David Lean's twelfth film was The Bridge on the River Kwai starring Alec Guinness and William Holden as P.O.W.'s working to build and/or destroy a bridge for the Japanese during World War II.  The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Guinness), not to mention a handful of Golden Globes, BAFTAs, and even a Grammy nomination for its soundtrack.  The process of adapting Pierre Boulle's French-language novel Le Pont de la Riviere Kwai was difficult, but the two writers ultimately responsible for it were Carl Foreman (High Noon) and Michael Wilson (A Place in the Sun).  Neither of them got credit, though, as The Bridge on the River Kwai was released during the three-year period when people who'd ever been Communists (or who refused to answer questions about it before Congress) were ineligible for Academy Awards.  The screenplay was instead credited to the novelist, Boulle—which was quite a feat, since he didn’t speak or read English. In 1985, the Academy officially recognized Foreman and Wilson as the screenwriters and posthumously awarded the Oscar to them.  Boulle based his novel, published in 1952, on his own experiences as a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, and on an infamous construction project that he wasn't involved with.  The Japanese did indeed force British, Dutch, Australian, and American prisoners to build the Burma Railway, resulting in some 13,000 POW deaths and at least 80,000 civilian deaths.  The real Kwai River was just a trickle near Burma, where Boulle set his bridge; the actual bridge had been built 200 miles away, near Bangkok.  A sketch of that bridge was used as the basis for the fictional one.  The movie's famous theme, The “Colonel Bogey March" was composed in 1914 by Kenneth Alford, a military band conductor. During World War II, British soldiers added words about Hitler, Goering, Himmler and Goebbels.  Lean wanted to use the tune in Kwai, figured those lyrics wouldn't pass the censors (or the approval of the composer's widow), and opted to have the troops whistle it instead.  Kwai's composer, Malcolm Arnold, wove the march into his Oscar-winning score so seamlessly that modern viewers may assume it was original to the film.  Eric D. Snider  http://mentalfloss.com/article/82646/13-fascinating-facts-about-bridge-river-kwai

As you go through online articles, magazine editorials, and news reports, you may encounter the use of the word sic.  It is typically italicized and enclosed in square brackets like this—[sic]—but what exactly does it mean?  Should you be paying any attention to this notation or should you just skim right past it?  It’s debatable how much weight you should be placing on “sic,” but you should at least know what it means.  It is a Latin word that roughly translates to “in such a manner” or “as such.”  That’s not really how we use it today, however.  Instead, you’ll find that when writers are quoting the work or words of other people, they’ll insert [sic] to indicate that the quote has been reproduced verbatim.  Typically, the quote will contain an incorrect or strange spelling of some kind and the writer wants to preserve that without it appearing to be a typo on their part.  If you were to pronounce “sic” in Latin, it would sound closer to the English word “seek.”  These days, we tend to anglicize the term to sound closer to the English word “sick.”  In terms of usage, [sic] is generally used to preserve an incorrect spelling, but it can also be used to preserve an inaccuracy in a quote as well.  http://btr.michaelkwan.com/2009/06/11/grammar-101-what-does-sic-mean/

Mix, Heat, Eat:  Fried Rice  In skillet with oil over medium-high heat, add 2 cups diced vegetables and  hot or teriyaki or soy sauce.  Stir fry briefly.  Add 1 c. cooked rice and, if desired, cooked meats.  Cook 1 minute.  Make a well and pour in 1 egg, stirring constantly.  When mostly cooked, stir everything together.  Add salt and pepper if needed.  Adapted from recipe at http://www.toledoblade.com/Mary-Bilyeu/2018/03/04/Dinner-for-One-Give-new-life-to-your-leftovers.html

February 1, 2018  Anthony Wayne shipwreck first from Lake Erie on National Registry by Jack Nissen   Ohio is a hotbed for historical preservation, but the state lacked a shipwreck  on the National Register of Historic Places until recently.  “The Anthony Wayne is a great example of the kinds of vessels that used to  supply Lake Erie in the 1800s,” said Kendra Kennedy, a maritime archaeologist  at the Ohio History Connection.  The Anthony Wayne shipwreck’s nomination to the national register ends mountains of research from an unlikely source:  a Texas A&M student’s thesis.  Shipwreck hunters confirmed the  ship was an old steamboat after its discovery in 2006, said Brad Kruger, a National Park Service cultural resource  specialist.  “After learning this, I began to do my  own research.  In 2008 I formed an archaeological survey and worked with  volunteers for a four week period,” said Kruger.  The first year of the survey reported the wreckage above the lakebed, most  notably its paddle wheels.  The following year, Kruger and his team excavated  around the wreck to see what the mud was hiding.  “We found a marine engine, one of  the earliest examples of one in the entire Great Lakes,” Kruger said.  “A fully  preserved engine, just under a few feet of mud.”  The Anthony Wayne was about seven miles north of Ohio when two of its  boilers exploded.  It sank to the bottom of Lake Erie in 1850.  http://thebeacon.net/beacon-news/news-ottawa-outdoors/item/13152-anthony-wayne-shipwreck-first-from-lake-erie-on-national-registry 

Remember That Shipwreck Story?  Here's What Really Happened!  Tom Kemp, GenealogyBank's Director of Genealogy Products, has been searching historical newspapers for nearly 50 years.  After reading sensationalist articles from the 1850s describing the sinking of the Anthony Wayne in Lake Erie, he dug deeper in old newspaper archives to separate the true from the false.  https://www.genealogybank.com/newsletter-archives/201202/remember-shipwreck-story-heres-what-really-happened 

coined recently:  getting Tillersoned--kept in a state of limbo about your future  coined recently:  de-wed--get a divorce

Despite claims by CNN, Time, USA Today, People, HuffPost, LiveScience and Newsweek, astronaut Scott Kelly’s DNA did not actually change by seven percent after two years in space, according to Prof. Chris Mason, professor at Weill Cornell Medicine and lead of the study.  Kelly’s body and genes were monitored closely during his two-year stint in space and compared against those of his identical twin brother, Mark Kelly, in the NASA-backed “Twins Study” led by Prof. Mason, physiology and biophysics.  The extensive research of Mason’s team did not find that seven percent of Kelly’s genome changed after he left the Earth’s atmosphere.  While his genes remained the same, what changed was his gene expression—the activity of his cells, using that same genetic code, in deciding when and what proteins to manufacture.  Sarah Skinner  Read more at http://cornellsun.com/2018/03/16/despite-national-media-claims-7-of-astronauts-genes-did-not-change-in-space/

Scott Shoemaker was flooded with messages of support, death threats and offers from attorneys because of a viral internet post claiming his son was suspended for refusing to join the national walkout on March 14, 2018 to protest guns in schools.  The story wasn’t true, but that didn’t stop thousands from sharing it.  The photo of a Hilliard City Schools suspension slip made its way around Twitter and Facebook—along with Shoemaker’s name and phone number on it.  The now-viral story is 100 percent false, the Hilliard district says.  Shoemaker's son Jacob, a Hilliard Davidson 12th-grader, was suspended for failing to follow instructions to either join students outside or those in the study hall.  Shannon Gilchrist  http://www.the-review.com/news/20180315/hilliard-student-wasnt-suspended-for-avoiding-gun-protest-but-internet-doesnt-believe-that

Born in Toledo in 1928, Kate Wilhelm might have gone on to live a desperately ordinary life:  raised in Kentucky, she married young and had two children while her marriage fell apart. She was not born to science fiction—in fact, her first published novel, written in the midnight hours while her family slept, was "More Bitter Than Death" (1962), a mystery (a genre she returned to late in life with two popular long-running series of crime novels).  She once claimed that her decision to write SF was entirely serendipitous:  "I was a housewife with two young children, and I'd been reading an anthology, and I put it down and said to myself, 'I can do that.'  And I wrote 'The Mile-Long Spaceship,' and sold it."  She went on to write stories for a number of magazines, including the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, which continued to publish her best stories right up until a few months before her death.  Selected for various "best of the year" anthologies, she was eventually introduced to the life of a full-time writer—as well as to her second husband and first-best editor, Damon Knight.  Wilhelm never quite "fit" into any of the genres she chose to briefly occupy—SF, crime, mystery, domestic realism­.  But despite her relative obscurity in the world of "serious" literature, she was an intensely present woman in the lives of other writers; and she seemed happiest when other writers were around.  With her husband, she helped organize some of the first Milford Workshops, an annual meeting of young and established writers that notably included the likes of Thomas M. Disch, Avram Davidson, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Theodore Sturgeon, Judith Merril and even a young Gustav Hasford (author of "The Short-Timers," a.k.a. Stanley Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket.")  And when the Milford Workshops eventually developed into the Clarion workshops for young writers of fantasy and SF, Wilhelm and Knight were among the first (and most valued) instructors, teaching there every year from 1969 through the late 1990s.  Over many decades, she taught and inspired more soon-to-be-major writers than could be recorded in a drawer-full of class registers, including Robert Crais, George Alec Effinger, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, Cory Doctorow, Jeff VanderMeer, Ted Chiang, Lucius Shepard Nicola Griffith—the list could easily fill any one tribute and spill over into another.   Scott Bradfield  http://www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-kate-wilhelm-appreciation-20180313-story.html   Kate Wilhelm died March 8, 2018 in Eugene, Oregon at the age of 89.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1859  March 19, 2018