Charles Ray (born 1953) is a Los Angeles-based American sculptor.  He is known for his strange and enigmatic sculptures that draw the viewer's perceptual judgments into question in jarring and unexpected ways.  Christopher Knight in the Los Angeles Times wrote that Ray's "career as an artist . . . is easily among the most important of the last twenty years."  Charles Ray was born in Chicago as the son of Helen and Wade Ray.  His parents owned and ran a commercial art school which his grandmother had founded in 1916.  He was the second oldest in his family and has four brothers and a sister.  The family moved to Winnetka, Illinois, in 1960.  Charles and his older brother, Peter, attended high school at the Catholic Marmion Military Academy in Aurora, Illinois, where their father had gone.  On Saturdays he went to the Art Institute's studio program for high-school students.  He earned his BFA at the University of Iowa and his MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.  He studied sculpture at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History with Roland Brener, who exposed Ray to many of developments of Modernist sculpture, in particular the constructivist aesthetic of artists like Anthony Caro and David Smith.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ray_(artist) 

Meime means “coastal” in Wappo, according to winemaker Joe Wagner.  Wappo is the language of the indigenous people of Northern California, the tribe has the same name.  It’s also a word that symbolizes the character of California’s coveted coastal vineyards, which guarantee their fruit to Meiomi’s signature wines.  https://wineonmytime.com/meiomi-wine/ 

A mondegreen is a mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase in a way that gives it a new meaning.  Mondegreens are most often created by a person listening to a poem or a song; the listener, being unable to hear a lyric clearly, substitutes words that sound similar and make some kind of sense.  American writer Sylvia Wright coined the term in 1954, writing that as a girl, when her mother read to her from Percy's Reliques, she had misheard the lyric "layd him on the green" as "Lady Mondegreen" in the fourth line of the Scottish ballad "The Bonny Earl of Murray".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondegreen 

Sylvia Wright was born in 1917 as the daughter of Austin Tappan Wright.  She studied at Bryn Mawr College and after graduation she became a freelance writer for various magazines, among them Harper's Bazaar.  It was in this magazine that she coined the neologism mondegreen in 1954.  https://en.everybodywiki.com/Sylvia_Wright 

The term "Radar" was coined in 1940 by the United States Navy, as an acronym for "RAdio Detection And Ranging."  "Scuba" stands for "Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus".  LASER:  "Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation."  American computer scientist Steve Wilhite created the “graphics interchange format,” or gif, in 1987.  TASER stands for "Thomas A Swift Electric Rifle", after the inventor, Jack Cover, decided in 1974 to name it after his favorite children’s book character - Tom Swift.  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2grMKJ29Ghlw36WXCHGJvKk/7-words-you-probably-didnt-know-were-acronyms 

Radio Terms and Abbreviations  AM:  Abbreviation for amplitude modulation.  ASCII:  Acronym for "American standard code for information interchange," a method of representing upper and lower letters in addition to numbers and special symbols.  FM:  Abbreviation for frequency modulation.  UHF:  Abbreviation for ultra high frequencies.  USB:  Abbreviation for upper sideband.  https://www.dxing.com/radterms.htm 

Lou Stovall is an American artist (born 1937, Athens, GA).  Stovall grew up in Springfield, MA and he studied at Howard University, where he earned a BFA in 1965.  He also received a Doctor of Fine Arts Honoris Causa, from the now closed Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, Washington, D.C. in 2001.  He has lived and worked in Washington, D.C. since 1962.  Stovall is most often associated with drawing and silkscreen printmaking.  In 1968 he founded Workshop, Inc., initially a community studio which has subsequently grown into a professional printmaking facility used by many artists, including Josef Albers, Peter Blume, Alexander Calder, Gene Davis, Sam Gilliam, Jacob Kainen, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Mangold, Mathieu Mategot, Pat Buckley Moss, Paul Reed, Reuben Rubin, Di Bagley Stovall, and James L. Wells.  In a 1998 New York Times profile of Stovall, American artist Jacob Lawrence described him as “a craftsman who is also an artist.”  Stovall's art has been exhibited in many galleries, art centers, and museums.  Additionally, he has been the recipient of several high-profile art commissions.  In 1982, First Lady Nancy Reagan commissioned Stovall to design that year's Independence Day invitation for the White House.  Subsequently, in 1986 Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry commissioned Stovall to create a work for the city's host committee for the 1988 Democratic National Convention.  His artwork is in the collection of several museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC, The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., The National Endowment of the Arts, Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, Florida, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Bristol Museum in Bristol, R.I, the Bayly Art Museum in Charlottesville, VA, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Washington D.C. Commission of the Arts and Humanities.  The Washington City Paper once described him as "legendary in his adopted hometown of Washington," while The Washington Post noted in 2020 that "Veteran Washington artist Lou Stovall has been making silk-screen prints for so long that he’s begun to see them as a sort of natural resource."  See lists of awards and exhibitions at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lou_Stovall 

Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it! - Yuri Gagarin, first human in space (9 Mar 1934-1968) 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2505  March 9, 2022