New York historic buildings 

* Before Gracie Mansion was built, the 1770 country residence of the Flatbush merchant Jacob Walton called Belvue Mansion was roughly on the same site.  Because it strategically overlooked Hell Gate (where the Harlem River, East River, and Long Island Sound meet), and featured a secret escape tunnel from the house to the East River shore.  Belvue Mansion was seized and commandeered by George Washington during the American Revolutionary War.  American troops put up a fort on the Walton lawn with a series of cannons facing the East River to guard the waterways.  The British destroyed this house on September 8, 1776, during the Revolutionary War, even though it was owned by a British Loyalist.  In 1798, the heirs of the Walton family reclaimed the property and sold it for $5,625 to Scottish immigrant, Archibald Gracie.  In 1799, Archibald Gracie built this two-story wooden mansion from his acquired wealth after founding a successful trading company.  Gracie used the Federal architectural styled mansion as his country home and enlarged it between 1810 and 1811.  The patent-yellow parlor is part of those additions to the mansion, which provided the Gracie family with more room in which to entertain their party guests. Gracie hosted elegant dinner parties at this country estate for his visitors which included Alexander Hamilton, John Quincy Adams, James Fenimore Cooper, Rufus King, Joseph Bonaparte, Marquis de Lafayette and Washington Irving.

* Manhattan's only lighthouse, the Little Red Lighthouse has sat on Jeffreys Hook since 1921, on the eastern pier of the George Washington Bridge in Fort Washington Park.  Jeffrey's Hook Lighthouse can be easily accessed by walking north through Riverside Park and Riverbank State Park or down a rather steep footpath just north of the bridge.  The Little Red Lighthouse was originally erected in Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in 1880, it was first called the North Hook Beacon.  In 1917, the 40-ft. spark plug lighthouse was dismantled and moved four years later to Jeffreys Hook where the George Washington Bridge would be built over between 1927 and 1931.  The lighthouse operated until 1947, when the Coast Guard decided to extinguish its lamp because its function was no longer needed due to the bridges bright lights.  It was decommissioned and plans were made to auction it off before those plans were overturned by the power of the people.  The Little Red Lighthouse is a New York City landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  Hildegarde H. Swift's children's book Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge was first published in 1942.  The book shows that being small can still be important in this story of the building of NYC's George Washington Bridge.
* British Colonel Roger Morris and his rich American Tory wife, Mary Philipse, built the Palladian styled Morris-Jumel Mansion, Manhattan's oldest house.  Eleven years before the Revolutionary War, in 1765, their 8,500-sq.-ft. summer mansion was built on Harlem Heights on a breezy hilltop by John Edward Pryor, and they called their new mansion Mount Morris.  The Morris's bought the land from Jacob and Yantie Dyckman with money from funds from Mary Philipse's dowry in 1758.  The second story balcony of the Morris's country home overlooked its 130 acres stretching from the Hudson to Harlem rivers.  The Morris-Jumel Mansion's strategic panoramic views of the Harlem River, the Bronx, and Long Island Sound to the east, NYC and its harbor to the south, and the Hudson River and Jersey Palisades to the west, made it the ideal headquarters to General Washington.  George Washington slept (and worked) here between September 14th and October 20th of 1776, after his army were forced to evacuate Brooklyn Heights, and before he forced a British retreat at the Battle of Harlem Heights. http://www.nychistorytours.com/

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

potpourri  (poh-poo-REE, POH-poo-ree) noun
1.  A mixture of dried flower petals, spices, herbs, etc., kept for fragrance.
2.  A musical medley.
3.  A mixture of incongruous things.
From French pot pourri, literally rotten pot (loan translation of Spanish olla podrida), from pot (pot) + pourri (rotten), from pourrir (to rot).  English has borrowed not only the loan translated term potpourri from French, but also the original Spanish olla podrida.  It has borrowed from other languages a whole bunch of terms to describe hodgepodge or miscellany, such as, from Swedish smorgasbord, from French salmagundi, and from Hungarian goulash.  
Earliest documented use:  1611.
blue blood  (BLOO bluhd)  noun
1.  An aristocratic or socially prominent lineage.
2.  A member of such a family.
Loan translation of Spanish sangre azul (blue blood).  The term arose from the visible veins of light-skinned royalty.  Earliest documented use:  1835.
deus ex machina  (DAY-uhs eks MAH-kuh-nuh, -nah, MAK-uh-nuh) noun
An unexpected or improbable person or event that saves a seemingly hopeless situation.
From Latin deus ex machina, deus (god) + ex (from) + machina (machine), loan translation of Greek theos apo mekhanes.  Earliest documented use:  1697.

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potpourri  Here in Jamaica we prepare a mixture of pickled/salted herring with seasonings especially scotch bonnet peppers.  This is served mainly on plain crackers usually at cocktail parties or wherever alcoholic drinks are served.  It is available commercially overseas also and is very popular.  We call this Solomon Gundy and some people say the name is derived from a person.  Now, of course, I do believe it is from the French salmagundi!  Interesting.

deus ex machina  In his book, Without Feathers, Woody Allen includes a one-act play called God.  In this hilarious spoof of a Greek comedy, when one of the actors, Diabetes is sentenced by the King to die, he calls upon the god Zeus to save him.  The actor playing Zeus is lowered down upon a wire to serve as the deus ex machina.  Through a horrible technical malfunction, he is strangled by the wire.  Only the comic genius of Woody Allen can conceive of a deus ex machina that can go so terribly wrong. 

Alexander Hamilton was born and raised in the West Indies and came to New York in 1772 at age 17 to study at King's College (now Columbia University). During his career, Hamilton was a military officer, lawyer, member of the United States Constitutional Convention, American political philosopher, author of the majority of the pivital and influential Federalist Papers, and the first United States Secretary of the Treasury.

Hamilton Grange National Memorial is a National Park Service site in St. Nicholas Park, New York City that preserves the relocated home of U.S. Founding Father Alexander Hamilton.  Hamilton commissioned architect John McComb Jr. to design a country home on Hamilton's 32 acres (13 ha) (0.13 km²) estate in upper Manhattan.  The two-story frame Federal style house was completed in 1802, just two years before Hamilton's death resulting from his duel with Aaron Burr on July 11, 1804.  The house was named "The Grange" after Hamilton's grandfather's estate in Scotland.  The Grange was the only home ever owned by Hamilton and it remained in his family for 30 years after his death.  The Hamilton Heights neighborhood of Harlem derived its name from Hamilton and the Grange.  See more plus images at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_Grange_National_Memorial 

HealthCare.gov - Find Insurance Options

"This tool will help you find the health insurance best suited to your needs, whether it's private insurance for individuals, families, and small businesses, or public programs that may work for you.  It was created to help consumers under the health insurance reform law, the Affordable Care Act."  Includes pricing information.  http://finder.healthcare.gov/ 

Walk the Benjamin Franklin Parkway to the plaza before the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which Lord Dunsany called the most beautiful building in America.  The plaza, named for Thomas Eakins (1844-1916), the great Philadelphia painter who is best known for "The Gross Clinic" and "The Agnew Clinic," leads to three fountains.  The center fountain, dedicated to Washington, was erected by the Society of the Cincinnati of Pennsylvania.  The four figures and the animals overlooking the pools at the base represent four great waterways of America — the Mississippi, the Potomac, the Delaware and the Hudson.   http://www.ushistory.org/districts/parkway/eakin.htm   

A three-page AV-TEST study recently revealed that although search engine operators such as Google and Bing make a lot of effort to avoid doing so, they sometimes deliver websites infected with Trojans and similar malware among their top search results.  Other search engines do an even worse job.  Malware developers are now putting more and more effort into their work, for example in order to distribute their spyware programs or Trojans.  They therefore exploit search engines for their own purposes and sneak infected websites into the top results delivered to users.  The trick used by these criminals is actually very simple:  they first create a multitude of small websites and blogs before selecting the most frequently used search terms from top news stories and using backlinks to optimise these terms for search engines.  This process of optimising websites for search engines, known as SEO (search engine optimisation) for short, is used by all major website operators to ensure that their sites are easier to find.  The way to ensure that a web site is the quickest to be found is to achieve a place in the top ten search results delivered by Bing or Google."  Google achieved the best results in the study, followed by Bing.  Attention must, however, be drawn to the fact that Bing delivered five times as many websites containing malware as Google during the study.   Markus Selinger  Magdeburg, Germany, 6th April 2013  Please contact the team at AV-TEST GmbH if you have any questions.  E-mail: presse@av-test.de  Tel.: +49 (0)391 6075460  See the study at:   http://www.av-test.org/fileadmin/pdf/avtest_2013-03_search_engines_malware_english.pdf 

NOTE that AV-TEST is listed as "The Independent IT-Security Institute" at:   http://www.av-test.org/en/home/

The Reanimation Library in Brooklyn, N.Y. is a small, independent library that came to Proteus Gowanus as part of our theme year, Libraries.  It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation.  Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country and given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists.  The Reanimation Library is comprised of materials that are generally considered to be “outdated,” “obsolete” and lacking the privileged cultural status and/or market value that adhere to such artifacts as first editions or manuscripts.  It includes items that, due to their age and their pedestrian nature, are often discarded from other library collections and that in some cases have never been catalogued.  Many of the books in the collection contain significant amounts of graphic material; examples of these include, but are not limited to:  textbooks, pedagogical aides, “how-to” books, atlases, scientific, medical, and technical manuals, government documents, books about the natural world, space exploration, and urban planning.  The Reanimation Library is designed to provide source material for individuals embarking on and engaged in creative projects.  Find hours and location at:  http://proteusgowanus.org/reanimation-library/ 

Proteus Gowanus is an interdisciplinary gallery and reading room.  Named for the Greek sea god of change and the adjacent Gowanus Canal, Proteus Gowanus acts as an interpreter of culture and place, deepening the community’s sense of context and connection.  Find hours, location and list of exhibits and events at:  http://proteusgowanus.org/ 

New York City's first bridge, known as the King's Bridge, was constructed in 1693.  Fitted with stone abutments and a timber deck, it spanned Spuyten Duyvil Creek between Manhattan and the Bronx.  It was demolished in 1917.  The oldest bridge that is open to passengers or vehicles is the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883.  The oldest bridge still standing in New York City is the High Bridge, which spans the Harlem River between Manhattan and the Bronx; it opened in 1848. The High Bridge was originally an aqueduct, built to bring water to the city.  It is not currently open, but is being rehabilitated for pedestrian and bicycle use.

http://www.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bridges/bridges.shtml

strait 

noun   1.  Often, straits. ( used with a singular verb ) a narrow passage of water connecting two large bodies of water.   2.  Often, straits. a position of difficulty, distress, or need   3.  Archaic.  a narrow passage or area.  4.  an isthmus.

adjective   Archaic.  5.  narrow:  Strait is the gate.  6.  affording little space; confined in area. 

7.  strict, as in requirements or principles.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/strait

Golden Gate Bridge 

The Golden Gate is the North American strait that connects San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. 

1846  Captain John Fremont declares California’s independence from Mexico and names the mile-wide entrance to the San Francisco Bay as Chrysopylae, which means Golden Gate in Greek.

1919  San Francisco Board of Supervisors tell San Francisco City Engineer Michael O’Shaughnessy to proceed with the study of the feasibility of a bridge across the Golden Gate Strait.
December 9, 1929  Two dedication ceremonies were held to mark the start of borings for the Golden Gate Bridge tower piers at Fort Scott in San Francisco starting at 1pm, and two hours later on the Marin County side.
November 20, 1936  (this has also been cited as occurring on November 18 and 19, 1936):  The two sections of the Golden Gate Bridge's main span were joined.
April 27, 1937  The Last Rivet Ceremony - A ceremony of completion was held at midspan.   With hundreds of on lookers, ironworker Edward “Iron Horse” Stanley, the man who had driven the first rivet on the Bridge, took his rivet gun and drove that rivet….and the golden rivet disintegrated right before everyone’s eyes.

May 27, 1937  Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrian traffic.

http://goldengatebridge.org/research/dates.php

Hell Gate is a narrow tidal strait in the East River in New York City in the United States.  It separates Astoria, Queens from Randall's Island/Wards Island (formerly two separate islands that are now joined by landfill).  It was spanned in 1917 by the New York Connecting Railroad Bridge (now called the Hell Gate Bridge), which connects Wards Island and Queens.  The bridge provides a direct rail link between New England and New York City.  In 1936 it was spanned by the Triborough Bridge, allowing vehicular traffic to pass between Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens.  The name "Hell Gate" is a corruption of the Dutch phrase Hellegat, which could mean either "hell's hole" or "bright gate/passage", which was originally applied to the entirety of the East River.  The strait was described in the journals of Dutch explorer Adriaen Block, who is the first European known to have navigated the strait, during his 1614 voyage aboard the Onrust.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate  NOTE that Linda Fairstein's book, Hell Gate, is a mystery novel with the added attraction of much New York history.

Construction of the Hell Gate project began in 1912, two years after the first trains traveled under the Hudson River tunnels to Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.  Toward the end of 1915, the two trajectories of the steel arches from the Astoria and Ward's Island anchorages met high above the Hell Gate.  The arch bridge, the two smaller bridges and the viaduct were completed in September 1916. By 1917, the first Pennsylvania Railroad train - the Federal Express service between Washington and Boston - went over the Hell Gate Bridge, completing the first uninterrupted rail service between the two cities.  Buttressed by a 1991 article in The New Yorker on what Moynihan called "a great engineering miracle," Congress appropriated $55 million to repair and refurbish the Hell Gate Bridge. A unique color was even selected for the http://goldengatebridge.org/research/dates.php

"April is the cruellest month . . ." begins the first line of The Waste Land, the signature modernist poem by T. S. Eliot.  The 15th of April could easily be named the cruelest day of April, as it is the annual deadline for Americans to mail their tax returns, and checks, to the Internal Revenue Service.  To mark National Poetry Month on past tax days, the Academy of American Poets and the American Poetry & Literacy Project distributed thousands of free copies of The Waste Land at selected post offices across the country to taxpayers rushing to make the deadline.  Eliot's poem, a landmark of twentieth century poetry, was published in 1922 to a fire-storm of reviews—some praising the work for capturing the confusion of the "modern" age following World War I and some cursing its difficult, discontinuous voice.  Words and images in the first line and elsewhere in The Waste Land echo Walt Whitman's great poem, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."  Whitman's poem commemorates the death of Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated while lilacs were in bloom.  http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5628

Books written by librarians   Authors include Madeleine L’Engle, Marianne Moore, Archibald MacLeish, Beverly Cleary, Dee Brown, Jorge Luis Borges, August Strindberg and Anne Tyler.  See list of titles at:  http://www.abebooks.com/blog/index.php/2013/03/18/literature-from-librarians-great-reads-written-by-the-experts/   

Black, white, and green peppercorns are all the same seed of the same plant in various stages of development and processing.   Black Peppercorns:  They have reached their full size, but are not quite ripe.  They are picked and allowed to dry in the sun.  White Peppercorns:  These are mature berries which ripen to a red color before being picked.  After harvesting, they are soaked and rubbed free of the outer skin down to the smooth white underlayer, then dried and bleached by the sun.  Green Peppercorns:  This is the unripe version, picked while green and usually pickled in vinegar or brine.  Pink Peppercorns:  In spite of its moniker, these are unrelated to the black peppercorn.  They come from the Baies rose plant (Euonymus phellomanus), imported from Madagascar.  Read about red peppercorns and pink berries at:  http://homecooking.about.com/od/spices/a/peppervarieties.htm

Abraham Lincoln was nominated at the Republican convention in Chicago in May 1860.  He did not attend the convention and remained at home in Springfield through the long months of the presidential campaign as was the custom.  During his final days in Springfield, Lincoln and his family moved into a two-dollar-a-day hotel suite.  Most of the family furniture had been sold, and the house had been rented.  The extra cash would be needed, as the government at that time did not underwrite a president-elect's travel expenses.  The Hour of Peril:  the Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War by Daniel Stashower,   2013.

The Inaugural Address of Jefferson Davis  February 18, 1861

http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/toccer-new2?id=DavInau.sgm&images=images/modeng&data=/texts/english/modeng/parsed&tag=public&part=1&division=div1

The First Inaugural Address of Abraham Lincoln  March 4, 1861  http://www.bartleby.com/124/pres31.html

A popular myth suggests that a Chicago carpenter, George W. Snow, invented the balloon frame in 1832 and revolutionized construction practice.  Chicago architect John M. Van Osdel erroneously attributed the invention to Snow in 1883, and subsequent histories accepted the story.  But they did so without examining physical evidence.  The oldest buildings that remain in metropolitan Chicago suggest that the balloon frame was not a revolutionary idea; nor was it invented by Snow or any other Chicagoan.  During the colonial period, carpenters simplified the timber frame to allow for rapid construction with standardized materials.  The frame employed smaller, standardized timbers.  All mortises and tenons were very simple. The roof was a system of small common rafters held in place by nails.  Heated by stoves, the building had no need for a large, central fireplace.  The idea was not original. Carpenters in seventeenth-century Virginia employed a similar method when confronted with pressures to build rapidly.  But no matter the type of frame, carpenters could not reduce substantially the handwork necessary for building a house until the 1880s.  The balloon frame evolved slowly over the course of the nineteenth century.  It resulted from modest shifts in the practice of many carpenters over time.  Most likely, Chicago gained a reputation for the invention owing to factories like the Lyman Bridges Company that produced ready-made houses with balloon frames that were sold to various Western cities attempting to meet the needs of rapidly expanding populations.  Joseph C. Bigott   http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/105.html

EASY  When mashing a small amount of cooked potatoes or ripe avocados, you can use a fork instead of a masher or processor.

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather  on sale April 16, 2013 

Willa Cather, wanting to be judged on her work alone, clearly forbade the publication of her letters in her will.  But now, more than sixty-five years after her death, with her literary reputation as secure as a reputation can be, the letters have become available for publication.  The 566 letters collected here, nearly 20 percent of the total, range from the funny (and mostly misspelled) reports of life in Red Cloud in the 1880s that Cather wrote as a teenager, through those from her college years at the University of Nebraska, her time as a journalist in Pittsburgh and New York, and during her growing eminence as a novelist.  Postcards and letters describe her many travels around the United States and abroad, and they record her last years in the 1940s, when the loss of loved ones and the disasters of World War II brought her near to despair.  Written to family and close friends and to such luminaries as Sarah Orne Jewett, Robert Frost, Yehudi Menuhin, Sinclair Lewis, and the president of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Masaryk, they reveal her in her daily life as a woman and writer passionately interested in people, literature, and the arts in general.  http://www.randomhouse.com/book/217597/the-selected-letters-of-willa-cather-by-willa-cather

On November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected sixteenth president of the United States.  He won as “The Railsplitter” candidate, a nickname acquired the previous May when Illinois Republicans convened at Decatur to endorse a favorite son for president.  Lincoln was the likely choice but his supporters felt he needed a catchier nickname than “Old Abe” or “Honest Abe.”  Thus, Richard J. Oglesby and John Hanks, a first cousin of Lincoln’s mother, located a split-rail fence supposedly built by Lincoln in 1830.  When they walked into the hall carrying two of the rails—decorated with flags, streamers, and a sign that read, “Abraham Lincoln/The Rail Candidate”—the crowd went wild.  Although Lincoln claimed he could not say for certain that he had split those particular rails, he said that “he had mauled many and many better ones since he had grown to manhood.”  Several days after the state convention, the Republican Party held its national convention in Chicago and nominated Lincoln for president.  Lincoln did not actively campaign for office (as was the custom), but his supporters staged a lively campaign. 

http://blog.chicagohistory.org/index.php/2009/11/the-railsplitter/

"In the digital world, the traditional print functions of a librarian are still needed, since most would agree that full-text search is not a substitute for a skilled research librarian who adds value through context, experience, and personal interaction with the searcher." 

Vinton G. Cerf, ACM President  56 Communications of the ACM  7  April 2013

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg 

Contranyms (words with contradictory meanings)

secrete  (si-KREET) verb tr.
1.  To discharge or release.
2.  To conceal; to keep secret.
peruse  (puh-ROOZ)  verb tr.
1.  To read or examine with great care.
2.  To read or examine in a casual manner.
second-guess  (SEK-uhnd GES)  verb tr.
1.  To criticize an event with the benefit of hindsight.
2.  To guess or predict.
discursive  (dis-KUHR-siv)  adjective 
1.  Jumping from topic to topic; rambling.
2.  Proceeding logically, using reason or argument rather than emotion.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day--contranyms

In French, the word hôte can mean either host or guest.  The Greek language presents a similar dual meaning in the word xénos, which can mean foreigner or stranger as well as guest-friend.  The Greek gods frequently traveled in human guise on earth, and it was Zeus's expectation that strangers be greeted hospitably.  Going about disguised as a mortal was one way of conducting clandestine inspection tours, an ancient version of the mystery shopper.  Another contranym is "scan" which contains meanings (amongst others) "scrutinise" and "glance over"

Profile of Anu Garg  He sends out a simple email every day, A.Word.A.Day, containing a word, its definition and etymology, and an example of its current contextual usage; this to more than a quarter million subscribers in about 170 countries.  And he has been doing it since 1994.  The New York Times calls his mails “arguably the most welcomed, most enduring piece of daily mass e-mail in cyberspace.”  The Wall Street Journal compares him to Tom Sawyer, who has managed to alter others’ views about fence painting, and points to the numbers who happily join painting his wall with words.  Add the fact that this is an immigrant whose first language is not English, a man who has had no “English connection” till high school.  Anu Garg is a man with a mission.

Read entire article at:  http://www.thehindu.com/features/magazine/word-hungry/article4533467.ece

There are two forms of contranyms:  homographic, where two words with the same spelling can have opposing definitions; and homophonic, where two words with the same pronunciation can have opposing definitions.  In general, the terms below are both homographic and homophonic contranyms.  Richard Lederer included a list of self-contradicting words in a chapter on Janus-faced words in his book Crazy English.  T-Rex in the November 2nd, 2007 edition of Dinosaur Comics describes this class of words as homographic homophonic autantonyms.  See list of contranyms at:  http://www.translationdirectory.com/glossaries/glossary107.htm

 

Ricky Smith works at a library full of magic secrets:  The Conjuring Arts Research Center, located a few blocks from the Empire State Building.  The archive has over 15,000 books, plus manuscripts and letters serving magicians, historians and screenwriters.  The documentation is all created by magicians for magicians.  The magic library has taken on the sometimes dueling missions of preserving the art and making it more accessible—while being entrusted with mysteries magicians have guarded for centuries.  The center doesn't allow browsers, but members of the public with specific interests can make appointments to seek out volumes such as "Indian Rope Trick" or "Mnemonica" (for memorizing cards).  The library is a warren of rooms with towering bookshelves and velvet drapes.  Labels mark sections on such topics as mentalism, ventriloquism, juggling, hypnosis, escapology, sleight-of-hand and cheating at gambling.  One of the oldest documents in the collection comes from 1476—a fragment from Caxton's "Canterbury Tales," by Chaucer.  Bill Kalush's prized page includes the passage in which a pilgrim recounts a story about a magician conjuring at a party.  Other treasures include rare Italian pamphlets from the mid-1500s sold by street magicians, and science and math books revealing magical secrets—the kind made even more rare by those who burned books they saw as witchcraft.  Mr. Kalush, a specialist in sleight-of-hand with cards, was introduced to magic by his father.  After college, he founded a produce business and began seriously collecting magic books.  They began to multiply, so in 2003 he founded the nonprofit library.  It now has six on staff, plus interns and volunteers, many of whom are magicians.  Demetria Gallegos  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323826704578356542833994224.html?mod=djemITP_h 

Pinkerton's Inc., the nation's oldest and largest security services company, donated its archives in 2000 to the Library of Congress. The archives document the history of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, founded in 1850 by Scottish immigrant Allan Pinkerton, one of the most important figures in crime detection and law enforcement during the latter half of the 19th century.  See Pinkerton National Detective Agency ad with an eye and the motto  "We never sleep" at:  http://www.loc.gov/loc/lcib/0006/pink.html

Yellow journalism, or the yellow press, is a type of journalism that presents little or no legitimate well-researched news and instead uses eye-catching headlines to sell more newspapers.   Techniques may include exaggerations of news events, scandal-mongering, or sensationalism.  By extension, the term yellow journalism is used today as a pejorative to decry any journalism that treats news in an unprofessional or unethical fashion.  The term originated during the American Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century with the circulation battles between Joseph Pulitzer's New York World and William Randolph Hearst's New York Journal.  The battle peaked from 1895 to about 1898, and historical usage often refers specifically to this period.  Both papers were accused by critics of sensationalizing the news in order to drive up circulation, although the newspapers did serious reporting as well.  The term was coined by Erwin Wardman, the editor of the New York Press.  Wardman was the first to publish the term but there is evidence that expressions such as "yellow journalism" and "school of yellow kid journalism" were already used by newsmen of that time.  Wardman never defined the term exactly.  Possibly it was a mutation from earlier slander where Wardman twisted "new journalism" into "nude journalism".  Wardman had also used the expression "yellow kid journalism" referring to the then-popular comic strip which was published by both Pulitzer and Hearst during a circulation war.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

"It was a dark and stormy night" is an often-mocked phrase written by Victorian novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton in the opening sentence of his 1830 novel Paul Clifford.  The phrase is considered to represent "the archetypal example of a florid, melodramatic style of fiction writing," also known as purple prose.  The phrase comes from the original opening sentence of Paul Clifford:  It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.  It is used in the 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle:  It was a dark and stormy night. In her attic bedroom Margaret Murry, wrapped in an old patchwork quilt, sat on the foot of her bed and watched the trees tossing in the frenzied lashing of the wind.  Behind the trees clouds scudded frantically across the sky. Every few moments the moon ripped through them, creating wraithlike shadows that raced along the ground.   The Peanuts character Snoopy always begins his novels with the phrase "It was a dark and stormy night," and a book by Charles M. Schultz is titled It Was a Dark and Stormy Night, Snoopy.  The annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was formed in 1982.  The contest, sponsored by the English Department  at San Jose State University, recognizes the worst examples of "dark and stormy night" writing. It challenges entrants to compose "the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels."  The "best" of the resulting entries have been published in a series of paperback books, starting with It Was a Dark and Stormy Night in 1984.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It_was_a_dark_and_stormy_night 

Lytonny of Grand Prize Winners, 1983-2012  http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/lyttony.html

Face the music  This phrase meaning to accept responsibility, suffer consequences is an Americanism dating to the mid-19th century.  The underlying metaphor is uncertain.  From the New Hampshire Statesman and State Journal of 17 February 1834:  We want no equivocation—“face the music” this time—Gove and Barton are able backers.  There are a couple of common explanations for the phrase, but none have any conclusive evidence to support them.  The first explanation is that it derives from the stage.  With the musicians in a pit before the stage, to face the music is to turn towards the audience and either their hoots or cheers.  Another is that it is military in origin, and refers to a ceremony where an officer is cashiered and is literally drummed out of the service.  Because of the early citations from New Hampshire, it has also been suggested that face the music may have originated in contra dancing, a social dance form that was popular in 19th century New England and is still practiced in New Hampshire today.  

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/face_the_music/

National Library Week  April 14-20, 2013  Find information about NLW and nine other library celebrations in April at:  http://www.ala.org/conferencesevents/celebrationweeks  Check your local library for a list of festivities.   

Find 30 ways to celebrate National Poetry Month in April at:  http://www.poets.org/page.php/prmID/94

Of all the historical and high-end treasures that Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis accumulated and left behind, her scrapbook of poems — copied and illustrated by her two children — are what her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, treasures most.  Every holiday, Caroline and her brother, the late John F. Kennedy Jr., each used to select a poem to write in their own hands and then illustrate as a gift to their mother.  “We used to complain about it, and it was a big chore,” Kennedy said.  “But then, we secretly liked it.  My mother saved them and looked at the scrapbook.”  The scrapbook fell apart a while ago, Kennedy said, so she had it rebound with marbleized paper and a leather spine.  That’s her copy.   For the rest of us, Kennedy, 55, has compiled “Poems to Learn By Heart,” an anthology illustrated by Jon J. Muth.  Nicole Brodeur  http://seattletimes.com/html/nicolebrodeur/2020703413_nicolecarolinexml.html

The Internal Revenue Service has issued its annual “Dirty Dozen” list of tax scams, reminding taxpayers to use caution during tax season to protect themselves against a wide range of schemes ranging from identity theft to return preparer fraud.  The Dirty Dozen listing, compiled by the IRS each year, lists a variety of common scams taxpayers can encounter at any point during the year.  But many of these schemes peak during filing season as people prepare their tax returns.  "This tax season, the IRS has stepped up its efforts to protect taxpayers from a wide range of schemes, including moving aggressively to combat identity theft and refund fraud," said IRS Acting Commissioner Steven T. Miller.  "The Dirty Dozen list shows that scams come in many forms during filing season.  Don't let a scam artist steal from you or talk you into doing something you will regret later."  Illegal scams can lead to significant penalties and interest and possible criminal prosecution.  IRS Criminal Investigation works closely with the Department of Justice (DOJ) to shutdown scams and prosecute the criminals behind them.   See descriptions of the Dirty Dozen at:  http://www.irs.gov/uac/Newsroom/IRS-Releases-the-Dirty-Dozen-Tax-Scams-for-2013

 

The Utah teapot or Newell teapot is a 3D computer model which has become a standard reference object (and something of an in-joke) in the computer graphics community.  It is a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot of fairly simple shape, which appears solid, cylindrical and partially convex.  A teapot primitive is considered the equivalent of a "hello world" program, as a way to create an easy 3D scene with a somewhat complex model acting as a basic geometry reference for scene and light setup.  Many libraries will even have functions dedicated to drawing teapots.  The teapot model was created in 1975 by early computer graphics researcher Martin Newell, a member of the pioneering graphics program at the University of Utah.   

See images at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_teapot

See Martin Newell's drawing of the Utah teapot and other images at:  http://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/computer-graphics-music-and-art/15/206

Tenterhooks are hooks in a device called a tenter.  Tenters were originally large wooden frames which were used as far back as the 14th century in the process of making woollen cloth.  After a piece of cloth was woven, it still contained oil from the fleece and some dirt.  A craftsperson called a fuller (also called a tucker or wa[u]lker) cleaned the woollen cloth in a fulling mill, and then had to dry it carefully or the woollen fabric would shrink.  To prevent this shrinkage, the fuller would place the wet cloth on a tenter, and leave it to dry outdoors.  The lengths of wet cloth were stretched on the tenter (from Latin tendere, meaning "to stretch") using tenterhooks (hooked nails driven through the wood) all around the perimeter of the frame to which the cloth's edges (selvedges) were fixed, so that as it dried the cloth would retain its shape and size.  In some manufacturing areas, entire tenter-fields, larger open spaces full of tenters, were once common.  By the mid-18th century, the phrase "on tenterhooks" came to mean being in a state of tension, uneasiness, anxiety, or suspense, i.e. figuratively stretched like the cloth on the tenter.  The word tenter is still used today to refer to production line machinery employed to stretch polyester films and similar fabrics.  The spelling "stenter" is also found.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenterhook 

A verb is often defined as a word which shows action or state of being.  Recognizing the verb is often the most important step in understanding the meaning of a sentence.  In the sentence The dog bit the man, bit is the verb and the word which shows the action of the sentence.  In the sentence The man is sitting on a chair, even though the action doesn't show much activity, sitting is the verb of the sentence.  In the sentence She is a smart girl, there is no action but a state of being expressed by the verb is.  The word be is different from other verbs in many ways but can still be thought of as a verb.  Unlike most of the other parts of speech, verbs change their form . Sometimes endings are added (learn - learned) and sometimes the word itself becomes different (teach-taught).  The different forms of verbs show different meanings related to such things as tense (past, present, future), person (first person, second person, third person), number (singular, plural) and voice (active, passive).  Verbs are also often accompanied by verb-like words called modals (may, could, should, etc.) and auxiliaries (do, have, will, etc.) to give them different meanings.  http://eslus.com/LESSONS/GRAMMAR/POS/pos3.htm

The nine parts of speech  http://www.edb.utexas.edu/minliu/pbl/ESOL/help/libry/speech.htm

April 5, 2013  The British Library and four other "legal deposit libraries'" have the right to collect and store everything that is published online in the UK.  It is estimated around a billion pages a year will be available for research.  It follows 10 years of planning and will also offer visitors access to material currently behind paywalls.  The other institutions involved are the National Libraries of Scotland and Wales, the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, the University Library, Cambridge and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin.  The archive will cover 4.8 million websites and will include magazines, books and academic journals as well as alternative sources of literature, news and comment such as Mumsnet, the Beano online, Stephen Hawking's website, and the unofficial armed forces' bulletin board, ARRSE.    The new databases will cover all areas of interest, for example the website Style Scout - a fashion blog documenting London Street Fashion - will give historians a snapshot of what people were wearing in 2013.  As part of the launch of the process, the British Library has commissioned a survey of the top 100 websites that ought to be preserved for historians and researchers.  Among the sites recommended to keep material from are eBay, Facebook, Twitter, Tripadvisor and Rightmove.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-22028738