“What’s in a name?”  Juliet asked as she and Romeo tried to puzzle their way around the troubling problem of their warring families.  Well, plenty, the most detailed investigation into surnames in the UK and Ireland has found.  A team of researchers has spent four years studying the meanings and origins of almost 50,000 surnames, from the most common to the highly obscure.  Some names have been around for many centuries while other more recent arrivals are explained for the first time in the work, the Oxford Dictionary of Family Names in Britain and Ireland.  There are dozens of obvious ones linked to occupations, such as Smith (a name carried by more than half a million British and Irish people), or to place names, such as Leicester, Sutton or Green.  There are also many that began life as nicknames, such as Longbones and Goodfellow.  But there are also some that could not be guessed at, such as Campbell.  The surname used to be represented in Latin documents as de campo bello (of the beautiful field).  Actually, the new dictionary spells out that it comes from the Gaelic for crooked mouth.  Richard Coates, professor of linguistics at the University of the West of England (UWE), said there was great interest in the origins of family names.  (His own may stem from one of the numerous places called Coates, or from the Old English cot, for cottage or workman’s hut.)  About half of the 20,000 most common names are locative, meaning they come from places; a quarter are relationship names, such as Dawson; and a fifth are nicknames.  About 8% are occupational, including less familiar ones such as Beadle (church official), Rutter (musician), and Baxter (baker).  The nicknames are not always straightforward:  the early Shorts may have earned theirs because they were tall.  Steven Morris  https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/nov/17/dictionary-of-50000-surnames-and-their-origins-published

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

ambisinistrous  (am-bi-SIN-uh-struhs)  adjective  Clumsy with both hands.  Modeled after ambidextrous (able to use both hands with equal ease), from Latin ambi- (both) + sinister (left).  Earliest documented use:  1863.  An ambisinistrous person has two left hands, etymologically speaking.  You’d think it would be rare for such an uncommon word to have a perfect synonym, but there is one:  ambilevous, from Latin laevus (left).  A similar express is “to have two left feet” (to be clumsy, especially while dancing).

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From:  Pauline Ridel  Subject:  Two Left Feet  Richard Thompson’s song Two Left Feet, from his album Hand of Kindness, can be heard on YouTube.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJFwfWSsXEg&feature=youtu.be  3:53  Paradoxically perhaps, it’s great fun to jig around to.

BABY BURGERS  Shape 12 patties from one pound of ground beef, ham, lamb, chicken or turkey.  Fry in a mixture of either butter and worchestershire sauce or a mixture of butter and balsamic vinegar.

"Certainly one of the most enthralling things about human life is the recognition that we live in what, for practical purposes, is a universe without bounds."  "I'm one of the most durable and fervent advocates of space exploration, but my take is that we could do it robotically at far less cost and far greater quantity and quality of results."  James Alfred Van Allen (1914-2006) American physicist who discovered the Earth's magnetosphere, two toroidal zones of radiation due to trapped charged particles encircling the Earth.  https://todayinsci.com/V/VanAllen_James/VanAllenJames-Quotations.htm

Nathan Hill’s literary career almost ended before it started.  Like so many optimistic young M.F.A. graduates, Mr. Hill moved to New York City in his 20s with a hard drive full of short stories, hoping to land an agent and a publisher.  His early overtures to literary agents brought rejections.  Then one day in the summer of 2004, when he was moving out of a house in Queens where he lived with 11 other guys, his car was broken into.  He lost all of his possessions, including his computer and his backup drive.  All of his work in progress vanished.  He sulked for a while and played lots of World of Warcraft, an online fantasy game.  Eventually, though, he started something new.  The story began as a family drama about an estranged mother and son, but over the years it morphed into a sprawling tale about politics, online gaming, academia, Norwegian mythology, social media, the Occupy Wall Street protests and the 1960s counterculture.  Now, 12 years later, that novel, “The Nix,” is being published by Alfred A. Knopf.  And Mr. Hill finally seems poised to break out as a major literary talent.  Mr. Hill knew from the time he was in elementary school that he wanted to be a writer.  In second grade, he wrote a choose-your-own-adventure story about a brave knight trying to rescue a princess from a haunted castle.   He titled it “The Castle of No Return” and illustrated it himself.  (“The Castle of No Return” still sits in a box somewhere in his parents’ attic, but Mr. Hill sneaked the story into “The Nix,” during a pivotal flashback.  He majored in English and journalism at the University of Iowa, where he studied with the novelist Sara Levine.  Ms. Levine remembers him as a serious young man who was interested in the granular mechanics of sentence structure.  She said that she was stunned by the caliber of “The Nix” and by the unusual amount of attention the book is getting.  Alexandra Alter  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/27/books/nathan-hill-the-nix.html

The Wall of Sound (also called the Spector Sound) is a music production formula developed by American record producer Phil Spector at Gold Star Studios in the 1960s, with assistance from engineers Stan Ross, Larry Levine, and the session musician conglomerate known as "the Wrecking Crew".  The intention was to create a dense aesthetic that came across well on AM radio and jukeboxes popular in the era.  In order to attain the Wall of Sound, Spector's arrangements called for large ensembles (including some instruments not generally used for ensemble playing, such as electric and acoustic guitars), with multiple instruments doubling and even tripling many of the parts to create a fuller, richer sound.  Spector also included an array of orchestral instruments—strings, woodwind, brass and percussion—not previously associated with youth-oriented pop music, characterizing his methods as a Wagnerian approach to rock & roll:  little symphonies for the kids.  The intricacies of the technique were unprecedented in the world of sound production for popular records.  Wrecking Crew guitarist Barney Kessel would note:  "Musically, it was terribly simple, but the way he recorded and miked it, they’d diffuse it so that you couldn't pick out any one instrument.  Techniques like distortion and echo were not new, but Phil came along and took these to make sounds that had not been used in the past.  I thought it was ingenious."  According to Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson, who used the formula extensively:  "In the '40s and '50s, arrangements were considered 'OK here, listen to that French horn' or 'listen to this string section now.'  It was all a definite sound.  There weren't combinations of sound, and with the advent of Phil Spector, we find sound combinations, which—scientifically speaking—is a brilliant aspect of sound production."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound

Words form the thread on which we string our experiences. - Aldous Huxley, novelist (1894-1963)

THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE--ITS DEFECTS AND DANGERS by John D. Feerick  40 NEW YORK STATE BAR JOURNAL 317 (1968)   The "winner take all" or "general ticket" aspect of the system, which is purely a product of state law, isolates a candidate's popular votes in one state from those cast for him in another state.  Thus, in 1960 Kennedy received 2,377,846 popular votes in Illinois while Nixon obtained 2,368, 988 votes.  Kennedy therefore received Illinois' twenty-seven electoral votes.  On the other hand, Nixon received 1,175,120 popular votes in Indiana and Kennedy 952,358 votes.  Accordingly, Indiana cast its thirteen electoral votes for Nixon.  What is noteworthy is that on a two state basis, Nixon received a substantial majority of the popular votes but less than one-third of their combined electoral votes.  In every election millions of popular votes are never reflected in any electoral votes.  "The electoral college method of electing a President of John D. Feerick the United States is archaic, undemocratic, complex, ambiguous, indirect, and dangerous." - "Electing the President," Report of the American Bar Association Commission on Electoral College Reform (1967), pp. 3-4.  Read 15-page article at http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1292&context=faculty_scholarship

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1666  December 19, 2016  On this date in 1776, Thomas Paine published one of a series of pamphlets in The Pennsylvania Journal entitled "The American Crisis".  On this date in 1777, George Washington's Continental Army went into winter quarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.  Thought for the Day  You must protest / It is your diamond duty / Ah but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty. - Phil Ochs, folksinger (19 Dec 1940-1976)  Word of the Day  humbug interj   Balderdash!,  nonsense!,  rubbish!  Charles Dickens’ novella A Christmas Carol, featuring the character Ebenezer Scrooge who hates Christmas and calls it a “humbug”, was first published December 19, 1843.

Robert Lewis (later “Louis”) Balfour Stevenson (1850-1894) was born in Edinburgh.  At the age of seventeen he enrolled at Edinburgh University to study engineering, with the aim--his father hoped--of following him in the family firm.  However, he abandoned this course of studies and made the compromise of studying law.  He “passed advocate” in 1875 but did not practice since by now he knew he wanted to be a writer.  His first published work was an essay called “Roads”, and his first published volumes were works of travel writing.  His first published volume, An Inland Voyage (1878), is an account of the journey he made by canoe from Antwerp to northern France, in which prominence is given to the author and his thoughts.  A companion work, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), gives us more of his thoughts on life and human society.  Stevenson has an important place in the history of the short story in the British Isles:  the form had been elaborated and developed in America, France and Russia from the mid-19th century, but it was Stevenson who initiated the British tradition.  His first published fictional narrative was “A Lodging for the Night” (1877), a short story originally published in a magazine, like other early narrative works, such as “The Sire De Malétroit’s Door” (1877), “Providence and the Guitar” (1878), and “The Pavilion on the Links” (1880).  They have an affinity with the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in their setting in the labyrinthine modern city, and the subject matter of crimes and guilty secrets involving respectable members of society.  Stevenson continued to write short stories all his life, and notable titles include: “Thrawn Janet” (1881), “The Merry Men” (1882), “The Treasure of Franchard” (1883), “Markheim” (1885), which, being a narrative of the Double, has certain affinities with Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.  “Olalla” (1885), which like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde originated in a dream also deals with the possibility of degeneration.  The above short narratives were all collected in The Merry Men and Other Tales and Fables in 1887.  Weir of Hermiston, Stevenson’s very Scottish romance, was written when Stevenson was far away on the other side of the world.  His decision to sail around the Pacific in 1888, living on various islands for short periods, then setting off again (all the time collecting material for an anthropological and historical work on the South Seas which was never fully completed), was another turning point in his life.  In 1889 he and his extended family arrived at the port of Apia in the Samoan islands and they decided to build a house and settle.  This choice brought him health, distance from the distractions of literary circles, and went towards the creation of his mature literary persona:  the traveller, the exile, very aware of the harsh sides of life but also celebrating the joy in his own skill as a weaver of words and teller of tales.  He wrote about the Pacific islands in several of his later works:  Island Nights’ Entertainments already referred to; In the South Seas (1896), essays that would have gone towards the large work on the area that he planned; and two other narratives with a South Sea setting:  The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894).  http://robert-louis-stevenson.org/life/  Read about the Robert Louis Stevenson Museum at http://rlsmuseum.org/

COMPLETE COLLECTION OF POEMS by Robert Louis Stevenson   Select poems from Child's Garden of Verses, New Poems, Songs of Travel, and Underwoods--or browse titles alphabetically.  Link to biography at http://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/stevenson/stevenson_ind.html

The 10 Best Books of 2016 and 100 notable titles that you shouldn’t miss.  Also, look for special recommendations for lovers of mysteries, graphic novels, audiobooks, romance, poetry, memoirs, and science fiction and fantasy from The Washington Post.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/entertainment/2016-best-books/?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_sa-books-535pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory  The Washington Post is a daily newspaper, and was founded on December 6, 1877.

WHAT’S IN A BRAND NAME? by James Surowiecki   In October of 1955, a marketing researcher at Ford named Robert Young wrote the poet Marianne Moore a curious letter.  Ford had designed a new car, which it hoped would revolutionize the industry, and it was struggling to find a good name.  Young said that the options his division had come up with were “characterized by an embarrassing pedestrianism.”  Perhaps a poet could devise something to convey, “through association or other conjuration, some visceral feeling of elegance, fleetness, advanced features and design.”  In the following months, Moore sent Ford a long list of suggestions that were anything but pedestrian:  Intelligent Bullet, Ford Fabergé, Mongoose Civique, Bullet Cloisoné, Utopian Turtletop.  Ford, unsurprisingly, didn’t go for any of them.  Instead, after considering more than six thousand names, it settled on one that has since become a byword for failure:  Edsel.  Still, in going to such lengths to find a great name, Ford was ahead of the curve.  Corporate branding is now big business, and companies routinely spend tens of millions of dollars rebranding themselves or coming up with names for new products.  And good monikers are still defined by Young’s precept that a name should somehow evoke the fundamental qualities that you hope to advertise.  If only Tribune Publishing—the media company that owns the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune—had followed this simple rule.  In 2016, Tribune announced that it was reinventing itself as a “content curation and monetization company focused on creating and distributing premium, verified content” (whatever that means) and giving itself a new name:  Tronc.  The name, which stands for Tribune Online Content, was ridiculed at the time and hasn’t done the company any favors since.  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/14/whats-in-a-brand-name

Frankenstein's monster, sometimes known as Frankenstein, is a fictional character whose fictional creator was Victor Frankenstein.  The monster first appeared, without any name, in Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus.  Shelley's title thus compares Victor Frankenstein to the mythological character Prometheus who fashioned humans out of clay and gave them fire.  Although nameless in Shelley's novel, the creature took on the name "Frankenstein" in later years.  In Shelley's Gothic story, Victor Frankenstein builds the creature in his laboratory through an ambiguous method consisting of chemistry and alchemy.  Shelley describes the monster as 8-foot-tall (2.4 m), hideously ugly, but sensitive and emotional.  The monster attempts to fit into human society, but is shunned, which leads him to seek revenge against his creator.  See pictures and find a list of monster portrayals from 1823-2015, and monster appearances in media at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein%27s_monster

See Why 'Frankenstein' Is the Greatest Horror Novel Ever by Susan J. Wolfson and Ronald Levao

at http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/54478-why-frankenstein-is-the-greatest-horror-novel.html

Mary Shelley was just a teenager when she began writing Frankenstein in 1816.  The circumstances of its genesis are well known:  in 1815 the volcano known as Mount Tambora, in Indonesia, erupted, causing a drop in the average global temperature of around 0.5 degrees Celsius.  This led to a subsequent failure of many crops.  1816 was ‘The Year Without a Summer’ (Byron documented the event in his poem ‘Darkness’).  Shelley, along with her poet-husband Percy Bysshe, went to stay at Lake Geneva with none other than Byron, and a young man named John Polidori.  To occupy the time, the four of them held a competition to see who could come up with the best ghost story.  From this event, we got not only what is arguably the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein, but the first vampire novel too--Polidori’s The Vampyre, which appeared in 1819, a year after Frankenstein.  https://interestingliterature.com/2012/12/04/frankenstein-the-most-misread-novel/

Welcome to Interesting Literature, an online library of all that is most interesting and captivating about literature.  Here you’ll find fun facts, interesting research into writers and their work, and blog posts which seek to capture the most fascinating facets of the literary world.  Interesting Literature was set up in 2012 by Dr Oliver Tearle, Lecturer in English at Loughborough University and freelance writer.  The aim is simple:  to uncover the little-known interesting facts about the world of books, and to shine a light on some of the more curious aspects of literature.  In 2016, Interesting Literature also became a book, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History, which contains all sorts of hidden gems from the world of literature, such as the ancient parody of Homer’s Iliad, the surprising identity of England’s first female dramatist, and the bestselling nineteenth-century American novel that predicted radio stations, credit cards, and electronic broadcasting.  Unless otherwise stated, all posts are written by Oliver Tearle.  https://interestingliterature.com/about-us/

“Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.  Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested:  that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.”  ― Francis Bacon, The Essays  http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/28623-read-not-to-contradict-and-confute-nor-to-believe-and

Refute vs Confute - What's the difference?  As verbs the difference between refute and confute is that refute is to prove (something) to be false or incorrect while confute is to show (something or someone) to be false or wrong; to disprove or refute.  http://wikidiff.com/confute/refute

Nursery Rhyme Headlines #3  December 9, 2016 by Wrong Hands

https://wronghands1.com/  cartoons by John Atkinson  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1665  December 16, 2016  On this date in 1899, Noël Coward, English actor, playwright, and composer, was born.  On this date in 1988, Anna Popplewell, English actress, was born.  

Born Tula Ellice Finklea in Amarillo, Texas in March 1922, Cyd Charisse had a brush with polio as a child, making dancing seem a pretty remote possibility.  But the sickly Tula began dancing at home at the encouragement of her father.  By the age of 14 she was dancing with a Russian ballet troupe.  He built her a practice bar and a full-length mirror in her bedroom.  He wanted her to work and stretch her muscles.  She began dance lessons at age 8.  “I was this tiny, frail little girl, I needed to build up muscle,” she would say in a later interview, “and I fell in love with dancing from the first lesson.”  During a family vacation in Los Angeles when she was 12, her parents enrolled her in classes at a Hollywood ballet school.  As a teenager, she returned to the school as a full-time student.  One of her teachers there was Nico Charisse, a handsome young dancer.  At age 14, she auditioned for and later joined the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, touring under Russian-required stage names Natacha Tulaelis and Felia Siderovaa.  Later, on a European tour, she and Nico Charisse met again, became involved, and were married in Paris in 1939.  She was 18.  Their son, Nicky, was born in 1942.  World War II in Europe led to the break-up of the dance company and Charisse returned to Los Angeles, where she resumed dancing.  There she was discovered by choreographer Robert Alton (who had also discovered dancer Gene Kelly) and joined the MGM film studio as a ballet dancer.  She soon began a career of dance film-making that paired her with two of the best dancers then in Hollywood—Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly.  These roles and others would take her beyond ballet, and into many styles of dance.  Her film debut came in 1943 under the name Lily Norwood in Something to Shout About, with Don Ameche and Janet Blair.  That role came about when David Lichine was hired for a ballet sequence in the film and he needed a partner.  The movie was not a blockbuster, but its ballet sequence attracted notice, and Charisse, still billed as Lily Norwood, began receiving movie offers.  “I had just done that number with David as a favor to him,” she would later explain.  “Honestly, the idea of working movies had never once entered my head.  I was a dancer, not an actress.  I had no delusions about myself.  I couldn’t act—I had never acted.   So how could I be a movie star?”  But movie dance star she would later become, and signed on at MGM with a seven-year contract.  Read much more and see pictures at http://www.pophistorydig.com/topics/cyd-charisse-1950s-1990s/

Rebranding has helped the aronia berry catch on and develop into what is now a multi-million dollar industry.  The berry's new name comes from its genus, Aronia melancorpa, but the fruit is also commonly known by its traditional and much less appetizing name of "chokeberry."   Native to North America, the aronia berry has been cultivated in Russia and eastern Europe for juices and wines since the early 20th century.  Now it is also becoming popular in the U.S., where farmers in the upper Midwest are planting thousands of aronia berry shrubs.  Its current trendiness can be traced to to Sawmill Hollow Family Farm in the Loess Hills of western Iowa, where most in the industry believe the first bushes were planted for commercial cultivation in the U.S.  Andrew Pittz and his family are the driving force behind it.  In 1997, his parents planted about 200 bushes, having looked for a crop they could cultivate on the heavy, silt-heavy soil near the Missouri River.  The bush turned out to grow well in the Midwest, as it has few pests and doesn't require replanting every year.  http://www.cbsnews.com/news/aronia-berry-rebranding-helps-a-new-superfood-catch-on/

"Salad days" is a Shakespearean idiomatic expression to refer to a youthful time, accompanied by the inexperience, enthusiasm, idealism, innocence, or indiscretion that one associates with a young person.  A more modern use, especially in the United States, refers to a heyday, a period when somebody was at the peak of their abilities—not necessarily in that person's youth.  The phrase was coined in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in 1606.  In the speech at the end of Act One in which Cleopatra is regretting her youthful dalliances with Julius Caesar she says:  . . .  My salad days, / When I was green in judgment, cold in blood . . .   The phrase became popular only from the middle of the 19th century, coming to mean “a period of youthful inexperience or indiscretion."  The metaphor comes from Cleopatra's use of the word 'green'—presumably meaning someone youthful, inexperienced, or immature.  Her references to "green" and "cold" both suggest qualities of salads.  Find uses in popular culture at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salad_days

Colbert Nembhard looked more like a traveling salesman than a librarian in his dark suit with his rolling suitcase on a recent Wednesday morning in the Bronx.  He had strolled 10 minutes to the Crotona Inn homeless shelter from the Morrisania Branch Library, where he has been the manager for 25 years.  As he dug through the dozens of books stuffed inside the suitcase, an announcement crackled over the intercom inside the shelter, where 87 families live:  “Mr. Nembhard is here to read stories and sing songs to your children.”  Mr. Nembhard made do in a small office filled with file cabinets and dated desktops that also serves as a computer lab, a children’s classroom and a community recreation room.   For the past eight years, Mr. Nembhard has turned the shelter’s day care room or its dimly lighted office into an intimate library, tapping into the imaginations of transient children with the hope of making reading books a constant in their lives.  Mr. Nembhard’s partnership with the homeless shelter, operated by SCO Family of Services, began informally, and has served as a model for a citywide initiative to place small libraries at shelters for families.  In September, 2016 the Library of Congress recognized the city’s Department of Homeless Services for best practices in literacy for its Library Pilot Project, an initiative that has created small libraries in 30 shelters for families with children since March 2015 with the help of a donation of 3,000 books from Scholastic Inc.  The progam includes the Crotona shelter, where Mr. Nembhard was already a fixture.  His example gave volunteers a blueprint for how to go to shelters and read to children.  “It’s a pleasure to come in here,” Mr. Nembhard began on that Wednesday, never removing his jacket during a presentation that was just short of a Mr. Rogers routine.  He began to sing, “Good morning to you,” and followed with “Wheels on the Bus.”  The children joined in with a chorus of “round and round, round and round.”  Nikita Stewart   http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/24/nyregion/a-bronx-librarian-keen-on-teaching-homeless-children-a-lasting-love-of-books.html?_r=0

December 9, 2016  Austria’s Word of the Year Has 52 Letters by Erin Blakemore   Bundespraesidentenstichwahlwiederholungsverschiebung.  To an English speaker, it may seem like a meaningless, even endless assortment of letters, but it turns out that it’s an award-winning German word.  As the Associated Press reports, a survey of 10,000 Austrians has chosen the lengthy noun as its word of the year.  Roughly translated, the word means “postponement of the repeat runoff of the presidential election.”  The super-long word was coined this year in response to a similarly drawn-out presidential election in Austria.  In May, Austrians elected Alexander Van der Bellen to the presidency.  But Van der Bellen’s victory was a narrow one, and the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ), the country’s far-right party, contested the results and claimed that voting irregularities warranted a new election.  The repeat runoff was due to go ahead on October 2, but then something sticky happened.  As The Guardian’s Kate Connolly reports, the government requested a postponement of the repeat runoff when issues with the glue used to seal mail-in ballots were discovered.  The election was postponed and a new term was born.  The election finally went forward with higher turnout.  This time, the far-right party was rejected by Austrian voters by an even wider margin.  The events were watched with amusement and exhaustion by Austrians.  As the jury of experts who judged the contest told the Austrian paper Der Standard (in German), it is “both an expressive and ironic commentary [on] the political events of the year.”  The German language is famous for its compound words, which let speakers coin their own words by clumping together other ones.  Since compound words can be made up on the fly by anyone and are so unwieldy they’re rarely used, they don’t always make it into the dictionary.  http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/austrias-word-year-has-52-letters-180961375/

Alan Thicke died December 13, 2016 at the age of 69.  While Thicke was best known as a sitcom actor, he was also a successful theme song composer.  And in some cases, such as the Diff'rent Strokes theme song "It Takes Diff'rent Strokes," Thicke was even a featured singer.  On occasion, Thicke collaborated with his then-wife singer and Days of Our Lives star Gloria Loring--mother of Robin Thicke--on these projects, with her singing singing on the Diff'rent Strokes spin-off The Facts of Life theme song.  Colin Stutz  Link to videos of Thicke's ten best TV theme songs at http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7624440/alan-thicke-10-best-television-theme-songs

The present full moon, the one that was up there December 13, 2016  and will be only a little less than full on December 14, is called the Cold Moon.  This happens to be the third supermoon in three months.  A supermoon has come to be recognized as a full moon that occurs when the moon is also at its closest approach to the Earth.  The moon’s orbit is elliptical, or egg shaped, and therefore includes points where it is closest to us, and points where it is farthest.  In the Northern hemisphere, the Earth is closer to the sun in winter than in summer.  That means the sun’s gravity exerts a stronger pull on the moon, which draws it just a little closer to the Earth at the time it is full.  Martin Weil   https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/this-full-moon-is-a-supermoon-and-the-cold-moon/2016/12/14/fe7642a4-c1c2-11e6-9a51-cd56ea1c2bb7_story.html?utm_term=.d2d6bebedd81

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1664  December 14, 2016  On this date in 1836, the Toledo War unofficially ended.  On this date in 1911, Roald Amundsen's team, comprising himself, Olav Bjaaland, Helmer Hanssen, Sverre Hassel, and Oscar Wisting, became  the first to reach the South Pole.

FROM the Library of Congress:  Search America's historic newspaper pages from 1789-1924 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.  http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/

COMING FROM the Library of Congress:  "As part of its web archiving program (https://www.loc.gov/webarchiving/), the Library of Congress is harvesting the Twitter account of Donald J. Trump as part of a collection for the 2016 election.  The Library of Congress anticipates continuing to harvest this Twitter account if President Elect Trump continues to use it in addition to, or perhaps instead of, the existing POTUS Twitter account.  These targeted web harvesting efforts are separate from the Library’s acquisition of the wider body of Twitter content.”  http://www.bespacific.com/lc-to-harvest-twitter-account-of-donald-j-trump/

A SHORT HISTORY OF DENIM ©2014 Lynn Downey Levi Strauss & Co. historian   A fabric called “serge de Nimes,” was known in France prior to the 17th century.  At the same time, there was also a fabric known in France as “nim.”  Both fabrics were composed partly of wool.  Serge de Nimes was also known in England before the end of the 17th century.  The question then arises:  is this fabric imported from France or is it an English fabric bearing the same name?  According to Ms. Gorguet-Ballesteros, fabrics which were named for a certain geographic location were often also made elsewhere; the name was used to lend a certain cachet to the fabric when it was offered for sale.  Therefore a “serge de Nimes” purchased in England was very likely also made in England, and not in Nimes, France.  There still remains the question of how the word “denim” is popularly thought to be descended from the word “serge de Nimes.”  Serge de Nimes was made of silk and wool, but denim has always been made of cotton. What we have here again, I think, is a relation between fabrics that is in name only, though both fabrics are a twill weave.  Then, to confuse things even more, there also existed, at this same time, another fabric known as “jean.”  Research on this textile indicates that it was a fustian--a cotton, linen and/or wool blend--and that the fustian of Genoa, Italy was called jean; here we do see evidence of a fabric being named from a place of origin.  By the 18th century jean cloth was made completely of cotton, and used to make men’s clothing, valued especially for its property of durability even after many washings.  Read more at http://www.levistrauss.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/A-Short-History-of-Denim2.pdf

QUOTES from The Last Bookaneer, a novel by Matthew Pearl  "Nothing in the world—not a ton of bricks—feels as heavy as books being moved.”   “Strangers talking over piles of books do not remain strangers for long.”  "The high seas of literature swarm with plunderers."

Bookaneer was coined by the poet and author Thomas Hood in a letter in The Athenaeum of 22 April 1837 under the title Copyright and Copywrong:  “If a work be of temporary interest it shall virtually be free for any Bookaneer to avail himself of its pages and its popularity with impunity.”  The extent of the problem was described in an American publication at the middle of the century:  No sooner is a literary venture of Bulwer, Thackeray, or Dickens afloat, than a whole baracoon of “bookaneers,” as Hood called them, rushes forth to seize it.  The Metropolitan (Baltimore), March 1853.  A barracoon was a rough barracks used for the temporary confinement of slaves or criminals.  Matthew Pearl writes in The Last Bookaneer:  “Bookaneers would not describe themselves as thieves, but they would resort to almost any means to profit from an unprotected book.”  Dickens had a very public battle with piratical American periodicals and satirised their activities in Martin Chuzzlewit, the serial parts of which were reprinted in the very publications he was lambasting.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-boo3.htm

What we term "copyright" is understood as as international system that legally protects the rights of an author or owner of published and unpublished works, including letters and playscripts, against plagiarism, or other unauthorised reproduction or publication of that work.  No sooner had William Caxton set up his printshop in London that an act (I Richard. 3 c. 9) was passed to regulate the British book-trade.  This Tudor statute permitted the importation of foreign books because the legislators of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth England believed that such a practice would encourage the growth of learning.  Until 1709 copyright was legally available only to printers and publishers, who regarded copyrights as perpetual investments.  The 1709 Statute of Queen Anne first made it legal for anyone--even a writer--to own a copyright, but only for fourteen years (or twenty-eight, if the author survived the first fourteen).  The Copyright Acts of 1709, 1814, and 1842 increased the duration of protection from fourteen, to twenty-eight, to forty-two years respectively.  George III re-established the concept of perpetual copyright in law, but only for the universities of the United Kingdom, whose libraries enjoy the right of "demand"--i. e., the right to require from a British author a copy of his published work.  Between 1735 and 1875, no less than thirteen parliamentary acts governed the legal application of copyright in the United Kingdom.  In 1896 the American Congress joined the international copyright union, after petitions directed at it by such noted British novelists as Maria Edgeworth, Benjamin Disraeli, and Charles Dickens, beginning in 1837.  Their pleas had fallen on deaf ears in the American government until joined by those of Americans such as Mark Twain, who complained that he was fed up with publishers' ignoring American works in favour of those of English writers, whose books could be re-printed more cheaply because there were no royalty costs.  A further point of exacerbation for Twain was Canadian piracies of his works, which he attempted to prevent by establishing temporary residence in Canada on the date of publication of each of his works.  Read much more at http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva74.html

Within two weeks of the publication of A Christmas Carol, volumes reportedly were selling on the streets of New York for pennies.  Charles Dickens’s objection to the loss of income as a result of America’s disrespect for the ownership rights in his creations was loud and bold.  American writers fared no better in Great Britain.  The works of Edgar Allen Poe and Henry Wordsworth Longfellow found no protection in London and its environs.  The United States simply did not honor the copyrights of authors who were not American citizens and, as a result, Great Britain would not honor the copyrights of American authors.  With a treasure trove of English literature free for the taking, American publishers simply didn’t pay authors, especially unknown American authors, for their work.  Without a day job, writers would starve (think Edgar Allen Poe) or go bankrupt (think Sir Walter Scott).  Dickens’s advocacy of copyright law was punished by the American Press as an attempt to upend the publishing industry and attack their profit center—royalty-free content.  They set out to ruin his reputation.   Surprisingly, even Walt Whitman jumped on the anti-copyright, Dickens-is-an-evil-agent-of-the-British crusade.  Dickens ended his first visit to America surprised and dismayed at how the popular tide had turned against him.  When he returned in 1867, he had mastered a way to generate alternative income streams based on his celebrity status.  He performed readings of his work to packed houses and collected the receipts from the door.  He also gave the exclusive rights to his next novel The Mystery of Edwin Drood to the American publishing house that sponsored his reading tour.  He was ultimately unable to take advantage of that deal.  Dickens died in 1870 before he finished the book.  Kathryn Goldman  http://www.charmcitylegal.com/charles-dickens-and-the-american-copyright-problem/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1663  December 12, 2016  On this date in 1787, Pennsylvania became the second state to ratify the United States Constitution, five days after Delaware became the first.  On this date in 1897, Belo Horizonte, the first planned city in Brazil, was founded.  Word of the Day  cockalorum  noun  (1)  A menial, yet self-important person; a person who makes empty boasts.  (2)  Boastful speech, crowing.  (3)  A game similar to leapfrog.

"The English language is forever changing.  New words appear; old ones fall out of use or alter their meanings.  World Wide Words tries to record at least a part of this shifting wordscape by featuring new words, word histories, words in the news, and the curiosities of native English speech."  Michael Quinion  http://www.worldwidewords.org/personal.htm

The Federal Privacy Council https://www.fpc.gov/

is the principal interagency forum to improve the privacy practices of agencies and entities acting on their behalf.  The Federal Privacy Council shall strengthen protections of people’s personal information and privacy rights across the Federal Government.  To achieve this purpose, the Federal Privacy Council shall:  support interagency efforts to protect privacy and provide expertise and assistance to agencies; expand the skill and career development opportunities of agency privacy professionals; improve the management of agency privacy programs by identifying and sharing lessons learned and best practices; and promote collaboration between and among agency privacy professionals to reduce unnecessary duplication of efforts and to ensure the effective, efficient, and consistent implementation of privacy policy government-wide.  The Law Library https://www.fpc.gov/law-library/ is a compilation of information about and links to select Federal laws related to the creation, collection, use, processing, storage, maintenance, dissemination, disclosure, and disposal of personally identifiable information (PII) by departments and agencies within the Federal Government.  The Law Library does not include all laws that are relevant to privacy or the management of PII in the Federal Government. http://www.bespacific.com/federal-privacy-council-online-law-library/

                                                                                             

Fare Thee Well, poem by George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)

http://www.bartleby.com/41/478.html

Farewell, also known as Fare Thee Well, is a song by American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan.  Dylan wrote the song in January 1963.  Dylan based the song on the traditional British folk ballad "Leaving of Liverpool".  He first played it for friends in Greenwich Village after returning from a two-week trip to London in early January 1963.  In "Leaving of Liverpool", the ballad's first verse and chorus tell the tale of someone sailing from Liverpool to California, bound to miss the loved one left behind.  Find lyrics and a list of recordings by other artists at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farewell_(Bob_Dylan_song)

fare–thee–well  noun  1:  the utmost degree 2:  a state of perfection 

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fare-thee-well

Paraphrase from Depths, a novel by Henning Mankell  The Milky Way was an archipelago like a string of islands off  the coast . . .

The Henning Mankell books in order for the translated Kurt Wallander series are different from the actual order of the original published Swedish series.  The same thing happened with the Jo Nesbo books--the translations are totally out of order compared to the original ones.  It is a pity though because there is usually a continuity to the character that doesn’t translate well when books are picked in seemingly random order, so when you get to read the books, make sure you do read them in the proper timeline order, well worth the small effort.   Mankell's standalone book, Depths, was published as Djup in 2004 and translated in 2006.  His children’s novels are best known for his 3 parts series Sofia and the 4 part Joel Gustaffson series.  The author also wrote a book for small kids called The Cat Who Liked Rain, and several plays, many of which have been translated into English.  Find a list of the Kurt Wallander books in the original order of publication in Swedish at http://mysterysequels.com/henning-mankell-books-in-order

"As Time Goes By" was written by Tin Pan Alley songwriter Herman Hupfeld for the 1931 Broadway musical, Everybody's Welcome.  "As Time Goes By" made another stop, thanks to Everybody's Welcome, before landing in the immortal Casablanca.  Murray Burnett and Joan Alison wrote the play Everybody Comes to Rick's, which ultimately became the basis for the movie Casablanca, and included Hupfeld's ballad.  Burnett recalled "As Time Goes By" from Everybody's Welcome and thought it was the perfect song for the nightclub scene at "Rick's."  He was right.  See complete lyrics, including the prelude (substantially different melody and perhaps unrecognizable to most people) at    

http://www.durango-songwriters-expo.com/as-time-goes-by.html

Librarians are the original search engines.  Thank you, Muse reader!

On November 30, 2016 ten librarians from across the country were honored with this year’s I Love My Librarian Award.  The winning librarians were recognized for their exceptional contributions to transforming lives and communities through education and lifelong learning.  The librarians were selected from nearly 1,100 nominations submitted by the public detailing how their favorite librarians working in public, school, college, community college or university libraries connected them to information, opportunities and critical technology to help improve the quality of their lives.  The 2016 award recipients include a librarian who provides a safe haven and emergency relief services during natural disasters, a librarian who works with students with learning or behavioral challenges and youths in foster care, a librarian who uses her skills as a former chef to teach the community about cooking healthy meals and a librarian who instructs incoming college freshmen on plagiarism and academic integrity.  This year’s librarians join a distinguished group of award recipients who have been commended for their efforts to advance individual and community progress.  Ninety librarians have received the national award since its inception in 2008. In the United States, there are 166,000 librarians who are continually working to meet the changing needs of library users and the communities they serve.  http://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2016/11/ala-announces-winners-2016-i-love-my-librarian-award

Artificial Intelligence and Your Career—A Lighthearted Look

Posted by Ron Aspe, CEO on 12/7/2016  http://blog.lucidea.com/artificial-intelligence-and-your-career-a-lighthearted-look?utm_campaign=Blog%20posts&utm_content=new%20blog%20post&utm_source=email  Thank you, Muse reader!

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1662  December 9, 2016  On this date in 1892, Widowers' Houses, the first play by George Bernard Shaw to be staged, premièred.  On this date in 1965, A Charlie Brown Christmas, first in a series of Peanuts television specials, appeared on CBS.