Edmund Charles Tarbell (1862–1938) was an American Impressionist painter.  A member of the Ten American Painters, his work hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery of Art, DeYoung Museum, National Academy Museum and School, New Britain Museum of American Art, Worcester Art Museum, and numerous other collections.  He was a leading member of a group of painters which came to be known as the Boston School.  Edmund C. Tarbell was born in the Asa Tarbell House, which stands beside the Squannacook River in West Groton, Massachusetts.  His father, Edmund Whitney Tarbell, died in 1863 after contracting typhoid fever while serving in the Civil War. His mother, Mary Sophia (Fernald) Tarbell, remarried a shoemaking-machine manufacturer.  Young "Ned" (as he was nicknamed) and his older sister, Nellie Sophia, were left to be raised by their paternal grandparents in Groton, a frontier town during the French and Indian Wars that the early Tarbell family helped settle.  As a youth, Tarbell took evening art lessons from George H. Bartlett at the Massachusetts Normal Art School.  Between 1877 and 1880, he apprenticed at the Forbes Lithographic Company in Boston.  In 1879, he entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, studying under Otto Grundmann.  He matriculated in the same class with Robert Lewis Reid and Frank Weston Benson, two other future members of the Ten American Painters.  His 1891 plein air painting entitled In the Orchard established his reputation as an artist.  It depicts his wife with her siblings at leisure. Tarbell became famous for impressionistic, richly hued images of figures in landscapes. H is later work shows the influence of Johannes Vermeer, the 17th-century Dutch painter.  Tarbell painted portraits of many notable individuals, including industrialist Henry Clay Frick, Yale University President Timothy Dwight V, and U.S. presidents Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover.  See pictures and a list of selected paintings at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edmund_C._Tarbell

The largest deposit of uranium in the U.S.A. is in Virginia at Coles Hill; however, the state's generous rainfall and occasional flooding (in contrast with typical American uranium mines in the dry and isolated desert southwest) have led to citizen concern about commercial-scale mining.  Lawmakers in the state enacted a de facto ban on uranium mining in 1982.  A 2015 federal court case involving the owners of Coles Hill might overturn the ban.  Marline Uranium Corp. announced in July 1982 that it had discovered 110 million pounds (50,000 metric tons) of uranium in the Swanson/Coles Hill deposit, on land that it had leased near Chatham in Pittsylvania County.  During the 1982 legislative session, the state of Virginia adopted laws to govern exploration for uranium in the Commonwealth.  At the same time, the legislature imposed a moratorium on uranium mining in the state until such time that regulations to govern uranium mining could be enacted into law.  Uranium mining in the United States produced 3,303,977 pounds (1,498,659 kg) of U₃O₈ (1271 tonnes of uranium) in 2015, 32% lower than 2014's production of 4,891,332 pounds (2,218,671 kg) of U₃O₈ (1881 tonnes of uranium) and the lowest US annual production since 2005.  The 2015 production represents 7% of the anticipated uranium market requirements of the USA's nuclear power reactors for the year.  Production came from one conventional uranium mill in Utah, and six in-situ leach operations: four in Wyoming, one in Texas and one in Nebraska.  While uranium is used primarily for nuclear power, uranium mining had its roots in the production of uranium-bearing ore in 1898 with the mining of carnotite-bearing sandstones of the Colorado Plateau.  The United States was the world's leading producer of uranium from 1953 until 1980.  In 1960 annual U.S. production peaked at 17,055 metric tons U₃O₈.  Until the early 1980s, there were active uranium mines in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Oregon, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.  Price declines in the late 1970s and early 1980s forced the closure of numerous mines.  Most uranium ore in the United States comes from deposits in sandstone, which tend to be of lower grade than those of Australia and Canada.  Because of the lower grade, many uranium deposits in the United States became uneconomic when the price of uranium declined sharply in the late 1970s.  By 2001, there were only three operating uranium mines (all in-situ leaching operations) in the United States.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uranium_mining_in_the_United_States#Virginia

The Scots word blether, pronounced to rhyme with tether, means a chat, often a long chat with a good deal of juicy gossip thrown in.  For example you might say that many people who join a book group do so to have a good blether over a glass or two of wine rather than to take part in a great literary debate.  When applied to a person the noun blether means someone who is given to talking at too great length.  Blether can also be used to refer to someone who is apt to talk a lot of foolish nonsense.  Often the two meanings meet together in one person.  The plural form of the noun, blethers, also takes up these themes of foolishness and long-windedness.  It means foolish, nonsensical talk or long-drawn-out rambling in which there can be an element of bragging.  Bletheration and bletherie are less well-known words for foolish talk.  As an exclamation blethers! means nonsense or rubbish.  Betty Kirkpatrick  http://caledonianmercury.com/2012/08/22/useful-scots-word-blether/0035026t

Cutouts of press secretary Sean Spicer in bushes have quickly become a new Internet meme.  The joke began after a report from The Washington Post on May 9, 2017 following President Trump’s stunning decision to fire FBI Director James Comey.  Spicer did not make any on-camera appearances on May 9, but The Post reported that Spicer at one point spent several minutes “hidden in the darkness and among bushes” outside the White House while deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway made TV appearances.  People have responded by printing cardboard cutouts of Spicer and putting them in their garden hedges.  http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/333213-cutout-of-sean-spicer-in-the-bushes-becomes-internet-meme

May 16, 2017  While sifting through artifacts recovered two years earlier from a Roman shipwreck, Greek archaeologist Valerios Stais noticed an intriguing lump of bronze among the statues, jewelry and coins retrieved by divers.  What at first appeared to be a gear or wheel turned out to be what is now widely referred to as the first known analog computer.  To highlight Stais' discovery, 115 years ago on May 17, Google dedicated its doodle to the Antikythera mechanism, a complex clockwork mechanism believed to have been designed and constructed by Greek scientists around 87 BC, or even earlier.  Housed in a wooden and bronze box the size of a shoe box, the corroded instrument's 30 bronze gears were used to track astronomical positions, predict solar and lunar eclipses, and signaled the timing of the Ancient Olympic Games.  The technical complexity and workmanship of the mechanism wouldn't be duplicated again until development of astronomical clocks in Europe during the 14th century, suggesting the knowledge used to create the device had been lost to antiquity.  Steven Musil  See pictures of the Google doodle and the actual mechanism, now kept at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens at https://www.cnet.com/news/google-doodle-antikythera-mechanisms-discovery-analog-computer-bronze/

WE COULD HAVE BEEN CANADA  Was the American Revolution such a good idea?  (A Critic at Large)  May 15, 2017 issue of The New Yorker  The Revolution remains the last bulwark of national myth.  One new take insists that we misunderstand the Revolution if we make what was an intramural and fratricidal battle of ideas in the English-speaking Empire look like a modern colonial rebellion.  Another insists that the Revolution was a piece of great-power politics, fought in unimaginably brutal terms, and no more connected to ideas or principles than any other piece of great-power politics:  America was essentially a Third World country that became the battlefield for two First World powers.  Holger Hoock, in his new book, “Scars of Independence” (Crown), raises another, unexpected question:  why is it that, until now, the Civil War cast such a long, bitter shadow, while the Revolution was mostly reimagined as a tale of glory?  One reason, too easily overlooked, is that, while many of those who made the Civil War were killed during it, including the Union Commander-in-Chief, none of the makers of the Revolution died fighting in it.  The Founding Fathers had rolled the dice and put their heads on the line, but theirs was the experience of eluding the bullet, and, as Churchill said, there is nothing so exhilarating as being shot at without result.  Adam Gopnik  Read extensive article at http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/we-could-have-been-canadall.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/333213-utout-of-sean-spicer-in-the-bushes-becomes-internet-eme

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1710  May 17, 2017  On this date in 1792, the New York Stock Exchange was formed under the Buttonwood Agreement.  On this date in 1863, Rosalía de Castro published Cantares Gallegos, the first book in the Galician language.  Thought for Today  Most creativity is a transition from one context into another where things are more surprising.  There's an element of surprise, and especially in science, there is often laughter that goes along with the 'Aha'.  Art also has this element.  Our job is to remind us that there are more contexts than the one that we're in--the one that we think is reality. - Alan Kay, computer scientist (b. 17 May 1940)