Friday, May 13, 2016

Thomas Moran (1837–1926) from Bolton, England was an American painter and printmaker of the Hudson River School in New York whose work often featured the Rocky Mountains.  He was a younger brother of the noted marine artist Edward Moran, with whom he shared a studio.  A talented illustrator and exquisite colorist, Thomas Moran was hired as an illustrator at Scribner's Monthly.  During the late 1860s, he was appointed the chief illustrator for the magazine, a position that helped him launch his career as one of the premier painters of the American landscape, in particular, the American West.  Moran along with Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Hill, and William Keith are sometimes referred to as belonging to the Rocky Mountain School of landscape painters because of all of the Western landscapes made by this group.  Thomas Moran's vision of the Western landscape was critical to the creation of Yellowstone National Park.  In 1871 Dr. Ferdinand Hayden, director of the United States Geological Survey, invited Moran, at the request of American financier Jay Cooke, to join Hayden and his expedition team into the unknown Yellowstone region.  Funded by Cooke (the director of the Northern Pacific Railroad), and Scribner's Monthly, a new illustrated magazine, Moran agreed to join the survey team of the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871 in their exploration of the Yellowstone region.  During forty days in the wilderness area, Moran visually documented over 30 different sites and produced a diary of the expedition's progress and daily activities.  His sketches, along with photographs produced by survey member William Henry Jackson, captured the nation's attention and helped inspire Congress to establish the Yellowstone region as the first national park in 1872.  The Thomas Moran House in East Hampton, New York is a National Historic Landmark.  Mount Moran in the Grand Teton National Park is named for Moran.  His work is held in the collection of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MassachusettsSee graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Moran  See also https://www.nps.gov/subjects/arts/index.htm

COLA  acronym  cost of living adjustment  Find over a dozen COLA acronyms at http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/COLA  cola  noun  The kola plant, genus Cola, famous for its nut, or one of these nuts.  A beverage or a drink made with kola nut flavoring, caramel and carbonated waterhttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cola  Dr Pepper legally not a cola   For much of Dr Pepper’s history, the drink was a regional delicacy confined to the South and Southwest. Coca-Cola and Pepsi had used their head starts on Dr Pepper to build nationwide networks of independent bottlers who had exclusive franchise contracts to turn their respective syrups into colas. Dr Pepper simply couldn’t crack into new markets with the deck stacked so squarely against it.  That all changed in 1963.  A federal court ruled that Dr Pepper’s unique flavor kept it from being a “cola product,” which meant that bottlers were free to distribute Dr Pepper without running afoul of their exclusive deals with Coca-Cola and Pepsi.  By the end of the decade, Dr Pepper was available from coast to coast. The soda fizzed its way into the national consciousness at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis.  As the Dr Pepper Museum notes, the drink joined the ice cream cone, the hamburger, and the hot dog in making their first big splashes at the event.  http://mentalfloss.com/article/67514/11-things-you-might-not-know-about-dr-pepper

At the start of 2016, the good folks of the American Dialect Society got together to crown their Word of the Year.  They (see what I’m doing here) have decided that the word could now be used as a singular pronoun, flexing the English language so a plural could denote a singular, genderless, individual.  They has long been used in the singular in English, but not to denote genderlessness.  One of the earliest examples comes from Geoffrey Chaucer in 1395, who wrote in The Pardoner’s Tale:  “And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, They wol come up…” Shakespeare followed in 1594, in The Comedy of Errors: There’s not a man I meet but doth salute me/As if I were their well-acquainted friend”.  It took a few centuries for they to pop up in reference to women:  Jane Austen uses they in the singular 75 times in Pride and Prejudice (1813) and as Rosalind muses in 1848’s Vanity Fair:  “A person can’t help their birth.”  Lorraine Berry  Read much more at http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2016/may/05/they-the-singular-pronoun-that-could-solve-sexism-in-english

In 1943, Louis Armstrong and his wife, Lucille, settled in a modest house in Corona, Queens, where they lived for the remainder of their lives. No one has lived in the house since the Armstrongs, and the house and its furnishings remain very much as they were during Louis and Lucille’s lifetime.  Today, the Louis Armstrong House Museum is open to the public, offering guided tours of Louis’s longtime home.  On the tour, audio clips from Louis’s homemade recordings are played, and visitors hear Louis practicing his trumpet, enjoying a meal, or talking with his friends.  Visitors also get to enjoy an exhibit on Louis’s life and legacy, and the Armstrongs’ beautiful Japanese-inspired garden.  The entire ground floor (which includes the Welcome Center, Museum Store, exhibit area, and restroom) of the Museum is wheelchair-accessible.  The historic house tour requires the ability to climb two sets of steep stairs and to stand for 40 minutes.  Visitors that are unable to take the tour receive a virtual tour instead.  Find hours, location and directions at http://louisarmstronghouse.org/visiting/overview.htm

Chervil, sometimes called garden chervil to distinguish it from similar plants also called chervil, or French parsley, is a delicate annual herb related to parsley.  It is commonly used to season mild-flavoured dishes and is a constituent of the French herb mixture fines herbeshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chervil  Chervil should be added at the end of cooking or sprinkled over food.

May 13, 2016  This week, Nicola Thorp successful stopped a company insisting that women wear heels to work.  Now, she's campaigning against being forced to wear make-up, too.  The 27-year-old actress was employed as a temporary worker by agency Portico, who outsourced her to City firm PwC to work on their reception.  But after turning up for her first day wearing black flat shoes, she was told to leave, unpaid.  Thorp's petition for the practice to be make illegal has gained 123,000 signatures.  Portico has since pledged to review its uniform policy.  But Thorp isn't done.  She's now calling for the company to change a section in its dress code referring to make-up.  She claims that, during her time working for them, she was also shown a colour chart of acceptable nail varnish shades, and told it was compulsory for her to wear make-up during her time as a temporary receptionist.  Radhika Sanghani 

From the Italian for "bad air," mal'aria has probably influenced to a great extent human populations and human history.  Following their arrival in the New World, Spanish Jesuit missionaries learned from indigenous Indian tribes of a medicinal bark used for the treatment of fevers.  With this bark, the Countess of Chinchón, the wife of the Viceroy of Peru, was cured of her fever.  The bark from the tree was then called Peruvian bark and the tree was named Cinchona after the countess.  The symptoms of malaria were described in ancient Chinese medical writings.  In 2700 BC, several characteristic symptoms of what would later be named malaria were described in the Nei Ching, The Canon of Medicine).   Malaria became widely recognized in Greece by the 4th century BCE, and it was responsible for the decline of many of the city-state populations.  On August 20th, 1897, Ronald Ross, a British officer in the Indian Medical Service, was the first to demonstrate that malaria parasites could be transmitted from infected patients to mosquitoes.  In further work with bird malaria, Ross showed that mosquitoes could transmit malaria parasites from bird to bird.  For his discovery, Ross was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1902.   Read much more at http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/index.html#panamacanal

Quote of the Day:  The Panama Canal was dug with a microscope. - Ronald Ross (13 May 1857-1932) [alluding to the research done to get rid of the mosquito]


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1471  May 13, 2016  On this date in 1907, Daphne du Maurier, English novelist and playwright, was born.  On this date in 1958 – Ben Carlin became the first (and only) person to circumnavigate the world by amphibious vehicle, having travelled over 17,000 kilometres (11,000 mi) by sea and 62,000 kilometres (39,000 mi) by land during a ten-year journey.  

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