Friday, March 16, 2018


Pearl Zane Gray was born on January 31, 1872, in Zanesville, Ohio, a town founded by his mother's ancestors.  (The spelling of the Gray family name was changed to "Grey" sometime during the late 1890s.)  As a youth in Ohio, he developed interests in fishing, baseball and writing.  All three pursuits would later bring him acclaim.  Grey's baseball prowess led to a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania's Dental Department.  He graduated in 1896 with a degree in dentistry, but chose to play amateur baseball for several seasons, practicing dentistry intermittently.  He established his own dental practice in New York City in 1898.  While residing in New York, he continued to play baseball.  He loved to get away from the city, and began visiting Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania.  There he fished and enjoyed the outdoors as in his youth.  On one of these outings in 1900, Zane ("Doc") met 17-year-old Lina Elise Roth, or "Dolly" as he called her, while canoeing near the Delaware House, a grand boarding house on the river.  Dolly was a positive influence in Grey's struggle to become a successful writer.  Her encouragement and belief in his abilities led him to continue writing despite rejection by publishers.  Grey's first published article was "A Day on the Delaware," in Recreation magazine, May 1902.  In 1903, Grey wrote, illustrated and published his first novel, Betty Zane, with money from Dolly.  https://www.nps.gov/upde/learn/historyculture/zanegrey.htm

Zane Grey Day - April 29, 2018 at the National Road & Zane Grey Museum, 8850 East Pike, Norwich, OH   Learn about U.S. 40, the old National Road that came to be called “the Main Street of America,” explore the adventure novels and Westerns of Zanesville author Zane Grey and see examples of the art pottery for which this region of Ohio was famous in the 20th century.  Exhibits speak to the history of the road, its construction and transportation, from wagons to cars.  A diorama of the National Road with many accompanying objects illustrates what it was like to travel on the National Road from the early 19th century, when the first tree was felled, to the mid-20th century.  The 3/8ths-scale diorama is 136 feet long.  The National Road, early America’s busiest land artery to the West, stretched from Cumberland, MD, to Vandalia, IL.  Begun in 1806, the “Main Street of America” was the only significant land link between the east coast and the western frontier in the early 19th century.  The dream of Washington and Jefferson, it was needed to move crops and goods between East and West and help immigration.  Zane Grey, born in Zanesville in 1872, wrote more than 80 books and is known for his novels of the old West.  Grey penned about 60 Westerns, nine novels about fishing, three books tracing the fate of the Ohio Zanes, a biography of the young George Washington and several short story collections.  His study is re-created in the museum and includes many manuscripts and other personal memorabilia. https://www.ohiohistory.org/visit/museum-and-site-locator/national-road-and-zane-grey-museum
                                                                                                
The World Happiness Report at http://worldhappiness.report/, published March 14, 2018, ranks 156 countries by happiness levels, based on factors such as life expectancy, social support and levels of corruption.  The Nordic countries have dominated the index since it first was produced in 2012.  Rounding out the Top 10 this year are Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden and Australia.  Unlike past years, the annual report published by the U.N. Sustainable Development Solutions Network also evaluated 117 countries by the happiness and well-being of their immigrants.

Recharge with simple exercise:  walking, stretching, measured breathing.  Recharge with simple foods:  fruit, nuts, cheese.

The National Archives celebrates Women’s History Month, recognizing the great contributions that women have made to our nation.  Learn about the history of women in the United States by exploring their stories through letters, photographs, film, and other primary sources. 
Employee Affinity Groups (EAGs) at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) serve as a forum for education, communication, and professional development.  Through NARA's collaboration with the 2020 Women’s Vote Centennial Initiative  (WVCI) to observe the 19th Amendment Centennial Celebration, members of WAG will be providing updates to NARA’s research pages, which will be featured on the WVCI website.
Explore selected images from the National Archives Catalog related to Women's History.  https://www.archives.gov/news/topics/womens-history

The estate of Harper Lee has filed a lawsuit against the producers of a highly-anticipated Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, arguing that the Aaron Sorkin’s script “departs from the spirit of the novel”.  The lawsuit, filed on March 13, 2018 in Alabama by the late author’s lawyer Tonja Carter, alleges that Sorkin’s script has substantially altered Lee’s novel, despite a clause in the contract stipulating that “the play shall not derogate or depart in any manner from the spirit of the novel nor alter its characters”.  According to the lawsuit, the estate and Lee’s literary agent Andrew Nurnberg made repeated approaches to Hollywood producer Scott Rudin’s company, Rudinplay, letting them know that “for this classic, it is really important that any spin put on the characters, not least Atticus, does not contradict the author’s image of them”.  Atticus Finch, it states, is “based on Ms Lee’s own father, a small-town Alabama lawyer who represented black defendants in a criminal trial”, and “is portrayed in the novel as a model of wisdom, integrity, and professionalism”.   Alison Flood  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/15/harper-lee-estate-sues-over-broadway-version-of-to-kill-a-mockingbird

Amazon’s first Washington-area bookstore opens March 13 by Abha Bhattarai   The online behemoth, which has helped drive a number of traditional bookstores out of business, is hoping its loyal online following will translate into in-store customers on Georgetown’s M Street NW, in the same building that Barnes & Noble once inhabited before shutting in 2011.  At 10,000 square feet, the store is among the largest of Amazon’s 15 bookstores.  It includes 5,600 book titles—all of which are displayed with their covers facing out—as well as dozens of tablets and smart-home devices on display for customers to test.  Instead of price tags, each book comes with a review card that shows its star rating on Amazon.com and includes a snippet of a customer review. Customers are encouraged to use Amazon’s mobile app to scan items for prices.  Scanning machines throughout the store also alert shoppers to an item’s cost—which, for Prime members, is the same as on Amazon.com. Everyone else pays list price.  A section called “New Year New You” includes Vitamix blenders and Breville juicers, alongside espresso makers and wellness items.  The children’s section, where books are organized by age group, includes a table of magnetic toys and Fire Kids tablets.  Another area, called Amazon Launchpad, features start-up creations like sous-vide cooking tools and Mason jar fermentation kits. A small coffee bar downstairs is operated by Allegro Coffee, which is owned by Whole Foods Market.  (Amazon bought Whole Foods last year for $13.7 billion.)  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/business/wp/2018/03/12/amazons-first-washington-area-bookstore-opens-tuesday/?utm_term=.45b3f1e8836d  

Symbolic communication in the form of language underlies our unique ability to reason—or so the conventional wisdom holds.  A new study published March 15, 2018 in Science, though, suggests our capacity to reason logically may not actually depend on language, at least not fully.  The findings show babies still too young to speak can reason and make rational deductions.  The authors—a team hailing from several European institutions—studied infants aged 12 and 19 months, when language learning and speech production has just begun but before complex mastery has been achieved.  The children had to inspect distinct objects repeatedly—such as a dinosaur and a flower.  The items were initially hidden behind a black wall.  In one set of experiments the animation would show a cup scooping up the dinosaur.  Half of the time, the barrier would then be removed to reveal, as expected, the remaining flower. In the rest of the instances, though, the wall would disappear and a second dinosaur would be there.  The children deduced in these latter occurrences that something was not quite right, even though they were unable to articulate in words what was wrong.  Eye-tracking—a commonly used technique to gauge mental abilities in preverbal children and apes—showed infants stared significantly longer at scenes where the unexpected object appeared behind the barrier, suggesting they were confused by the reveal.  Bret Stetka  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/babies-think-logically-before-they-can-talk/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1858  March 16, 2018 

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