The Olympic Games (often referred to simply as The Olympics) are the worlds premier multi-sport international athletic competition held every four years in various locations.  Separate summer and winter games are now held two years apart from each other.  Until 1992, they were held in the same year.  The original Olympic Games began in c. 776 B.C.E. in Olympia, Greece, and were hosted for nearly a thousand years, until 393 C.E.  The Greek games were one of the splendors of the ancient world, so much so that warring factions took breaks so their athletes could compete.  Greek philanthropist Evangelos Zappas sponsored the first modern international Olympic Games in 1859.  The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894, and the first of the IOC's Olympic Games were the 1896 Summer Olympics, held in Athens.  According to legend, the divine hero Heracles was the creator of the Olympic Games and built the Olympic stadium and surrounding buildings as an honor to his father Zeus, after completing his 12 labors.  According to that legend he walked in a straight line for 400 strides and called this distance a "stadion" which later also became a distance calculation unit.  This is also why a modern stadium is 400 meters in circumference length.  The Games quickly became an important institution throughout ancient Greece, reaching their zenith in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.E.  The Olympics were of fundamental religious importance, contests alternating with sacrifices and ceremonies honoring both Zeus (whose colossal statue stood at Olympia)  and Pelops, divine hero and mythical king of Olympia, famous for his legendary chariot race, in whose honor the games were held.  At first involving only a foot race, then wrestling and the pentathlon, the number of events increased to 20, and the celebration was spread over several days.  Winners of the events were greatly admired and were immortalized in poems and statues.  The Games were held every four years, and the period between two celebrations became known as an 'Olympiad'.  The Greeks used Olympiads as one of their methods to count years.  http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Olympic_games

The U.S. Olympic Festival was an amateur multi-sport event held in the United States by the United States Olympic Committee in the years between Olympic Games.  Started in 1978 as an American counterpart to the communist Spartakiade--a similar event held on a quadrennial basis by the former Soviet Union and its former satellite in East Germany.  As the competitive position of U.S. athletes in the Olympics slipped relative to that of the Soviets and East Germans, it was felt the U.S. needed some kind of multi-sports event to simulate the Olympic experience.  It was originally called the National Sports Festival and was the nation's largest amateur sporting event, before ending in 1995.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Olympic_Festival

Olympic Games We No Longer Play  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/08/olympics-olympic-games-no-longer-play-ancient-greece/

Coney Island is the westernmost part of the barrier islands of Long Island, and is about 4 miles (6.4 km) long and 0.5 miles (0.80 km) wide lying between Sheepshead Bay to the east and Lower New York Bay to the west.  The original Native American inhabitants of the region were the Lenape, who called the island Narrioch.  This name has been attributed the meaning of "land without shadows" or "always in light" describing how its south facing beaches always remained in sunlight.  A second meaning attributed to Narrioch is "point" or "corner of land".  The Dutch established the colony of Nieuw Amsterdam in that area in the early 17th century.  The Native American population in the area dwindled as the Dutch settlement grew and the entire southwest section of what was to become Brooklyn was purchased from an elder in 1645 for a gun, a blanket and a kettle.  There is no clear historical consensus on how the island got the name "Coney Island".   A Robert Morden map from 1690 has the label "Conney Iſle"and the name appears on an 1733 map ("Coney Iſland") and an 1811 map ("Coney I"). The most popular theory is the name came from the old spelling of the Dutch word for rabbit, "conyn", derived from a purported large population of wild rabbits, giving it the name "Conyne Eylandt" ("Rabbits Island"), with the name being anglicized to "Coney Island" after the English took over the colony in 1664, "coney" being the English version of the word rabbit.  Other origins of the name include that it came from the name of the native american tribe, the Konoh, who supposedly once inhabited it, or the name "Conyn" which appears in a 1816 work on New York place names, believed to be the surname of a family of Dutch settlers who lived there.   Read much more, including alternative theories on how the island got its name, at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coney_Island

Coney Island Creek encompasses two sea inlets in Brooklyn, one separating Coney Island from the neighborhoods of Gravesend and Bath Beach, the other separating the neighborhoods of Sheepshead Bay and Manhattan Beach.  Prior to construction of the Shore Parkway in the 1950s, Coney Island Creek was a strait and a partial mudflat connecting Gravesend Bay and Sheepshead Bay, making Coney Island an actual island.  Coney Island Creek was minimally navigable and in the early 20th century the City of New York developed plans to widen, straighten and deepen it as the Gravesend Ship Canal.  Those plans never came to fruition.  Instead, a portion of the creek was filled in during 1962 with dirt from the construction of Verrazano–Narrows Bridge, making Coney Island a peninsula. 

See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coney_Island_Creek

As Hurricane Katrina raged through New Orleans in 2005, neighborhood after neighborhood collapsed from flooding.  Of the houses that stood, many still had to be bulldozed due to mold within the walls.  But one building, a plantation-home-turned-museum on Moss Street built two centuries before the disaster, was left almost entirely unscathed.  “The Pitot house was built the old way, with plaster walls,” says Steve Mouzon, an architect who helped rebuild the city after the hurricane.  “When the flood came, the museum moved the furniture upstairs.  Afterwards, they simply hosed the walls—no harm done.”  The other houses weren’t built the old way.  “All the homes around the Pitot house were lost because they were built with drywall,” says Mouzon.  Drywall, also known as plasterboard or wallboard, consists of two paperboards that sandwich gypsum, a powdery white or gray sulfate mineral.  Gypsum is noncombustible, and compared to other wall materials, like solid wood and plaster, gypsum boards are much lighter and cheaper.  Haniya Rae  http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/07/an-exciting-history-of-drywall/493502/

The Justice Department sent an earthquake rumbling through the music industry August 4, 2016, even as it insisted that it wasn’t changing a thing.  After a two-year review, the department’s antitrust division announced that it wouldn’t seek to modify the 75-year-old consent decrees that govern two groups that issue licenses to perform music publicly (just the underlying compositions, not the actual recordings, which have separate copyrights).  See the news release and link to a detailed statement at  https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-completes-review-ascap-and-bmi-consent-decrees-proposing-no-modifications .  Though the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) and Broadcast Music, Inc., (BMI)  had sought more flexibility in negotiating licensing deals, the department wound up giving them less.  It declared that the decrees require the two organizations to issue full licenses to all the songs in their catalogs, including the ones whose songwriting teams they don’t fully represent.  BMI and ASCAP said they would challenge the department’s position in court and in Congress.  If it remains unchanged, it would be a big win for online music services but not necessarily for anyone else.  By saying that ASCAP and BMI are required to offer full licenses to all who seek them, the department will force the industry to rethink its approach to some of the most popular genres of music, such as Top 40 and hip hop, where songs are frequently crafted by a grab bag of unaffiliated producers and writers.  Jon Healey  Read more at http://www.latimes.com/opinion/opinion-la/la-ed-ascap-bmi-justice-department-20160804-snap-story.html

What happens when the carnival moves on:  Incredible photos show the decaying former Olympic sites across the world - from Germany in 1936 to Beijing in 2008  by Lucy Mae Beers  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3730579/As-Rio-Olympics-kicks-eerie-photographs-reveal-derelict-sites-past-games.html

The Beatles Revolver at 50 - 14 awesome facts about the classic album updated August 8, 2016 by Peter Guy  http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/whats-on/music-nightlife-news/beatles-revolver-50-14-awesome-11692663

                                                                                                              

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1510  August 9, 2016  On this date in 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden.  On this date in 1892, Thomas Edison received a patent for a two-way telegraph.