brimstone   sulfur  origin:  Middle English brinston, probably from birnen to burn + ston stone  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brimstone

sulfur  During ancient times, sulfur and carbon were the only nonmetals known to man.  Some might define sulfur as the second member of the oxygen family.  Sulfur appears yellow in color, and because it is a member of Group 6, sulfur serves as a relatively good oxidizing agent.  Sulfur can be defined as 'a nonmetallic that exists in several forms, which burns with a blue flame and suffocating odor.'  http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-sulfur-definition-facts-uses.html

Unfortunately, newspapers often don't check to see if their op-ed contributors are shading the truth or lying outright.  The evidence is clear that some editorial page editors don't believe it's their responsibility to vet for accuracy and truth what they publish, unless the material comes from their own staff--and, of course, even that doesn't guarantee veracity.  Op-ed pieces that run under the bylines of famous politicians, celebrities and business people are almost never written by those people, just as they rarely author their autobiographies.  They don't have time.  Their staffers and PR people, or paid ghostwriters in the case of books, do the research and writing for them.  Sometimes, the "author" is blindsided by what he or she "wrote".  This can have hilarious results, as in the case of retired basketball star Charles Barkley. Upon the publication of his autobiography, which contained some controversial observations, he complained that he'd been misquoted.  Then again, he hadn't actually read it, let alone written it.  Dan Gillmor  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/aug/24/oped-ghostwriter-deception

Communicators used to present a point of view:  Ghostwriter, mouthpiece, speechwriter, press secretary, spokesperson, ghostposter. spin doctor.  See also "Who's actually writing your favorite celebrity's tweets?" by Evan Dashevsky at http://www.pcworld.com/article/2048479/whos-actually-writing-your-favorite-celebritys-tweets-.html

Gonzo Journalism is a style of reporting in which the journalist is far more than a detached observer of the events being recorded.  It rejects objectivity in favor of vivid depictions of events experienced, subjectively, by the reporter.  The Gonzo Journalist is part of the story, by coincidence, or a conscious choice to participate in shaping the events and outcome.  Fictional elements sometimes co-exist with non-fictional elements in Gonzo Journalism.  Hunter S. Thompson is the father of Gonzo Journalism.  The article "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," published in Scanlan's Monthly, in June of 1970, and illustrated by Ralph Steadman, is often considered to be the first true example of the style.  http://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1106&context=lib_articles

Life hack (or life hacking) refers to any trick, shortcut, skill, or novelty method that increases productivity and efficiency, in all walks of life.  The term life hack was coined in 2004 during the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference in San Diego, California by technology journalist Danny O'Brien to describe the "embarrassing" scripts and shortcuts productive IT professionals use to get their work done.    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_hack

"Get out of here" can mean "You're kidding."  See idioms from get out to get real at http://esl-bits.net/idioms/id236.htm

Cheryl Kettinger who  works at St. Christopher’s Hospital for Children in North Philadelphia isn’t a doctor or a nurse.  She’s a law school graduate.  She’s also not a lawyer.  Her area is compliance.  She helps interpret medical law and create company guidelines so people don’t break those laws.  “My whole goal is to find a way to do things the right way,” said Kettinger.  Before she landed her current gig, Kettinger got her master’s of jurisprudence—or M.J.—in health law at Widener University’s Delaware Law School just outside Wilmington.  The law school business model used to be simple.  You recruit a bunch of aspiring lawyers.  Those aspiring lawyers pay a lot of money.  Three years later—and after a few hundred nights in the law library—the aspiring lawyers graduate and become lawyers.  The model worked fine, until the recession hit U.S. law firms.  With fewer jobs available, a lot of aspiring lawyers decided they should aspire to something else.  So what does a law school do when there aren’t enough aspiring lawyers left to educate?  They start to look for students in places you wouldn’t expect—places like hospitals.  Rod Smolla, dean at Delaware Law School, says close to a third of the school’s students are now in non-JD programs.  “And I can easily imagine it going bigger,” said Smolla.  “I can imagine it being half of what we do.”  Most of Delaware Law’s new programs are for people in higher ed, healthcare or finance.  It’s law school for non-lawyers.  “That’s a whole new thing for law schools,” said Smolla.  “And it’s good for us in terms of expanding our revenue streams and diversifying our portfolio.”  Delaware Law needs to diversify.  Enrollment in its traditional J.D. program has fallen by almost 50 percent since 2011.  Smolla doesn’t think those folks are ever coming back.  “I would be delighted if it just held very steady and stable indefinitely,” said Smolla.  “In contrast, where there’s real entrepreneurial growth is on the non-J.D. programs.”  Delaware Law’s M.J. degrees cost about $30,000 apiece, take one or two years to complete, and are taught totally online.  More and more law schools now rely on these non-J.D. programs.  Nationwide, non-J.D. enrollment at law schools spiked 45 percent between 2007 and 2013, according to the American Bar Association.  Avi Wolfman-Arent  http://www.marketplace.org/2016/07/15/education/law-schools-offering-programs-non-lawyers  Thank you, Muse reader!

chock–full  : completely full :  full to the limit  Origin:  Middle English chokkefull, probably from choken to choke + full  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/chock%E2%80%93full

Grosgrain, also gros-grain and, rarely, gros grain, is a type of fabric characterized by its ribbed appearance.  In grosgrain, the weft is heavier than the warp, creating prominent transverse ribs. It is called a "corded" fabric since the weft resembles a fine cord.  Grosgrain is a plain weave corded fabric, with heavier cords than in poplin but lighter than in faille.  Grosgrain is both a direct French loan word and a folk corruption of the French word grogram.  Grogram, originally gros gram (appeared in literature in 1562), is defined as a coarse, loosely woven fabric of silk, silk and mohair, or silk and wool.  The adjective grosmeans thick or coarse, originally from the Old French gros, itself derived from the Latin grossus.  "Grain" is derived from Old French graine, itself derived from the Latin grana (plural of granum) – seed or in some contexts texture.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grosgrain

Not content with being one of the best footballers in the world, Barcelona and Brazil star Neymar is out to make an impression in the music industry too.  That’s after the footballer announced on September 11, 2016 he was to launch his music career, under the moniker "Neymusico."  "This Wednesday I begin my music career and I’m going to release my first song on Facebook," said the 24-year-old on his Twitter account, per Aled Byron of AS. " . . . We will have 'Neymusico'. Share it."  Footballers delving into the music industry is not a new phenomenon.  As noted by Byron, Neymar's compatriot, Pele, the legendary three-time World Cup winner, released an album.  More recently, Paris Saint-Germain forward Jese Rodriguez, formerly of Real Madrid, dropped a rap track.  United States international striker Clint Dempsey has also released music under the alias "Deuce."  Matt Jones  http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2663107-neymar-reveals-launch-of-neymusico-music-career-on-twitter

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1525  September 12, 2016  On this date in 1609, Henry Hudson began his exploration of the Hudson River while aboard the Halve Maen.  On this date in 2011, the 9/11 Memorial Museum in New York City opened to the public.

Paraphrase from The Fire, a novel by Katherine Neville  A well-planned meal is the greatest lubricant to successful diplomacy.

Lye Bagels by Stefania  http://www.thefreshloaf.com/node/10877/lye-bagels

Homemade bagels are a breeze! by Michael Ruhlman  http://ruhlman.com/2011/01/bagel-recipe/

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

ragout  (ra-GOO)  noun  1.  A highly seasoned stew of meat, vegetables, etc.  2.  A mixture of disparate elements.  From French ragoût, from ragouter (to revive the taste), from re- (again) + a-/ad (to) + gout (taste), from Latin gustus (taste).  Ultimately from the Indo-European root geus- (to taste or choose), which also gave us choice, choose, gusto, disgust, degust, and pregustator.  Earliest documented use:  1652.

Presidential libraries can create excitement, or controversy for campuses by Jarrett Carter  http://www.educationdive.com/news/presidential-libraries-can-create-excitement-or-controversy-for-campuses/423649/

The most beautiful library in each US state by Chris Weller  http://www.techinsider.io/most-beautiful-library-in-all-50-states-2016-7

Karo Pecan Pie recipe from Kelley Wilson  http://www.missinformationblog.com/karo-pecan-pie/

Suffix:  ium   (1)  (chemistry) Used to form the names of metal elements, after the style of early-named elements, as well as the isotopes of hydrogen.  (2)  (chemistry) Used to form the temporary systematic element name of a metallic or nonmetallic element which is postulated to exist, or which has been newly synthesized and has not yet been assigned a permanent name.  (3)  (by extension, humorous) Appended to common words to create scientific-sounding or humorous-sounding fictional substance names.  (4)  Used to form the name of an aggregation or mass of something, such as biological tissue:  for example, epithelium, pollinium.  (5)  Used to indicate the setting where a given activity is carried out:  for example, auditorium, colloquium, gymnasium, natatorium, planetarium, podium, sanatorium, stadium.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/-ium

The Great Dissent:  How Oliver Wendell Holmes Changed His Mind--And Changed the History of Free Speech in America, by Thomas Healy  Osgoode Legal Studies Research Paper No. 65/2016  

Jamie Cameron  York University - Osgoode Hall Law School  August 10, 2016  Abstract:  Thomas Healy’s The Great Dissent re-treads the familiar story of US Supreme Court Justice Holmes’s First Amendment conversion between March and November 1919, when he launched his marketplace of ideas theory and strong-form version of the clear and present danger doctrine.  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2821109

Library anxiety is real.  The phenomenon, which involves feeling intimidated, embarrassed, and overwhelmed by libraries and librarians, was first identified by Constance A. Mellon in 1986.  Her paper, "Library Anxiety: A Grounded Theory and Its Development," https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/40906/crl_47_02_160_opt.pdf?sequence=2&isAllowed=y  reported that college students in particular are prone to library anxiety because they believe their research skills are inadequate, which makes them feel ashamed and unwilling to talk to the very librarians who might be able to ease their worries.  A major contributor to students' anxiety is in the design and architecture of the buildings.  "It’s such a change from most high schools,” she says.  “Columbia has 20 libraries, and they’re divided up by subject.  That’s not obvious—you wouldn’t know that when you walk in, there’s no sign to tell you that.”  When there are signs, they can be misleading.  For example, the stately building with "The Library of Columbia University" carved on its facade is not, in fact, the library of Columbia University.  Well, not anymore—the Low Memorial Library, as it was dubbed when built in the 1860s, quickly proved too small to house the required information resources, and has been used as an administration building ever since.  Even when students end up at the right place—for most, Butler Library, Columbia's main source of research resources—it's a "fairly intimidating."  Butler's grand facade, built in the 1930s, is inscribed with the names of ancient Greek writers and philosophers (Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle) above the formidable columns that flank that main entrance.  “You walk in and you’re in a large domed lobby, not a book in sight," says Mills. "There’s no people, there’s no one to ask, there’s no signage.  You have to figure it out on your own—where are the books?”  Though Butler Library underwent extensive renovations in the early 2000s, it remained confusing.  “The architect who designed the renovation did not want to put signage up in the lobby that said ‘This is where you go for this,’" says Mills.  "He thought that would be too much like an airport.”  Ella Morton  http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-strange-affliction-of-library-anxiety-and-what-librarians-do-to-help

HOMOPHONES:  peak, peek, and pique.  Peak is a topmost point, such as a mountain peak, or to reach that point.  A peek is a glance or a quick look. It can also mean to glance or to peer at.  Finally, pique is to upset or excite someone.  Memory tips:  You have to reach to gain the peak.  If you peer at something, you are peeking.  And if you're piqued about something, there's usually a question in your mind about it.  https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/peak-peek-pique/

HOMOPHONES:  reek and wreak.  Reek means to give off.  Wreak means to cause.  http://www.homophone.com/h/reek-wreak

NEARLY HOMOPHONES:   wreak and wreck.  English speakers often confuse ‘wreak havoc’ with ‘wreck havoc’.  The confusion is more than understandable:  both words are nearly homophones (they sound alike) and also are spelled with only a letter of difference.  Wreak means to cause.  Wreck, means to ‘destroy or severely damage'.  Another confusing aspect of the word wreak deals with how to conjugate its past tense.  The common phrase ‘wrought havoc’ sometimes leads people to assume that wrought is the past tense of wreak, but that is not the case:  it is simply wreaked.  http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2016/01/wreak-havoc-wreck-havoc/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1524  September 9, 2016  On this date in 1839, John Herschel took the first glass plate photograph.  On this date in 1886, the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works was finalized.  On this date in 1972, in Kentucky's Mammoth Cave National Park, a Cave Research Foundation exploration and mapping team discovered a link between the Mammoth and Flint Ridge cave systems, making it the longest known cave passageway in the world.

No one knows exactly how it started, but a coal vein has been burning under the Pennsylvania mining town of Centralia since 1962.  Some trace it back to careless trash incineration in a landfill next to an open pit mine, which ignited a coal vein.  The fire crawled, insidiously, along coal-rich deposits far from the miner's pick, venting hot and poisonous gases up into town, through the basements of homes and businesses.  With dawning horror, residents came to realize that the fire was not going to be extinguished, or ever burn itself out--at least not until all the interconnected coal veins in eastern Pennsylvania were spent in some epic, meatless barbecue.  As the underground fire worked its way under rows of homes and businesses, the threat of fires, asphyxiation, and carbon monoxide poisoning became a daily concern.  The government eventually stepped in, and Centralia joined an elite club of communities, including Love Canal and Times Beach.  Declared municipalis non grata, Centralia was slowly abandoned as houses were demolished or burned, and citizens relocated.  http://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/2196

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is a popular choice for book groups around the world.  But it turns out that American readers may be enjoying a rather different experience to those in Britain, after an academic uncovered “astonishing” differences between the US and UK editions of the award-winning novel.  Professor Martin Paul Eve of Birkbeck, University of London was writing a paper on Cloud Atlas, working from the UK paperback published by Sceptre, and from a Kindle edition of the novel, when he realised he was unable to find phrases in the ebook that he could distinctly remember from the paperback.  He compared the US and UK editions of the book, and realised they were “quite different to one another”.  Shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2004, Cloud Atlas is already complicated enough:  telling the story of six interlocking lives and hopping back and forth across centuries and genres.  But differences between the US and UK editions highlighted by Eve in a journal article published on the Open Library of Humanities run to 30 pages of examples.  https://olh.openlibhums.org/article/10.16995/olh.82/  Mitchell himself explains the reasons for the discrepancies in an interview quoted in Eve’s paper:  they occurred because the manuscript of Cloud Atlas sat unedited for around three months in the US, after an editor there left Random House.  Meanwhile in the UK, Mitchell and his editor and copy editor worked on the manuscript, but the changes were not passed on to the US.  Alison Flood  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/aug/10/cloud-atlas-astonishingly-different-in-us-and-uk-editions-study-finds

The country of Mongolia is among the world's most sparsely populated—twice the size of Texas with about one-tenth the state's population of about 27 million.  Its roads, even in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, often lack well-known names, making navigation difficult and street addresses unreliable.   To make matters even more complicated, about a quarter of the country's residents are nomadic, with no permanent homes.  All of that means it can often be incredibly challenging for the Mongol Post to locate people.  Things are looking up, though.  The Mongolian government has partnered with a British startup called What3Words to overhaul its postal and address systems.  Now, instead of an address—like, say, 1600 Pennsylvania Ave —each 9-square-meter plot in Mongolia will receive its own three-word identifier.  "What we've done is we've cut the world into 3-meter squares, so that's 57 trillion 3-meter squares," Chris Sheldrick, co-founder of What3Words, tells NPR's Rachel Martin.  "And there's enough words in the dictionary—so, I'm talking words like table, chair, spoon—that you can actually assign three words to every 3-meter square in the world and you don't run out of combinations."  So, to bring it back to Pennsylvania Avenue—want to write a note to the president?  Better address it to Engine.Doors.Cubs.  How about the British prime minister?  That'd be Chief.Score.Locked.  Eric McDaniel  http://www.npr.org/2016/06/19/482514949/welcome-to-mongolias-new-postal-system-an-atlas-of-random-words#Where

Coming to Terms with Secret Law by Dakota S. Rudesill  Ohio State University (OSU) - Michael E. Moritz College of Law  November 01, 2015  7 Harvard National Security Journal 241 (2015)   Ohio State Public Law Working Paper No. 321    Abstract:  The allegation that the U.S. government is producing secret law has become increasingly common.  This article evaluates this claim, examining the available evidence in all three federal branches.  In particular, Congress’s governance of national security programs via classified addenda to legislative reports is here given the first focused scholarly treatment, including empirical analysis that shows references in Public Law to these classified documents spiking in recent years.  Having determined that the secret law allegation is well founded in all three branches, the article argues that secret law is importantly different from secrecy generally:  the constitutional norm against secret law is stronger than the constitutional norm against secret fact.  Three normative options are constructed and compared:  live with secret law as it exists, abolish it, or reform it.  The article concludes by proposing rules of the road for governing secret law, starting with the cardinal rule of public law’s supremacy over secret law.  Other principles and proposals posited here include an Anti-Kafka Principle (no criminal secret law), public notification of secret law’s creation, presumptive sunset and publication dates, and plurality of review within the government (including internal Executive Branch review, availability of all secret law to Congress, and presumptive access by a cadre of senior non-partisan lawyers in all three branches).  Download paper at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2687223

Christian Andreas Doppler (1803–1853) was an Austrian mathematician and physicist.  He is celebrated for his principle—known as the Doppler effect—that the observed frequency of a wave depends on the relative speed of the source and the observer.  He used this concept to explain the color of binary stars.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Doppler  See also http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/3039.html and http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3743612/

Conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, best known for being the voice of opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, died on September 5, 2016.    She was 92.  According to The Associated Press, Schlafly's self-published book, A Choice Not an Echo, brought her into the national spotlight in 1964.  The news service reports the book, which sold 3 million copies, became a manifesto for many conservatives and boosted Sen. Barry Goldwater's bid for the 1964 GOP presidential nomination.  Yet Schlafly's legacy is perhaps most tied to her outspoken criticism of the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the Constitution that would have explicitly prohibited gender discrimination.  It was passed by Congress in 1972 but defeated in the years to come, when it failed to be ratified by enough states—partly because of Schlafly's fierce opposition.  "Since the women are the ones who bear the babies and there's nothing we can do about that, our laws and customs then make it the financial obligation of the husband to provide the support," she said in 1973.  "It is his obligation and his sole obligation.  And this is exactly and precisely what we will lose if the Equal Rights Amendment is passed."   "I really spent 25 years as a full-time homemaker before I did any particular traveling around," she said in 2014.  "And by that time, the children were well along in school or college.  And they were very supportive.  My husband was very supportive.  I told the feminists the only person's permission I had to get was my husband's."  Despite the key role she played in championing conservatism and helping to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment, Schlafly told The Associated Press in 2007 that perhaps her greatest legacy was the Eagle Forum, the conservative group she founded in the 1970s.  Schlafly held three degrees—a bachelor's in political science from Washington University, a master's in government from Radcliffe, and a law degree from the Washington University School.  Tanya Ballard Brown  http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/05/492748832/conservative-icon-phyllis-schlafly-dies-at-92

September 5, 2016  Braconid:  a parasitic wasp and winning 176-point, eight-letter, triple-triple scoring word in the 2016 World Scrabble Championship.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Scrabble_Championship  In the final at Lille’s Grand Palais, Londoner Brett Smitheram beat fellow Briton Mark Nyman with this perfectly obscure, delightful Scrabble specimen.  Compare it to other Scrabble moves:  Quetzals (365) Guatemala’s national bird and one of its monetary units. Quixotry (365) a visionary idea or scheme. Caziques (392) Caribbean tribal chiefs or a black and red or black and yellow tropical birds. Flatfish (239) any fish of the order Heterosomata (Pleuronectiformes), including halibut, sole, flounder.  Muzjiks (126) Russian peasants. Cothurni (92) Footwear worn by actors in ancient Greece. Felty (35) resembling felt.  Oxyphenbutazone (1778) Anti-inflammatory medication used to treat arthritis and bursitis. OK, it has never actually been played but it’s thought to be the highest scoring word possible under American Scrabble rules.  Chitra  Ramaswamy  https://www.theguardian.com/global/shortcuts/2016/sep/05/braconid-brett-smitheram-2016-world-scrabble-championship-quixoty-felty

Children’s author, illustrator, and educator Anna Dewdney, whose toddler-centric picture books starring wildly expressive Baby Llama are multi-million-copy bestsellers, died at her home in Vermont on September 3, 2016 at the age of 50.  Dewdney did many school, library, and event appearances, where she spoke passionately about her work and children’s literacy.  In her role as a literacy advocate, Dewdney wrote a 2013 opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, emphasizing that “empathy is as important as literacy” when it comes to educating children.  “When we read with a child, we are doing so much more than teaching him to read or instilling in her a love of language,” she wrote.  “We are doing something that I believe is just as powerful, and it is something that we are losing as a culture:  by reading with a child, we are teaching that child to be human.  When we open a book, and share our voice and imagination with a child, that child learns to see the world through someone else’s eyes.”  Dewdney had recently completed a new picture book, Little Excavator, which is scheduled for June 2017 publication from Viking.  http://publishersweekly.tumblr.com/post/150056066571/childrens-author-illustrator-and-educator-anna

Queen guitarist Brian May says an asteroid in Jupiter's orbit has been named after the band's late frontman Freddie Mercury on what would have been his 70th birthday.  May says the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Centre has designated an asteroid discovered in 1991, the year of Mercury's death, as "Asteroid 17473 Freddiemercury."   Mercury, born Sept. 5, 1946, wrote and performed hits including "Bohemian Rhapsody" and "We Are The Champions" with Queen, releasing over a dozen studio albums between 1973 and 1991.  http://phys.org/news/2016-09-far-away-asteroid-freddie-mercury-birthday.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1523  September 7, 2016  On this date in 1963, the Pro Football Hall of Fame opened in Canton, Ohio with 17 charter members.  On this date in 2008, the US Government took control of the two largest mortgage financing companies in the US, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Quote of the Day  America has been called a melting pot, but it seems better to call it a mosaic, for in it each nation, people, or race which has come to its shores has been privileged to keep its individuality, contributing at the same time its share to the unified pattern of a new nation. - King Baudouin of Belgium (7 September 1930-1993)

How long is the U.S. shoreline?  The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shoreline length calculation of 95,471 miles was determined by hand in 1939-40 with a recording instrument on the largest-scale charts and maps available at that time.  Shorelines of outer coast, offshore islands, sounds, bays, rivers, and creeks were included to the head of the tidewater or to a point where tidal waters narrow to a width of 100 feet.  For the Great Lakes, the shoreline lengths were measured in 1970 by the International Coordinating Committee on Great Lakes Basic Hydraulic and Hydrologic Data.  The total length of tidal shoreline includes measurements of the coastal states as well as the outlying U.S. territories and possessions.  http://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/shorelength.html

Paraphrases from Silence, a novel by Thomas Perry  He pushed the speed limit, but let the future organ donors flash past him.  People pretend until they believe.

Thomas Perry (born 1947) is an American mystery and thriller novelist.  He received a 1983 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best First Novel.  Perry's work has covered a variety of fictional suspense starting with The Butcher's Boy, which received a 1983 Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best First Novel, followed by Metzger's Dog, Big Fish, Island, and Sleeping Dogs.  He then launched the critically acclaimed Jane Whitefield series:  Vanishing Act (chosen as one of the "100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century" by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association), Dance for the Dead, Shadow Woman, The Face Changers, Blood Money, Runner, and Poison Flower.  The New York Times selected Nightlife for its best seller selection.  From this point, Perry has elected to develop a non-series list of mysteries with Death Benefits, Pursuit (which won a Gumshoe Award in 2002), Dead Aim, Night Life, Fidelity, and Strip.  In The Informant, released in 2011, Perry brought back the hit-man character first introduced in The Butcher's Boy and later the protagonist in Sleeping Dogs.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Perry_(author)

With more than 9,200 acres of rolling hills, gentle trails, relaxing waterfront and shaded woodlands, Philadephia's Fairmount Park keeps a wealth of natural landscapes within easy reach of all city residents.  You can take a stroll, head out for an afternoon of softball, organized frisbee or pier-side fishing, or just settle in for a family picnic.  There are miles of trails for horseback riding, off-road cycling and deep-woods hiking, yet there are also tours of historic mansions, Japanese tea ceremonies and outdoor concerts.  Three environmental centers, as well as a wildlife refuge treatment center, help bring the natural world to life for adults as well as children.  In 1876, more than 10 million people journeyed to Fairmount Park for the nation’s Centennial celebration.  A Victorian-style trolley offers tours of the Colonial-era mansions that dot the landscape.  Two outdoor concert venues feature some of the tops names in music.  The world-famous Philadelphia Museum of Art sits at the headway of the Park and overlooks the row of Victorian-era boathouses that have become architectural landmarks.  Bankruptcy and the quest for clean water were the two driving forces behind the creation of Fairmount Park.  When Robert Morris, financier of the Revolutionary War, went bankrupt, his country farm and gardens were purchased by another businessman who created such lovely gardens, he charged admission.  The property changed hands again only to suffer from yet another economic downturn.  In 1843, a shrewd city councilman pressed to purchase the property which was situated above the municipal water works.  By purchasing the property and designating it as parkland, the city was able to end the industrial contamination of the river that had occurred downstream.  http://www.visitphilly.com/outdoor-activities/philadelphia/fairmount-park/

Aristophanes (c. 446 – c. 386 BC) was a comic playwright of ancient Athens.  Eleven of his forty plays survive virtually complete.  These, together with fragments of some of his other plays, provide the only real examples of a genre of comic drama known as Old Comedy, and are used to define it.  Also known as the Father of Comedy and the Prince of Ancient Comedy, Aristophanes has been said to recreate the life of ancient Athens more convincingly than any other author.  His powers of ridicule were feared and acknowledged by influential contemporaries; Plato singled out Aristophanes' play The Clouds as slander that contributed to the trial and subsequent condemning to death of Socrates although other satirical playwrights had also caricatured the philosopher.  Aristophanes won second prize at the City Dionysia in 427 BC with his first play The Banqueters (now lost).  He won first prize there with his next play, The Babylonians (also now lost).  It was usual for foreign dignitaries to attend the City Dionysia, and The Babylonians caused some embarrassment for the Athenian authorities since it depicted the cities of the Delian League as slaves grinding at a mill.  Some influential citizens, notably Cleon, reviled the play as slander against the polis and possibly took legal action against the author.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristophanes

Paraphrases from Murder One, a novel by Robert Dugoni  Actions define us, not our thoughts.  The amount of brass in the conference room could have made instruments for a marching band. 

Robert Dugoni is the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and #1 Amazon Bestselling Author of the Tracy Crosswhite Series:  My Sister's Grave, Her Final Breath (September 2015) and A Clearing in the Woods (May 2016).  He is also the author of the critically acclaimed, David Sloane series:  The Jury Master, Wrongful Death, Bodily Harm, Murder One and The Conviction. Dugoni has twice been nominated for the Harper Lee Award for Legal Fiction, was a 2015 International Thriller Writer's finalist for thriller of the year, and the 2015 winner of the Nancy Pearl Award for Fiction.  His books are sold world-wide in more than 20 countries and have been translated into a dozen languages including French, German, Italian and Spanish.  Dugoni and author Steven James teach a four day writing intensive.    www.novelwritingintensive.com  Dugoni wrote his way to Stanford University, receiving writing awards along the way, and majored in communications/journalism and creative writing while working as a reporter for the Stanford Daily.  He graduated Phi Beta Kappa and worked briefly as a reporter in the Metro Office and the San Gabriel Valley Office of the Los Angeles Times.  Dugoni attended the UCLA law school and practiced law for 13 years in San Francisco.  His longing to return to writing never wavered, however, and in 1999 he awoke one morning and made the decision to quit law and write novels.  On the four-year anniversary of his wedding day, keeping a promise to his wife, he drove a U-Haul trailer across the Oregon-Washington border and settled in Seattle to pursue his dreams.  For the next three years, Dugoni worked daily in an 8 foot by 8 foot windowless office in Pioneer Square to complete three novels, winning the 1999 and 2000 Pacific Northwest Writer's Conference Literary Contests.  http://www.robertdugoni.com/dugoni.html

In three-dimensional space, a Platonic solid is a regular, convex polyhedron.  It is constructed by congruent regular polygonal faces with the same number of faces meeting at each vertex.  Five solids meet those criteria, and each is named after its number of faces:  tetrahedron (4 faces), cube (6 faces), octahedron (8 faces), dodecahedron (12 faces), and icosahedron (20 faces).  Read more and see graphics at  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Platonic_solid

The nonprofit, non-partisan Commission on Presidential Debates released the list of moderators September 2, 2016.  The first presidential debate, set for Sept. 26 at New York's Hofstra University, will be moderated by NBC Nightly anchor Lester Holt.  CNN's Anderson Cooper and Martha Raddatz, chief global affairs correspondent and co-anchor of ABC's "This Week," will moderate the second debate, set for Oct. 9 at Washington University in St. Louis.  Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace will moderate the third presidential debate.  It is planned for Oct. 19 at University of Nevada in Las Vegas.  Elaine Quijano, anchor for CBSN and a correspondent with CBS News, will moderate the vice presidential debate, planned for Oct. 4 at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia.  Steve Scully, senior executive producer, White House and political editor for C-SPAN Networks, will be the backup moderator for all debates.  The Sept. 26 and Oct. 19 debates, as well as the vice presidential one, will include topics selected by moderators and announced at least one week before the debate.  Each candidate will be asked a question and then given two minutes to respond followed by an opportunity to reply to each other.  The Oct. 9 debate will take the form of a town hall.  Half of the questions will be posed by citizen participants and the other half will come from the moderators.  The candidates will have two minutes to respond and then an additional minute from the moderator for more discussion.  The town meeting participants will be uncommitted voters selected by the Gallup Organization.  All debates will be run from 9-10:30 p.m. Eastern Time without commercial breaks.  http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/2016/09/presidential_debate_moderators.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1522  September 5, 2016  On this date in 1882, the first United States Labor Day parade was held in New York City.  On this date in 1927, the first Oswald the Lucky Rabbit cartoon, Trolley Troubles, produced by Walt Disney, was released by Universal Pictures.

In 1966, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the National Historic Preservation Act, a law that made preserving historic, architectural and archaeological resources whenever possible a policy of the federal government.  Since 1966, Ohio, the 36th-largest state geographically, has become the third-highest number of National Register listings:  more than 3800.  Echoes, v. 55, Sept./Oct. 2016   Find National Historic Preservation Act of 1966 at https://www.nps.gov/history/local-law/nhpa1966.htm and literary landmarks by state at http://www.ala.org/united/products_services/literarylandmarks/landmarksbystate/landmarksbystate

The color amber is a pure chroma color, located on the color wheel midway between the colors of gold and orange.  The color name is derived from the material also known as amber, which is commonly found in a range of yellow-orange-brown-red colors; likewise, as a color amber can refer to a range of yellow-orange colors.  In English the first recorded use of the term as a color name, rather than a reference to the specific substance, was in 1500.  Amber is one of several technically defined colors used in automotive signal lamps.  In North America, SAE standard J578 governs the colorimetry of vehicle lights, while outside North America the internationalized European ECE regulations hold force.  Both standards designate a range of orange-yellow hues in the CIE color space as "amber".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_(color)

While it doesn't quite roll off the tongue the way "cronut" does, and isn't as photogenic as the rainbow bagel, the mufgel is the new hybrid pastry on the block.  The mufgel is part bagel, part muffin and is the Franken-carb du jour at Williamsburg's The Bagel Store, the world's most viral bagel purveyor.  It was released on July 23rd, 2016 and while some genius is crafted over many years, owner Scot Rossillo was inspired by a Quick Draw radio commercial which made fun of food crazes in New York City.  He quickly came up with the recipe and started with two flavors:  carrot cake and chocolate chip crumb.  Currently the bakery makes 42 mufgels each day and sells out by close, says manager Scarlen Espinal.   "The rainbow bagel started just like that as well," she said.  "They were selling very few a day and now all of a sudden we bake thousands of rainbow bagels a day."  Emily Siegel  http://gothamist.com/2016/07/28/mufgel_williamsburg_gimmicks.php

July 14, 2016  Suzanne Corkin, who has died aged 79, was a neuroscientist who, for almost 50 years, worked with and cared for Henry Molaison, the most-studied patient in the history of brain science.  “Patient HM”, as he was known in the medical literature, had undergone an experimental operation to cure his epilepsy in 1953, when he was 27.  A hole had been drilled in the front of his skull and much of his hippocampus and amygdala removed.  The result was a profound amnesia, which caused Henry to forget all his post-operative experiences after just 30 seconds.  Despite this, he remained lucid and able to participate in hundreds of studies.  Assessing him in 1962 with her supervisor, Dr Brenda Milner, at McGill University in Montreal, Suzanne Corkin found that he had an above-average IQ and well-developed verbal skills, as well as a keen sense of humour.  At that time little was known about the nature of memory, which was assumed to be a global neurological process.  Through a series of experiments involving Henry, Dr Milner was able to cast light on the particular role of the hippocampus in retrieving and storing memories.  After 1966 Dr Corkin carried on her mentor’s work from the psychology department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  She was born Suzanne Hammond on May 18 1937 and grew up in West Hartford.  After graduating with a degree in Psychology from Smith College in Massachusetts, she moved to Montreal and Dr Milner’s laboratory.  In all she published more than 100 research papers on subjects such as Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s and the neurological processes of healthy ageing.  Her longest working relationship, however, was with Henry Molaison--even if Henry never recognised it as such.  After his death in 2008 Dr Corkin’s study of his neuroanatomy continued.  His post-mortem scans were “beautiful . . . much clearer than what you could see in a living person, partly because we scanned him for so long”.   Henry’s brain was then sent to a lab in San Diego and sliced into 2,401 sections for further study.  Then, and only then, was his full name revealed to the public.  In Permanent Present Tense:  The Unforgettable Life of the Amnesic Patient, HM (2013), Dr Corkin spoke of her decades-long mission to protect Henry as a person in his own right, rather than as a series of “anonymous descriptions in textbooks”.   “His story is not just a medical curiosity,” she wrote.  “It is a testament to the impact that a single subject can have.”   http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/2016/07/14/suzanne-corkin-neuroscientist-who-did-groundbreaking-work-on-amn/

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  Each of this week’s words has two opposite meanings.

dabster  (DAB-stuhr)  noun  1.  An expert.  2.  A bungler.

salad days  (SAL-uhd dayz)  noun  1.  A period of youthful innocence and inexperience.  2.  period of great success:  heyday.

depthless  (DEPTH-les)  adjective   1.  Immeasurably deep.  2.  Shallow; superficial.

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From:  Anthony Vazquez  Subject:  Contranyms  I always enjoyed the riddle:  The name of which US state is made of two antonyms separated by the letter ‘i’?  Connect-i-cut is the only state that cleaves to the rule and is cleft with an ‘i’.

From:  Sue Goldstein  Subject:  Contranyms  I was quite pleased to see this week’s theme.  I have a list at my desk of antagonyms , which is a synonym for contranyms.  My favorites are “sanction”, “splice”, and “cleave”.  Also on the list are “hulled”, “seeded”, and “shelled”.  I was once asked to write something that sanctioned a particular activity, so I had to ask whether the person wanted to prohibit or permit the activity.  This was an important question since I am a nonpartisan legislative bill drafter.

From:  David Housden  Subject:  dabster  Here in the UK these days one is likely to observe that someone is a “dab hand"--in fact an expert.  However, people can be “dabbling” at something, in other words, they are unfamiliar with the task at hand--in fact an amateur.

From:  JB Bryant  Subject:  depthless  When I was in elementary school (centuries ago), my mother was going to be one of the parent drivers for our class field trip.  One of the other boys asked me, “Is your mom a reckless driver?”  When I answered “Yes,” he surprised me by saying he wasn’t going to ride with her.  I had never heard the word “reckless” before that, but it seemed obvious to me that it meant “without a wreck” just as penniless means without a penny.

September is the ninth month of the year in the modern day Gregorian calendar and its predecessor, the Julian calendar.  The month kept its original name from the Roman calendar in which septem means “seven” in Latin marking it as the seventh month.  September was named during a time when the calendar year began with March, which is why its name no longer corresponds with its placement in the Julian and Gregorian calendars.  September was the seventh month that had a length of 30 days in the Roman calendar.  It became the ninth month with a length of 29 days when King Numa Pompilius reformed the calendar and added the months of January and February around 700 BCE.  Julius Caesar added one day to the month making it 30 days long during the Julian calendar reform.  Its birth flowers are the forget-me-not, morning glory and aster.  The birthstone for September is the sapphire which means clear thinking.  http://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/months/september.html

National anthem and sports   The first documented example was in May 1862, when Brooklyn inaugurated its first professional baseball field.  The "Star-Spangled Banner" was played during a pregame ceremony, and again "at intervals throughout the contest," the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported.  http://bklyn.newspapers.com/clip/451673/1862brooklyn_daily_eaglefirst_ssb_in/  In the decades that followed, the song resurfaced at baseball and college football games, usually during times of war and social upheaval.  The trend continued after Congress made the song the national anthem in 1931, and through World War II, when patriotic fervor, along with the development of modern public address systems, made the song part of the everyday routine.  By the 1970s, television and big-money sports turned the pre-game national anthem into an event unto itself, with popular musicians performing it to huge crowds.  Jon Schuppe  Read more and see pictures at  http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/history-behind-kaepernick-protest-sports-dissent-star-spangled-banner-n640256

The Olympics Games has its own flag and “hymn”, used when the Olympic flag is raised, usually during the opening and closing ceremonies.  The Olympic Hymn first appeared at the first Olympic Games in 1896 in Athens, Greece.  The lyrics were written in Greek by Greece’s national poet, Kostis Palamas and set to music by Spyros Samaras for the 1896 Games.  The hymn was not used again, nor was it officially adopted, for several decades; until the 1960 Games, each country would commission local composers to compose an Olympic hymn for that particular Games.  A hymn was officially adopted in 1954 and used in the 1956 Games, which was intended to be the Olympic hymn, but due to disputes, the original Olympic hymn was unanimously adopted as the official Olympic Hymn at the 1958 IOC meeting.  Written in Greek, the IOC’s preference is that the Olympic Hymn be performed in either English or Greek.  If it is to be performed in the local language, it is to be translated from the original Greek, rather than the English.  Starting with the 1924 Games, the winner’s national anthem for each event is played as their flag is hoisted in celebration.  Also, according to Olympic rules, national anthems cannot be longer than 80 seconds in length, causing some countries to create a shortened version of their anthem to be played at the Games in the event that their participant wins.  Also, a nation may choose to have another anthem played instead of their national one if they so choose; for example, at the 1992 Games, the former Soviet republics united under a team known as the “Unified Team”, whenever a member of this team won their event, they chose the song “Ode to Joy” to be played.  During the 1980 Games in Moscow, several non-Communist countries that were participating chose to have the Olympic Hymn played rather than their own anthem when they won their event.  Also, because of conflicts with China, Taiwan has a special song which they use for such events known as the “Flag Raising Song”.  http://www.nationalanthems.info/oly.htm

212 musicians voice support for 'Blurred Lines' appeal--Artists like Rivers Cuomo, Jennifer Hudson, Hans Zimmer, Jason Mraz, and more support Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke's appeal by Jessica Goodman   In December 2015, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams filed an appeal against the verdict that ordered them to pay Marvin Gaye’s family more than $5 million for copyright infringement when a judge determined “Blurred Lines” had copied from Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.”   http://www.ew.com/article/2015/03/10/blurred-lines-trial-robin-thicke-pharrell.  On August 24, 2016 more than 200 artists and musicians have backed Thicke and Williams’ appeal in an amicus brief filed with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to support the bid.  http://www.ew.com/article/2016/08/31/blurred-lines-appeal-artists-support-amicus-brief  The pop stars' challenge follows a blockbuster trial in March 2015 that ended with a jury verdict that “Blurred Lines”—the best-selling single in the world in 2013—lifted key elements from Gaye’s “Got To Give It Up.”  A judge ordered the pair to pay $5.4 million and ongoing royalties to Gaye’s heirs.  http://www.law360.com/articles/780736/blurred-lines-verdict-will-chill-musical-creativity-9th-circ-told

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com   Issue 1521  September 2. 2016  On this date in 1661, Georg Böhm, German organist and composer, was born.  On this date in 1919, Marge Champion, American actress, dancer, and choreographer, was born.