October 13, 2015  For more than a decade, retired engineer Tom Tryniski has been digitizing old newspapers from microfilm and making their full text available and searchable online.  Tryniski's site, which he created in his living room in upstate New York, has grown into one of the largest historic newspaper databases in the world, with 22 million newspaper pages.  By contrast, the Library of Congress' historic newspaper site, Chronicling America, has 5 million newspaper pages on its site.  

http://kottke.org/15/10/the-man-who-digitizes-newspapers

FROZEN PEAS  and how to use them.  Add them to pasta, salad, soup, mixed vegetables.  Mash them with egg yolks, yogurt and mustard as filling for deviled eggs.

WHO IS HE?  He was born in 1912 in Prievidza, Hungary (now Slovakia), although his year and place of birth are usually and inaccurately given as 1915 in New York City.  A talented linguist and an astute mimic, he had an ear for languages which became apparent later in his acting career.  He attended the City College of New York as a pre-med student, completing the four-year course in three years and winning a scholarship to the Physicians and Surgeons College at Columbia University.  He qualified for the United States fencing team prior to the 1936 Summer Olympic Games, but quit the team just prior to the games in order to take a role in the theater.

November 2, 2015  Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society has changed its Chilling Effects project's name to “Lumen,” and can be found at www.lumendatabase.org.  The name borrows from the unit of measurement for visible light, highlighting the use of data for transparency reporting.  “Since Chilling Effects was founded in the wake of the passage of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the project has been essential to the collection and study of notices sent to online platforms requesting the removal of content,” said Chris Bavitz, Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center and Clinical Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.  Started in 2001 by then-Berkman fellow Wendy Seltzer and current Berkman Faculty Director Jonathan Zittrain, Chilling Effects was founded to provide a database of requests for content removal, to assist scholars and others in understanding trends in content removal demands and practices, and to facilitate research into how online intermediaries make their content removal decisions.  Over time, the project has expanded in the types of notices it hosts, the sources they come from, and the sheer volume of requests it receives.  In addition to DMCA notices, request types now include removal demands grounded in trademark, patent, locally-regulated content, and private information removal claims.  Companies sharing notices they receive include Google, Twitter, Wikipedia, WordPress, and Reddit.  The number of notices collected has grown from a few notices per week, to approximately 4,000 per day.  As of July 2015, the Chilling Effects database contains more than three million notices and is the definitive source for online content removal requests.

https://cyber.law.harvard.edu/node/99191

Jean Catherine Coulter (born December 26, 1942) is an American author of romantic suspense thrillers and historical romances who currently resides in northern California.  Coulter grew up on a horse ranch in Cameron County, Texas.  Her grandmother, who died at the young age of 37, was also a writer.  Her father was a painter and singer, and her mother is a retired concert pianist.  Coulter wrote her first two novels, fifteen pages each, when she was fourteen.  While a freshman at the University of Texas, Coulter wrote poetry.  After earning her undergraduate degree from the University of Texas, Coulter attended Boston College and earned a Master's degree in early 19th-century European history.  She took a job as a speech writer for a Wall Street executive.  One night, when she found herself in the middle of a particularly bad romance novel she threw it across the room, asserting that even she could do better.  When Coulter finished writing her novel she sent it to an editor at Signet.  Three days later Signet offered her a three-book contract.  That first novel, The Autumn Countess, was published by Penguin Books in 1978.  By 1982, she was earning enough to quit her job and become a full-time writer.  Since then she has written over fifty books and has had forty-two consecutive New York Times Bestsellers since 1988.  Her thriller The Maze was her first book to place on the New York Times Hardcover Bestseller list, while The Cove spent nine weeks on the New York Times Paperback Bestseller list and sold over one million copies.  Coulter generally publishes one historical romance and one suspense novel each year, and has been busily rewriting many of her earlier Regency romances to turn them into longer historical romances.  Coulter sits down at her computer every morning at 6:30 a.m. to review her email before beginning writing at 7:30 a.m.  She normally finishes writing by 11 a.m.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Coulter

Saturday, November 7, 2015  1-4 p.m.  Toledo-Lucas County Public Library  McMaster Center  325 Michigan St.   It has been 40 years since the Edmund Fitzgerald, a ship considered the largest, strongest and fastest vessel of its time, the "Queen of the Great Lakes," sank in a violent storm on Lake Superior on November 10, 1975.    

Thomas Walton, retired Editor and Vice President of The Blade and a member of the Fitzgerald crew as a young man, will present "10 November, the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,"  followed by the documentary,  "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald."  The program will also feature maritime-themed musical pieces performed by the Toledo School for the Arts Studio Winds.  This program is FREE and open to the public.  Free on-site parking.  Sponsored by the Library Legacy Foundation

2015’s Best and Worst Cities to Retire

https://wallethub.com/edu/best-places-to-retire/6165/  

2015’s Best & Worst Cities to Find a Job

https://wallethub.com/edu/best-cities-for-jobs/2173/ 

2015’s Best & Worst Small Cities in America

https://wallethub.com/edu/best-worst-small-cities-to-live-in/16581/

November 2015  When Google launched Inbox, its most recent email app from the Gmail team, it touted the app's ability to act almost like an assistant.  Now, a year later, Google is making the app more like an aide than ever.  The company will soon be rolling out a new feature called "Smart Reply," which uses artificial intelligence to suggest replies for your messages. The Smart Reply feature works a bit like predictive text in keyboard apps, except that it predicts phrases you're most likely to use when replying to messages.  The feature will show up to three short sentences based on the message and how people have responded to similar emails in the past.  Karissa Bell  http://mashable.com/2015/11/03/google-inbox-smart-reply/#Dhn0qh_1j8ql

The  latest version of Mozilla Firefox browser (v42) came out on November 3, 2015 with safety upgrades to the Web security controls and Private Browsing.  Tracking Protection in Private Browsing stops  trackers that have the habit of monitoring your searches, spamming you with ads or discreetly monitoring your online behavior without consent.  Horia Ungureanu  http://www.techtimes.com/articles/102967/20151104/mozilla-firefox-42-rolls-out-with-tracking-protection-lets-you-block-trackers-in-private-browsing.htm

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1373  November 4, 2015  On this date in 1861, the University of Washington opened in Seattle as the Territorial University.  On this date in 1922, in Egypt, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men found the entrance to Pharaoh Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

olio  (OH-lee-oh)  noun   A miscellaneous collection of things, for example, a variety show.  From Spanish olla (pot, stew), from Latin olla (pot).  “I will launch into an olio of malapropisms, bad abbreviations, similar words that tend to be used interchangeably.”  

All right, Already!  Today You Get Plenty of Options; Daily Herald (Illinois); September 13, 2015.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day

From:  Glenn Glazer  Subject:  olio  ‘Olio’ is also Italian for ‘oil’ and many pasta recipes have this word in their names, for example  Spaghetti aglio e olio.

Pemmican is a concentrated mixture of fat and protein used as a nutritious food.  The word comes from the Cree word pimîhkân, which itself is derived from the word pimî, "fat, grease".  It was invented by the native peoples of North America.  It was widely adopted as a high-energy food by Europeans involved in the fur trade and later by Arctic and Antarctic explorers, such as Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton, Robert Falcon Scott and Roald Amundsen.  The specific ingredients used were usually whatever was available; the meat was often bison, moose, elk, or deer.  Fruits such as cranberries and saskatoon berries were sometimes added.  Cherries, currants, chokeberries and blueberries were also used, but almost exclusively in ceremonial and wedding pemmican.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pemmican

Pemmican Recipes:  New and Old  http://paleofood.com/pemmican.htm

preposterous  incongruous; inviting ridicule  adjective  Original source:  Princeton WordNet  Etymology:  Latin praeposterus "absurd, contrary to nature", literally "before-behind"  http://www.memidex.com/preposterous#etymology

An average professional football game lasts 3 hours and 12 minutes, but if you tally up the time when the ball is actually in play, the action amounts to a mere 11 minutes.  Part of the discrepancy has to do with the basic rules of American football.  Unlike hockey or basketball, the 60-minute game clock in football can run even when the ball is not in play.  That means a lot of game time is spent standing around or huddling up before each play begins.  The 11 minutes of action was famously calculated a few years ago by the Wall Street Journal.  Its analysis found that an average NFL broadcast spent more time on replays (17 minutes) than live play.  The plurality of time (75 minutes) was spent watching players, coaches, and referees essentially loiter on the field.  An average play in the NFL lasts just four seconds.  The average NFL game includes 20 commercial breaks containing more than 100 ads.  The Journal’s analysis found that commercials took up about an hour, or one-third, of the game.  Football’s stop-and-go nature makes it particularly prime for commercials, unlike soccer, which forces broadcasters to creatively insert ads during the 45 minutes of continuous play in each half.  Broadcasts of NFL games in Europe, incidentally, include far fewer commercials.

http://qz.com/150577/an-average-nfl-game-more-than-100-commercials-and-just-11-minutes-of-play/

You've probably heard about the legendary "Johnny Appleseed" who, according to story and song, spread his apple seeds all over the nation.  Did you know there really was a "Johnny Appleseed"?  His name was Jonathan Chapman.  Born in Massachusetts on September 26, 1775, Chapman earned his nickname because he planted small orchards and individual apple trees during his travels as he walked across 100,000 square miles of Midwestern wilderness and prairie.  In 1801, Chapman transported 16 bushels of apple seeds from western Pennsylvania down the Ohio River.  About 1830, Chapman also acquired land in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  There, he planted a nursery that produced thousands of seedling apple trees that he sold, traded, and planted elsewhere.  http://www.americaslibrary.gov/jb/revolut/jb_revolut_apple_1.html

Johnny Appleseed Squares recipe http://www.cooks.com/recipe/r7924910/johnny-appleseed-squares.html  Johnny Appleseed Squares is also the name of a square dance club that started in 1968.

A Penny for your Books by Dan Nosowitz  In recent years, my bookshelves have swelled. Old John le Carré and Donald E. Westlake and Lawrence Block titles are easier than ever to find online, along with pretty much every other book published in the last century.  They’re all on Amazon, priced incredibly low, and sold by third-party booksellers nobody has ever heard of.  Better-known titles with more robust print circulation quickly obey the seesaw of supply and demand; after time, their prices can sink even lower, because of the increased number of copies floating around.  Take Jennifer Egan’s “A Visit From the Goon Squad”:  You can buy a new hardcover or paperback copy for $18.82 or $9.19, from Amazon itself, or download the Kindle version for $8.56.  Or, as with hundreds of thousands of other books on Amazon, you can click through to the “used” section and buy the 2011 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction for a penny.  Despite the naysaying about the death of publishing, the industry’s most vital numbers—sales and revenue—aren’t actually all that gloomy.  In 2014, publishers sold just over 2.7 billion books domestically, for a total net revenue of just under $28 billion, a larger profit than in the preceding two years, according to the Association of American Publishers.  There were just over 300,000 new titles (including re-releases) published in the United States in 2013.  The book industry may not be as strong as it once was, but it’s still enormous, and generates a considerable amount of surplus product each year.  Enter the penny booksellers.  There are dozens of sellers offering scores of relatively sought-after books in varying conditions for a cent.  Even including the standard $3.99 shipping, the total sum comes out to several dollars cheaper than what you’d pay at most brick-and-mortar used-book stores.  “At some point in the next two to three years, I predict that ‘Go Set a Watchman’ will be selling for a penny,” says Mike Ward, president of the Seattle-based used-book seller Thriftbooks.  Ward would know; though it isn’t considered in the same league as Barnes & Noble or Books-A-Million, Thriftbooks sells about 12 million books a year, mostly on Amazon, and many for a penny.  (In comparison, Barnes & Noble, the country’s largest book retailer, sells somewhere around 300 million books a year, but has the added weight of hundreds of enormous, expensive megastores to run and thousands of employees.)  Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/magazine/a-penny-for-your-books.html?_r=0

October 30, 2015  Two things you probably haven’t been paying a lot of attention to lately:  Election Day in Ohio.  Former boy-band star and reality TV spouse Nick Lachey.  Well, settle in, because you have some catching up to do.  On November 3, 2015, Ohio residents go to the polls to decide whether marijuana should be legal.  If they vote yes, the Cincinnati native and long-ago leading man of “Newlyweds:  Nick and Jessica” will automatically become one of the top weed kingpins of the Buckeye State.  It is one of the most curious ballot initiatives in the country—a synergy of B-list celebrity and entrepreneurial democracy in a culturally conservative state that would hardly be expected to lead the charge for legal pot.  And yet it has driven a wedge into the usual pro-marijuana coalition, in part because of language in the measure that would restrict virtually all large-scale marijuana cultivation to 10 designated farms.  The owners of those farms?  A random bunch, including Lachey, designer Nanette Lepore, NBA legend Oscar Robertson, NFL journeyman Frostee Rucker, a pair of President William Howard Taft’s great-great-grandnephews and twenty-some others—who, not coincidentally, are the same folks bankrolling the campaign, and stand to become very, very wealthy if the measure passes.  Each ownership group was asked to put up an initial $4 million to underwrite the ballot campaign; it cost them an estimated $10 million more to buy land and get their farms up and running.  Lachey’s piece of the action would be 29 acres just outside of Akron, which he would co-own with a couple of financial executives and a car dealership owner from Texas.  Every one of the 1,100 state-regulated marijuana retail shops across Ohio will have no choice but to buy from his or one of the other nine farms.  Jessica Contrera  https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-ohio-marijuana-vote-that-could-make-nick-lachey-a-weed-kingpin-yes-that-nick-lachey/2015/10/30/58bd2b28-7cc4-11e5-b575-d8dcfedb4ea1_story.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1372  November 3, 2015  On this date in 1789, the first District Court established by the Constitution opened in New York City.  On this date in 1903, with the encouragement of the United States, Panama separated  from Colombia.

EMPATHY DEFICIT  October 27, 2010  Young Americans today live in a world of endless connections and up-to-the-minute information on one another, constantly updating friends, loved ones, and total strangers—“Quiz tomorrow...gotta study!”—about the minutiae of their young, wired lives.  And there are signs that Generation Wi-Fi is also interested in connecting with people, like, face-to-face, in person.  The percentage of high school seniors who volunteer has been rising for two decades.  But new research suggests that behind all this communication and connectedness, something is missing.  The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, found that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than they were in 1979, with the steepest decline coming in the last 10 years.  According to the findings, today’s students are generally less likely to describe themselves as “soft-hearted” or to have “tender, concerned feelings” for others.  They are more likely, meanwhile, to admit that “other people’s misfortunes” usually don’t disturb them.  In other words, they might be constantly aware of their friends’ whereabouts, but all that connectedness doesn’t seem to be translating to genuine concern for the world and one another.  Keith O'Brien  http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/10/17/the_empathy_deficit/ 

July 10, 2015  Traditionally, empathy has been seen as a force for moral good, motivating virtuous deeds.  Yet a growing chorus of critics, inspired by findings like those above, depict empathy as a source of moral failure.  In the words of the psychologist Paul Bloom, empathy is a “parochial, narrow-minded” emotion—one that “will have to yield to reason if humanity is to survive.”   Likewise, in another recent study, the psychologists Karina Schumann, Jamil Zaki and Carol S. Dweck found that when people learned that empathy was a skill that could be improved—as opposed to a fixed personality trait—they engaged in more effort to experience empathy for racial groups other than their own.  Empathy for people unlike us can be expanded, it seems, just by modifying our views about empathy.  Some kinds of people seem generally less likely to feel empathy for others—for instance, powerful people.  An experiment conducted by one of us, Michael Inzlicht, along with the researchers Jeremy Hogeveen and Sukhvinder Obhi, found that even people temporarily assigned to high-power roles showed brain activity consistent with lower empathy.  But such experimental manipulations surely cannot change a person’s underlying empathic capacity; something else must be to blame.  And other research suggests that the blame lies with a simple change in motivation:  People with a higher sense of power exhibit less empathy because they have less incentive to interact with others.  Daryl Cameron, Michael Inzlicht and William A, Cunningham     http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/12/opinion/sunday/empathy-is-actually-a-choice.html?_r=0

"Elephant in the room" or "Elephant in the living room" is an English metaphorical idiom for an obvious truth that is either being ignored or going unaddressed.  The idiomatic expression also applies to an obvious problem or risk no one wants to discuss.  It is based on the idea that an elephant in a room would be impossible to overlook.  In 1814, Ivan Andreevich Krylov (1769-1844), poet and fabulist, the Russian La Fontaine (whom he translated), wrote a fable entitled "The Inquisitive Man" which tells of a man who goes to a museum and notices all sorts of tiny things, but fails to notice an elephant.  The phrase became proverbial.  Fyodor Dostoevsky in his novel 'Demons' wrote, 'Belinsky was just like Krylov's Inquisitive Man, who didn't notice the elephant in the museum....'  The Oxford English Dictionary gives the first recorded use of the phrase, as a simile, as The New York Times on June 20, 1959:  "Financing schools has become a problem about equal to having an elephant in the living room.  It's so big you just can't ignore it."  This idiomatic expression may have been in general use much earlier than 1959.  For example, the phrase appears 44 years earlier in the pages of a British journal in 1915.  The sentence was presented as a trivial illustration of a question British schoolboys would be able to answer, e.g., "Is there an elephant in the class-room?"  The first widely disseminated conceptual reference was a story written by Mark Twain in 1882, "The Stolen White Elephant", which slyly dissects the inept, far-ranging activities of detectives trying to find an elephant that was right on the spot after all.  This may have been the reference in the legal opinion of United States v. Leviton, 193 F. 2d 848 (2nd Circuit, 1951), makes reference in its opinion, "As I have elsewhere observed, it is like the Mark Twain story of the little boy who was told to stand in a corner and not to think of a white elephant."  A slightly different version of the phrase was used before this, with George Berkeley talking of whether or not there is "an invisible elephant in the room" in his debates with scientists.  In 1935, comedian Jimmy Durante starred on Broadway in the Billy Rose Broadway musical Jumbo, in which a police officer stops him while leading a live elephant and asks, "What are you doing with that elephant?"  Durante's reply, "What elephant?" was a regular show-stopper.  Durante reprises the piece in the 1962 film version of the play, Billy Rose's Jumbo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elephant_in_the_room  See also Animal Idioms at http://www.idiomconnection.com/animal.html

litmus  noun  blue coloring matter obtained from certain lichens, especially Roccella tinctoria. In alkaline solution litmus turns blue, in acid solution, red:  widely used as a chemical indicator.

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

litmus test  noun  something (such as an opinion about a political or moral issue) that is used to make a judgment about whether someone or something is acceptable.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/litmus%20test

The Melton Mowbray pork pie is named after Melton Mowbray, a town in Leicestershire.  Melton pies became popular among fox hunters in the area during the late eighteenth century.  The uncured meat of a Melton pie is grey in colour when cooked; the meat is chopped, rather than minced.  The pie is made with a hand-formed crust, giving the pie a slightly irregular shape after baking.  As the pies are baked free-standing, the sides bow outwards, rather than being vertical as with mould-baked pies.  In light of the premium price of the Melton Mowbray pie, the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association applied for protection under the European "Protected designation of origin" laws as a result of the increasing production of Melton Mowbray-style pies by large commercial companies in factories far from Melton Mowbray, and recipes that deviated from the original uncured pork form.  Protection was granted on 4 April 2008, with the result that only pies made within a designated zone around Melton, and using the traditional recipe including uncured pork, are allowed to carry the Melton Mowbray name on their packaging.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pork_pie

A safe room or panic room is a fortified room that is installed in a private residence or business to provide a safe shelter, or hiding place, for the inhabitants in the event of a break in, home invasion, tornado, terror attack or other threat.  Safe rooms usually contain communications equipment, so that law enforcement authorities can be contacted.  The simplest safe room is simply a closet with the hollow-core door replaced with an exterior-grade solid-core door that has a deadbolt and longer hinge screws and strike-plate screws to resist battering.  Sometimes, the ceiling is reinforced, or gated, to prevent easy access from the attic or from an overhead crawl space.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_room  Panic Room is also the title of a 2002 American film, and the name of a Welsh band.

2015 ART BOOK SALE  Art Reference Library in the UT Center for the Visual Arts,

Toledo Museum of Art   FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 6 | 1–6 p.m.  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 7 | NOON–3 p.m.  NEW & USED Art Books, Exhibition and other Catalogues, Posters, Magazines, Book Covers, Cookbooks  LIBRARY LEAGUE MEMBER PREVIEW:  NOVEMBER 6 FROM NOON – 1 p.m.  Not a Library League member?  Join for as little as $10/year!  Visit: www.toledomuseum.org/learn/library/mll  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1371  November 2, 2015  On this date in 1920, KDKA of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania started broadcasting as the first commercial radio station.  On this date in 1920, Adam Martin Wyant became the first former professional American football player to be elected to the United States Congress.

The black-and-orange monarch butterfly has become nature's celebrity and a rallying symbol of agreeable, grass-roots environmentalism after news spread over the past two years of a stark decline in its population—90 percent in the last 20 years.  The growing number of campaigns to save monarchs range from initiatives launched by President Barack Obama to those by an eastern Iowa Facebook group, from university research scientists to Iowa farmers.  Even bicyclists in the middle of their own zany migration on RAGBRAI got into the act in July 2015.  David Osterberg, professor of occupational and environmental health at the University of Iowa, helped mold milkweed seed balls to the size of a big marble for the Monarchs in Eastern Iowa group to hand out to RAGBRAI riders, who tossed them into ditches on the way out of Mount Vernon.  The Obama administration launched a plan in March 2015 to increase the number of pollinators and monarchs by seeding habitat along the Interstate Highway 35 "monarch flyway" from Texas to Minnesota.  When it comes from the highest levels, says U.S. Fish and Wildlife's Doug Helmers, you know it's a movement.  As the private lands coordinator for the agency in Iowa, he has worked with Iowa landowners on a series of small patches of more than 10 acres of land to grow milkweed, using a $200,000 budget, half of it from the Iowa Department of Natural Resources.  He has seen more enthusiasm for the project than any he can remember.  Mike Killen  http://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/life/2015/07/24/monarch-decline-iowa-milkweed/30629973/

"I am a reference librarian at the Thomas Ford Memorial Library who graduated from the  University of Texas at Austin.  I have worked in public libraries in Texas, Missouri, and Illinois. I am interested in promoting reference services and the reading of good books."  View Rick's blog at http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/  In addition to links to library book reviews and news, you may search subjects in the blog archives.  Find results for architecture at http://ricklibrarian.blogspot.com/search/label/architecture

QUOTES from A Conspiracy of Friends by Alexander McCall Smith  “If we eat pies, then we should never, not for one moment, look down on the making of them.”  “Saying 'believe me' all the time is a sign of insecurity."

Born in Rhodesia, Alexander McCall Smith has a great fondness for Africa:  he co-wrote what remains the only guide to the legal system of Botswana and founded the country's first centre for opera training.  He has also been involved in numerous other charitable projects in Botswana and throughout the African continent.  As a highly respected professor of medical law, he has served in a number of high-profile committees on medical ethics both in the UK and for UNESCO.  He is also famously a founder member of the Really Terrible Orchestra of Great Britain, created to give those without notable musical talent the opportunity to perform in public.  They now perform adequately to packed houses.  Among Smith's favorite books are Excellent Women (Barbara Pym has been described as the Jane Austen of our times, and I would concur with this view.  She created a whole world of people living rather mousy lives, illuminated with poignant detail.  She is extremely funny in an understated way.) and A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Christopher Alexander is an architectural guru whose work is greatly appreciated by a growing band of followers.  This book is astounding.  I dip into it at odd moments, savouring the insights of this prophet of humane architecture and design.  He changed the way I feel about buildings; after you read it, prepare to look at the world around you with very different eyes.)  http://www.foyles.co.uk/alexander-mccall-smith-favourite-books

Out of your element:  like a fish out of water (English) like an octopus in a garage (Spanish)  Find many idioms in I'm Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ears and Other Intriguing Idioms From Around the World by Jag Bhalla

A monopthong is a single vowel sound.  A dipthong is a vowel sound which, within a specific language, is usually considered to be a "single" sound, but actually consists of two vowel sounds occurring consecutively in the same syllable.  A tripthong is a consecutive sequence of three vowel sounds.  In many varieties of English tripthongs tend to be avoided by the use of an "intrusive" consonant (our will be pronounced /aʊwə/ rather than /aʊə/ and player as /pleɪjə/ rather than /pleɪə/).  However, in other varieties of English, such as Australian English, they are common.  See examples at http://eltnotebook.blogspot.com/2013/01/an-elt-glossary-monopthong-dipthong.html    

A backpack is a type of bag that is carried on one’s back.  There are many types of backpacks:  rucksack, knapsack, packsack, pack, etc.  A rucksack and a knapsack are essentially types of backpacks.  Alternatively, a Haversack is a one shouldered bag.  

See pictures, descriptions and comparisons at http://www.differencebetween.info/difference-between-backpack-haversack-knapsack-and-rucksack 

See a list of largest libraries that store 15 million items or more since 2008.  

Find locations, size, budget, number of visitors by year, and staff at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_libraries

WHO AM I?  I was born in 1928 and appeared in over 100 movies beginning in 1956, including Dr. Heckyl and Mr. Hype in 1980.  I appeared as myself in a 2014 documentary.  Look for my films on TV around Halloween.

In the 17th century, the term jack- o’-lantern meant a man with a lantern, or a night watchman. 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1370  October 30, 2015  On this date in 1938, Orson Welles broadcast his radio play of H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds, causing anxiety in some of the audience in the United States.  On this date in 1945, Jackie Robinson of the Kansas City Monarchs signed a contract for the Brooklyn Dodgers to break the baseball color line.

It’s thanks to wine that vinegar exists.  It is the natural offspring.  It’s a fact:  leave a bottle of wine uncorked and it will become vinegar.  One finds traces of vinegar production in Egypt and in Mespotania more than 5000 years ago.  During the Roman age, as well as Greek age, the most common beverage was, for a very long time, water mixed with a light vinegar.  It was used for everything, not only as a refreshing drink, but also as a condiment.  It was flavoured with herbs, flowers or fruit.  It was also appreciated for the conservation of wild game and for its therapeutical properties.  It is no doubt that it is the very first natural antibiotic of all time.  Link to recipes and to information on mustard at http://www.vinaigre.com/History-of-Vinegar

Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) was one of the most extraordinary scientists in history, leaving a legacy of scientific contributions which include an understanding of how microorganisms carry on the biochemical process of fermentation, the establishment of the causal relationship between microorganisms and disease, and the concept of destroying microorganisms to halt the transmission of communicable disease.  These achievements led him to be called the founder of microbiology.  After his early education Pasteur went to Paris, studied at the Sorbonne, then began teaching chemistry while still a student.  After being appointed chemistry professor at a new university in Lille, France, Pasteur began work on yeast cells and showed how they produce alcohol and carbon dioxide from sugar during the process of fermentation.  He found that fermentation would take place only when living yeast cells were present.  Establishing himself as a serious, hard-working chemist, Pasteur was called upon to tackle some of the problems plaguing the French beverage industry at the time.  Of special concern was the spoiling of wine and beer, which caused great economic loss and tarnished France's reputation for fine vintage wines.  Vintners wanted to know the cause of l'amer, a condition that was destroying the best burgundies.  Pasteur suggested that heating the wine gently at about 120°F would kill the bacteria that produced lactic acid and let the wine age properly.  Pasteur's book Etudes sur le Vin, published in 1866 was a testament to two of his great passions--the scientific method and his love of wine.  It caused another French Revolution--one in wine-making, as Pasteur suggested that greater cleanliness was need to eliminate bacteria and that this could be done with heat.  The idea of heating to kill microorganisms was applied to other perishable fluids like milk and the idea of pasteurization was born.  In his work with yeast, Pasteur also found that air should be kept from fermenting wine, but was necessary for the production of vinegar.  In the presence of oxygen, yeasts and bacteria break down alcohol into acetic acid--vinegar.  Pasteur also informed the vinegar industry that vinegar production could be increased by adding more microorganisms to the fermenting mixture.  Pasteur carried on many experiments with yeast.  He showed that fermentation can take place without oxygen (anaerobic conditions), but that the process still involved living things such as yeast.  He did several experiments to show (as Lazzaro Spallanzani had a century earlier) that living things do not arise spontaneously but rather come from other living things.  To disprove the idea of spontaneous generation, Pasteur boiled meat extract and left it exposed to air in a flask with a long S-shaped neck.  There was no decay observed because microorganisms from the air did not reach the extract.  On the way to performing his experiment Pasteur had also invented what has come to be known as sterile technique, boiling or heating of instruments and food to prevent the proliferation of microorganisms.  In 1862 Pasteur was called upon to help solve a crisis in another ailing French industry.  The silkworms that produced silk fabric were dying of an unknown disease.  So armed with his microscope, Pasteur went to the south of France in 1865.  He found the tiny parasites that were killing the silkworms and affecting their food, mulberry leaves.  His solution seemed drastic at the time.  He suggested destroying all the unhealthy worms and starting with new cultures.  Pasteur then turned his attention to human and animal diseases.  He had believed for some time that microscopic organisms cause disease and that these tiny microorganisms could travel from person to person spreading the disease.  Other scientists had expressed this thought before, but Pasteur had more experience using the microscope and identifying different kinds of microorganisms such as bacteria and fungi.    Pasteur discovered that weakened microbes make a good vaccine by imparting immunity without actually producing the disease.  Pasteur then began work on a vaccine for anthrax, and in 1881 produced a vaccine that successfully prevented the deadly disease.  Pasteur's last great scientific achievement was developing a successful treatment for rabies.  http://www.faqs.org/health/bios/83/Louis-Pasteur.html

Introduction:  A Brief History of College Football  by Robert M. Ours

From www.footballencyclopedia.com/cfeintro.htm  The first intercollegiate football contest was played on November 6th, 1869, at New Brunswick, New Jersey.  Rutgers beat Princeton 6 goals to 4, using a soccer-style round ball, played on a huge field (120 yards long and 75 yards wide) with 25 players on each side.  The sport grew slowly at first with Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and Stevens Tech fielding teams by 1875.  In 1876 a crossbar was added to the goal posts at a height of 10 feet (in effect to the present day), the field was reduced to nearly modern dimensions, and the number of players on each side was lowered to 15.  The sport did not really begin to resemble the modern game until former Yale player Walter Camp revised the rules in the early 1880s:  limit players to 11 on a side, establishing a scrimmage system for putting the ball in play, and he instituted a system of downs for advancing the ball, requiring a team to make 5 yards in 3 downs (the current system of 4 downs to make 10 yards was not adopted until 1912).  The first-down rule of 1882 required the marking of yard lines on the field and led to the term gridiron.  With these changes the game spread more rapidly, and some 250 colleges were participating by the beginning of the twentieth century.  Although the first All-America team was named in 1889, numbers to identify individual players were not recommended until 1915, and it wasn't until 1937 that numerals were required on both the front and back of game jerseys.  In 1967 this rule was further modified to require numbering according to position, with offensive players ineligible to receive forward passes assigned numbers in the 50-79 range.  Read more at http://www.collegefootballpoll.com/history_of_college_football.html

COLLEGE NAME CHANGES

Princeton University is a private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey.   Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton was the fourth chartered institution of higher education in the Thirteen Colonies and thus one of the nine Colonial Colleges established before the American Revolution.  The institution moved to Newark in 1747, then to the current site nine years later, where it was renamed Princeton University in honor of its host community of Princeton in 1896.

Rutgers University, the eighth of nine colleges established during the American colonial period, was chartered as Queen's College on 10 November 1766.  It was renamed Rutgers College in 1825 after Colonel Henry Rutgers (1745–1830), an American Revolutionary War hero philanthropist and an early benefactor of the school.  With the development of graduated education, Rutgers College was renamed Rutgers University in 1924.

New Jersey State Normal School (1855) name changes:  1908 New Jersey State Normal School at Trenton, 1929 New Jersey State Teachers College and State Normal School at Trenton, 1937 New Jersey State Teachers College at Trenton, 1958 Trenton State College, 1996 The College of New Jersey.

James Madison University is a public coeducational research university located in Harrisonburg, Virginia.  Founded in 1908 as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg, the institution was renamed Madison College in 1938, in honor of President James Madison, and named James Madison University in 1977. 

The University at Lewisburg (Pa.) in 1881, facing dire financial circumstances, turned to William Bucknell, a charter member of the board of trustees, for help.  His donation of $50,000 ($1,221,897 today) saved the university from ruin.  In 1886, in recognition of Bucknell's support of the school, the trustees voted unanimously to change the name of the University at Lewisburg to Bucknell University. 

Trine University in Angola, Indiana was founded in 1884 as Tri-State Normal College, and retained the reference to the "Tri-State" area for more than 120 years--so named because of the school's location in Indiana and its proximity to Michigan and Ohio.  In 1906 the school was renamed Tri-State College, and again in 1975 as Tri-State University.  In 2008, the school's name was changed to the current Trine University, in honor of alumnus Dr. Ralph Trine. 

The Rise and Fall of Digital Amnesia by Kapersky Lab  • Across the United States, the study shows that an overwhelming number of consumers can easily admit their dependency on the Internet and devices as a tool for remembering.  Almost all (91.2%) of those surveyed agreed that they use the Internet as an online extension of their brain.  Almost half (44.0%) also admit that their smartphone serves as their memory--everything they need to recall and want to have easy access to is all on it.  • In addition, many consumers are happy to forget, or risk forgetting information they can easily find--or find again online.  When faced with a question, half of U.S. consumers would turn to the Internet before trying to remember and 28.9% would forget an online fact as soon as they had used it.  • Contrary to general assumptions, Digital Amnesia is not only affecting younger digital natives--the study found that it was equally and some times more prevalent in older age groups.  • The loss or compromise of data stored on digital devices, and smartphones in particular, would cause immense distress, particularly among women and people under 35.  More than half of women (51.0%) and almost the same number of 25 to 34 year-olds (48.6%) say it would fill them with sadness, since there are memories stored on their connected devices that they would never get back.  However, it caused the even younger participants the most fear.  One in four women (27.1%) and 35.0% of respondents age 16 to 24 say they would panic:  their devices are the only place they store images and contact information.  • Worryingly, despite this growing reliance on connected devices, the study found that consumers across America are failing to adequately protect them with IT security.  Just one in three (30.5%) installs extra IT security, such as an anti-virus software solution on their smartphone and one in five (20.7%) adds any security to their tablet.  28.0% doesn’t protect any of their devices with additional security.  See 15-page report at https://kasperskycontenthub.com/usa/files/2015/06/Digital-Amnesia-Report.pdf

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1369  October 28, 2015  On this date in 1848, the first railroad in Spain between Barcelona and Mataró was opened.  On this date in 1893,  Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 in B Minor, Pathétique, received its première performance in St. Petersburg, only nine days before the composer's death.