Always observed two days after elections, Sussex County Return Day encourages political winners and losers to put aside their campaign differences.  It also serves as a platform for a celebration with no equal in Delaware.  It is a function that smacks of old-time Delaware history and Georgetown's long-time tradition of grace and hospitality.  Russ McCabe, the former state archivist, has dated it to 1812.  When the original county seat and courthouse in Lewes were moved here to Georgetown, people started coming here to vote because it was a midpoint, supposedly 16 miles from anywhere in Sussex County, Bowden said.  The celebration was centered around the wooden courthouse, built in 1791, that served the county until 1836, when it was replaced by the current courthouse on the Circle, built in 1836-37.  "We are only one of two places in the nation that have two county seat courthouses on the National Register of Historic Places," Bowden said.  The 1791 structure was moved across the street when the "new" courthouse of 1836 was constructed on the site.  Sometime after 1812, Bowden said, the custom of "buryin' the hatchet" came into being.  Just after the parade, which starts at 1:30 p.m., is over, the ceremonies begin, including the burying of the hatchet.  They go up on the stage, they all have their hands on the hatchet, and the sand is poured over it, symbolizing the closing of the election season and the dismissal of any animosities between the parties."  By 5:30 p.m., the ceremonies end.  Even before 5:30 p.m. comes, a line forms around the Circle for folks wanting legendary free ox sandwiches.

http://www.delmarvanow.com/story/news/local/maryland/2014/11/05/behind-return-day/18568677/   Delaware, our first state, has only three counties.  The southernmost county, Sussex, along with Kent County, and a portion of New Castle County, are on the Delmarva Peninsula. 

The Delmarva Peninsula or simply Delmarva is a large peninsula on the East Coast of the United States, occupied by most of Delaware and portions of Maryland and Virginia.  Although called a peninsula, it is technically an island after the digging of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal.  The peninsula is 170 miles (274 km) long.  In width, it ranges from 70 miles (113 km) near its center, to 12 miles (19 km) at the isthmus on its northern edge, to less near its southern tip of Cape Charles.  It is bordered by the Chesapeake Bay on the west, the Delaware River, Delaware Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean on the east, and the Elk River and its isthmus on the north.  In older sources, the peninsula between Delaware Bay and Chesapeake Bay was referred to variously as the Delaware and Chesapeake Peninsula or simply the Chesapeake Peninsula.  The toponym Delmarva is a clipped compound of Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia (abbreviated VA), which in turn was modelled after Delmar, a border town named after two of those states.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delmarva_Peninsula  See also http://delmarvausa.com/

October 27, 2016  “The U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) wins six 2016 American Graphic Design Awards from Graphic Design USA magazine.  GPO’s Creative Services Department offers Federal Agencies a variety of design services:  publication design, branding and identity, exhibit graphics, video, multimedia, photography, and security design.  For more than fifty years, Graphic Design USA has recognized the design work of professionals from design firms, ad agencies, government agencies, corporations, non-profits and students.  Nearly 10,000 entries were submitted for this year’s awards.”  http://www.bespacific.com/gpo-honored-for-its-design-services-for-federal-agencies/

Long before the Spanish conquest, fermented beverages made from corn, agave and cocoa beans were common; some descendants of these beverages are still made today.  But the first recognizable ancestor of modern beer in the Americas was brewed in Mexico in the 1540s—quite a long time before anything similar took place in what is now the US or Canada.  Alfonso de Herrero's brewery did not last terribly long, but it is still notable for potentially being able to claim the title of 'first brewery in the Americas.'  German-speaking immigrants from what are now Switzerland, Germany, and Austria began settling in (what would eventually be) Texas and Mexico, but it was no direct line from those settlers to Corona; the first widely-produced beers in Mexico were closer to Vienna lagers than to the light, fizzy beer many associate with the country today, and indeed, for many years, it was easier to find the style in Mexico than in its native land.  Originally developed by Anton Dreher in Vienna in the 1840s, the malty, dark-to-coppery beer style began to fall out of favor in Europe as pale lagers took off, but not before brewers trained in the 'Wiener Art,' or Vienna style, made their way to the Americas.  Their influence grew when Maximilian I was proclaimed Emperor of Mexico in 1864.  Not coincidentally, one of Mexico's most prominent beer brands was born in the year following Maximilian's accession—Cervecería Toluca began producing Victoria in that year.  Mexico's first large-scale brewer, Cerveceria Cuauhtémoc, opened in 1891, and they began producing their Czech-style Bohemian pilsner early in the 20th century; Bohemia is still widely recognized throughout Mexico and the US.  A few years later after Cuauhtémoc's founding, German-born Wilhelm Hasse founded the Moctezuma Brewery.  Its Siglo XX, brewed to welcome in the 20th century, became known best for its two Xs, and was soon renamed Dos Equis.  The familiar Dos Equis XX Ambar (the version closest to the original recipe) also began life as a Vienna lager.  http://drinks.seriouseats.com/2012/02/mexican-beer-history-victoria-bohemia-modelo-corona-brands.html

Dos Equis has revealed the new face of its wildly popular "Most Interesting Man in the World" ad campaign.  The last star, Jonathan Goldsmith—who is an interesting man in his own right (Fernando Lamas was his inspiration) http://www.npr.org/2015/06/20/415835643/the-man-behind-the-most-interesting-man-is-interesting-too earlier this year, as the beer company moved to "contemporize" the campaign.  His character was blasted off on a one-way mission to Mars.  Goldsmith, for his part, is now writing and making videos for the online magazine True.Ink.  Dos Equis released a few ads featuring sportscaster Erin Andrews and actor Luis Guzmán as the 5,008th and 8,507th most interesting people in the world, respectively.  Now it has unveiled the new No. 1.  He's played by Augustin Legrand—a trilingual French actor, more than 30 years younger than Goldsmith.  http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/12/493596746/most-interesting-man-numero-dos-new-face-of-dos-equis-ads-revealed  See also http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/12/business/media/dos-equis-makes-its-case-for-its-new-most-interesting-man.html

Facebook’s Trending feature is supposed to serve as a snapshot of the day’s most important and most-discussed news, made possible by a combination of algorithms and a team of editors.  One algorithm surfaces unusually popular topics, a human examines and vets them, and another algorithm surfaces the approved stories for people who will be most interested.  Without any piece of that process, Trending doesn’t really work—an observation readily illustrated by a Facebook product called Signal, which shows popular topics before and after they’re approved.  The after list is overlong, and it’s difficult to see how any of the topics could be relevant; the before list is an indecipherable sea of place names, sports teams and conspiracies.  In May 2016, Facebook faced a torrent of high-profile accusations about political bias on the Trending editorial team—so much so that, in the aftermath, the company decided to tweak the role humans play in approving Trending topics.  On August 26, 2016 Facebook laid off its editorial team and gave the engineers who replaced them a much different mandate when it came to vetting news.  Where editors were told to independently verify trending topics surfaced by the algorithm, even by cross-referencing “Google News and other news sources,” engineers were told to accept every trending topic linked to three or more recent articles, from any source, or linked to any article with at least five related posts.  The previous editorial team could also influence which specific news stories were displayed with each topic, rejecting the story selected by the algorithm if it was “biased,” “clickbait” or irrelevant.  Trending’s current quality review team does not vet URLs.  At a recent conference, Adam Mosseri—Facebook’s vice president of product management—indicated that efforts were underway to add automated hoax- and parody-filtering technologies to the Trending algorithm, like those that exist in News Feed.  (News Feed makes guesses about content based on user behavior around it.)  Another solution might be something like the system Google News uses to rank top stories, which gives approved publishers the means to flag notable content.  It’s worth noting, of course, that even Google News has been fooled before—all social platforms, not just Facebook, struggle with the complex and overwhelming task of identifying hoaxes and other sorts of misinformation.  Still, Facebook is a special case:  About 40 percent of all American adults turn to it for news.  Caitlin Dewey   second article in a series--link to first story at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/10/12/facebook-has-repeatedly-trended-fake-news-since-firing-its-human-editors/

FAKE NEWS  #1, Hoax sites with totally made-up news headlines that try to trick you; #2, Hyperpartisan sites that aren't lying, per se, but are misleading, because they only share good news about your political party and bad news about the other party; #3, "Hybrids" that purposely mix a little bit of fact and then a lot of fiction.  These sites aren't going away, so it's up to Internet users to spot fake news and avoid spreading it.  Fact-checking sites like Snopes can help -- they are devoted to ferreting out hoaxes and tricks.  http://money.cnn.com/2016/10/30/media/facebook-fake-news-plague/index.html  Check sources of information before assuming a story is true and that you need to tell others about it.

November 2, 1948 Election Day, an overwhelming sense of inevitability hung about the Republican nominee.  The polls and the pundits left no room for doubt:  Dewey was going to defeat President Harry S. Truman.  And the Chicago Tribune would be the first to report it.  Arguably the most famous headline in the newspaper's 150-year history, DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN is every publisher's nightmare on every election night.  Like most newspapers, the Tribune, which had dismissed him on its editorial page as a "nincompoop," was lulled into a false sense of security by polls that repeatedly predicted a Dewey victory.  Critically important, though, was a printers' strike, which forced the paper to go to press hours before it normally would.  As the first-edition deadline approached, managing editor J. Loy "Pat" Maloney had to make the headline call, although many East Coast tallies were not yet in.  Maloney banked on the track record of Arthur Sears Henning, the paper's longtime Washington correspondent.  Henning said Dewey.  Henning was rarely wrong.  Besides, Life magazine had just carried a big photo of Dewey with the caption "The next President of the United States."   The ink was hardly dry on 150,000 copies of the paper when radio bulletins reported that the race was surprisingly close.  The headline was changed to DEMOCRATS MAKE SWEEP OF STATE OFFICES for the second edition.  Truman went on to take Illinois and much of the Midwest in this whopping election surprise.  Radio comedian Fred Allen noted Truman was the "first president to lose in a Gallup and win in a walk."  The Tribune blamed the pollsters for its mistake.  Tim Jones  See picture of Truman holding copy of paper declaring Dewey the winner at http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/chi-chicagodays-deweydefeats-story-story.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1545  November 2, 2016  On this date in 1889, North Dakota and South Dakota were admitted as the 39th and 40th U.S. states.  On this date in 1966, the Cuban Adjustment Act came into force, allowing 123,000 Cubans the opportunity to apply for permanent residence in the United States.