The first cousin of the English language is alive and well in the Netherlands by Patrick Cox   English has become the world's premier language.  And Frisian . . .  it has managed to hang on, against the odds.  It's now making a comeback, partly thanks to the European Union and Dutch government support (sometimes begrudgingly) for Frisian language schools, news media and performance arts.  Frisians themselves are more likely to say their language has survived because of the determination of the Frisian people.  Non-Frisians in the Netherlands sometimes characterize this as stubbornness.  Whatever it is, people in villages across the province of Friesland still speak Frisian.  And increasingly, young people write in Frisian, especially when using social media.  So what about that connection with English?  It goes back at least 1,400 years.  The English king Ethelbert oversaw the establishment of the so-called Kentish laws, the first laws that we know of written in any Germanic language.  The Kentish Laws are the oldest surviving documents in Old English.  Read more and see pictures at http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-12-23/first-cousin-english-language-alive-and-well-netherlands

Winston Churchill was forty before he discovered the pleasures of painting.  The compositional challenge of depicting a landscape gave the heroic rebel in him temporary repose.  He possessed the heightened perception of the genuine artist to whom no scene is commonplace.  Over a period of forty-eight years his creativity yielded more than 500 pictures.  His art quickly became half passion, half philosophy.  He enjoyed holding forth in speech and print on the aesthetic rewards for amateur devotees.  To him it was the greatest of hobbies.  Encouragement to persevere with his hobby stemmed from an amateur prize (his first) which he won for "Winter Sunshine, Chartwell," a bright reflection of his Kentish home.  He sent five paintings to be exhibited in Paris in the 1920s.  Four were sold for £30 each.  Making money, it has been well established, was not the incentive, then or ever.  Sheer delight accounted for Churchill's devotion.  For the Paris test of his ability he hid his identity under an assumed name:  Charles Morin.  Churchill again favoured a pseudonym (Mr. Winter) in 1947 when offering works to the Royal Academy, so his fame in other spheres was not exploited.  Two pictures were accepted and eventually the title of Honorary Academician Extraordinary was conferred on him.  A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Churchill was conscious of the abiding unity of poetry, painting and sculpture -- "sister arts."  Ron Cynewulf Robbins  https://www.nationalchurchillmuseum.org/the-artist-winston-churchill.html

In 2015, an important collection of paintings by Winston Churchill was  accepted for the nation in lieu of inheritance tax and will mostly hang at his family home, the National Trust property Chartwell.  The 37 paintings were offered following the death of the wartime leader’s last surviving child, Mary Soames, who died aged 91 in May, 2014.  Many of Soames’ most prized possessions related to her father were sold at auction but she expressed a wish that the paintings, which were on long-term loan to Chartwell, should remain there.  In total, 35 paintings are being allocated to Chartwell, the earliest being Hoe Farm from 1915 and the latest being two from 1955, painted on holidays--The Grotto of the Ropemakers, Syracuse and a view of Marrakech.  Mark Brown  https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/mar/10/winston-churchill-paintings-accepted-for-nation-in-lieu-of-tax  See also 165 works of art by Winston Churchill at http://www.museumsyndicate.com/artist.php?artist=667 and 10 Politicians Who Tried Their Hands at Art at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/politicians-who-had-brushes-with-art-11291

Deep in the Folger Library, in Washington DC, Heather Wolfe, a paleographer specialising in Elizabethan England is a Shakespeare detective who, last year, made the career-defining discovery that is going to transform our understanding of Shakespeare’s biography.  In the simplest terms, Wolfe delivered the coup de grace to conspiracy theorists, including Vanessa Redgrave and Derek Jacobi, who contest the authenticity, even the existence, of the playwright known to contemporaries as Master Will Shakespeare.  Wolfe is an accidental sleuth.  Her scholar’s passion is as much for old manuscripts as for the obscurities surrounding our national poet.  Project Dustbunny, for example, one of her initiatives at the Folger Shakespeare Library, has made some extraordinary discoveries based on microscopic fragments of hair and skin accumulated in the crevices and gutters of 17th-century books.  Robert McCrum  Read more at https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/jan/08/sherlock-holmes-of-the-library-cracks-shakespeare-identity

The loss of the ancient world's single greatest archive of knowledge, the Library of Alexandria, has been lamented for ages.  But how and why it was lost is still a mystery.  The mystery exists not for lack of suspects but from an excess of them.  Alexandria was founded in Egypt by Alexander the Great.  His successor as Pharaoh, Ptolomy II Soter, founded the Museum or Royal Library of Alexandria in 283 BC.  The Museum was a shrine of the Muses modeled after the Lyceum of Aristotle in Athens.  The Museum was a place of study which included lecture areas, gardens, a zoo, and shrines for each of the nine muses as well as the Library itself.  It has been estimated that at one time the Library of Alexandria held over half a million documents from Assyria, Greece, Persia, Egypt, India and many other nations.  Over 100 scholars lived at the Museum full time to perform research, write, lecture or translate and copy documents. T he library was so large it actually had another branch or "daughter" library at the Temple of Serapis.  The first person blamed for the destruction of the Library is none other than Julius Caesar himself.  In 48 BC, Caesar was pursuing Pompey into Egypt when he was suddenly cut off by an Egyptian fleet at Alexandria.  Greatly outnumbered and in enemy territory, Caesar ordered the ships in the harbor to be set on fire.  The fire spread and destroyed the Egyptian fleet. Unfortunately, it also burned down part of the city--the area where the great Library stood.  The second story of the Library's destruction is more popular, thanks primarily to Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire".  But the story is also a tad more complex.  Theophilus was Patriarch of Alexandria from 385 to 412 AD.  During his reign the Temple of Serapis was converted into a Christian Church (probably around 391 AD) and it is likely that many documents were destroyed then.  The Temple of Serapis was estimated to hold about ten percent of the overall Library of Alexandria's holdings.  The final individual to get blamed for the destruction is the Moslem Caliph Omar.  In 640 AD the Moslems took the city of Alexandria.  Upon learning of "a great library containing all the knowledge of the world" the conquering general supposedly asked Caliph Omar for instructions.  The Caliph has been quoted as saying of the Library's holdings, "they will either contradict the Koran, in which case they are heresy, or they will agree with it, so they are superfluous."  So, allegedly, all the texts were destroyed by using them as tinder for the bathhouses of the city.  It is also quite likely that even if the Museum was destroyed with the main library the outlying "daughter" library at the Temple of Serapis continued on.  Many writers seem to equate the Library of Alexandria with the Library of Serapis although technically they were in two different parts of the city.  https://ehistory.osu.edu/articles/burning-library-alexandria

The dates of the Greek mathematician and engineer Heron of Alexandria are not known with certainty, but he must have worked between the first and third century CE.  Boas cites evidence in Heron's treatise Dioptra that Heron referred to an eclipse of the moon that occurred on March 13, 63, which would place him definitely in the first century.  In Heron's numerous surviving writings are designs for automata—machines operated by mechanical or pneumatic means.  These included devices for temples to instill faith by deceiving believers with "magical acts of the gods," for theatrical spectacles, and machines like a statue that poured wine.  Among his inventions were:  ♦ A windwheel operating a pipe organ—the first instance of wind powering a machine.  ♦ The first automatic vending machine.  When a coin was introduced through a slot on the top of the machine, a set amount of holy water was dispensed.  When the coin was deposited, it fell upon a pan attached to a lever.  The lever opened up a valve which let some water flow out.  The pan continued to tilt with the weight of the coin until the coin fell off, at which point a counter-weight would snap the lever back up and turn off the valve.  ♦ Mechanisms for the Greek theater, including an entirely mechanical puppet play almost ten minutes in length, powered by a binary-like system of ropes, knots, and simple machines operated by a rotating cylindrical cogwheel.  The sound of thunder was produced by the mechanically-timed dropping of metal balls onto a hidden drum.  http://www.historyofinformation.com/expanded.php?id=16  See also Heron's Inventions (includes graphics) by Martyn Shuttleworth  at https://explorable.com/heron-inventions

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1681  January 23, 2017  On this date in 1957, American inventor Walter Frederick Morrison sold the rights to his flying disc to the Wham-O toy company, which later renamed it the "Frisbee".  See also http://www.wfdf.org/history-stats/history-of-fyling-disc/4-history-of-the-frisbee and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_(sport)  On this date in 1964, the 24th Amendment to the United States Constitution, prohibiting the use of poll taxes in national elections, was ratified.