The name
of the city of Buenos Aires, the capital of Argentina, means "Good Airs" or "Fair
Winds" in Spanish. When the Aragonese conquered Cagliari, Sardinia from the Pisans in
1324, they established their headquarters on top of a hill that overlooked the
city. The hill was known to them as Buen
Ayre (or
"Bonaria" in the local language),
as it was free of the foul smell prevalent in the old city (the Castle area),
which is adjacent to swampland.
"Foul smell" is another word for malaria ("mal aria"
= bad air), since at that time people believed the air to cause the
illness. Swamps are the breeding ground
of Anopheles mosquitoes, the vectors of malaria which plagued Sardinia until
the swamps were drained and treated with DDT in the 20th century. During the siege of
Cagliari, the Aragonese built a sanctuary to the Virgin Mary on top of the hill. In 1335, King Alfonso the Gentle donated
the church to the Mercedarians,
who built an abbey that
stands to this day. In the years after
that, a story circulated, claiming that a statue of the Virgin Mary was
retrieved from the sea after it miraculously helped to calm a storm in the Mediterranean Sea. In 1536, Spanish seaman Pedro de Mendoza established
a fort and port in current-day San Telmo (about one kilometre south of the
current Buenos Aires city centre) and called it Santa
María del Buen Aire ("Our Lady of the Good
Air"). The naming of Buenos Aires
after the Sardinian virgin also suggested itself because Buenos Aires lies
immediately beyond the southern limit of the South-American range of Anopheles
species and was thus one of the first malaria-free ports for ships coming from
the north. Mendoza’s settlement soon
came under attack by indigenous peoples, and was abandoned in 1541. A second (and permanent) settlement was
established in 1580 by Juan de Garay, who sailed down the Paraná River from Asunción (now the capital of Paraguay).
Garay preserved the name chosen by Mendoza, calling the city Ciudad
de la Santísima Trinidad y Puerto de Nuestra Señora la Virgen María de los
Buenos Aires ("City
of the Most Holy Trinity and Port of Saint Mary of the Good Airs"). The short form "Buenos Aires" became
the common usage during the 17th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Buenos_Aires
Helene Hathaway Robison
Britton (1879-1950) was the first woman to run a baseball franchise. She inherited the St. Louis Cardinals from her uncle Stanley Robison in 1911. She had
to fight other owners, who did not like the idea of a woman joining their
exclusive club, but by 1916 was holding the office of team president
herself. She worked on attracting more
female fans to the ballpark by multiplying the number of Ladies
Days. After the 1916 season, having
found the responsibilities of the day-to-day running of the club excessive and
in a precarious financial state, she decided to sell the team. The team's legal counsel, attorney James Jones put
together a group of local businessmen who made an offer of $375,000. The sale was made, but Helene Britton had to
file lawsuits to receive the full payment.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/Helene_Robison_Britton
When people think of Warner Bros., the first words that often come to
mind are "Hollywood", "entertainment", or maybe "Bugs
Bunny." The billion dollar media
and entertainment empire actually originated in Youngstown, Ohio. The Warner brothers (Harry, Sam, Albert, and
Jack) moved with their parents to the northeastern Ohio city in 1896. The brothers grew up on the north side of the
city and attended Rayen High School in addition to working in their father’s
shoe repair and meat market businesses.
In the early 1900′s, the Warner Brothers made their grand
entrance into the entertainment industry by taking over the city’s Old
Grand Opera House, which they used for vaudeville and photoplays. Soon after, Sam Warner purchased a movie
projector for $150. He financed the
projector by pawning his father’s gold watch and a family horse (with his
parents’ consent). He also purchased a
copy of the popular film, "The Great Train Robbery." Sam and the rest of the Warner
brothers rented out a storefront in nearby Niles and put on showings of the
film. They were so successful, they
began opening up theaters around the Mahoning Valley. The brothers left for New York and Hollywood
to expand their foothold in the entertainment industry. Brett Rosenstein http://ohiowins.com/warner-bros/
Youngstown, Ohio is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and
the county seat of Mahoning County. The municipality is situated on the Mahoning River, approximately 65 miles
(105 km) southeast of Cleveland and 61 miles (100 km) northwest
of Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania. Youngstown lies
10 miles (16 km) west of the Pennsylvania state line. It lies midway between New York City and Chicago.
The city was named for John Young,
an early settler from Whitestown, New York,
who established the community's first sawmill and gristmill.
Find a list of notable or famous people who
were all born in, residents of, or otherwise closely associated with Youngstown at
"If bridges are America’s cathedrals, the Notre Dame-standard of
American bridges were built in Oregon in the 1920s and 30s by Conde McCullough.
Go to this page on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conde_McCullough--then
click on the bridges he designed for photos. As stated in the
article, McCullough advocated that bridges be built economically, efficiently, and
with beauty. He helped design over 600
bridges, many with architectural details such as Gothic spires, art deco
obelisks, and Romanesque arches incorporated into the bridges. Many
times while driving along the Oregon coastal highway, I would park and sit
under these bridges to take in their beauty and majesty. ” Thank you, Muse reader!
The Digital Public Library of America, based in Boston, has begun to link
the collections of research libraries in a national network, which now makes
ten million items available free of charge to everyone with access to the
Internet. The Internet Archive, with
headquarters in San Francisco, performs a similar service by harvesting texts
from millions of websites as well as books.
HathiTrust, located in Ann Arbor, Michigan, preserves the texts of 13.4
million volumes, largely from collections that were digitized by Google. (Google’s own database cannot be made
available as a commercial digital library, owing to a decision of a federal
district court, which declared Google Book Search illegal in 2010.) Each of these initiatives provides valuable
services. Although they overlap in
places, they should be maintained—and above all, they should be integrated in a
single system so that everyone has access to all of the country’s cultural
resources. The Library of Congress is
the richest resource of all. As it is
supported by public funds, the public should be able to tap its collections—160
million items, of which 37.8 million are books and other print materials—by
means of the Internet.” http://www.bespacific.com/viewpoint-great-new-possibilities-for-the-library-of-congress/
August 17, 2015 It is
not too early to identify the sleeper case of the last Supreme Court term. In an otherwise minor
decision about a municipal sign
ordinance, the court in June 2015 transformed the First Amendment. Robert Post, the dean of Yale Law School and
an authority on free speech, said the decision was so bold and so sweeping that
the Supreme Court could not have thought through its
consequences. The decision’s logic, he
said, endangered all sorts of laws, including ones that regulate misleading
advertising and professional malpractice.
“Effectively,” he said, “this would roll consumer protection back to the
19th century.” Floyd Abrams, the
prominent constitutional lawyer, called the decision a blockbuster and welcomed
its expansion of First Amendment rights. The ruling, he said, “provides significantly
enhanced protection for free speech while requiring a second look at the
constitutionality of aspects of federal and state securities laws, the federal
Communications Act and many others.” Whether
viewed with disbelief, alarm or triumph, there is little question that the
decision, Reed v. Town of Gilbert, marks an important shift toward treating
countless laws that regulate speech with exceptional skepticism. Though just two months old, the decision has
already required lower courts to strike down laws barring panhandling,
automated phone calls and “ballot selfies.”
The ordinance in the Reed case discriminated against signs announcing
church services in favor of ones promoting political candidates. That distinction was so offensive and so silly
that all nine justices agreed that it violated the First Amendment. It would have been easy to strike down the
ordinance under existing First Amendment principles. In a concurrence, Justice Elena Kagan said the
ordinance failed even “the laugh test.” But
Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for six justices, used the occasion to
announce that lots of laws are now subject to the most searching form of First
Amendment review, called strict scrutiny.
The key move in Justice Thomas’s opinion was the vast expansion of what
counts as content-based. The court used
to say laws were content-based if they were adopted to suppress speech with
which the government disagreed. Justice Thomas took a
different approach. Any law that singles
out a topic for regulation, he said, discriminates based on content and is
therefore presumptively unconstitutional.
A recent case illustrates the distinction between the old understanding
of content neutrality and the new one.
Last year, the federal appeals court in Chicago upheld an
ordinance barring panhandling in parts of Springfield,
Ill. The ordinance was not
content-based, Judge Frank H. Easterbrook wrote, because it was not concerned
with the ideas panhandling conveys. This
month, after the Reed decision, the appeals court reversed
course and struck down the ordinance. “The majority opinion in Reed effectively
abolishes any distinction between content regulation and subject-matter
regulation,” Judge Easterbrook wrote.
“Any law distinguishing one kind of speech from another by reference to
its meaning now requires a compelling justification.” That same week, the federal appeals court in
Richmond, Va., agreed that Reed had revised the meaning of content
neutrality. “Reed has made clear,” the court
said, that “the government’s justification or purpose in enacting
the law is irrelevant” if it singles out topics for regulation. The court struck down a South Carolina law
that barred robocalls on political and commercial topics but not on
others. Last week, a federal judge in
New Hampshire relied on Reed to strike
down a law that made it illegal to take a picture of a
completed election ballot and show it to others. “As in Reed,” Judge Paul Barbadoro wrote,
“the law under review is content-based on its face because it restricts speech
on the basis of its subject matter.” In
a concurrence in the Reed decision, Justice Stephen G. Breyer suggested that
many other laws could be at risk under the majority’s reasoning, including ones
concerning exceptions to the confidentiality of medical forms, disclosures on
tax returns and signs at petting zoos.
Professor Post said the majority opinion, read literally, would so
destabilize First Amendment law that courts might have to start looking for
alternative approaches. Perhaps courts
will rethink what counts as speech, he said, or perhaps they will water down
the potency of strict scrutiny. Adam
Liptax http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/us/politics/courts-free-speech-expansion-has-far-reaching-consequences.html See also Opinion analysis: The message determines the right by Lyle Denniston
Amid deep divisions on First Amendment theory, the Supreme
Court gave state governments sweeping new control over the messages that
can be put on auto and truck license plates but restricted governments at
all levels from using differing rules to control the messages put on billboards
and other outdoor signs. As a
combined result of two new rulings, government both gained added power to speak
for itself but faced the loss of some of its power to control what
others may say in public displays. And the meaning of the First Amendment, in
general, became somewhat more confusing.
The license
plate case — Walker
v. Texas Division, Sons of Confederate Veterans — and the municipal sign case — Reed v. Town of Gilbert — are
likely to be analyzed together from here on, to determine how — and
whether — they fit into the strong pattern that the modern Court had followed
in more or less steadily expanding free-speech rights. Indeed, in some
ways the outcomes seemed contradictory, and the splintering of the Court added
to that appearance.
http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/06/opinion-analysis-the-message-determines-the-right/ Thank you, Muse reader!
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1341
August 20, 2015 On this date in 1858, Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution through natural selection in The
Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London, alongside Alfred Russel Wallace's
same theory. On this date in 1882, Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture was first publicly performed in Moscow, Russia.
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