David Alexander Colville (1920–2013) was a Canadian painter and printmaker.  Colville had some success while still enrolled at Mount Allison, exhibiting at the Art Association of Montreal (now the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts) in 1941, and the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1942.  After the war, Colville returned to New Brunswick and became a faculty member with the Fine Arts Department at Mount Allison University.  He taught there from 1946 to 1963.  Colville developed his own style of Realism that influenced both a regional and national art community, as teacher and founder of the what would become known as Maritime Realism.  By contrast to other members of the Maritime school, the composition of his work involved geometry.  Colville influenced a host of students that pursued a realist painting style.  He left teaching to devote himself to painting and print-making full-time from a studio in his home on York Street; this building is now named Colville House.  In 1966, works by Colville along with those of Yves Gaucher and Sorel Etrog represented Canada at the Venice Biennale.  In 1967, Colville was made an Officer of the Order of Canada, elevated to Companion in 1982, the order's highest level.  He lived in St. Catharines, Ontario, for three years before moving to Nova Scotia.  In 1973, he moved his family to his wife's hometown of Wolfville, where they lived and worked in the house that her father built and in which she was born.  In 1981 he was appointed university chancellor of Acadia University serving in that role until 1991.  In 1965, Colville was commissioned to design the images on the Canadian 1867–1967 centennial commemorative coin set.  The set consists of the following designs:  Rock dove on 1 cent coin, rabbit on 5 cent coin, mackerel on 10 cent coin, lynx on 25 cent coin, wolf on 50 cent coin and goose on the 1 dollar coin.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Colville   

New Caledonia, a remote French overseas territory in the South Pacific Ocean, is home to some of the healthiest and most biodiverse coral reefs on Earth, including the world’s most diverse concentration of coral species and the second-largest barrier reef on the planet.  In April 2014, the New Caledonian government created the Natural Park of the Coral Sea, which covers the territory’s entire exclusive economic zone.  Since that time, the government has been working with The Pew Charitable Trusts, local nongovernmental organizations, scientists, businesses, and the community to develop a management plan that will define the regions of the park, how they will be used, and their levels of protection.  The territory’s coral reefs and surrounding tropical lagoons form one of the healthiest, most extensive reef systems in the world and support a vast array of wildlife.  New Caledonia’s waters are also home to numerous seamounts (underwater mountains) and the Fosse des Nouvelles-Hébrides subduction trench, both of which also harbor an array of life.  In fact, experts have identified more than 9,300 species in New Caledonia’s waters, including:  1,700 species of fish, 473 species of coral, 48 species of sharks, 27 species of marine mammals, 32 species of seabirds, and four species of sea turtles.  https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2021/06/01/new-caledonia-marine-ecosystem-among-the-healthiest-on-earth-deserves-stronger-protection   

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is a sequence of stories by Stephen Leacock, first published in 1912.  It is generally considered to be one of the most enduring classics of Canadian humorous literature.  The fictional setting for these stories is Mariposa, a small town on the shore of Lake Wissanotti.  Although drawn from his experiences in Orillia, Ontario, Leacock notes:  "Mariposa is not a real town.  On the contrary, it is about seventy or eighty of them.  You may find them all the way from Lake Superior to the sea, with the same square streets and the same maple trees and the same churches and hotels."  This work has remained popular for its universal appeal.  Many of the characters, though modelled on townspeople of Orillia, are small town archetypes.  Their shortcomings and weaknesses are presented in a humorous but affectionate way.  Often, the narrator exaggerates the importance of the events in Mariposa compared to the rest of the world.  For example, when there is a country-wide election, "the town of Mariposa, was, of course, the storm centre and focus point of the whole turmoil."  The story of the steamboat Mariposa Belle sinking in Lake Wissanotti is one of the best-loved in the set.  The apparent magnitude of this accident is lessened somewhat when it is revealed that the depth of the water is less than six feet.  Men from the town come to the rescue in an un-seaworthy lifeboat which sinks beneath them just as they are pulled onto the steamer, and the narrator earnestly remarks that this was "one of the smartest pieces of rescue work ever seen on the lake."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_Sketches_of_a_Little_Town

Stephen P. H. Butler Leacock (1869–1944) was a Canadian teacher, political scientist, writer, and humorist.  Between the years 1915 and 1925, he was the best-known English-speaking humorist in the world.  He is known for his light humour along with criticisms of people's follies.  The Stephen Leacock Associates is a foundation chartered to preserve the literary legacy of Stephen Leacock, and oversee the annual award of the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour.  It is a prestigious honour, given to encourage Canadian humour writing and awarded for the best at Canadian humour writing.  The foundation was instituted in 1946 and awarded the first Leacock Medal in 1947.  The presentation occurs in June each year at the Stephen Leacock Award Dinner, at the Geneva Park Conference Centre in Orillia, Ontario.  Leacock began submitting articles to the Toronto humour magazine Grip in 1894, and soon was publishing many humorous articles in Canadian and US magazines.  In 1910, he privately published the best of these as Literary Lapses.  The book was spotted by a British publisher, John Lane, who brought out editions in London and New York, assuring Leacock's future as a writer.  This was confirmed by Literary Lapses (1910), Nonsense Novels (1911--probably his best books of humorous sketches--and by the more sentimental favourite, Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912).  John Lane introduced the young cartoonist Annie Fish to illustrate his 1913 book Behind the Beyond.   Leacock's humorous style was reminiscent of Mark Twain and Charles Dickens at their sunniest—for example, in his book My Discovery of England (1922).  However, his Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich (1914) is a darker collection that satirizes city life.  Collections of sketches continued to follow almost annually at times, with a mixture of whimsy, parody, nonsense, and satire that was never bitter.  Leacock was enormously popular not only in Canada but in the United States and Britain.  In later life, Leacock wrote on the art of humour writing and also published biographies of Twain and Dickens.  After retirement, a lecture tour to western Canada led to his book My Discovery of the West:  A Discussion of East and West in Canada (1937), for which he won the Governor General's Award.  He also won the Mark Twain medal and received a number of honorary doctorates.  Other nonfiction books on Canadian topics followed and he began work on an autobiography.  A prize for the best humour writing in Canada was named after him, and his house at Orillia on the banks of Lake Couchiching became the Stephen Leacock Museum.  Canadian stage actor John Stark was most noted for An Evening with Stephen Leacock, a long-running one-man show.  An album of his show, released on Tapestry Records in 1982, received a Juno Award nomination for Comedy Album of the Year at the Juno Awards of 1982.  Stark also later produced a television film adaptation of Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town, as well as a stage musical based on Leacock's short story "The Great Election".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Leacock   

November 3, 2021  The Atlanta Braves are World Series champions with a 7-0 pummeling of the Houston Astros.  The Braves had gone 26 years without a title.  Chelsea Janes,  Scott Allen  and Adam Kilgore  https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2021/11/02/world-series-game-6/   

Find results of 2021 elections and more at https://ballotpedia.org/Main_Page   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2450  November 3, 2021