The Wheel of Fortune TV game show has a category “Before and After.”  One of their puzzles was Haunted House of Pancakes.  Others could be Sleepless in Seattle Mariners, Birthday Suit of Cards or Bathing Suit of Cards, Ferris Wheel of Fortune, Wheel of Fortune cookies. 

In late 1890, Daniel Burnham, the eminent architect charged with turning a boggy square mile of Chicago into a world-dazzling showpiece, assembled an all-star team of designers and gave them one directive:  “Make no little plans.”  Burnham was laboring in the shadow of a landmark erected the year before in Paris, an elegant wrought iron structure rising a thousand feet into the air.  But nobody in the States had an answer for the Eiffel Tower.  Oh, there were proposals:  a tower garlanded with rails to distant cities, enabling visitors to toboggan home; another tower from whose top guests would be pushed off in cars attached to thick rubber bands, a forerunner of bungee jumping.  Eiffel himself proposed an idea:  a bigger tower.  As plans for the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago took shape, there was a void where its exclamation point was meant to stand.  Burnham spoke before a group of engineers employed on the project and chided them for their failure of imagination.  To avoid humiliation, he said, they needed to come up with “something novel, original, daring and unique.”  One of their number, George Washington Gale Ferris Jr., a 33-year-old engineer from Pittsburgh whose company was charged with inspecting the steel used by the fair, was struck by a brainstorm and quickly sketched a huge revolving steel wheel.  After adding specifications, he shared the idea with Burnham, who balked at the slender rods that would carry people to a height taller than the recently opened Statue of Liberty.  Ferris was hardly the first to imagine such a wheel.  In fact, a carpenter named William Somers was building 50-foot wooden wheels at Asbury Park, Atlantic City and Coney Island; a roundabout, he called it, and he’d even patented his design.  But Ferris had not only been challenged to think big; the huge attendance expected at the fair inspired him to bet big.  He spent $25,000 of his own money on safety studies, hired more engineers, recruited investors.  On December 16, 1892, his wheel was chosen to answer Eiffel.  It measured 250 feet in diameter, and carried 36 cars, each capable of holding 60 people.  More than 100,000 parts went into Ferris’ wheel, notably an 89,320-pound axle that had to be hoisted onto two towers 140 feet in the air.  Launched on June 21, 1893, it was a glorious success.  Over the next 19 weeks, more than 1.4 million people paid 50 cents for a 20-minute ride and access to an aerial panorama few had ever beheld.  “It is an indescribable sensation,” wrote a reporter named Robert Graves, “that of revolving through such a vast orbit in a bird cage.”  But when the fair gates closed, Ferris became immersed in a tangle of wheel-related lawsuits about debts he owed suppliers and that the fair owed him.  In 1896, bankrupt and suffering from typhoid fever, he died at age 37.  A wrecking company bought the wheel and sold it to the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.  Two years later, it was dynamited into scrap.  Jamie Malanowski  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/history-ferris-wheel-180955300/ 

Carnaby Street is a pedestrianised shopping street in Soho in the City of Westminster, Central London.  It is home to fashion and lifestyle retailers, including many independent fashion boutiques.  Carnaby Street derives its name from Karnaby House, which was built in 1683 to the east.  The origin of the name is unknown.  The street was probably laid out in 1685 or 1686.  First appearing in the ratebooks in 1687, it was almost completely built up by 1690 with small houses.  A market was developed in the 1820s.  In his novel, Sybil (1845), Benjamin Disraeli refers to "a carcase-butcher famous in Carnaby-market".  This area is notable for a cholera outbreak in 1854 leading to an early application of fundamental epidemiological principles to resolve the crisis.  John Snow, the physician who recognised the cases were concentrated near a pump on Broad Street communicated the finding on a map-based graphic.  It led to the pump being locked and the reduction in cases of cholera was rapid.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnaby_Street 

Nathaniel "Natty" Bumppo is a fictional character and the protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper's pentalogy of novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales.  Song of the Mohicans, written by Paul Block in 1995, is a direct sequel to Last of the Mohicans.  Taking up the story a few days after Uncas' death and burial, it recounts the adventures of Hawkeye and Chingachgook as they travel north to discover the connection between an Oneida brave and the Mohican tribe, and whether a sachem truly holds the key to the ultimate fate of the Mohicans.  Natty Bumppo is featured in the Marvel comic Deadpool Killustrated, as part of a group of time-traveling heroes (Beowulf, Hua Mulan, and Sherlock Holmes and his partner Dr. Watson), intent on stopping Deadpool from killing all literary characters.  Tinker, a major character in Amor Towles' novel, "Rules of Civility", wants to be Natty Bumppo for the day.  There is an intelligent dog named Natty Bumppo in John Brunner's novel "Shockwave Rider".  Natty Bumppo appears as a character in Diana Gabaldon's eighth Outlander series novel, Written in My Own Heart's Blood.  University of Iowa's mascot, the Hawkeye was taken from The Last of the Mohicans novel.  Natty Bumppo was the name of several pop music bands in the 1970s, including bands from Dayton, Ohio, and central Utah.  Natty Bumppo is the name of the author of The Columbus Book Of Euchre and House Of Evil.  University of Iowa's mascot, the Hawkeye was taken from The Last of the Mohicans novel.  Natty Bumppo was the name of several pop music bands in the 1970s, including bands from Dayton, Ohio, and central Utah.  Natty Bumppo is the name of the author of The Columbus Book Of Euchre and House Of Evil.  Find titles, subtitles, publication dates and story dates of The Leatherstocking Tales at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natty_Bumppo 

Presidents' Day is a federal holiday celebrated on the third Monday in February.  Originally established in 1885 in recognition of President George Washington, the holiday became popularly known as Presidents' Day after it was moved as part of 1971’s Uniform Monday Holiday Act, an attempt to create more three-day weekends for the nation’s workers.  While several states still have individual holidays honoring the birthdays of Washington, Abraham Lincoln and other figures, Presidents' Day is now popularly viewed as a day to celebrate all U.S. presidents, past and present.  The shift from Washington’s Birthday to Presidents' Day began in the late 1960s, when Congress proposed a measure known as the Uniform Monday Holiday Act.  Championed by Senator Robert McClory of Illinois, this law sought to shift the celebration of several federal holidays from specific dates to a series of predetermined Mondays.  The proposed change was seen by many as a novel way to create more three-day weekends for the nation’s workers, and it was believed that ensuring holidays always fell on the same weekday would reduce employee absenteeism.  While some argued that shifting holidays from their original dates would cheapen their meaning, the bill also had widespread support from both the private sector and labor unions and was seen as a surefire way to bolster retail sales.  The main piece of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act passed in 1968 and officially took effect in 1971 following an executive order from President Richard M. Nixon. Washington’s Birthday was then shifted from the fixed date of February 22 to the third Monday of February.  While Nixon’s order plainly called the newly placed holiday Washington’s Birthday, it was not long before the shift to Presidents' Day began.  The move away from February 22 led many to believe that the new date was intended to honor both Washington and Lincoln, as it now fell between their two birthdays.   By the mid-1980s, Washington’s Birthday was known to many Americans as Presidents' Day.  This shift had solidified in the early 2000s, by which time as many as half the 50 states had changed the holiday’s name to Presidents' Day on their calendars.  Some states have even chosen to customize the holiday by adding new figures to the celebration. Arkansas, for instance, celebrates Washington as well as civil rights activist Daisy Gatson Bates.  Alabama, meanwhile, uses Presidents' Day to commemorate Washington and Thomas Jefferson (who was born in April).  As a federal holiday, many banks and schools are closed in observance of Presidents' Day.  The New York Stock Exchange and NASDAQ are closed for trading on Presidents' Day.  The post office is not open and non-essential federal workers have the day off.  https://www.history.com/topics/holidays/presidents-day 

The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent upon it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do. - Galileo Galilei, physicist and astronomer (15 Feb 1564-1642)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2326  February 15, 2021