What is the difference between valuable and invaluable?  Something that’s valuable is worth a lot of money and would net a good price.  Something that’s invaluable, on the other hand, is valuable beyond estimation.  It’s priceless.  These adjectives can also apply to people, traits, actions, relationships and more.  Since we don’t typically appraise these for monetary value, this is where usage can get tricky.  Use invaluable when you want to step it up a notch.  A valuable employee is one who has desirable qualities and consistently makes positive contributions.  But a company would truly suffer at the loss of an invaluable employee.  https://www.writingclasses.com/toolbox/ask-writer/what-is-the-difference-between-valuable-and-invaluable

As happens with every presidential transition, the White House pages for the prior administration were removed immediately following the inauguration ceremony and replaced with those reflecting the new president.  It appears the Obama White House pages will now be found at https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/   (information provided from Dudley Knox Library Naval Postgraduate School  courtesy of Ann M. Holman, Librarian at Darnall Medical Library, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center)  The Verge reports the launch of archivesocial.com/whitehouse, which stores all of the 250,000-plus Instagram, Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest posts by President Barack Obama and his administration in a searchable collection.  http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/5/14181274/obama-social-media-archive-twitter-instagram-facebook  Thank you, Muse reader! 

Word of the Year (WOTY) 2016: Part 2. This is not fake news!  Posted on January 26, 2017 by thebettereditor   At last, for your reading pleasure (or displeasure, as the case may be):  the second part of the annual wrap-up of Word of the Year (WOTY) selections and related topics (part one is here).  It’s already late January of 2017, so all of this should have been settled some time ago.  Let’s blame this late post not on my procrastination, but on the fact that one of the sources on my ‘WOTY Watch List’ only released its final selection on January 25th.  They’re dragging out their “People’s Choice” selection until the 31st, but enough is enough:  I’ll add a postscript when that’s final.  The main reason I do this follow-up is to include the words nominated in various categories by the American Dialect Society, which doesn’t select a WOTY until the first week of January.  Because the ADS is made up of people who actually spend time thinking about language, and because they look at words in numerous categories (10 this year), most of the time their list is more interesting and includes better insight into what’s really going on with English than most of the others.  In the end, the ADS didn’t disappoint this year with their WOTY selection:  dumpster fire.  An excellent choice.  This word definitely saw a lot more use in 2016, in exactly the way they describe.  You can review all of the ADS nominees and see how they fared in balloting (there were clear favorites and clear rejections).  Macquarie Dictionary, in the meantime, went with “fake news.” Christopher Daly  Read more at https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2017/01/26/word-of-the-year-woty-2016-part-2-this-is-not-fake-news/

The Lane Sisters were four siblings who achieved success during the 1930s as a singing act, with their popularity leading to a series of successful films.  The sisters were Lola (1906-1981), Leota (1903-1963), Rosemary (1913-1974), and Priscilla (1915-1995).  Lola was born in Macy, Indiana and Leota, Rosemary, and Priscilla were born in Indianola, Iowa.  They changed their surname from "Mullican" when they began their careers.  Lola began her career as an actress in 1929 and made several films during the early 1930s.  By 1932 she had joined her three younger sisters to form a singing act.  First performing as a quartet with a dance band in 1932, the sisters toured the United States, and gradually their popularity grew.  In 1937 Priscilla was signed to a contract with Warner Brothers Studios.  She and Rosemary made their film debuts together in "Varsity Show" in 1937.  In the same year Lola played a strong supporting role in the Bette Davis crime melodrama "Marked Woman", as the type of hardboiled character that exemplified many of her later roles with Warner Brothers.  The following year Davis was offered a role in the film version of Fannie Hurst's novel "Sister Act" and when she turned down the part, Lola suggested to Jack Warner that the Lane Sisters would be suitable.  Each was tested for the roles of the four sisters, with only Leota being rejected as unsuitable.  The film was released in 1938 as "Four Daughters" with the fourth sister played by Gale Page.  The three Lane Sisters were promoted as "The Picture of American Girlhood" and the film was a great success, leading to more joint film appearances by the three sisters in sequels.  "Daughter's Courageous", and "Four Wives", (both 1939), and "Four Mothers" (1941) were popular successes.  Read more and see pictures at http://greatentertainersarchives.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-lane-sisters-and-their-mark-in.html

PARAPHRASES from The Gustav Sonata, a novel by Rose Tremain   ** Gin rummy is fairly simple with a little skill involved--without need for perpetual vigilance, as in bridge.  Friends thought gin rummy was a waste of time.  That's the point:  wasting time changes the nature of time, and the heart is stilled.  You may fall under the game's consoling spell.  ** This is not so Swiss--where's your famous self-mastery now?

Rose Tremain, born in London in 1943, was one of only five women writers to be included in Granta’s original list of 20 Best of Young British Novelists in 1983.  Her novels and short stories have been published worldwide in 27 countries and have won many prizes, including the Sunday Express book of the Year Award (for Restoration, also shortlisted for the Booker Prize); the Prix Femina Etranger, France (for Sacred Country); the Whitbread Novel of the Year Award (for Music & Silence) and the Orange Prize for Fiction 2008 (for The Road Home).  Restoration was filmed in 1995 and a stage version was produced in 2009.   Link to a list of her books at http://rosetremain.co.uk/about/biography/

Why tomatoes got bland—and how to make them sweet again  by Michael Price Jan. 26, 2017  Decades of commercial growing have altered the tomato’s genetic makeup, turning it from a once-sweet fruit into today’s relatively tasteless sandwich topper.  Now, a new study has uncovered which flavor-enhancing genes have been lost, giving growers a “roadmap” to breed tastiness back into their tomatoes.  “This is great work, which I believe could only be done by very few groups on Earth,” says Changbin Chen, a horticultural scientist at the University of Minnesota in St. Paul, who wasn’t involved with the study.  “This is doable for commercial growers who supply the fresh tomato market.”  Tomatoes are among the highest-value crops in the world.  In the United States—the world’s second largest tomato grower behind China—they account for more than a billion dollars in sales annually.  Nutritionally, they are important sources of vitamins A and C.  But the large, plump, ruddy tomatoes available year-round in grocery stores taste much different than the small, multihued, berry-sized fruits that evolved more than 50 million years ago near Antarctica and were first domesticated in Central and South America some 2500 years ago.  The fruits spread throughout the world following Spanish colonization in the 16th century.  Over the next 400 years or so, hundreds of regional cultivars of tomatoes emerged, but they mostly stayed small, sweet, and flavorful.  To try to bring the taste of bland commercial tomatoes closer to that of their more appetizing ancestors, Harry Klee and an international team of horticultural researchers set out to decode exactly what has changed in the tomato genome.  They sequenced the genomes of 398 tomato varieties including commercially grown versions as well as wild, ancestral tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes—older, motley strains that are “light-years away from market tomatoes in terms of taste,” Klee says.   Over the next few years, the scientists assembled dozens of consumer panels and conducted taste tests with 101 university-grown tomato varieties, including both heirlooms and commercially grown fruits, recording which ones people liked most.  Comparing the consumer panels’ tomato preferences to their chemical profiles, the team came up with a list of 13 chemical compounds strongly linked to likability.  Going back to the tomato genome, the researchers identified specific genes responsible for the presence of these volatiles, as well as which heirloom varieties carried those genes, they report today in Science.  Klee says that by crossbreeding commercial tomato crops with these heirloom varieties over multiple generations, growers could, step-by-step, produce a tomato that’s large, plump, red, and disease resistant—but that also tastes pretty good.  This process would likely only take a few years, he says.  http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/01/why-tomatoes-got-bland-and-how-make-them-sweet-again

If you receive a phone call from someone asking “can you hear me,” hang up. You’re a potential victim in the latest scam circulating around the U.S.  Virginia police are now warning about the scheme, which also sparked warnings by Pennsylvania authorities late last year.  The “can you hear me” con is actually a variation on earlier scams aimed at getting the victim to say the word “yes” in a phone conversation.  That affirmative response is recorded by the fraudster and used to authorize unwanted charges on a phone or utility bill or on a purloined credit card.  “You say ‘yes,’ it gets recorded and they say that you have agreed to something,” said Susan Grant, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America. “I know that people think it’s impolite to hang up, but it’s a good strategy.”  But how can you get charged if you don’t provide a payment method?  The con artist already has your phone number, and many phone providers pass through third-party charges. 

Kathy Kristof  http://www.cbsnews.com/news/beware-new-can-you-hear-me-scam/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1684  January 30, 2017  On this date in 1847, Yerba Buena, California was renamed San Francisco, California.  On this date in 1862, the first American ironclad warship, the USS Monitor was launched.  On this date in 1969, The Beatles' gave their last public performance, on the roof of Apple Records in London. The impromptu concert was broken up by the police.