David Crystal made two discoveries when searching the Bible for idioms. First, there are not as many as some people think: he found only 257. And second, most of the idioms don't originate in the King James translation at all. Rather they are to be found in one of the translations that appeared in the preceding 130 years - by Wycliffe (1388), Tyndale (1526-30), the Bishops' Bible (1568), the Geneva Bible (1560), or the DouaiRheims (1582, 1609-10). By his count, only 18 expressions are stylistically unique to the King James version:

east of Eden--know for a certainty--how are the mighty fallen--a still small voice-the root of the matter--to every thing there is a season--much study is a weariness of the flesh--beat their swords into plowshares--set thine (your) house in order--be horribly afraid--lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven--get thee behind me--suffer little children--no small stir--turned the world upside down--a thorn in the flesh--unto the pure all things are pure--let us now praise famous men

Every other idiomatic expression is shared with at least one earlier translation. In many cases, an idiom is found in all of them - such as "milk and honey" or "salt of the earth." http://www.kansascity.com/2011/04/24/2821651/the-king-james-bible-and-the-english.html

The Danish Bible Society published a revised translation of the Bible on April 14. "Blissful" is now "happy," "meek" is now "shy," and "blessed" is now "lucky." http://concordiaandkoinonia.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/denmark-the-bible-doesnt-have-to-be-easy-by-jakob-holm-in-kristeligt-dagblad/

A comparison of translations in "parallel versions" of the Bible for I Corinthians 13:13 finds faith, hope and love 13 times, and faith, hope and charity 4 times. http://bible.cc/1_corinthians/13-13.htm

Bible versions http://www.ccel.org/s/schaff/encyc/encyc02/htm/iv.v.lxiv.htm

Bible translations by language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_translations_by_language

A Paris hotel, Pavillon des Lettres, combines the art of writing and the aesthetics of the decoration to pay homage to the known and hidden talents of both French and international literature. In the image of the 26 letters of the alphabet, the rooms and suites of the Pavillon des Lettres reveal the beauty and poetry of the various authors. Behind each door hides the spirit of a poet, a writer, an impassioned virtuoso, a genius, which will give a special atmosphere to the room, with the help in particular of extracts chosen and printed on the walls. The authors are: Andersen, Baudelaire, Calderon, Diderot, Eschyle, Flaubert, Goethe, Hugo, Ibsen, James, Kafka, La Fontaine, Musset, Nerval, Ovid, Proust, Queiroz, Rousseau, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Urfe, Voltaire, Woolf, Xenophon, Yeats, and Zola. http://www.pavillondeslettres.com/uk/index.php

Other literary-themed hotels, such as Library Hotel in Midtown Manhattan (organized using the Dewey Decimal System), Inn BoonsBoro (owned by author Nora Roberts) a small B & B in Boonsboro, Maryland with themed bedrooms based on famous literary couples, and Hobbit Motel in Woodlyn, New Zealand are listed at: http://www.examiner.com/books-in-minneapolis/hobbit-holes-for-humans-literary-lodgings-part-1

Outer Banks (also known as OBX) is a 200-mile (320-km) long string of narrow barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina, beginning in the southeastern corner of Virginia Beach on the east coast of the United States. They cover approximately half the northern North Carolina coastline, separating the Currituck Sound, Albemarle Sound, and Pamlico Sound from the Atlantic Ocean. The Outer Banks is a major tourist destination and is known for its temperate climate and wide expanse of open beachfront. The Cape Hatteras National Seashore has four campgrounds where visitors may camp. The Wright brothers' first flight in a powered, heavier-than-air vehicle took place on the Outer Banks on December 17, 1903, at Kill Devil Hills near the seafront town of Kitty Hawk. The Wright Brothers National Monument commemorates the historic flights, and First Flight Airport is a small, general-aviation airfield located there. The English Roanoke Colony—where the first person of English descent, Virginia Dare, was born on American soil—vanished from Roanoke Island in 1587. The Lost Colony, written and performed to commemorate the original colonists, is the longest running outdoor drama in the United States and its theater acts as a cultural focal point for much of the Outer Banks. The treacherous seas off the Outer Banks and the large number of shipwrecks that have occurred there have given these seas the nickname Graveyard of the Atlantic. The Graveyard of the Atlantic Museum is located in Hatteras Village near the United States Coast Guard facility and Hatteras ferry.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Banks

What exactly is the National Register? It is the National Register of Historic Places. One official government website employs an impressive skein of nouns to describe it as a compilation of "districts, sites, buildings, structures, and objects that are significant in American history, architecture, archaeology, engineering, and culture." Another describes the Register more succinctly as "the official list of the Nation's historic places worthy of preservation." The process by which a property gets listed begins with an exercise in straight-up democracy: Anyone can nominate anything to the National Register. All it takes is basic research and a few required forms. The nomination forms are reviewed and submitted to the Register by the state historic preservation officer (SHPO) in the state where the property is located. Generally speaking, properties must be at least 50 years old to be added to the National Register. (Properties that have achieved significance in the last 50 years may qualify if they are of exceptional importance.) Owners of some types of Register-listed properties are eligible for generous tax credits that can help offset the costs of rehabilitation.
http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2011/may-june/what-is-the-national-register.html

The New York Botanical Garden is an elixir for the soul—a 250-acre eden founded in 1891 and thriving today just 20 minutes northeast of Midtown Manhattan. Standing on the banks of the Bronx River, which runs through the eastern part of the botanical garden, the Stone Mill was built in 1840 by the P. Lorillard Company for its bourgeoning tobacco and snuff business. Having established tobacco fields in Connecticut and offices in Manhattan, the company moved industrial operations to the Bronx at the turn of the 19th century. The water-powered mill functioned until about 1870, when the tobacco company opened a huge manufacturing plant across the Hudson River in New Jersey, and the obsolete stone structure was abandoned. Twenty years later, in April of 1891, the surrounding land became part of the botanical garden when the New York State legislature set aside acreage in the Bronx for "the collection and culture of plants, flowers, shrubs and trees, the advancement of botanical science and knowledge … and for the entertainment, recreation and instruction of the people." In vivid contrast to the Stone Mill, the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden splashes color across the easternmost part of the New York Botanical Garden. Knowledge about roses is not a prerequisite for a visit; you can learn all about the history and cultivation of those showy shrubs if you take the audio tour. Designed in 1916 by the famed American landscape architect Beatrix Farrand and enlarged in phases, the garden didn't assume its current form until 1988, when David Rockefeller made a substantial donation in honor of his wife, Peggy. Then, in 2005, the unexpected happened: The City of New York adopted a public health law prohibiting the use of pesticides in open spaces, presenting the rose garden's caretakers with a new set of challenges. "We were mandated to reduce our chemical usage," explains garden -curator Peter Kukielski, and that meant replacing 2,000 prized but pesticide-dependent bushes in the garden. He began contacting hybridizers around the world to solicit information about roses that didn't depend upon chemicals to grow strong and healthy. And his investigations eventually paid off with the identification and acquisition of 3,659 plants in 607 varieties. The New York Botanical Garden is open year-round, Tuesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., with the exception of Jan. 11-Mar. 4, when it closes at 5 p.m. See more plus pictures at: http://www.preservationnation.org/magazine/2011/may-june/a-growing-concern.html

Students nationwide are still taught cursive, but many school districts are spending far less time teaching it and handwriting in general than they were years ago, said Steve Graham, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University. Sandy Schefkind, a pediatric occupational therapist in Bethesda, Md., and pediatric coordinator for the American Occupational Therapy Association, said that learning cursive helped students hone their fine motor skills. “It’s the dexterity, the fluidity, the right amount of pressure to put with pen and pencil on paper,” Ms. Schefkind said, adding that for some students cursive is easier to learn than printing. “I’m seeing an increase in inconstancy in the handwriting and poor form level — sloppy, semi-legible script that’s inconsistent,” Heidi H. Harralson, a Tucson graphologist she said. Most everyone has a cursive signature, but even those are getting harder to identify, Ms. Harralson said. “Even people that didn’t learn cursive, they usually have some type of cursive form signature, but it’s not written very well,” she said. “It tends to be more abstract, illegible and simplistic. If they’re writing with block letters it’s easier to forge.” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/28/us/28cursive.html

Q: What do delegates to Congress do? A: One delegate each represents the District of Columbia, the Virgin Islands, Guam, American Samoa, the Northern Mariana Islands, and Puerto Rico in the House of Representatives. They may speak on any subject, introduce bills, and serve on committees. But they cannot vote. U.S. Archives.
Q: My church sponsors a monthly recycling program and we have been told several times that if we save the plastic lids from soft drink and water bottles, these can be turned in to somebody somewhere and, when enough are turned in, a kidney patient gets a free hour of dialysis. No one, however, has been able to give us details about the "somebody somewhere" part. Can you?
A: "There's no such thing as a tabs-for-dialysis program," said Bryan Van Steenbergen, public relations manager of the National Kidney Foundation in New York. "It wouldn't ever be necessary because Medicare typically pays for 80 percent of the cost of dialysis time, regardless of the age of the patient. Private insurance and state programs usually pay for the remaining 20 percent," he said. "This has been a rumor that has plagued the National Kidney Foundation ... for decades and has recently resurfaced, perhaps fueled by the Internet," he said. Plastic bottle caps have no value in reycling, unlike aluminum, which Van Steenbergen said may be a fundraising source for other organizations. A similar "cause," plastic bottle caps for chemotherapy, has been exposed as a hoax in New York, West Virginia, and elsewhere in recent years, according to the American Cancer Society. http://www.thecourier.com/Opinion/columns/2011/Apr/JU/ar_JU_042511.asp?d=042511,2011,Apr,25&c=c_13

1987 On 4 May, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that Rotary clubs may not exclude women from membership on the basis of gender. Rotary issues a policy statement that any Rotary club in the United States can admit qualified women into membership. The Board "encourages all clubs in the U.S. to give fair and equal consideration to candidates for membership without regard to gender."
1988 In November, the RI Board of Directors issues a policy statement recognizing the right of Rotary clubs in Canada to admit female members based on a Canadian law similar to that upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court.
1989 At its first meeting after the 1987 U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Council on Legislation votes to eliminate the requirement in the RI Constitution that membership in Rotary clubs be limited to men. http://www.rotary.org/en/mediaandnews/news/pages/091001_news_history.aspx

Kiwanis International is an international, coeducational service club founded in 1915. It is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana. Current membership is 240,000 members in 7,700 clubs in 80 Nations. The average age is 57, 74% men; 26% women. The name “Kiwanis” was coined from an Otchipew American Indian expression, "Nunc Kee-wanis", variously translated as "we trade," "we share out talents," "we make a noise," or "we meet." This was originally the motto of Kiwanis, translated as "We build." The current motto is "Serving the children of the world". Members of the club are called Kiwanians. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwanis

Prior to September 29, 1995 to be eligible for membership in the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, an applicant had to be, inter alia, a male citizen of the United States of America. On September 29, 1995 the Grand Lodge amended its constitution to permit women to be eligible for membership. http://ny.findacase.com/research/wfrmDocViewer.aspx/xq/fac.19981008_43403.NY.htm/qx

Lions Clubs International (LCI) is a secular service organization with over 44,500 clubs and more than 1.3 million members in 206 countries around the world. Headquartered in Oak Brook, Illinois, United States, the organization aims to meet the needs of communities on a local and global scale. Membership is by invitation, though individuals are rarely turned away, and attendance at meetings is expected on a monthly or fortnightly basis. Due to the hierarchical nature of Lions Clubs International, members have the opportunity to advance from a local club to an office at the zone, district, multiple district and international levels. In 1986 the constitution of Lions Clubs International was amended to allow for women to become members. Since then many clubs have admitted women, but some all-male clubs still exist. In 2003, 8 out of 17 members at the Lions Club in Worcester, England resigned when a woman joined the club. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions_Clubs_International

The first Exchange Club was formed in Detroit, Michigan in 1911. The second was the Exchange Club of Toledo, Ohio formed in 1913. Subsequently, two others were organized in Grand Rapids, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio. These four clubs were the first to be chartered by the National Exchange Club after it was organized as a nonprofit, educational organization in 1917 and its headquarters established in Toledo, Ohio. On July 4, 1985, delegates voted to allow women membership in Exchange. http://www.nationalexchangeclub.org/100years/100-years-media.pdf

Cyberpunk is a postmodern and science fiction genre noted for its focus on "high tech and low life." The name is a portmanteau of cybernetics and punk, and was originally coined by Bruce Bethke as the title of his short story "Cyberpunk," published in 1983. It features advanced science, such as information technology and cybernetics, coupled with a degree of breakdown or radical change in the social order. Cyberpunk works are well situated within postmodern literature. Cyberpunk plots often center on a conflict among hackers, artificial intelligences, and megacorporations, and tend to be set in a near-future Earth, rather than the far-future settings or galactic vistas found in novels such as Isaac Asimov's Foundation or Frank Herbert's Dune. The settings are usually post-industrial dystopias but tend to be marked by extraordinary cultural ferment and the use of technology in ways never anticipated by its creators ("the street finds its own uses for things"). Much of the genre's atmosphere echoes film noir, and written works in the genre often use techniques from detective fiction. Primary exponents of the cyberpunk field include William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, and John Shirley. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk

William Ford Gibson (born 1948) is an American-Canadian writer who has been called the "noir prophet" of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his short story "Burning Chrome" and later popularized the concept in his debut novel, Neuromancer (1984). In envisaging cyberspace, Gibson created an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. He is also credited with predicting the rise of reality television and with establishing the conceptual foundations for the rapid growth of virtual environments such as video games and the World Wide Web. Gibson's early works are bleak, noir near-future stories about the effect of cybernetics and computer networks on humans – a "combination of lowlife and high tech". The short stories were published in popular science fiction magazines. The themes, settings and characters developed in these stories culminated in his first novel, Neuromancer, which garnered critical and commercial success, virtually initiating the cyberpunk literary genre. After expanding on Neuromancer with two more novels to complete the dystopic Sprawl trilogy, Gibson became an important author of another science fiction sub-genre—steampunk—with the 1990 alternate history novel The Difference Engine, written with Bruce Sterling. In the 1990s, he composed the Bridge trilogy of novels, which focused on sociological observations of near-future urban environments and late capitalism. His most recent novels— Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010) —are set in a contemporary world and have put his work onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Gibson

A MacGuffin (sometimes McGuffin or maguffin) is "a plot element that catches the viewers' attention or drives the plot of a work of fiction". The defining aspect of a MacGuffin is that the major players in the story are (at least initially) willing to do and sacrifice almost anything to obtain it, regardless of what the MacGuffin actually is. In fact, the specific nature of the MacGuffin may be ambiguous, undefined, generic, left open to interpretation or otherwise completely unimportant to the plot. Common examples are money, victory, glory, survival, a source of power, or a potential threat, or it may simply be something entirely unexplained.
The MacGuffin is common in films, especially thrillers. Usually, though not always, the MacGuffin is the central focus of the film in the first act, and then declines in importance as the struggles and motivations of characters play out. It may come back into play at the climax of the story, but sometimes the MacGuffin is actually forgotten by the end of the film. Multiple MacGuffins are sometimes—somewhat derisively—referred to as plot coupons. The director and producer Alfred Hitchcock popularized both the term "MacGuffin" and the technique, with his 1935 film The 39 Steps, an early example of the concept. Hitchcock explained the term "MacGuffin" in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University: "[We] have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacGuffin

Patina is a tarnish that forms on the surface of bronze and similar metals (produced by oxidation or other chemical processes); a sheen on wooden furniture produced by age, wear, and polishing; or any such acquired change of a surface through age and exposure. On metal, patina is a coating of various chemical compounds such as oxides or carbonates formed on the surface during exposure to the elements (weathering). Patina also refers to accumulated changes in surface texture and colour that result from normal use of an object such as a coin or a piece of furniture over time. The word "patina" comes from the Latin for "shallow dish". Figuratively, patina can refer to any fading, darkening or other signs of age, which are felt to be natural or unavoidable (or both). The chemical process by which a patina forms is called patination, and a work of art coated by a patina is said to be patinated. See beautiful pictures of the Statue of Liberty and a bronze coin at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patina

In the simplest terms, a pixel is a dot, but you rarely find just one. They travel in packs. Your computer screen, most likely, arranges them in a 1280 x 1024 phalanx - a megapixel, roughly. The word itself is a portmanteau, a blending of the words "picture" and "element." And according to the Oxford English Dictionary, it was first introduced to the reading public in the pages of Science magazine in 1969, in an article that explained just exactly how NASA spacecraft beamed the first pictures of Mars back to Earth. These days, the pixel has gained heft, something analogous to mass. Our advanced computer graphics systems describe their 3D worlds as an array of "voxels" - short for "volumetric pixel," the atomic unit of cyberspace. Even more advanced systems map light with "luxels" - think photons. Surfaces are rendered with "textels". Yet even if you exclude all the newfangled "els," there are likely more pixels in the world than any other flavour of digital information. Twenty five percent of all internet traffic is pixelated, and will exceed all other traffic combined by 2012. http://www.iconeye.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&catid=423&id=3880

The terms bit and byte are common in computer networking. Both terms refer to digital data transmitted over a network connection. For example, bits and bytes both may represent network addresses or port numbers.
A bit is a single numeric value, either '1' or '0', that encodes a single unit of digital information. A byte is a sequence of bits; usually eight bits equal one byte. http://compnetworking.about.com/cs/basicnetworking/f/bitsandbytes.htm

Convert between bits/bytes/kilobits/kilobytes/megabits/megabytes/gigabits/gigabytes http://www.matisse.net/bitcalc/

President Obama on April 27 posted online a copy of his “long form” birth certificate from the State of Hawaii, hoping to finally end a long-simmering conspiracy theory among some conservatives who have asserted that he was not born in the United States and was not a legitimate president. The birth certificate, which is posted on the White House Web site, shows that Mr. Obama was born in Honolulu and is signed by state officials and his mother. “The president believed the distraction over his birth certificate wasn’t good for the country,” Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, wrote on the Web site Wednesday morning. Mr. Pfeiffer said on the site that Mr. Obama had authorized officials in Hawaii, who had routinely made available a shorter version of the birth certificate, to release the longer, more complete document. Mr. Obama said Wednesday that he had decided to release the document in an effort to end the “silliness” about his birth, which threatened to distract the country from serious issues. http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/obamas-long-form-birth-certificate-released/?hp

Certificate of live birth, 61 10641, State of Hawaii, Barack Hussein Obama II
http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/042711obamabirthwsj.pdf

Jamaica is an island nation of the Greater Antilles, 234 kilometres (145 mi) in length and as much as 80 kilometres (50 mi) in width, and amounts to 10,990 square kilometres (4,243 sq mi). It is situated in the Caribbean Sea, about 145 kilometres (90 mi) south of Cuba, and 191 kilometres (119 mi) west of Hispaniola, the island harboring the nation-states Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Its indigenous Arawakan-speaking Taíno inhabitants named the island Xaymaca, meaning the "Land of Wood and Water", or the "Land of Springs". Once a Spanish possession known as Santiago, in 1655 it became an English, and later a British, colony, known as "Jamaica". It achieved full independence in 1962. The Arawak and Taino indigenous people, originating in South America, settled on the island between 4000 and 1000 BC. Christopher Columbus claimed Jamaica for Spain after landing there in 1494 and his probable landing point was Dry Harbour, now called Discovery Bay. There is some debate as to whether he landed in St. Ann's Bay or in Discovery Bay. St. Ann's Bay was the "Saint Gloria" of Columbus who first sighted Jamaica at this point. Jamaica is a parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy with the monarch being represented by a Governor-General. The head of state is Queen Elizabeth II, who officially uses the title "Queen of Jamaica" when she visits the country or performs duties overseas on Jamaica's behalf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamaica

Walmart or Wal-mart?
1962-1964,WALMART
1964-1981, WAL-MART "Frontier Font logo"
1981-1992, WAL-MART in updated font
1992-2008, WAL(star)MART
2008-, Walmart (starburst)
See graphics, including the Discount City mark used in print advertising and other things, but not building signage or annual reports at: http://www.underconsideration.com/brandnew/archives/less_hyphen_more_burst_for_wal.php

Quotes
Our virtues are most frequently but vices in disguise.
The only thing constant in life is change.
François de la Rochefoucauld (1613-1680) French writer

Goldendoodles, cockapoos and puggles are among the most popular cross-bred dogs in the U.S., according to the American Canine Hybrid Club. Nipping at their heels are cavachons, shih-poos and schnoodles, says the organization, which has registered and named 671 different hybrid combinations since it started registering litters in 1990. Golden retriever+poodle=goldendoodle. Cocker spaniel+poodle=cockapoo. Cavalier King Charles+bichon frise=cavachon. Maltese+yorkie=morkie. Pekingese+beagle=peagle.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704004004576271161275496124.html?mod=WSJ_newsreel_lifeStyle

The first sign of turmoil in the hilly neighborhood under the Hollywood sign came in the form of a smaller sign, whose message was so troubling somebody covered it with plastic bags. It read: "Hollywood Sign Scenic View," with an arrow pointing up a narrow street. The sign and four others like it guided tourists through a labyrinth of blind curves and steep inclines toward a view of the Hollywood sign. It also pushed tourists to one side of the neighborhood. "People were outraged and rightly so," said Sarajane Robinson Schwartz, the president of the Hollywoodland Homeowners Association, which decided to remove the signs a few weeks after the previous homeowners' board agreed to have them installed. The signs were uprooted. Their whereabouts are now secret, closely guarded by neighborhood factions at war over whether to reveal a path to the Hollywood sign, or try to keep tourists out of their neighborhood. Since the appearance—and disappearance—of the signs to the Hollywood sign, there have been threats of lawsuits, accusations of subversion of democracy, and class warfare among the community of filmmakers, lawyers, actors and artists that populate the grand mansions, renovations and ramshackle cottages here. Two neighbors recently asked the Los Angeles Police Department to investigate emails allegedly sent by someone impersonating the homeowners' association board. Originally built to advertise the Hollywoodland real-estate development in 1923, the sign for decades has done exactly what it was meant to do—draw people to the lush Los Angeles hillside on which it sits. On sunny weekends, lines of cars and tour vans creep up steep inclines to end up in a tangle on dead-end streets. Los Angeles city council member Tom LaBonge, who represents the neighborhood, asked both groups to get in the same car and show him the trouble spots. The idea was rejected. "I didn't have the Jimmy Carter in me to bring these two different groups together," said Mr. LaBonge, who says he can't see barring tourists from the streets, but does want to come up with alternate viewing sites. Mr. LaBonge and others say they are primarily concerned that tourists clog up a road that dead-ends at a gate leading to an access road for emergency vehicles. When the signs were up, traffic on the road to the emergency gate eased, residents there said. "The signs worked," said resident Martin Smith. He was so pleased that he sent an email to the Homeowners Association board expressing his appreciation for the signs. "My Dear Mr. Smith," a reply email began, "you wouldn't be so happy and upbeat if you paid $7 million for your little house…and had all those diesel-fueled tour busses and tourists screaming, yelling and blocking access to your house." For now, the Hollywoodland Homeowners Association has stopped working with the city council advisory board and is focused on its own plan, which does not include re-installing the scenic route signs. The neighborhood association and the city's advisory committee are working to get the signs back up, at least temporarily. One problem: They don't know where three of them are.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704529204576256561864418114.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_10_1

Four column-type wind turbines were added to the roof of the 22-floor structure at Toledo's One Government Center in October 2010. "It is part of going green and looking what we can do to save money," said Michael Sullivan, manager of Government Center. The $224,300 investment will make a small dent in the building's electric bill and will take at least 15 years to pay for itself. http://www.greenenergyohio.org/page.cfm?pageID=2836

One Government Center is also known as the DiSalle Center, and was completed in 1983. Approximately 1,500 state, city and county employees work in the building. Construction costs totaled approximately $61 million. It contains 505,272 square feet of office space, 327.5 feet high and has 22 stories. The four vertical wind turbines on roof use fabricated blades capable of catching wind from any direction. Their design allows birds to safely fly around the blades. The building is named in honor of Michael V. DiSalle, who was elected Governor in 1958. http://oba.ohio.gov/newver/disalle.htm

Seafood recommendations--what to buy and why--visit Monterey Bay Aquarium's Seafood Watch at: http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/seafoodwatch.aspx

Roman ricotta, is a fundamental ingredient in a number of dishes, from pastas to desserts. It was already being produced in the Roman period and mentioned by Cato the Elder. It is not surprising, therefore, that there are many recipes calling for ricotta in various ancient books, including the recipe for this tart, created by Francesco Palma. He refers to it as “pizza di ricotta” on page 75 of Il principe dei cuochi, o la vera cucina napolitana (The Prince of Cooks, or the True Neapolitan Cuisine), 1881. See recipe for the ricotta tart at: http://www.academiabarilla.com/recipes/lazio/ricotta-flan.aspx

A free port (porto franco) or free zone (zona franca), sometimes also called a bonded area (US: Foreign-Trade Zone) is a port, port area or other area with relaxed jurisdiction with respect to the country of location. Free economic zones may also be called free ports. Most commonly a free port is a special customs area with favorable customs regulations (or no customs duties and controls for transshipment). Earlier in history, some free ports like Hong Kong enjoyed political autonomy. Many international airports have free ports, though they tend to be called customs areas, customs zones, or international zones. See list of free ports by countries at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_free_ports

U.S. Foreign-Trade Zones http://ia.ita.doc.gov/ftzpage/letters/ftzlist-map.html

The Lake Erie Port of Toledo, Ohio is a multi-modal transportation hub with heavy waterborne, rail and highway activity. The seaport, rail station, two airports and Foreign Trade Zone 8 are managed by the Toledo-Lucas County Port Authority. http://www.toledoseaport.org/

Quotes from The Chairman, a novel by Stephen Frey
Politicians. Idiots, most of them because they never actually had to make money. They lived off others.
I can't help having ideas . . . it's what I do.

Winter radishes Black Spanish or Black Spanish Round occur in both round and elongated forms, and are sometimes simply called the black radish or known by the French name Gros Noir d'Hiver. It dates in Europe to 1548, and was a common garden variety in England and France the early 19th century. It has a rough black skin with hot-flavored white flesh, is round or irregularly pear shaped, and grows to around 10 cm (4 in) in diameter. Daikon refers to a wide variety of winter radishes from Asia. While the Japanese name daikon has been adopted in English, it is also sometimes called the Japanese radish, Chinese radish, Oriental radish or mooli (in India and South Asia). Daikon commonly have elongated white roots, although many varieties of daikon exist. One well known variety is April Cross, with smooth white roots. The New York Times describes Masato Red and Masato Green varieties as extremely long, well suited for fall planting and winter storage. The Sakurajima daikon is a hot-flavored variety which is typically grown to around 10 kg (22 lb), but which can grow to 30 kg (66 lb) when left in the ground. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radish

Contrary to what many in the public seem to think, General Electric did pay taxes in 2010. It reported $2.7 billion in cash tax payments during the year, and on its income statement lists a provision for income taxes of $1.05 billion. Considering GE's pretax income of $14.2 billion, that makes for a tax rate of just 7.4%. The only one of the 20 corporate giants with a lower rate was AT&T, at -6.4% -- but that was only because MaBell won a tax settlement with the IRS that reduced its tax liability by $8.3 billion. So how to make sense of GE's taxes? The outcry seems to focus on the $5 billion in profits GE made in the U.S. Now if GE were to pay the 35% statutory federal corporate tax rate on that, it would come to $1.75 billion. Yet, as the Times trumpeted, GE has recorded a $3.25 billion tax benefit for the year on its U.S. operations. It's important to understand that this "benefit" is not a refund. It just represents an amount GE will balance out against other tax obligations. But why does GE get this benefit? Simple: its finance arm, GE Capital, lost a lot of money during the financial meltdown (roughly $30 billion) and it's still carrying those losses forward and deducting them from current income. As GE spokesman Gary Sheffer wrote in his response to the Times story: "Without these financial crisis losses at GE Capital, GE's tax rate would have been near the average of other multinational corporations." He added, "In short, when you lose money, you don't pay taxes." See taxes paid by the top U.S. corporations at: http://finance.yahoo.com/taxes/article/112560/what-top-companies-pay-taxes-forbes

More books are produced in print each year than in the previous year. One million new titles will appear worldwide in 2011. In one day in Britain—"Super Thursday," last October 1—800 new works were published. The latest figures for the United States cover only 2009, and they do not distinguish between new books and new editions of old books. But the total number, 288,355, suggests a healthy market, and the growth in 2010 and 2011 is likely to be much greater. Moreover, these figures, furnished by Bowker, do not include the explosion in the output of "nontraditional" books—a further 764,448 titles produced by self-publishing authors and "micro-niche" print-on-demand enterprises. And the book business is booming in developing countries like China and Brazil. http://chronicle.com/article/5-Myths-About-the-Information/127105/

Laurel Gotshall Blair, founder of the Blair Museum of Lithophanes, was born in Toledo in 1909. He attended Scott High School and the University of Michigan. Like his father before him, he served as president of the Toledo Board of Realtors. A lifelong lover of beauty, Laurel was visiting a fellow musical box collector in Berlin Heights, Ohio, when he saw for the first time in the windows delicate porcelain pictures illuminated by the sun shining through them lithophanes. "And with that," he frequently said, "I fell in love." The Blair Museum of Lithophanes is home to over 2300 antique lithophanes. http://www.lithophanemuseum.org/who_was_laurel_blair.htm

The Blair Museum of Lithophanes will open its season with a free reception from 2 to 4 p.m. April 30. The museum is at Toledo Botanical Garden, 5403 Elmer Drive. Featured will be a new exhibit, Hands Illuminating Porcelain: The Lithophanes of Hannah Blackwell, continuing through Oct. 30. A recent graduate of the Kansas City Art Institute, Blackwell studied the 19th-century art in Hungary. The exhibit includes nine flat-panel lithophanes, lamps, and a tutorial which shows how she makes a lithophane, beginning with carving a model in beeswax, creating a plaster mold, pressing porcelain, and finally, firing the work. Information: 419-245-1356
http://www.toledoblade.com/Art/2011/04/21/Blair-Museum-opens-for-the-season-April-30.html

When jurors were chosen for the perjury trial of baseball star Barry Bonds this month, they were barred from using social media in regards to the case. Such a ban doesn’t extend to lawyers, who mine Facebook Inc. profiles of jurors to unearth a bias that might hurt or help their side. Facebook, Twitter Inc. and other services have become a major resource for both prosecutors and defense attorneys, letting them glean more insight than they can get from jury questionnaires, said Joseph Rice, chief executive officer of Jury Research Institute in Alamo, California. “Social media has given us an incredible tool, because it’s something jurors voluntarily engage in, and they post information about their activities or affiliations or hobbies,” Rice said. That reveals “their life experience or attitude that may have an impact on how they view the facts of the case.” The practice adds fuel to the debate over social-networking privacy and whether Internet postings should be used to reject someone from a job or academic program -- or a seat in the jury box. Facebook has more than 500 million users, while Twitter members post 140 million messages daily. That yields a wealth of data that lawyers can use to screen people or hone arguments. To ensure lawyers aren’t surprised, companies are selling social-media monitoring services. DecisionQuest, a trial consulting firm, started offering it three years ago, said Christine Martin, a senior consultant with the firm in New York. “In the old days, they could use private investigators,” Martin said. “This just makes it a lot easier.” She cites an example last year of a Michigan woman who was removed from a jury because she said on Facebook that the defendant was guilty -- before arguments were finished. In the Bonds case, jurors had to agree in writing not to communicate about the case via social media, the Internet “or any other means, electronic or otherwise,” according to a filing in federal court in San Francisco.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-03-31/trial-lawyers-scour-jury-members-profiles-on-facebook-twitter.html

The second O+ Festival in Kingston, New York is developing relationships with supporters from the West Coast to the UK, with plans to expand, and the team is assembling an elegant publication of photographs and essays along with a compilation CD to be released in June 2011. The festival is scheduled Oct. 7 to 9. The first O+ Festival was a massive success. a wonderful turnout. outstanding music and art from 30 bands, 48 visual, performance, and film artists. at the first O+ artists’ clinic, 38,000 dollars of medical, dental and wellness services were administered by 40 health care providers to festival artists, free of charge. See much more at: http://opositivefestival.org/art-music-wellness/

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day
From: James Downie Subject: Joke about knots
Surely you have heard the story about three pieces of string who go into a bar. The first piece of string orders the drinks and the barman says, "We don't serve strings in here." The second piece of string fails as dismally. The third piece ties himself up, fluffs out his ends and saunters up to the bar. "Three beers and make it snappy!" he shouts. The barman turns around and looks puzzled. "You're a string, aren't you?" he asks. The string says, "No, I'm a frayed knot!"
From: Paula Meier Subject: Knotty
I often use this word as a pun. I make and sell hand-tied Celtic knotwork jewelry. I often sell at Renaissance Faires and as part of my sales pitch I tell the crowds "I am a Knotty girl. I like to tie one on, in public! Which is not to say tie one up but that can be fun too." This often gets the attention I seek.
From Gary Glasser Subject: Gordian
Def: Highly intricate; extremely difficult to solve.
Might one say one cuts the Gordian knot with Occam's razor?

Edith Wharton (1862-1937) wrote over 40 books in 40 years, including authoritative works on architecture, gardens, interior design, and travel. Essentially self-educated, she was the first woman awarded: the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, an honorary Doctorate of Letters from Yale University, and full membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Edith Wharton designed and built her "first real home," The Mount, in 1902. The Mount was Wharton's design laboratory where she implemented the principles articulated in her first major book, The Decoration of Houses (1897). Wharton believed that the design of a house should be treated architecturally and should honor the principles of proportion, harmony, simplicity, and suitability. She viewed proportion as the "good breeding of architecture" and symmetry as the "sanity of decoration." She saw house decoration as "a branch of architecture" and the decorator's role as "not to explain illusions, but to produce them." She thought gardens, too, should be architectural compositions.
http://www.edithwharton.org/index.php?catId=6&subCatId=16

Alliteration is the repetition of the same sound, usually of a consonant, at the beginning of two or more words immediately succeeding each other or at short intervals. Two examples:
(1) The repetition of f and g in fields ever fresh, groves ever green
(2) Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. A peck of pickled peppers, Peter Piper picked. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked? http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061204162937AA40mUK
Alliterative names: Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Calvin Coolidge, Ronald Reagan, Billy Budd, January Jones.
Clark Kent

Q: Is it true that some of the newly-elected congressmen are living in their offices at the Capitol in Washington?
A: Yes, and Rep. Jim Jordan and Rep. Bob Latta, both R-Ohio, are among at least 30, and perhaps as many as 50, lawmakers who do so.
The Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which made the estimate, has called for the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate whether the congressmen are getting an unfair tax break and violating their own rules by making personal use of public resources on Capitol Hill. Although the newest congressmen have swelled the number of office-sleepers, the practice is not new. "For years, at least a few lawmakers have slept on couches and cots in their offices to avoid long commutes or pricey Washington rents," Associated Press reported. "Some see it as a badge of honor, a commitment to frugality and hard work, and a reminder to constituents they don't consider Washington home," it reported. AP, Jordan and Latta aides
Q: Where is the new population center from the 2010 Census?
A: It is 2.7 miles northeast of Plato, Mo. ¬¬ U.S. Census Bureau
http://www.thecourier.com/Opinion/columns/2011/Apr/JU/ar_JU_041811.asp?d=041811,2011,Apr,18&c=c_13

Amazon said on April 20 that it will launch the public-library feature—which gives the Kindle the same library-borrowing abilities as competing e-reading devices such as Barnes & Noble Inc.'s Nook and Sony Corp.'s Reader—later this year. "We think customers are going to love this new library feature," said a spokeswoman for the Seattle-based retailer. The move is likely to have major repercussions for public libraries and the digital-reading market generally, since Amazon currently dominates the e-book industry and its actions in the space are closely watched. There are an estimated 7.5 million Kindles in the U.S., which gives Amazon a two-thirds share of the $1 billion digital-book market, said Forrester Research analyst James McQuivey. There likely will be little immediate impact on Amazon's business since no money changes hands in borrowing digital books. But analysts said the new feature could help adoption of the Kindle in the long term, potentially leading to greater Kindle book sales. Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, which holds the second-biggest share of the e-reader market with its Nook reader, said Amazon's announcement "is not news for Nook customers who have always had access to library services." Many major public libraries, including those in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, offer free digital-book lending. A physical trip to the library isn't required. Instead, library-card holders can download books from library websites. Each library sets its own digital-book lending policy, but typical lending periods are 14 or 21 days. Libraries need to purchase digital copies of books in order to lend them out. The e-books are then loaned out as if they were physical books. Only one person can check out each digital copy at a time. The question of library lending has been thorny for publishers. A key issue is that unlike physical books, digital copies don't wear out, which means publishers and authors don't benefit from a popular title that has to be reordered because of extended use. Two of the country's largest publishers, CBS Corp.'s Simon & Schuster Inc., and Macmillan, a unit of Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH, don't currently sell their digital works to libraries. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704570704576274802584356140.html

The BORDERS – GET PUBLISHED™ co-branded service allows users to create an eBook in a few simple steps using the intuitive BookBrewer tools and then make that content available for sale within a few days on Borders.com and other major eBook outlets, including Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, Apple iBooks and Google Books. Users can easily load, format and have their content displayed across a number of technology platforms, including the iPhone®, iPad™, Android™-powered tablets, as well as a variety of eReaders, notably the Kobo™ Wireless eReader, Kobo™ eReader, Aluratek Libre Pro and Velocity® Micro Cruz™ Reader. BORDERS – GET PUBLISHED™ Powered by BookBrewer is the only retailer-aligned eBook self publishing service that includes an integrated Print on Demand feature, which enables users to create an automated print version of the book and allows them to buy copies for as low as $4 and mark them up to sell to others independently at a profit. http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/borders-empowers-teachers-to-become-ebook-authors-119188874.html

Five years after ground was broken (and four since the economic collapse that almost thwarted the project), Iceland has opened the Harpa Reykjavík Concert Hall and Conference Center. The shimmering building was designed by Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, who has made a career out of reinterpreting the earth's elements. He hung a semicircular sun composed of hundreds of lamps inside London's Tate Modern and installed four waterfalls on New York's East River. Back home, he found inspiration in the giant basalt columns formed by Iceland's volcanic substrate. See the glass-and-steel honeycomb facade of the new Harpa Concert Hall and Conference Center at: http://www.concierge.com/cntraveler/articles/503662

A 10-year-old blind school girl has become the youngest interpreter to work at the European Parliament. Alexia Sloane is fluent in four languages – English, French, Spanish and Mandarin. Sloane, who lost her sight when she was 2-years-old after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, is also now in the process of learning German. http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/90045050?Blind%20girl%2C%2010%2C%20youngest%20interpreter%20for%20European%20Parliament

American Institute of Architects/American Library Association 2011 Library Building Awards
Arkansas Studies Institute
KAUST Library
Mattapan Branch Library, Boston Public Library
Harmon Library, Phoenix Public Library
William Oxley Thompson Memorial Library See pictures and find information on the buildings at: http://www.aia.org/practicing/awards/2011/library-awards/index.htm

The Wisconsin Historical Society recently acquired photographs from 1912 of AIA's Gold Medalist Frank Lloyd Wright's summer home, Taliesin, near Spring, Green, Wisconsin. See at: http://info.aia.org/aiarchitect/2011/multimedia/slideshows/FLW-Taliesin/FLW-Taliesin.html

When Frank Lloyd Wright decided to construct a home in this valley, he chose the name of the Welsh bard Taliesin, whose name means "shining brow" or "radiant brow". Wright positioned the home on the "brow" of a hill, a favorite of his from childhood, rather than on the peak so that Taliesin would appear as if it arose naturally from the landscape. In his words, "...not on the land, but of the land". (And Taliesin is the earliest poet of the Welsh language whose work has survived.) The home was designed with three wings that included his living quarters, an office, and farm buildings. On August 15, 1914, while Wright was in Chicago completing a large project, Midway Gardens, Julian Carlton, a manservant whom Wright had hired two months earlier, set fire to the living quarters of Taliesin and murdered seven people with an axe as the fire burned. The dead were: his mistress, Mamah; her two children, John and Martha; Thomas Brunker, the foreman; Emil Brodelle, a draftsman; David Lindblom, a landscape gardener; and Ernest Weston, the son of the carpenter William Weston. Two victims survived the mêlée—William Weston and draftsman Herb Fritz—and the elder Weston helped to put out the fire that almost completely consumed the residential wing of the house. Carlton, hiding in the unlit furnace, survived the fire but died in jail six weeks later. Wright eventually rebuilt the living quarters, naming it Taliesin II. These living quarters were again destroyed by fire on April 22, 1925. Wright began the rebuilding of Taliesin, which he now named Taliesin III, shortly afterward. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taliesin_(studio)

Taliesin is one of the most well-known and highly-regarded early Welsh poets, as being one of a number of early poets who flourished in the late sixth century. He set the benchmark for panegyric verse - a speech or text in praise of someone or something - which remained a tradition in Welsh literature until the Middle Ages. The majority of work accredited to Taliesin has been collected in The Book of Taliesin, of which about a dozen poems are believed to be genuinely from his own hand. Dating from around the first half of the 14th century it is one of the most famous Welsh manuscripts and, along with poems written by Taliesin, contains many famous early Welsh poems such as Armes Prydein and Preiddeu Annwfn, a poem featuring Arthur. In the mid 16th century Elis Gruffydd wrote a mytholigised account of Taliesin's life, entitled Ystoria Taliesin, The Story of Taliesin. http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/arts/sites/early-welsh-literature/pages/taliesin.shtml

Robo-signing is the process of signing complex documents without first evaluating their contents. Robocall is a term for an automated phone call that uses both a computerized autodialer and a computer-delivered pre-recorded message.

In January 2011, Aaron Titus got a robocall at 4:30 in the morning from the Prince George's County (Maryland) School District, informing him of something he'd learned the night before from the district's website - that the opening of school would be delayed by two hours, due to snow. "I picked up the phone and it said, 'You can sleep in for two hours,'" Tutus recalled, "and so I was a little perturbed." The 31-year-old lawyer from the D.C. suburb of Fort Washington, Md., says he was irate, and decided turnabout was the perfect fair play. So, he called a company that does robocalls and arranged to have one made the following morning - at 4:30 - to nine school board members as well as the district's superintendent and its general counsel. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/01/15/earlyshow/saturday/main7249322.shtml

The lengthy patent battle between TiVo and EchoStar took a decisive turn in TiVo’s favor April 20 when the Federal Circuit ruled that EchoStar continued to infringe on TiVo’s patents for digital video-recording devices. Find the ruling here: http://www.cafc.uscourts.gov/images/stories/opinions-orders/09-1374.pdf The court ruled as it did despite EchoStar’s efforts to change the technology in its devices following an earlier court injunction. The court also said EchoStar had acted in contempt of a provision within that injunction that ordered the satellite television company to disable all infringing devices already sold to customers. The decision also affects Dish, a sister company that relies on EchoStar’s devices for its service. The legal battle dates back to 2004, when TiVo accused satellite TV provider EchoStar’s Dish Network of violating TiVo’s patent for software that allows users to record one TV program while watching another. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/2011/04/20/why-is-this-little-television-smiling-click-here/

The law firm Beasley Allen recently dropped its high-profile lawsuit against Taco Bell which claimed that the meat used in Taco Bell’s food was something other than advertised. Taco Bell placed a full-page ad on page A7 of The Wall Street Journal on April 20 ripping the law firm that brought the suit, Montgomery, Alabama-based Beasley Allen. “Would it kill you to say you’re sorry?” reads the ad, in about 50-point type. http://blogs.wsj.com/law/?p=39861?mod=djemlawblog_h

Upcoming Icelandic music festival Aldrei for eg sudur (I never went south), taking place on 22-23 April 2011 in Iceland’s Westfjords, is to be streamed live via the Inspired by Iceland website, giving music lovers across the world a chance to tune in and be a part of one of Iceland’s most celebrated music festivals. Located in Isafjordur, the festival brings together live performances from local bands with the biggest names in the Icelandic music scene, all surrounded by the beautiful mountain slopes and quaint, colourful town houses. Aldrei for eg sudur first began as an idea between Icelandic musician Mugison and his father, both of them Isafjordur natives. Since its inception in 2004, the festival has gone from strength to strength, with festival-goers praising the relaxed atmosphere, unique location and the consistently strong festival line-up.
http://www.icenews.is/index.php/2011/04/18/icelandic-music-festival-to-be-streamed-live-via-inspired-by-iceland-website/

The black paintstick that Richard Serra uses in his drawings rarely produces the same effect: It can thicken like asphalt, pucker delicately like lace or pour down paper like a sheet of rain. Those textures fill the rooms of "Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective," an exhibit that opened the week of April 11 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The works span 40 years and include massive floor-to-ceiling pieces that dwarf the viewer, just like the abstract sculptures that have made Mr. Serra an art-world powerhouse. The 71-year-old artist said drawing has been a refuge since he was four years old. "It's a place where I can get lost and a place where I can throw out work and a place where I don't have to worry about what it is I'm up to," he said in an interview. The exhibit, which runs through Aug. 28 before moving to San Francisco and Houston, showcases Mr. Serra's methods, which include pouring molten paintstick—a combination of pigment, oil and wax—onto a flat surface, pressing a mesh screen over the material, covering that with paper and pressing the back of the work with a metal tool before peeling the paper back to reveal the image. Mr. Serra created the technique in 2001 after the terrorist attacks. Then, as now, he lived near the World Trade Center site. "You understand that life has an expectancy, but it could be snuffed out at any minute," he said. "Your lifespan is a nanosecond, and if you have a contribution to make, you better make it now."
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704116404576262823623292428.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_sections_lifestyle

Florida is one of only three states that require commercial interior designers to become licensed before they hang a single painting in an office building, school or restaurant. A bill making its way through the state legislature, however, would deregulate the occupation, along with more than a dozen others, including yacht brokers and hair braiders. Similar tussles have broken out elsewhere, but Florida, which is considered by many in the industry to have the most strictly enforced licensing law in the country, is ground zero. A host of national interest groups have descended on Tallahassee, including the pro-licensing American Society of Interior Designers and the anti-licensing National Kitchen and Bath Association. Among the auctioneers, travel agents and telemarketers who are also in town lobbying to keep their professions regulated, designers have made the biggest ruckus. Under a state law passed in 1994, anyone who wants to practice commercial interior design in Florida must be licensed. That means completing a combined six years of schooling and apprenticeship and passing a two-day exam. Anyone can perform residential interior design, but until recently, the law prohibited such workers from calling themselves "designers." They had to settle for "decorators." http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703551304576260742209315376.html?mod=WSJ_topics_obama

Herbert Marshall McLuhan, (1911 –1980) was a Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar—a professor of English literature, a literary critic, a rhetorician, and a communication theorist. McLuhan's work is viewed as one of the cornerstones of the study of media theory, as well as having practical applications in the advertising and television industries. McLuhan is known for coining the expressions "the medium is the message" and "the global village" and predicted the World Wide Web almost thirty years before it was invented. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
Note: Today the medium is the messenger if you consider the promotion of newscasters as celebrities and the effort to persuade you to watch a particular person rather than listening to content.

The Ohio Historical Society's old-building experts, the Building Doctors, are coming to Toledo May 5-6 for a free Building Doctor Clinic for area old-building owners, cosponsored by United North Community Development Corporation, Toledo Chapter, American Institute of Architects, Toledo-Lucas County Plan Commission, and Toledo Historic District Commission. The clinic includes a free seminar on care and maintenance of older buildings, followed by free on-site consultations to examine old-building problems and prescribe cures. Seminar: Thursday, May 5, 2011, 7:00-9:00 p.m., Casey-Pomeroy House, 802 N. Huron St., Toledo. The Building Doctors are experts on old-building maintenance and repairs, as well as bringing buildings built before 1955 up-to-date while preserving their historic features. If you own an older home or building or are involved in care and maintenance of one, don't miss this informative seminar, including ways to solve common problems like peeling paint or flaking plaster, wet basements, deteriorating masonry, window work, and other old-building topics. The seminar is free, but you must register in advance. To register, visit www.building-doctor.org, or call toll free 1-800-499-2470. Consultations by appointment: Friday, May 6, 9:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.

The Los Angeles Times won the Pulitzer Prize for public service April 18 for a series revealing that politicians in the struggling, working-class city of Bell (Los Angeles County) were paying themselves extravagant, six-figure salaries. See 2011 journalism and arts winners at:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/04/18/MN7L1J2VVP.DTL

Members meet regularly for lunch or dinner, write songs about liver and hold holiday gatherings. At the Halloween outing of the Pittsburgh Liver and Onions Club, co-founder Jeanette Matthews, and her son, Ed, dyed some sheets and dressed up as liver and onions. The group has a Christmas carol with a liver theme sung to the tune "Walking in a Winter Wonderland." Sample: "What a dish, c'mon try it. It's delish, toss the diet, the taste we adore and you'll ask for more. Liver and Onions—That's for sure." The Regina Liver Lovers Luncheon Club in Saskatchewan holds potluck liver picnics in the summer and has a sister club in Comox, British Columbia. Loosely organized Ditto's Liver and Onion Club of Stanwood, Iowa, was started by a loyal patron of Ditto's Family Restaurant who compiled a list of area liver lovers and invited them to a first-Monday-of-the-month $5.75 liver special. The U.S. produced 108,771 metric tons of edible liver in 2010, but it ships 89% overseas, most to Egypt. Americans just don't like it, says Sara Goodwin, the association's communications director. A three-ounce serving of liver contains 260 to 300 milligrams of cholesterol, which exceeds the daily recommendation, but it also is rich in nutrients and was often recommended to pregnant women needing extra iron. The Pittsburgh Liver and Onions Club met recently in the back room of the Getaway Cafe. President Alycia Bencloski pounded the club gavel, which happens to be a meat tenderizer, to bring the meeting to order. The secretary read the monthly minutes, announcing proceeds of the last raffle, which will be used to rent a pavilion for a summer picnic.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704843404576251271955583098.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_RIGHTTopCarousel_2

City upon a hill is a phrase from the parable of Salt and Light in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. The phrase entered the American lexicon early in its history, in the Puritan John Winthrop's 1630 sermon "A Model of Christian Charity". Still aboard the ship Arbella, Winthrop admonished the future Massachusetts Bay colonists that their new community would be a "city upon a hill", watched by the world. Winthrop's sermon gave rise to the widespread belief in American folklore that the United States of America is God's country because metaphorically it is a Shining City upon a Hill. On 9 January 1961, President-Elect John F. Kennedy returned the phrase to prominence during an address delivered to the General Court of Massachusetts:
...I have been guided by the standard John Winthrop set before his shipmates on the flagship Arbella three hundred and thirty-one years ago, as they, too, faced the task of building a new government on a perilous frontier. "We must always consider", he said, "that we shall be as a city upon a hill—the eyes of all people are upon us". Today the eyes of all people are truly upon us—and our governments, in every branch, at every level, national, state and local, must be as a city upon a hill — constructed and inhabited by men aware of their great trust and their great responsibilities. For we are setting out upon a voyage in 1961 no less hazardous than that undertaken by the Arbella in 1630. We are committing ourselves to tasks of statecraft no less awesome than that of governing the Massachusetts Bay Colony, beset as it was then by terror without and disorder within. History will not judge our endeavors—and a government cannot be selected—merely on the basis of color or creed or even party affiliation. Neither will competence and loyalty and stature, while essential to the utmost, suffice in times such as these. For of those to whom much is given, much is required... President Ronald Reagan used the image as well, in his 1984 acceptance of the Republican Party nomination and in his January 11, 1989 farewell speech to the nation: ...I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill


A simile is a figure of speech that says that one thing is like another different thing. We can use similes to make descriptions more emphatic or vivid. We often use the words as...as and like with similes. Other similes are made with adverbs or words such as than and as if, for example:
He ran as fast as the wind.
He is larger than life.
They ran as if for their lives.
Similes can include other figures of speech. For example, "He ran like greased lightning" is a simile that includes hyperbole (greased lightning). Similes often make use of irony or sarcasm. In such cases they may even mean the opposite of the adjective used. Look at these examples:
His explanation was as clear as mud. (not clear at all since mud is opaque)
The film was about as interesting as watching a copy of Windows download. (long and boring)
Watching the show was like watching paint dry. (very boring) http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/figures-simile.htm

A metaphor is a figure of speech that says that one thing is another different thing. This allows us to use fewer words and forces the reader or listener to find the similarities. The word metaphor comes from the Greek word metapherin (meaning "transfer"). The simplest form of metaphor is: "The [first thing] is a [second thing]." Example: Her home was a prison.
Dead Metaphors
In the phrase "to grasp the concept" the physical action "to grasp" is used as a metaphor for "to understand" (which is non-physical). But this phrase has been used so often that most English speakers do not have an image of the physical action in their mind. This metaphor has died; it is a "dead metaphor".
Mixed Metaphors
The awkward use of two or more different metaphors at the same time is normally best avoided. It creates conflicting images in the reader or listener's mind, reduces each metaphor's impact, and generally causes confusion. http://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/figures-metaphor.htm
'This is awfully weak tea to have to hang your hat on.'"
"[T]he bill is mostly a stew of spending on existing programs, whatever their warts may be."
"The mayor has a heart as big as the Sahara for protecting 'his' police officers, and that is commendable. Unfortunately, he also often strips his gears by failing to engage the clutch when shifting what emanates from his brain to his mouth. The bullets he fires too often land in his own feet."
Read other examples of mixed metaphors at: http://grammar.about.com/od/qaaboutrhetoric/f/QAmixmetaphor.htm

The 111-year-old Philadelphia Orchestra filed for Chapter 11 reorganization on April 16. The orchestra said in a filing in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Philadelphia that a “precipitous decline in revenue” depleted cash reserves and unrestricted endowment to the point the ensemble would run out of cash next month. To regain financial viability, the orchestra says it needs relief from pension obligations, a new lease with the Kimmel Center where it performs, and a new union contract with musicians. The existing contract expires in September.
The union made $7 million in concessions in 2010 and 2011. While acknowledging that the union made “substantial concessions” in negotiations on a new contract, Worley said additional giveups offered by the musicians weren’t sufficient. Musicians are now covered by a union pension fund. Worley said that tickets sales represent one-third of income. Contributions represent 25 percent, and endowment makes up 40 percent of income. From Worley’s statement to the bankruptcy judge, it is unclear how bankruptcy alone will solve the orchestra’s financial problems except to the extent concessions from various parties encourage donors to make larger contributions. The case is In re The Philadelphia Orchestra Association, 11-13098, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Eastern District Pennsylvania (Philadelphia).
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2011-04-18/philadelphia-orchestra-lehman-innkeepers-bankruptcy.html

George Washington’s home, Historic Mount Vernon, broke ground at a special ceremony on April 14 for a new $47 million presidential library. The Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington will house 2,500 rare 18th and 19th-century books, including 80 books that were owned by Washington in addition to 500 letters, ledgers, and account books that bear George Washington‘s writing or signature. The five-acre facility, located across from Mount Vernon‘s conservation complex, will safeguard Washington’s books and manuscripts, serve as a scholarly retreat, create educational outreach programs on Washington, and provide seminars and training programs with a special focus on Washington’s leadership. The anticipated completion date for the library is 2013. http://museumpublicity.com/2011/04/15/new-george-washington-presidential-library-breaks-ground/

Robert Wyland (born 1956), known simply as Wyland, is an artist best known for painting large, outdoor murals of whales and other ocean life. Wyland was born in Detroit, Michigan. He grew up in Madison Heights, Michigan and attended Lamphere High School, where his 25th "whaling wall" is in the pool area of the high school. Wyland also painted a dome on the roof of his alma mater at Lamphere High School during the fall of 1999. During that time, the dome was vandalized by members of Lamphere's rival high school, Madison High School. It has since been repainted back to Royal Blue to represent the school's colors. Wyland divides his time between Oahu, Hawaii; Laguna Beach, California; and Florida. He had established a goal of painting 100 Whaling Walls by 2011. He reached his goal in 2008, by creating his 100th Whaling Wall in Beijing China to celebrate the Green Olympics. Since 2003, the Wyland Foundation has embarked on a five-year touring schedule to promote art, science, and conservation. The program has reached children along the East Coast, West Coast, and the Mississippi River regions. To date, the Wyland Foundation has conducted tour events in more than 35 states, Mexico and Canada, reaching more than 50 million people. In 2007, the artist (along with science educators and volunteers) conducted a national tour for clean water, themed, "From Pike's Peak to the Chesapeake Bay — Every Drop Counts," to raise awareness through art and science about protecting watersheds nationwide. Activities include water quality testing at rivers, bays and lakes, a pledge drive to reduce water waste, mural painting with children, life-size mazes about water conservation and a 1,000-square-foot (93 m2) clean water learning center on wheels, featuring exhibits about the future of river management, lake regions, estuaries, and wetlands. See more plus pictures of Whaling Walls at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wyland

Kashmir is the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term Kashmir geographically denoted only the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountain range. Today Kashmir denotes a larger area that includes the Indian-administered state of Jammu and Kashmir (the Kashmir valley, Jammu and Ladakh), the Pakistani-administered Gilgit-Baltistan and the Azad Kashmir provinces, and the Chinese-administered regions of Aksai Chin and Trans-Karakoram Tract. Historically, Kashmir became known worldwide when Cashmere wool was exported to other regions and nations (exports have ceased due to decreased abundance of the cashmere goat and increased competition from China). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashmir

CHAPTER I - FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION
SUBCHAPTER C - REGULATIONS UNDER SPECIFIC ACTS OF CONGRESS
PART 300 - RULES AND REGULATIONS UNDER THE WOOL PRODUCTS LABELING ACT OF 1939
300.19 - Use of terms “mohair” and “cashmere.”
(a) In setting forth the required fiber content of a product containing hair of the Angora goat known as mohair or containing hair or fleece of the Cashmere goat known as cashmere, the term mohair or cashmere, respectively, may be used for such fiber in lieu of the word wool, provided the respective percentage of each such fiber designated as mohair or cashmere is given, and provided further that such term mohair or cashmere where used is qualified by the word recycled when the fiber referred to is recycled wool as defined in the Act. The following are examples of fiber content designations permitted under this rule: 50% Mohair50% Wool 60% Recycled Mohair40% Cashmere 60% Cotton40% Recycled Cashmere.
(b) Where an election is made to use the term mohair or cashmere in lieu of the term wool as permitted by this section, the appropriate designation of mohair or cashmere shall be used at any time reference is made to such fiber in either required or nonrequired information. The term mohair or cashmere or any words, coined words, symbols or depictions connoting or implying the presence of such fibers shall not be used in nonrequired information on the required label or on any secondary or auxiliary label attached to the wool product if the term mohair or cashmere as the case may be does not appear in the required fiber content disclosure.
[29 FR 6625, May 21, 1964, as amended at 45 FR 44262, July 1, 1980] http://cfr.vlex.com/vid/300-ldquo-mohair-rdquo-cashmere-19636719

Find regulations for the European Union, U.S. and U.K. and link to definition of cashmere at: http://www.cashmere.org/cm/regulations.php

Gordian (GOR-dee-uhn) adjective Highly intricate; extremely difficult to solve. In Greek mythology, King Gordius of Phrygia tied a knot that defied all who tried to untie it. An oracle prophesied that one who would undo this Gordian knot would rule Asia. Alexander the Great simply cut the knot with one stroke of his sword. Hence the saying, "to cut the Gordian knot", meaning to solve a difficult problem by a simple, bold, and effective action. Earliest documented use: 1579. A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

His name was Reginald Alfred John Truscott-Jones. He is the only winner of the Best Actor Oscar to have uttered not a single word during his acceptance speech opting, instead, to simply bow his appreciation before casually exiting the stage. He is the first Welsh actor to receive an Academy Award. His stage name is Ray Milland. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001537/bio

Her name was Gabrielle Margaret Vere Long, née Campbell. She's best known under one of her most prolific pen names, Marjorie Bowen. She became a writer to support her family after the death of her alcoholic father, and published over 150 books under various pen names. She began writing in 1906 and published steadily until her death. As "George Preedy," she wrote a number of historical novels. As "Joseph Shearing," she wrote a number of novels, mostly fictionalized versions of real-life murders, and sometimes offering her own solutions. (Her Shearing novels were the most popular with filmmakers.) She also wrote as "John Winch," "Robert Paye," and "Margaret Campbell." http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0100884/bio

Community Supported Agriculture consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community's farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production. Typically, members or "share-holders" of the farm or garden pledge in advance to cover the anticipated costs of the farm operation and farmer's salary. http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/csa/csa.shtml
Databases to help you find a CSA in your area:
Local Harvest
USDA Alternative Farming Systems Information Center
Wilson College, Robyn Van En Center for CSA
Rodale Institute Farm Locator
ATTRA Local Food Directories
http://www.nal.usda.gov/afsic/pubs/csa/csa.shtml

"You Can Delegate Authority But Not Responsibility" is sometimes attributed to Stephen W. Comiskey. I've seen the acronym YCDABNR for it, but that's not an easy string of letters to remember.

amplitude modulation noun Abbr. AM
1. The encoding of a carrier wave by variation of its amplitude in accordance with an input signal.
2. A broadcast system that uses amplitude modulation. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/amplitude+modulation

frequency modulation noun Abbr. FM The encoding of a carrier wave by variation of its frequency in accordance with an input signal. http://www.thefreedictionary.com/frequency+modulation

An anabatic wind, from the Greek anabatos, verbal of anabainein meaning moving upward, is a wind which blows up a steep slope or mountain side, driven by heating of the slope through insolation. It is also known as an upslope flow. These winds typically occur during the daytime in calm sunny weather. Katabatic winds are down-slope winds, frequently produced at night by the opposite effect, the air near to the ground losing heat to it faster than air at a similar altitude over adjacent low-lying land. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabatic_wind

Ante Meridian Latin = "before midday" Post Meridian Latin = "after midday" See abbreviations, suggestions for voiding ambiguity, and how to convert from AM / PM to 24 hour clock at: http://www.worldtimezone.com/wtz-names/wtz-am-pm.html

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was born on April 27th 1791 in Charlestown (now Charleston) Massachusetts. His parents sent the young Morse to start his education at Phillips Academy in Andover (USA). He proved to be a rather poor and slightly eccentric scholar, but despite this he was moved to Yale College a few years later. Here his two main interests started to grow. The first was associated with the new science of electricity and the second was painting, especially small portraits. Morse graduated from Yale in 1810 and became a clerk for a book publisher in Boston Massachusetts. However he found the job uninteresting and he longed to become a painter. So a year later with help from his parents he set out for England to study the traditional style of painting followed there. Four years later in 1815 he returned to America and to his dismay he found that the style of art he had studied was not appreciated. Accordingly he took up portrait painting and became an itinerant artist. In 1822 he completed work on a painting of the House of Representatives in session. This work included small portraits of over 80 members of the house. As Morse was very busy with his painting as well as lecturing because he was now appointed professor of painting and sculpture at the University of the City of New York (now New York University). As a result he did not devote much time to his idea for a telegraph. It was not for about three years that he was able to develop a prototype. However once he had done this his enthusiasm for the idea grew and in 1837 he gave over all his time to it putting his painting and lecturing to one side. With this system operating interest grew very fast. Many of the railroad companies saw the possibilities of the new system and they started to have systems installed. In fact after only four years more than 5000 miles of line had been installed to take the new telegraph system. In addition to this orders soon started to come in from Europe as they heard about the system and how it performed. With all of these orders Morse became very wealthy. Along with this success came trouble. His former partners filed law suits against him as they felt they had contributed to the system. This legal battle took many years to settle and cost a great deal of money, but eventually Morse won and was able to hold onto all his ideas. Although the original code that Morse had derived served its purpose well it had several limitations. Some letters had pauses in them, others had dashes that were longer than others, and there was no provision for accents required by some European languages. These problems meant that the code was not always easy to use. As a result of this a new code was devised and introduced in 1851. It bore many similarities to the old one but it was much easier to send having no spaces in the letters themselves and standard lengths for all the dots and dashes. In fact this code is called the International Morse Code and it is the one that is used today. http://www.radio-electronics.com/info/radio_history/morse/sfbmorse.php

Many people consider the correct definition of decimate is 'to kill one in every ten as a punishment', a practice carried out in the ancient Roman army and continued by others in later centuries. That definition is now prefaced by the word 'historical' in the Oxford Dictionary of English (ODE), and is the second sense given for decimate. The first is "kill, destroy, or remove a large proportion of". The Usage box makes clear that the historical sense of decimate, ie kill one in ten, has been more or less totally superseded by the more recent sense, ie kill, destroy ..., and the example given to illustrate the word is "the virus has decimated the population". The dictionary recognises that there are traditionalists who argue that this current sense is incorrect, but says that it is now part of standard English. Actually, the 'kill one in ten' sense is not the only, or even necessarily the original meaning of decimate. Decimation in the 16th century was, according to the OED "The exaction of tithes, or of a tax of one-tenth" and the verb decimate with the sense 'to tax to the extent of one-tenth' appeared about a hundred years later. http://virtuallinguist.typepad.com/the_virtual_linguist/2010/10/decimate.html

Quote The creation of a thousand forests is in one acorn. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) American poet, essayist

Breast cancer fundraising bracelets that proclaim "I (heart) boobies!" are not lewd or vulgar and can't be banned by public school officials who find them offensive, a federal judge in Pennsylvania said in a preliminary ruling. The ruling is a victory for two Easton girls suspended for defying a ban on their middle school's Breast Cancer Awareness Day. "The bracelets ... can reasonably be viewed as speech designed to raise awareness of breast cancer and to reduce stigma associated with openly discussing breast health," U.S. Judge Mary McLaughlin wrote in a 40-page ruling issued April 12. She added that the school district had not shown the bracelets would be disruptive in school.
http://news.findlaw.com/ap/other/1110/04-12-2011/20110412140501_20.html

When Prince William and Kate Middleton exchange their wedding vows at Westminster Abbey on April 29th, they will join decades of royals who have bowed before the famous golden arches* of the abbey's gothic apse. The abbey, officially known as the Collegiate Church of St Peter, Westminster, has been the coronation church since 1066 when William the Conqueror became the first royal to be crowned inside the abbey. Benedictine monks first came to the site in the middle of the 10th century, to what was then a marshy area called "Thorny Island" on the banks of the River Thames. The church, or monetary as it was at the time, earned its link with the Crown after the support of the then King Edgar. One century later, Edward the Confessor's body was moved into the building after he was made a saint. His Anglo Saxon crypt still remains at the heart of the building, now resting alongside 17 more monarchs as well as notable authors and writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. Their bodies rest in Poets' Corner in the south transept. King George II's funeral was held at the abbey in 1760 and more recently in 2002 the funeral of the Queen Mother took place. The present church design, built by Henry III in 1245, is one of the most important Gothic buildings in the country with architectural influences from French cathedrals at Reims and Amiens.
http://www.t elegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/royal-wedding/8435055/Westminster-Abbey-what-it-means-to-the-Royal-family.html

*I was amused to read "golden arches of salvation" in the novel, Man in the Middle by Brian Haig when a hungry person saw McDonalds.

Citizens of Indonesia gobble up more rice than almost any other country. With annual per-person consumption of more than 275 pounds, Indonesians shovel down more than 15 times as much rice as Americans eat, and twice what the average Japanese consumes. Many Indonesian meals feature rice as the main course, with meat and vegetables on the side. But now, after years of promoting rice as the greatest thing since sliced bread, the government wants to diversify its consumers' carbohydrates. "We are too dependent on rice," says Bayu Krisnamurthi, Indonesia's vice minister of agriculture. "The price is going up, so the less we are depending on the international market, the better." Indonesia is hoping to slash average rice consumption by more than 10% over the next four years. So far, it has launched a "One Day, No Rice" campaign, which has First Lady Ani Bambang Yudhoyono on posters asking people to pick a day not to eat rice. The government has also started a program to subsidize thousands of villages to grow more fruits and vegetables. It's encouraging companies to make more foods that use cassava, a tropical tuber whose price is also rising, and sweet potatoes. Chefs have been commissioned to re-engineer traditional foods to use other ingredients. A village named Cireundeu in Java, for example, is being commended for its "cassava rice," a local process that shreds cassava so it can be cooked and eaten like rice.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703905404576164212551766804.html

The Sandwich Historical Society and its Glass Museum, collects, preserves and interprets the history of the Town of Sandwich, the oldest town on Cape Cod. A large part of Sandwich history is involved with American glass production. Incorporated in 1637, Sandwich, originally settled by the English, became an agricultural community, the main export of which was timber sent back to England. Even during the American Revolution, it remained a primarily agrarian community, supplemented by coastal fishing. But in 1825, the landscape of Sandwich would drastically change because of Deming Jarves, a Boston businessman and former agent of the New England Glass Company of East Cambridge, Massachusetts. Deming Jarves, the principal founder and manager of the Boston & Sandwich Glass Company, did not choose Sandwich as a site for the glass factory because of the beach sand that was readily available. Beach sand is too impure to make glass which requires pure quartz silica. The Company shipped in pure silica supplies first from New Jersey and New York and later from the Berkshire Hills in western Massachusetts. http://www.sandwichglassmuseum.org/about.php?pgID=2

3500 Years of Glass
Glass, that remarkable substance born of sand, alkali and fire, has fascinated and served humankind for more than 3,500 years – ever since some long-forgotten Middle Eastern artisan stumbled upon a way to control its manufacture. From quite beautiful luxury items prized by the pharaohs, glass has evolved into highly sophisticated functional uses deeply imbedded in the fabric of our twentieth century civilization. "Cut glass" is glass that has been decorated entirely by hand by use of rotating wheels. Cuts are made in an otherwise completely smooth surface of the glass by artisans holding and moving the piece against various sized metal or stone wheels, to produce a predetermined pleasing pattern. Cutting may be combined with other decorative techniques, but "cut glass" usually refers to a glass object that has been decorated entirely by cutting. Cut glass can be traced to 1,500 B.C in Egypt, where vessels of varying sizes were decorated by cuts made by what is believed to have been metal drills. Artifacts dating to the sixth century B.C. indicate that the Romans, Assyrians and Babylonians all had mastered the art of decoration by cutting. Ever so slowly glass cutting moved to Constantinople, thence to Venice, and by the end of the sixteenth century, to Prague. Apparently the art did not spread to the British Isles until the early part of the eighteenth century. Although glass making was the first industry to be established in America at Jamestown, Virginia in 1608, no glass is known to have been cut in the New World until at least 160 years later. Henry William Stiegel, an immigrant from Cologne, Germany, founded the American Flint Glass Manufactory in Manheim, Pennsylvania, and it was there in about 1771 that the first cut glass was produced in America. http://www.cutglass.org/Connections/articles/art11.htm



Many of North America's best old-house neighborhoods are in long- or formerly forgotten cities, towns, and 'burbs that are worth a fresh look. They're also places where you'll discover some of the best, most architecturally eye-popping older houses on the continent. http://shine.yahoo.com/channel/life/best-old-house-neighborhoods-of-2011-2465459
For all 64 Best Old House neighborhoods in the U.S. and Canada, visit http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/info/0,,20469788,00.html?xid=shine-110315-bestoldhouse

In recognition of the power of millions of individual actions, Earth Day 2011 will be organized around A Billion Acts of Green®: Personal, organizational and corporate pledges to live and act sustainably. A Billion Acts of Green® campaign – the largest environmental service campaign in the world – is steadily building commitments by individuals, corporations, and governments in honor of Earth Day.
See what others are doing and decide if you want to commit at: http://act.earthday.org/

Millions of people have watched the video of baby boys, clothed only in diapers and socks, appear to have a full-fledged conversation in their kitchen relying on just one syllable repeated over and over. “Da” becomes a question, an exclamation, a statement. There is cadence and inflection and intuitive understanding of the need to take turns, with one listening while the other babbles. Babies should be babbling by 10 months and using identifiable words by 14 months, on their road to slapping full sentences together. The twins in the video are using what's known as “reduplicated babbling,” in which they repeat a sound, according to Hope Dickinson, coordinator of Speech-Language Pathology Services at Children's Hospital Boston at Waltham, who spoke with Thrive, the pediatric health blog of Children's Hospital Boston: It's fun because these two are demonstrating great mimicking of multiple aspects of conversation. It really demonstrates how very young children communicate and know how a conversation works, even before they have the words to use. They will eventually begin to replace the babbling strings with words. One thing they are using wonderfully is turn taking, as in first one “talks” and then pauses and the other responds. They are also imitating the various intonations we use in conversation and speaking. There is fantastic rise and fall to their pitch and tones. Sentences or exclamations end loudly and emphatically, and there is also some questioning (rising) intonation. They are using gestures to supplement their talking, much like adults do.
http://healthland.time.com/2011/04/07/millions-watch-twin-baby-boys-babble-are-they-truly-talking/

Alain de Botton (born 1969) is a Swiss writer, television presenter, and entrepreneur, resident in the UK. His books and television programmes discuss various contemporary subjects and themes in a philosophical style, emphasising philosophy's relevance to everyday life. In August 2008, he was a founding member of a new educational establishment in central London called The School of Life. In May 2009, he was a founding member of a new architectural organisation called "Living Architecture". In October that year, de Botton was appointed an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in recognition of his services to architecture – which proposes to build a series of innovative houses in the U.K. using leading contemporary architects. These include Peter Zumthor, MVRDV, JVA, NORD and Michael and Patti Hopkins. The houses will be rented out to the general public. De Botton's aim is to improve the appreciation of good contemporary architecture – and seems a practical continuation of his theoretical work on architecture in his book The Architecture of Happiness. In October 2009, de Botton was appointed an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in recognition of his services to architecture. See much more at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_de_Botton

The Balancing Barn, built by Living Architecture, has been announced as one of the winners of a red dot design award, one of the world's most prestigious design competitions. The Balancing Barn received an 'honourable mention' in the 'Architecture and Urban Design' category, selected from more than 4,433 entries from 60 countries. The official awards ceremony will take place in Essen, Germany on 4th July 2011. See picture plus links to other pictures of other modernist homes at: http://www.living-architecture.co.uk/the-houses/balancing-barn/overview/

Quotes
An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.
The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) British philosopher, mathematician, essayist, Nobel laureate

On 27 November 1895, Alfred Nobel signed his last will and testament, giving the largest share of his fortune to a series of prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature and Peace - the Nobel Prizes. See Nobel prize facts at: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/nobelprize_facts.html

All Nobel prizes http://nbelprize.org/nobel_prizes/lists/all/

What Nobel laureates read when they were young http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/laureate_reading.html

A sampling of William Wordsworth
Composed At The Same Time And On The Same Occasion
I dropped my pen; and listened to the Wind
Composed By The Sea-Side, Near Calais, August 1802
Fair Star of evening, Splendour of the west,
Composed By The Seashore
What mischief cleaves to unsubdued regret,
Composed By The Side Of Grasmere Lake 1806
Clouds, lingering yet, extend in solid bars
Composed During A Storm
One who was suffering tumult in his soul,
Composed In One Of The Valleys Of Westmoreland, On Easter Sunday
With each recurrence of this glorious morn
Composed In Roslin Chapel During A Storm
The wind is now thy organist; a clank
Composed In The Glen Of Loch Etive
"This Land of Rainbows spanning glens whose walls,
Find other poems and links to complete poems at:
http://www.poetrycat.com/william-wordsworth

beau geste (bo ZHEST) plural beaux gestes (bo ZHEST) noun
A gracious, but often meaningless, gesture.
From French, literally fine gesture. Earliest documented use: 1920.
A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

After decades of decline, the bus is the U.S.'s fastest-growing way to travel, led by curbside service from Megabus, BoltBus, and others. Megabus and Coach USA are owned by the British company Stagecoach Group, and they have fundamentally changed the way Americans—especially the young—travel, so much so that they may help kill plans for new railroads. In 2010, Megabus launched its third and fourth hubs, in Philadelphia and Washington. It currently does $100 million in business annually, operating 135 buses each day to 50 U.S. cities. While other companies downsized over the past two years, Megabus hired 270 additional workers and invested $36 million in the business. Each month this year it will add five to six new double-deckers to its fleet. In Britain, the publicly traded Stagecoach Group is a transportation monolith, moving 2.5 million people each day on its buses and a full quarter of all U.K. rail passengers on its commuter lines and trams. he company first tried the Megabus idea there in 2003, and the service now links 50 cities in England, Scotland, and Wales—and hooks up with Megatrain—with fares starting at, yes, £1. The company's American division, Coach USA, operates charter, sightseeing, and even school buses throughout the U.S. and Canada. There's a battle going on to control the in-between routes, the 200- to 300-milers. Air travel, despite its enormous carbon footprint (and meager profitability), is unlikely to be displaced anytime soon as the transportation of choice for long-haul travel. For short distances, the car is still king. But of the most traveled American routes, many fall into this middle category: New York to D.C. (or Boston), Los Angeles to Las Vegas, Chicago to Detroit (or St. Louis), Dallas to Houston (or Austin or San Antonio), Miami to Orlando, Nashville to Atlanta (or Memphis). These routes are too far for a leisurely drive and too near for most Americans to justify the expense, or increasing hassle, of a plane. On most city-to-city trips under 300 miles, the curbside bus offers tickets that cost a tenth of those of Amtrak and far less even than the price of the gas to get there by car. The bus is also at least four times more fuel-efficient than a car. Researchers at DePaul University's Chaddick Institute for Metropolitan Development estimate that curbside carriers, at their current capacity, already reduce fuel consumption by 11 million gallons annually, the equivalent of taking 24,000 cars off the road. The curbside bus can also easily add and subtract departures. During Thanksgiving and Christmas in 2010, Megabus continued to sell as many tickets as were requested on its website, adding buses as needed.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_16/b4224062391848.htm?campaign_id=rss_topEmailedStories

Megabus review http://offmanhattan.com/2010/05/12/megabus-review/
Megabus Web site http://www.megabus.com/landing.php

BoltBus review http://businesstravel.about.com/od/cityguides/gr/BoltBus.htm
Boltbus Web site https://www.boltbus.com/default.aspx

Timeline of clocks by Elizabeth Rump
c. 3500 BC “Shadow” clocks or Sundials first appear.
c. 325 BC Waterclocks are invented.
100 - 1300 Clocks evolve in Far East & Europe
1088 Complex mechanism using water driven power source first used.
1500 - 1510 Spring powered mechanism designed
1505 Peter Henlein designs first portable timepiece.
1577 Minute hand mechanism designed.
1582 Design for long pendulum invented.
1656 Development of long pendulum clock .
1657 Christian Huygens invents balance wheel & spring assembly (as used in wristwatches today).
1660 Longcase or tallcase clocks become popular.
1660 - 1730 “Golden age” of clock making.
1671 Anchor or “recoil” escapement invented.
c. 1685 Tall case clocks imported to American Colonies.
c. 1695 First tall case clocks constructed in American Colonies.
1721 New design to improve accuracy developed.
1880 Term “grandfather’s clock” becomes popular based on a song Grandfather’s Clock that was popular in England and America. http://www.chaddsfordhistory.org/history/clocks.htm

The word mnemonic means a device such as a rhyme or acronym used to aid recall. Examples:
Seven Dwarfs: Keeping track of all seven dwarfs is actually quite simple once you have mastered this simple mnemonic device: two S’s, two D’s, and three emotions. Two S’s: Sleepy and Sneezy; two D’s: Dopey and Doc; and three emotions: Happy, Bashful, and Grumpy.
http://www.essortment.com/all/sevendwarfsnam_rygj.htm
HOMES to remind you of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior Search hundreds of mnemonics or add your own at: http://www.mnemonic-device.eu/mnemonics/

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From: Janice Ritter Subject: Trivial Pursuit I love AWAD and not just because it helped my team win a game of Trivial Pursuit! It was the classic battle between the sexes -- the girls against the guys. It was our turn (the girls). We needed one pie wedge to win the game. The question was: "What does 'AWAD' stand for?" I almost jumped through the roof. My brother, the more cerebral of the members of the boys' team, was disgusted. I loved it.
From: Claudine Voelcker Subject: elbow grease That's just like in French: huile de coude, or Italian: olio di gomito, or German: Armschmalz (they use the whole arm).
From: Bruce Brashear Subject: elbow grease This always makes me think of the old commercial for Ajax cleanser: You'll stop paying the elbow tax when you start using Ajax
From: Mark Mc Swain Subject: gluteus For those less-versed in anatomy, it can be a surprise to discover that there are three Gluteae, and the naming is based on dimension of the muscles. They are the G. Minimus; G. G. Medialis, and, of course, G. Maximus. While most people know that hindquarters are G. maximus, it is the other two Gluteae which define the shape of the human behind.

On Tuesdays during the fall semester of 2010, two first year law students at the University of Iowa participated in the Oakdale Prison Community Choir. The choir brings together local community members with inmates at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center to sing together once a week and the rehearsals culminate in a performance for the public at the prison at the end of the semester. The choir is led by Professor Mary Cohen, from the University of Iowa Music Education Department. In the past, Professor Cohen directed a prison choir in Kansas City and the choir here in Iowa is modeled after other prison choir projects in Kansas and at the University of Michigan. They would open and close each practice and concert with uplifting songs that were almost spiritual. The choir members were also able to talk to each other during the rehearsals. http://blogs.law.uiowa.edu/clp/?p=3810

A federal judge has temporarily blocked a plan by New York City to turn over two Civil War-era structures in Brooklyn Bridge Park to private developers. In granting a preliminary injunction, Judge Eric Vitaliano ruled that the National Park Service violated federal law by removing the Tobacco House and the Empire Stores from federally protected parkland. The decision was announced in federal court in Brooklyn on April 8. The ruling responded to a lawsuit filed by the New York Landmarks Conservancy, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Preservation League of New York State and other groups that claimed the park service capitulated to pressure from Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration. "This ruling reaches far beyond Brooklyn," Peg Breen, President of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, said in a statement Sunday. "If the National Park Service could choose when to enforce the law, historic buildings and parks across the country would suffer," she said. http://online.wsj.com/article/AP3573f0819be646b891476ac19e953f3d.html