His personal email silted up with nothing more than spam.  *  I like information.  Learning is a virtue.  *  Romeo, Juliet is R.J. in the NATO phonetic alphabet.  My initials, military style.  Reacher, Jack.  *  Reduce.  Reuse.  Recycle.  *  The Sentinel, 25^th novel in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child and Andrew Child  

The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC.  It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants.  In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.  The uppercase and lowercase forms of the twenty-four letters are:  Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ/ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, and Ω ω.  The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.  Find table with names and modern pronunciation of Greek letters at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet  See also https://www.thoughtco.com/letters-of-greek-alphabet-118638 

·        John Alcock and Arthur Whitten-Brown co-piloted a plane from Newfoundland to Ireland eight years before Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic alone.

·        Karate began in Okinawa.

·        Lincoln borrowed the phrase of the people, by the people and for the people from

abolitionist and minister Theodore Parker.

·        Baby Ruth candy bar was named for Grover Cleveland’s daughter.

Fabulous Fallacies by Tad Tuleja

Tad Tuleja (b. 1944) is a graduate of Yale, Cornell, and the University of Sussex.  He has been a journalist, editor, and researcher, and has authored numerous short-entry reference books.  See list of Tad Tuleja’s books at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19747.Tad_Tuleja 

In its short lifespan, Wordle has already made the tricky transition from cult phenomenon to established part of our daily lives.  Created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner in October 2021, the online word puzzle game gives you six tries to correctly guess a five-letter word each day.  Its no-frills design, once-daily refresh, and spoiler-free way to share results on social media has turned it into an overnight success.  But the game’s swift pop culture ascendancy, which led to it getting acquired by the New York Times for upward of $1 million in January, isn’t unprecedented.  In fact, 100 years before Wordle entered the scene, an even bigger word puzzle craze swept the nation.  I’m referring, of course, to the “cross-word mania” of the 1920s.  The modern “word-cross” appeared for the first time in print in the December 21, 1913 edition of New York World’s FUN Supplement.  Section editor Arthur Wynne, trying to fill the Christmas insert, drew inspiration from his native England, where Victorian newspapers and magazines regularly published word squares, acrostic puzzles where the same words can be read both across and down.  Building on this prototype, Wynne debuted FUN’s Word-Cross Puzzle.  The game looks different than what we’re accustomed to today—it’s shaped like a diamond, with 72 white squares clustered around a blank center.  “Crosswords were the Beatles of 1924,” reporter Margaret Petherbridge, who would go on to become the New York Times’ inaugural crossword editor under her married name, Margaret Farrar, later remarked.  By 1925, even Queen Mary (along with “lesser members of the royal family”) had taken up the pastime.  Jackie Mansky https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2022/04/01/before-wordle-there-was-cross-word-mania/ideas/culture-class/ 

Never mind the stir she created with the 1964 publication of “Life With Picasso,” a blisteringly candid account of her 10-year relationship with the artist.  (She was the only woman to have walked out on him.)  Or her stature as an artist:  Her works are exhibited in more than a dozen museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, their prices on the rise.  Francoise Gilot has said much of what she has to say in “Life With Picasso,” written with Carlton Lake, an American journalist.  Leaving Picasso was an attenuated process, the relationship ending in 1953.  Two years later, she married the artist Luc Simon.  They divorced in 1962, and in 1970 she wed Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, the union lasting until Mr. Salk’s death in 1995.  In 2021 her painting “Paloma à la Guitare,” a 1965 portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby’s in London, at seven times its high estimate.  Ruth La Ferla  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/style/francoise-gilot-it-girl.html 

The North American elk, (Cervus elaphus), are divided into six subspecies.  The Rocky Mountain elk of the Rocky Mountain West has the largest antlers of all the subspecies.  The Roosevelt ranges the Coastal Pacific Northwest and is the largest in body size.  The Tule in Central California is the smallest.  The Manitoban lives in the northern Great Plains.  The Merriams of the Southwest and Mexico and the Eastern elk lived east of the Mississippi River and are both extinct.  One of the largest in the deer family, a mature male bull elk stands 5 feet at the shoulder and averages 700 pounds.  Tule elk weigh less and the Roosevelts can reach 900 pounds.  Elk are very adaptable and live in areas from alpine meadows to rainforests and hardwood forests to desert valleys.  Typically, elk habitat is a blend of large open areas and woodland cover.  Tes Jolly  https://www.mossyoak.com/our-obsession/blogs/elk/north-american-elk-facts-and-restoration 

CONNECT WITH LIBRARIES      

·        The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 167 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves, which would span roughly the distance from The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to Cape Canaveral, Florida.

·        Libraries are a smart investment.  A recent study shows that for every dollar spent on Ohio public libraries, Ohioans received $5.48 in economic value.

·        There are more public libraries than Starbucks in the U.S.–a total of 16,568, including branches.

·        Nearly 100% of public libraries provide Wi-Fi and have no-fee access to computers.

·        Libraries are the place for lifelong learning.

·        Books unite us.  They reach across boundaries and build connections between readers.  Censorship, on the other hand, divides us and creates barriers.  American Library Association  2022 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2520  April 13, 2022