Mark Dunn (born July 12, 1956, in Memphis, Tennessee) is an American author and playwright.  He studied film at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis) followed by post-graduate work in screenwriting at the University of Texas at Austin moving to New York in 1987 where he worked in the New York Public Library whilst writing plays in his free time.  Among the thirty plays Dunn has written (as of 2015), Belles and Five Tellers Dancing in the Rain have been produced over one hundred and fifty times.  Dunn is playwright-in-residence with the New Jersey Repertory Company and the Community Theatre League in Williamsport, Pennsylvania.  Find a list of novels and full-length plays at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Dunn   

A pangram or holoalphabetic sentence is a sentence using every letter of a given alphabet at least once.  Pangrams have been used to display typefaces, test equipment, and develop skills in handwriting, calligraphy, and keyboarding.  The best-known English pangram is "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog".  It has been used since at least the late 19th century, was used by Western Union to test Telex/TWX data communication equipment for accuracy and reliability.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangram#   

Hailed by the Christian Science Monitor as “the first political satire of the 21st century”—and by the Dallas Morning News as “Orwell meets Scrabble”—Ella Minnow Pea is an exuberant novel of language and ideas.  As a political satire, it reflects the paranoid absurdities of both the political correctness movement and the domestic war on terror.  But the book is also a dazzling linguistic performance that will appeal to anyone who enjoys the subtleties and suppleness of the English language.  The 19th-century violinist Niccolo Paganini was famous for snipping three strings of his instrument in mid-concerto and playing on without missing a beat.  In Ella Minnow Pea Mark Dunn goes Paganini 21 better, divesting himself of most of the letters of the English alphabet and doing so in perfect accordance with the dictates of his story.  https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/43985/ella-minnow-pea-by-mark-dunn/9780385722438/teachers-guide/  See also https://inkandspine.com/2020/04/04/ella-minnow-pea/   

MORE PANGRAMS:  About sixty codfish eggs will make a quarter pound of very fizzy jelly.  *  Pack my box with five dozen jugs of liquid veneer.  *  Back in my quaint garden jaunty zinnias vie with flaunting phlox.  *  https://callibeth.com/downloads/pangrams111.pdf   

Starting July 9, 2023, the cost of the first-class “forever” stamps will jump from 63 to 66 cents.  The latest price comes just months after forever stamps climbed from 60 to 63 cents in January, 2023 following a series of similar increases in recent years.  A handful of other mail services will also see price increases starting.  The cost of sending a first-class one-ounce metered letter, for example, will rise to 63 cents and domestic postcards will jump to 51 cents.  International postcards and one-ounce letters are both set to move to $1.50.  The Postal Service will also launch a new package shipping service, USPS Ground Advantage, to replace and combine previous plans.  Ground Advantage pricing will reflect a 3.2 percent decline in retail prices and a 0.7 percent drop for commercial, the Postal Service says.  https://fortune.com/2023/07/03/us-postal-service-forever-stamps-5th-price-increase-since-2019/   

Kingsessing is a neighborhood in the Southwest section of Philadelphia.  On the west side of the Schuylkill River, it is next to the neighborhoods of Cedar Park, Southwest Schuylkill, and Mount Moriah, as well as the borough of Yeadon in Delaware County.  It is roughly bounded by 53rd Street to the northeast, Baltimore Avenue to the northwest, Cobbs Creek and 60th Street to the southwest, and Woodland Avenue to the southeast.  The name Kingsessing, also spelled Chinsessing, comes from a Delaware word meaning "a place where there is a meadow".  The historic Lenape, or Delaware as the English called them, had a village of the same name that roughly occupied the same site as where the current neighborhood was later developed.  When the township was organized to encompass where the Lenape and a later Swedish village stood, it also was named as Kingsessing.  In 1669 Hans Månsson, a Swedish settler, received a patent for an 1,100-acre plantation along the Schuylkill River between the current location of 60th Street and Woodlands Cemetery, extending as far west as Cobb's Creek.  Bartram's Garden, started by colonial botanist John Bartram in the late 1700s, is still operated in this neighborhood.  It had an international reputation and is considered the first true botanical garden in the United States.  It has been designated as a National Historic Landmark.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsessing,_Philadelphia#History   

Most U.S. state flags were designed and adopted between 1893 and World War I.  See a map showing the flags of the 50 states of the United States, its five territories, and the capital district, Washington, D.C. at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flags_of_the_U.S._states_and_territories 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2692  July 5, 2023