as photographers, and even NASA itself, snapped images of the unusual milestone.  2018 will actually see two blue moons, the first on January 31 and the second on March 31.  Melissa Taylor  See picture at http://www.modernreaders.com/blue-moon-fallout-sky-watchers-take-photos-of-julys-second-full-moon/29519/melissa-taylor

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1332  August 3, 2015  On this date in 1527, the first known letter from North America was sent by John Rut while at St. John's, Newfoundland.  On this date in 1803, Joseph Paxton, English gardener and architect, designed The Crystal Palace