Julius Robert Oppenheimer (1904–1967) was an American theoretical physicist and director of the Los Alamos Laboratory during World War II.  He is often credited as the "father of the atomic bomb" for his role in organizing the Manhattan Project, the research and development undertaking that created the first nuclear weapons.  Born to German Jewish immigrants in New York City, Oppenheimer earned a bachelor's degree in chemistry from Harvard University in 1925 and a PhD in physics from the University of Göttingen in Germany in 1927.  After research at other institutions, he joined the physics department at the University of California, Berkeley, where he became a full professor in 1936.  See extensive article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Robert_Oppenheimer  

The Alaska community coastal town of Cordova lives and breathes fishing.  Every July, through this family-friendly festival, local nonprofits and loads of volunteers come together to raise awareness of the region's rich resources and raise funds to support art opportunities with 2 days of live music, a wild food sampler, running events and kids activities.  There’s also an artisan craft fair and lots of fun for all ages at Cordova’s beautiful Mt. Eyak Ski Area.  Each day will offer hours of live music, highlighting local musicians such as Keys on Fire, Repeat Offenders and also featuring guest artists from Seward, Blackwater Railroad Company.  https://salmonjam.org/music/  

Birds fill the air of the island over the summer months.  Puffins put on miraculous displays at dawn and at dusk, but they are active all day long, bringing fish to their chicks waiting in the burrows pocketed all along the steep slopes. There are over five thousand of them.  Little heads peek out from burrow openings from early June as the chicks wait for the parents to bring food.  The adults repeatedly sweep out to sea, dive sixty feet or more, and rise into the sky again with beaks filled with shimmering fish.  Over the months of June and July the young are reared, and by early August the burrows are all deserted.  In 1991, two ornithologists arrived on the Skelligs to reestablish an annual census of nesting birds on the island.  Over the course of a weekend, they plotted sections of nesting areas on a master map, in order to indicate as many nests and resident adults as they could.  For long—and in some places still—fresh and preserved puffin meat has been eaten in the Faroes, Iceland, Scandinavia, Scotland, and Ireland.  Coastal monastic middens hold puffin bones.  And there are nineteenth-century accounts of men climbing precariously down the cliffs along the west coast of Ireland, hunting for fattened puffin chicks.  Thousands of creatures are always returning to home in on the tiniest of targets, on their specific burrows and ledges on Skellig Michael, a spike eight miles at sea; they move upon a map that is alive and changing, a shifting range of flight.  Excerpted from the book RETURNING LIGHT: Thirty Years on the Island of Skellig Michael by Robert L. Harris.  Copyright © 2023  https://lithub.com/a-paradise-of-birds-the-puffins-of-the-remote-island-of-skellig-michael/  

Tom Schweyer (1937-2023), who oversaw libraries in the Lucas County jail and other correctional facilities during a nearly 30-year career with the Toledo Lucas County Public Library system, died July 5, 2023 in Bay City, Mich.  He was 85.  His appointment as corrections librarian in 1977 coincided with an order by U.S. District Court Judge Don J. Young that Lucas County commissioners provide library services to inmates.  The library system also received a federal grant to offer services at the then-new Lucas County jail, the Toledo House of Corrections–known as the "workhouse"–in Whitehouse, and the Child Study Institute downtown, which held juvenile inmates.  "He always understood that people make mistakes," Mrs. Stacy said.  "He wanted to make the best of their experience.  He just believed in the good of people."  He tried to fulfill inmate requests, whether music or popular literature or law books.  With art supplies he provided, one inmate painted a mural on the wall of a clipper ship, its sails unfurled.   He worked four days a week at the jail, and also had duties at the Maumee branch, aboard the bookmobile, and he delivered books to nursing homes.  Lowell Thomas Schweyer was named for a well-known broadcaster, adventurer, and newsreel narrator of the era.  https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/toledoblade/name/tom-schweyer-obituary?id=52469909  Some of the inmates, when informed they could have one call, asked for the phone number of librarian Tom Schweyer.  

July 18, 2023  Dozens of feral rabbits are driving some residents of a Florida neighborhood hopping mad after the furry creatures that were let loose are taking over the streets and are multiplying like–rabbits.  In the suburbs of Fort Lauderdale, there’s a new “invasive species” to contend with in a state all too familiar with the destructive habits of non-native animals.  These include Burmese pythons and the iguanas that can voraciously consume their way to local wildlife dominance, as well as lionfish and giant African snails.  The rabbits of Jenada Isles, an 81-home community in Wilton Manors on the outskirts of the south Florida city are also voracious, apparently, when it comes to chewing on outdoor wiring and similar unwelcome targets, as well as the food fed to them by locals trying to deal with the small-scale invasion.  The estimated 60 to 100 rabbits are descendants of a group a backyard breeder illegally let loose when she moved away two years ago and they are lionhead rabbits, named after the furry flowing mane around their heads.  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/18/florida-neighborhood-hopping-lionhead-rabbits-invasion  

July 19 is the 200th day of the year (201st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar; 165 days remain until the end of the year.  1701 – Representatives of the Iroquois Confederacy sign the Nanfan Treaty, ceding a large territory north of the Ohio River to England.  1845 – Great New York City Fire of 1845:  The last great fire to affect Manhattan begins early in the morning and is subdued that afternoon.  The fire kills four firefighters and 26 civilians and destroys 345 buildings.  1848 – Women's rights:  A two-day Women's Rights Convention opens in Seneca Falls, New York.  1863 – American Civil War:  Morgan's Raid:  At Buffington Island in Ohio, Confederate General John Hunt Morgan's raid into the north is mostly thwarted when a large group of his men are captured while trying to escape across the Ohio River.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_19  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2698  July 19, 2023