Playing for keeps  Marbles have existed for quite some time, apparently for thousands of years.  As for the origins of this phrase, it may come from the game of marbles.  How is this game played?  Basically, the player's goal is to hit their opponent's marbles with their own, which is generally done by rolling a marble across the ground from a set distance, and hoping it collides with the target.  At the beginning of the game, players can establish if they are 'playing for keeps,' meaning if a player hits the opposing player's marble, then they get to keep it.  This expression, with its figurative meaning, has been around since at least the year 1842, as it was written in the Hattiesburg American newspaper.  https://www.knowyourphrase.com/playing-for-keeps

The Fosbury Flop is a style used in the athletics event of high jump.  It was popularized and perfected by American athlete Dick Fosbury, whose gold medal in the 1968 Summer Olympics brought it to the world's attention.  Over the next few years the flop became the dominant style of the event and remains so today.  Before Fosbury, most elite jumpers used the straddle technique, Western Roll, Eastern cut-off or even scissors jump to clear the bar.  Given that landing surfaces had previously been sandpits or low piles of matting, high jumpers of earlier years had to land on their feet or at least land carefully to prevent injury. With the advent of deep foam matting high jumpers were able to be more adventurous in their landing styles and hence experiment with styles of jumping.  Canadian high jumper Debbie Brill, then still a preteen, concurrently adopted a similar technique which became known as the "Brill Bend", setting the indoor world record (1.99m.) in 1982.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fosbury_Flop

One of the most memorable and historic moments in Olympic history as Dick Fosbury re-invents the high jump competition with the use of his Fosbury flop method instead of the classic scissors technique.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SlVLyNixqU  0:32

Brill Bend 1966  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoYRGQlfHQA  0:16

"Rumor carried its own currency, had its own uses."  Half World, a novel by Scott O'Connor

A.R. (Archie Randolph) Ammons was born in rural North Carolina in 1926, and his experiences growing up on a cotton and tobacco farm during the Great Depression inspired a great deal of his poetry.  Ammons wrote his first poems while serving aboard a Navy destroyer during World War II.  After the war, he completed his education, then held a variety of jobs before beginning his teaching career at Cornell University in 1964.  Ammons died on February 25, 2001, at the age of 75.  Franklin Crawford wrote Ammons’s obituary for the Cornell Chronicle, calling him “quite literally, a modern poetical phenomenon.  His influence over American letters is immeasurably profound, and, while his style may inspire comers of every stripe, his literary accomplishments are not likely to be duplicated in our time or any other.”  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/a-r-ammons

The People Behind The Birds Named For People:  Alexander Wilson by Alison Haigh   More than two centuries ago in the swamps of North Carolina, ornithologist and author Alexander Wilson squatted to sketch a yellow-green bird with a neat black cap flitting about above him, catching insects.  Wilson had always favored descriptive names for birds, so he called this one the “Green Black-capt Flycatcher.”  Later ornithologists changed that to “Wilson’s Warbler,” one of five North American species named for the Scottish immigrant who is widely regarded as the father of American ornithology.  That’s not just a fanciful title—Wilson actually wrote and illustrated American Ornithology, a nine-volume work published in 1814 that illustrated 268 bird species and kindled America’s insatiable appetite for bird knowledge, 30 years before Audubon’s Birds of America.  Today, he has five North American birds named in his honor.  Wilson was born in Scotland in 1766.  As a child, when he wasn’t gallivanting in the woods, he was burying his nose in a book or idly writing poetry.  But his working-class background forced him out of school at age 13 to apprentice as a weaver.  In his mid-twenties he wrote some of the industrial revolution’s first protest literature about the decrepit mill conditions he worked in.  After the local government put him in jail, slapped him with court fees, and forced him to burn his work in the town square, emigration to America seemed like his best remaining option.  Wilson slept on the ship’s open deck for the four-month journey from Scotland to Delaware.  Cataloguing the birds of America had been brewing in Wilson’s mind since he settled in Gray’s Ferry.  In 1806, when he left schoolteaching to start work at a prominent publishing company, Wilson approached his new boss about taking on American Ornithology.  The publisher agreed, under one condition:  Wilson had to procure 200 subscribers.  So, in 1808 Wilson set off on foot, “in search of birds, and subscribers.”  That expedition reads like an ornithological Indiana Jones adventure.  Traveling over 12,000 miles in seven years, from New England to Florida to western Tennessee, Wilson illustrated more than 230 bird species, highlighting important field marks with crisp colors, in a two-dimensional style mirrored in field guides today.  Read more and see graphics at https://www.allaboutbirds.org/the-people-behind-the-birds-named-for-people-alexander-wilson/ 

 The Toledo Museum of Art’s (TMA) first edition of Alexander Wilson’s pioneering multi-volume publication American Ornithology; or The Natural History of the Birds of the United States will take center stage when the exhibition Before Audubon:  Alexander Wilson’s Birds of the United States opens.  The exhibition is curated by Paula Reich, the Museum’s head of interpretive projects and managing editor.  “The prints are not only beautifully-produced with vibrant hand coloring, but they are historically important as the first attempt at a comprehensive natural history study of American birds,” said Reich.  “It’s also the first major scientific study published in the country.”  Fourth in TMA’s biennial exhibitions focused on bird-themed art, Before Audubon coincides with the Biggest Week in American Birding festival, which brings tens of thousands of birders to the shores of Lake Erie to observe the spring migration of songbirds.  Before Audubon:  Alexander Wilson’s Birds of the United States is supported in part by 2018 Exhibition Program Sponsor ProMedica.  Admission to the exhibition is free.  It will be on view in Gallery 18 from April 18 through July 15, 2018.  http://www.toledomuseum.org/2018/01/11/toledo-museum-of-art-displays-historical-bird-prints-by-father-of-american-ornithology/

Jon McGregor (born 1976) is a British novelist and short story writer.  In 2002, his first novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize, making him the youngest ever contender.  His second and fourth novels were longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006 and 2017 respectively, the latter winning in the Novel category.  In 2012, his third novel was awarded the International Dublin Literary Award. The New York Times has labelled him a "wicked British writer".  Born in Bermuda, McGregor was raised in the UK.  He grew up in Norwich and Thetford, Norfolk.  He studied for a degree in Media Technology and Production at Bradford University.  In his final year there he contributed a series entitled "Cinema 100" to the anthology Five Uneasy Pieces (Pulp Faction).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_McGregor  See also The Visionary Power of the Novelist Jon McGregor by James Wood at https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/27/the-visionary-power-of-the-novelist-jon-mcgregor

March 14 is Pi Day.  It is a day to celebrate the mathematical constant pi (π) and to eat lots of pie.  Celebrated in countries that follow the month/day (m/dd) date format, because the digits in the date, March 14 or 3/14, are the first three digits of π (3.14), Pi Day was founded by Physicist Larry Shaw in 1988.  One of the oldest and the most recognizable mathematical constant in the world, Pi (π) is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter.  Its value is approximately equal to 3.14159265.  It is an irrational number, which means it cannot be expressed as a ratio of whole numbers, and its decimal representation never ends or repeats.  In recent years, mathematicians have called for replacing pi by tau (τ) as a way to describe the relationship between a circle’s circumference and its radius.  In order to spread the word about the advantages of tau over pi, mathematicians around the world celebrate Tau Day on June 28.

PI(ANO) SONG  http://www.piday.org/2010/piano-song/  2:01

A FUGUE ON PI  http://www.piday.org/2015/a-fugue-on-pi/  0:49

               

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1856  March 12, 2018  Esa Pekka Salonen and Magnus Lindberg formed a group called "Ears Open" back when they were students at the Helsinki Academy, to raise the profile of new music in Finland.  Years later, after Salonen became the music director of the LA Philharmonic, he gave Lindberg his first major American commission, a work called “Fresco,” which had its world premiere in Los Angeles on today’s date in 1998.  Composers Datebook