A community of artists in a former confectionery factory in Rio de Janeiro have turned to lawyers, aerosol cans and cachaça (sugar-cane liquor) to overturn an eviction order from developers trying to capitalise on the regeneration of the city before the World Cup and Olympic Games.  Their campaign – one of several disputes triggered by the £21bn redevelopment plans for Rio – has drawn the attention of the mayor, Eduardo Paes, and led to questions about the city's priorities and potential as it moves into the international spotlight.  In the past three years, about 50 artists – including sculptors, painters, fashion designers and sound engineers – have created studios and offices in the Behring factory, which once produced chocolates and sweets but is now adorned with ceramic baths suspended from the ceiling by chains, factory equipment transformed into furniture and other installations.  Located in Rio's long-neglected port area, the 80-year-old building offered cheap rent and open space near the city centre.  But the property was recently auctioned and the new owners, Syn Brazil, told residents they had 30 days to get out.  The artists at Orestes 28 – the factory's address – have hired lawyers, lobbied the mayor's office and registered as a cultural organisation.  Some plan to spray paint the building in protest. Others say the experience has brought them together – often over glasses of cachaça.  Alexandre Rangel, a painter, sculptor and installation artist, said: "When we received the eviction notices, we were disorientated at first, but artists are political beings.  We got organised.  It has helped us draw closer together as a community . That is a good thing.  But we are still fighting for the right to stay here."  Theirs is not the only conflict as Rio prepares for 2014 and 2016.  Protesters have petitioned city hall against evictions on the site of the proposed Olympic Village.  But the artists have a selling point.  Similar communities have sprung up in many old factories around the world.  The Dashanzi 798 art district in Beijing was also threatened with demolition before the 2008 Olympics, but artists there successfully lobbied the authorities to make their community a cultural hub for the city.  The residents of Orestes 28 are now trying to do the same.  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/aug/23/rio-artists-evicted-olympics-2016

In recent years about one-third of all the tin mined in the world has come from Bangka in Indonesia, its sister island Belitung to the east, and the seabeds off the islands’ shores.  Because almost half of all tin is turned into solder for the electronics industry, a dominant force in the global tin market today is tablets and smartphones bought by consumers in the U.S. and elsewhere.  The trail from the dangerous mines to the leading names in electronics, including Foxconn Technology Group (HNHPF), the biggest manufacturer for Apple (AAPL)and others, is clear. Shenmao Technology and Chernan Metal Industrial—two of the top solder makers in Asia, both suppliers to Foxconn—say they buy 100 percent of their tin from Indonesia.  Shenmao estimates it’s the dominant supplier of solder to China, the cradle of electronics manufacturing, and accounts for 16 percent of the global market.  Chernan says other clients have included Sony (SNE), Panasonic (PC), Samsung Electronics, and LG Electronics.  The top of seahorse-shaped Bangka is about one degree south of the equator, just off the eastern coast of Sumatra.  It has a population of about 960,000 and has been known for tin for centuries.   Tin is often associated with soup and questionable meats, but tin cans were replaced long ago by containers made from far cheaper steel, lined with plastic or extremely thin coatings of tin, which does not corrode.  Tin’s real use is for solder.  Electronics manufacturers use solder, which today typically contains more than 95 percent tin, to attach and connect components.  The solder points are tiny but omnipresent, numbering about 7,000 in just two of the components in an iPad, according to research company IHS’s (IHS) iSuppli.  

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-08-23/the-deadly-tin-inside-your-ipad#p1

Recommended author:  Born in 1895 in Cincinnati, Helen Hooven Santmyer knew she wanted to be a writer when, at the age of nine, she finished reading Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.  Nearly 80 years later, Santmyer’s name would appear on best-seller lists throughout America.  Helen is best known for the widely acclaimed novel …And Ladies of the Club, published in 1982.  In the media blitz that followed the book’s release, there were numerous reports that it took Santmyer 50 years to write the 1,334-page novel.  Along the way, Santmyer wrote four other novels and one collection of essays, most of which reflect her love and admiration of Xenia.   In 1962, Santmyer published Our Town, a collection of essays depicting her early experiences in Xenia.  It won the Ohioana Book Award in 1965.  Shortly after that, Santmyer began to devote serious time to writing …And Ladies of the Club.  Some biographical accounts say that writing Ladies was Santmyer’s angry reaction to Sinclair Lewis’ Main Street (1920), an unflattering novel about small-town life.  …And Ladies of the Club takes place in the fictional Ohio town of Waynesboro.  Men who survived the Civil War have returned home.  Some of the wives form a literary club in effort to enrich their lives culturally.  The title of the book refers to members of this club, through whom the town’s political, cultural, and social changes are related.  http://www.ohioana-authors.org/santmyer/highlights.php

August 24, 2012 from Slipped Disc "on shifting sound worlds" by Norman Lebrecht

A couple of hours after we posted that the instruments of the Sao Paolo Symphony Orchestra were being held at the home airport because Customs were on strike, the entire cargo was mysteriously released – just in time for today’s concert.  A senior source at the orchestra tells us: ’It was no doubt important to show that the subject attracted international attention, and the Olympics should thank you for that too!’  Glad to be of service.  Meantime, Frankfurt remains deadlocked, refusing to return a seized Guarnerius violinto the Brussels-based Yuzuko Horigome until she pays a 380,000 Euro fine.  A Slipped Disc reader has clarified the position by phone with the Customs authorities at Frankfurt airport.  They told her that when you enter Germany with an object whose value is higher than Euro 430 you must go through the red lane anytime and pay a 19% deposit of the value of an instrument, which is repaid when leaving the country.  Ms Horigome went through green and suffered a higher penalty.  http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2012/08/did-slipped-disc-persuade-airport-to-release-precious-instruments.html

August 25, 2012   Adding to the confusion surrounding instruments in the air, Air Canada has told a student group it would not permit its four cellos to occupy paid seats on a flight from Calgary to Poland.  Why not?  Don’t ask.  It’s chaos in the air for travelling musicians.  The US Congress has introduced some clarity and there is pressure now on the EU to do likewise.  http://www.artsjournal.com/slippeddisc/2012/08/no-more-than-two-cellos-on-a-plane-says-airline.html   

Tanglewood is an estate and music venue in Lenox and Stockbridge, Massachusetts.  It is the home of the annual summer Tanglewood Music Festival and the Tanglewood Jazz Festival, and has been the Boston Symphony Orchestra's summer home since 1937.  Tanglewood was named for American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne, on the advice of his publisher William Ticknor, rented a small cottage in the area in March 1850 from William Aspinwall Tappan.  While at the cottage Hawthorne  wrote Tanglewood Tales (1853), a re-writing of a number of Greek myths for boys and girls. In memory of the book, the owner renamed the cottage "Tanglewood", and the name was soon copied by a nearby summer estate owned by the Tappan family.  Tanglewood concerts can be traced back to 1936, when the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) gave its first concerts in the Berkshires.  This first three-concert series was held under a tent for a total crowd of 15,000.  That same year, Mary Aspinwall Tappan (descendant of Chinese merchant William F. Sturgis and abolitionist Lewis Tappan), gave the family's summer estate—Tanglewood—to the orchestra.  In 1937, the BSO returned for an all-Beethoven program, presented at Tanglewood (210 acres), donated by the Tappan family.  In 1938 a fan-shaped Shed was constructed, with some 5,100 seats, giving the BSO a permanent open-air structure in which to perform.  Two years later conductor Serge Koussevitzky initiated a summer school for approximately 300 young musicians, now known as the Tanglewood Music Center (formerly the Berkshire Music Center).  The Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed in the Koussevitzky Music Shed every summer since, except for the interval 1942–45 when the Trustees canceled the concerts and summer school due to World War II.  The Shed was renovated in 1959 with acoustic designs by BBN Technologies.  In 1986 the BSO acquired the adjacent Highwood estate, increasing the property area by about 40%. Seiji Ozawa Hall (1994) was built on this newly expanded property.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanglewood

The 2012 Summer Paralympics opening ceremony was held on 29 August 2012, starting at 8.30 p.m. and marking the official opening of the 2012 Summer Paralympics in London, England.  The show – named Enlightenment – has Jenny Sealey and Bradley Hemmings as its artistic directors.  Queen Elizabeth II officially opened the Games and was joined by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge.  The ceremony was performed in front of a capacity audience of 80,000 people.  Once the Games were declared open, the Paralympic Flag was carried into the Stadium and hoisted into the air as the Anthem was played.  The Paralympic Flag featured three 'agitos' (Latin for 'I move') in red, blue and green – the colours most represented in national flags around the world.   The big finale was the entrance of the Paralympic Flame into the Stadium.  The torch entered on a wireline controlled descent from 350 feet up on the ArcelorMittal Orbit next to the Stadium, carried by Joe Townsend, a former Royal Marine with amputated legs and a member of the 2016 Rio British Paralympic Association, representing the future.   He passed the torch to David Clarke, member of the 2012 British 5-a-side blind football team, representing the present.  He, with his guide, passed the torch to Margaret Maughan, the first ever Paralympic gold medallist for Great Britain, representing the past.   She in a wheelchair, pushed by her assistant, lit the Paralympic Cauldron, of the same design as the 2012 Olympic Cauldron, with metal pedals on long metal arms.  When lit, it condensed from a splayed open hemisphere to a stand of trumpets.  The Flame will continue to burn for the whole of the Games.  The Cauldron was based on four others kindled on the summits of Scafell Pike, Ben Nevis, Snowdon and Slieve Donard, the highest peaks of each Home Nation: England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.  The flame arrived into the stadium after a 92 mile overnight relay from Stoke Mandeville to London.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Summer_Paralympics_opening_ceremony

Here’s the problem with libraries. They catch on fire really easily.  As such, they were the prized targets of the invading hordes of antiquity – the model collections of knowledge of their times, whose only fault was their inherent flammability.  They were one-man, one-torch jobs.  But the hordes didn’t prize the library only for how powerfully it burned.  Back in those days, if you wanted to kill a culture, you killed its library. “If this is what happens to libraries, make copies,” says Brewster Kahle.  And it’s Kahle’s impulse to copy and preserve that prompted the Internet Society to induct the serial entrepreneur and digital archivist into the Internet Hall of Fame on April 23 in its inaugural year.  Kahle took the library of libraries — the internet — and made a couple of copies of it, and keeps making copies.  One he keeps in servers in San Francisco, the other in mirror servers in Alexandria, where the world’s most famous library burned 2,000 years ago.  (His data survived the Egyptian revolution unscathed.)  Through the Wayback Machine, you can see what the web looked like in 1996.  And 1997.  And 2011.  It’s just one arm of Kahle’s ambitious goal to provide the world with universal access to all knowledge.  His vehicle is the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization Kahle founded in 1996, the same year he started analytics firm Alexa Internet, a pioneer in collaborative filtering, which he sold in 1999 to Amazon for $250 million.  http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/brewster-kahle/all/1?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Top+Stories%29

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

This week we sling the slang, To add to your diction a little tang.
Pit these words into your patter, Or let them into a letter.
But don't be a wiseacre, Leave 'em out of a thesis or paper.
wiseacre   (WYZ-ay-kuhr)  noun:  One who obnoxiously pretends to be wise; smart-aleck; wise-guy.  From Middle Dutch wijsseggher (soothsayer), translation of Middle High German wissage, from Old High German wissago (wise person), altered by folk etymology.  Earliest documented use:  1595.
suss  (suhs)  verb tr.:  To inspect, investigate, or to figure out.  By shortening of suspect, from Latin sub- (below) + specere (to look).  Earliest documented use:  1953.
lulu  (LOO-loo)  noun:  A remarkable person, idea, or thing.   
Perhaps from the nickname for Louise.  Earliest documented use: 1886.
jazz  (jaz) 
noun:
1.  A style of music characterized by improvisation.
2.  Etcetera (in the phrase: and all that jazz).
3.  Nonsense.
verb tr.:
1.  To enliven (in the phrase: to jazz up).
2.  To exaggerate or lie.
Of undetermined origin, perhaps a variant of slang jasm (energy, vigor).  Earliest documented use:  1912.

List of islands in the Mediterranean  Sicily (Italy) is the largest and Comino (Malta ) is the smallest.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_islands_in_the_Mediterranean

The noun chord is a musical term (two or more notes sounded together); chord also refers to an emotion or disposition ("a responsive chord").  The noun cord refers to a rope or a bond, an insulated electrical cable, or an anatomical structure ("vocal cords").  http://grammar.about.com/od/alightersideofwriting/a/ChordCordGlossary.htm 

Andy Coolquitt is building a compound-style home near downtown Austin.  He repurposed parts from a merry-go-round for a grand staircase.  He dotted an exterior stucco wall with hundreds of beer-bottle tops.  He crafted his kitchen's rainbow-hued chandelier by gluing together rows of plastic lighters he found on the streets nearby.  On Sept. 29, the public will be able to take a longer look when what's billed as the first museum survey of his art, "Attainable Excellence," opens at the Austin Museum of Art/Arthouse, with a stop scheduled next spring at Houston's Blaffer Museum, which organized the show.  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444375104577591572840283772.html

Feedback from muse reader:  This may not be a perfect duplicate, but there's a fish in Hawaii called Humuhumunukunukuapua'a.

When you visit Hawaii, you may come across this gigantic word that starts with H and has a bazillion letters.  That’s the word humuhumunukunukuapua’a and it’s Hawaii’s state fish.  Here’s how to pronounce it:  “who-moo-who-moo-noo-koo-noo-koo-ah-pooah-ah” Check out this 2:14 video of Don Ho singing My Little Grass Shack.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWlvYpJ5pRo  http://www.govisithawaii.com/2010/06/02/whats-a-humuhumunukunukuapuaa-how-do-you-say-it/  See also other videos and images of the fish on the Web.

Quotes

After hearing two eyewitness accounts of the same accident, you begin to wonder about history.  Unknown
Our Constitution is in actual operation.  Everything appears to promise that it will last, but in this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.  Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
We Justices must confront what is indeed an awesome responsibility.  It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, laid upon it by Congress in pursuance of the Federal Government’s power “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,” to decide What Is Golf.  I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them:  Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer?  The answer, we learn, is yes.  The Court ultimately concludes, and it will henceforth be the Law of the Land, that walking is not a “fundamental” aspect of golf. 

Justice Antonin Scalia (b. 1936) 
PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin (00-24)  Dissenting Opinion  May 29, 2001

http://www.jimpoz.com/quotes/Category:History

The United States Chamber of Commerce (USCC) is an American lobbying group representing the interests of many businesses and trade associations.  The Chamber was created by President Taft as a counterbalance to the labor movement of the time.  The Chamber has emerged as the largest lobbying organization in America.  It spent $91.7 million on lobbying in 2008, and $144.5 million in 2009, up from $18.7 million in 2000.  The Chamber's lobbying expenditures in 2009 were five times as high as the next highest spender: Exxon Mobil, at $27.4 million.  The Chamber had more than 150 lobbyists from 25 different firms working on its behalf in 2009.  The major issues that it advocated on were in the categories of torts, government issues, finance, banking and taxes.  As of October 2010, the Chamber had a worldwide network of 115 American Chamber of Commerce affiliates located in 108 countries.  During the 2010 campaign cycle, the Chamber spent $32 million, 93 percent of which was to help Republican candidates.  In addition to the expenditures from the Chamber's own funds, in 2010 its political action committee gave $29,000 (89 percent) to Republican candidates and $3,500 (11 percent) to Democratic candidates.  In 2011, the Chamber hosted a "GOP Holiday Party" honoring the Republican National Committee.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Chamber_of_Commerce   

See also:  http://www.uschamber.com/about

On The Hunger Games set, Gina Scarnati worked as the movie's milliner, an old industry term for hat maker.  From the showgirl-style, big feather hat worn by District 1's "career tribute" Glimmer, to the gaudy magenta flower in Effie Trinket's hair as she first takes the stage to wish that the odds be ever in District 12's favor, each of the 192 headpieces in the blockbuster film was created by Scarnati.  "If it's worn on the head, I did it," she says.   In addition to the opulent hats worn in scenes in "the Capitol," Scarnati spent countless hours creating hats for the tributes to wear during the famed "girl on fire" chariot parade.  "I wanted the hats to evoke the districts" from which the characters came, she explains.  And so the tributes from District 7, the lumber district, wore origami hats, 4 feet wide from end to end.  The young character Rue wore a hat composed of 96 pieces of thermoplastic, wired together and painted silver to evoke a Demeter-inspired crown of wheat, symbolic of the agricultural District 11.  http://www.udel.edu/udmessenger/vol20no2/stories/alumni-scarnati.html

Jorge Luis Borges (1889-1986) was a giant in Latin American letters.  Borges was a poet, story writer and essayist.  His short fiction was renowned for the rich and fantastical imagery.  The University of Cuyo awarded him the National Prize for Literature and an honorary doctorate.  In 1961, Jorge Luis Borges (along with Samuel Beckett) was awarded the Prix Formentor.  His own influence can be seen on the interextuality characteristic of Latin-American Literature by such pivotal figures as Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortázar.   At the precocious age of nine, a journal in Buenos Aires published Jorge Luis Borges’s Spanish translation of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince.  Starting in 1956 and lasting until his death, Borges was an instructor at the University of Buenos Aires.  This was also the year he was appointed the Director of the National Library.  However, when Juan Peron returned to power, Borges resigned his position.  Jorge Luis Borges translated the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Franz Kafka, Hermann Hesse, Joseph Rudyard Kipling, William Faulkner, Andre Gide, Walt Whitman and Virginia Woolf.  Borges was also known for literary hoaxes.  Writings in the style of authors such as Emanuel Swedenborg published under the names of another author.  Even Borges legitimate translations have been accused of having extensive manipulation and liberties taken with them.  His literary enterprises included imagining and reviewing works that do not exist.  The most noted piece is Borges “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.”  In this work, Borges imagines an author who creates/re-creates the work of Miguel de Cervantes.  The mercurial nature of the work of Jorge Luis Borges impacted the production of literature worldwide.   http://www.egs.edu/library/jorge-luis-borges/biography/ 

Borges's younger sister Norah, his junior by two years, was his only real childhood friend.  Together they invented imaginary playmates -- "Quilos" and "The Windmill" -- acted out scenes from books, and spent their time roaming the labyrinthine library and the garden, two images which would find endless incarnations in his writing. 

http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/00/pwillen1/lit/index3.htm

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.  Jorge Luis Borges   

One year ago today, August 24, 2011  The Internet is a vast, sprawling library of interconnected facts and fictions, and perhaps the World Wide Web owes something to author Jorge Luis Borges.  The pioneer of magic realism and hypertext fiction is celebrated by Google today.  The Google logo on the search giant's home page shows a man, perhaps Borges himself, looking down on a world of interconnected yet subtly different buildings and paths: the Internet as Borges' own Garden of Forking Paths, perhaps.  He pioneered literary magic realism with Historia universal de la infamia (A Universal History of Infamy), a collection of short stories published in 1935.  Each story tells the tale of a real-life criminal, such as Western antihero Billy the Kid; the notorious imposter in the Tichborne claimant case, Arthur Orton; and the bad guy in the Japanese legend of the 47 ronin, Kira Yoshinaka.  His book El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan (The Garden of Forking Paths), is part novel and part labyrinth.  http://crave.cnet.co.uk/software/jorge-luis-borges-pioneer-of-hypertext-fiction-celebrated-by-google-50004845/ 

Note:  There is no Google doodle on August 24,  2012.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com

A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again.  The word "palimpsest" comes through Latin palimpsēstus from Ancient Greek παλίμψηστος (palímpsestos, “scratched or scraped again”) originally compounded from πάλιν (palin, “again”) and ψάω (psao, “I scrape”) literally meaning “scraped clean and used again”.  Romans wrote on wax-coated tablets that could be smoothed and reused, and a passing use of the term "palimpsest" by Cicero seems to refer to this practice.  The term has come to be used in similar context in a variety of disciplines, notably architectural archaeology.  Because parchment, prepared from animal hides, is far more durable than paper or papyrus, most palimpsests known to modern scholars are parchment, which rose in popularity in western Europe after the 6th century.  Also, where papyrus was in common use, reuse of writing media was less common because papyrus was cheaper and more expendable than costly parchment. The writing was washed from parchment or vellum using milk and oat bran. With the passing of time, the faint remains of the former writing would reappear enough so that scholars can discern the text (called the scriptio inferior, the "underwriting") and decipher it.  The best-known palimpsest in the legal world was discovered in 1816 by Niebuhr and Savigny in the library of Verona cathedral.  Underneath letters by St. Jerome and Gennadius was the almost complete text of the Famous examples:  Institutes of Gaius, probably the first student's textbook on Roman law and the Archimedes Palimpsest, a work of the great Syracusan mathematician copied onto parchment in the 10th century and overwritten by a liturgical text in the 12th century.  See other examples at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palimpsest

The conservation of the Archimedes Palimpsest was undertaken by Abigail Quandt, Senior Conservator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.  Her first priority was to ensure the continued safety of a very fragile historical document.  Her second priority was to prepare the manuscript for imaging. T his entailed disbinding the manuscript, as the under texts run through the gutter of the book.  Work on disbinding the manuscript started in February 2000, and finished in November 2004. 

See pictures at:  http://archimedespalimpsest.org/about/conservation.php 

See also:  http://www.udel.edu/udmessenger/vol20no2/stories/alumni-quandt.html

Ten percent or more of Delaware’s land mass could be submerged by rising ocean waters by the end of the century, and that would include up to three-quarters of the Port of Wilmington, as much as a fourth of coastal industrial land, and virtually all of the state’s extensive tidal wetlands.  More than 60 percent of dams, dikes and levees could be inundated; sections of railroad flooded out, some roads and bridges made impassable, and up to a fifth of wastewater treatment plants knocked out as an anticipated one-meter rise in sea level spreads across the low-lying state.  Homeowners, business people and government officials face widespread disruption and increased costs ranging from higher insurance premiums to relocation or construction of flood-resistant buildings.  Some coastal farmland may be ruined by salt water; aquifers could be contaminated, and already-endangered species of birds and animals would be driven out of their habitats.  After more than a year’s work, DNREC’s Coastal Programs team has released a long-awaited draft of its vulnerability study, not yet to the public, but to the state officials, nonprofit groups, academics, and business people that make up its Sea Level Rise Advisory Committee.   The 230-page document, entitled “Preparing for Tomorrow’s High Tide,” is the most detailed study yet by any U.S. state into the threat posed by rising ocean waters, officials said.   http://www.wdde.org/25303-rising-seas-cut-delaware-land-ten-percent

See also:  http://www.udel.edu/udmessenger/vol20no2/stories/alumni-love.html

Retailers have long scoured the Web for mentions of their companies or products as a form of customer service, offering apologetic messages and refunds to disgruntled customers.  Now, they are going further.  "We're using that real-time feedback to help suppliers improve products faster," said Greg Hall, Walmart.com's vice president of marketing.  Wal-Mart earlier this year pulled a prepaid wireless Internet stick on account of angry customer reviews on its website.  It turned out the wireless carrier had mistakenly failed to activate the sticks; it was able to turn them on remotely and the sticks went back on sale on Walmart.com within two days, the company said.  To be sure, online reviews can be a faulty resource:  Most are anonymous, and questions over authenticity persist.  Companies have been known to pay reviewers to give positive ratings or instruct employees to promote their own products while bashing those of competitors.  Companies can use computer-recognition technology to monitor for fraud. Bazaarvoice, BV -0.04% a company that helps retailers like Wal-Mart and Best Buy Co. BBY +0.05% manage and monitor online reviews, said it used a process earlier this month called device fingerprinting to identify a certain company that was spouting off hundreds of positive reviews on one of its products and negative reviews on a competitor's item.  In the past two months, Bazaarvoice has flagged 12,000 fraudulent posts among companies that use its reviews platform, it said.  Experts also say customers tend to take their opinions to the Web only in extreme circumstances—when they really like or dislike a product.  So in some cases the majority of customers may be happy with a product but online reviews reflect the opinions of a few outliers.  Shelly Banjo  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303292204577517394043189230.html

The notion of a “super trail” had been a parlor topic in New England hiking-organization and even academic circles for some time, but the October 1921 publication of “An Appalachian Trail:  A Project in Regional Planning” in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects is almost universally seen as the moment of birth for the Appalachian Trail.  Benton MacKaye—former forester and government analyst and newspaper editor, now intermittently employed as a regional planner—proposed, as a refuge from work life in industrialized metropolis, a series of work, study, and farming camps along the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, with a trail connecting them, from the highest point in the North (Mt. Washington in New Hampshire) to the highest in the South (Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina).  Hiking was an incidental focus.  MacKaye immediately set about promoting his idea within his network of friends and colleagues in Washington, New York, and Boston, but it was again hikers who took up the cause—newspaper columnist Raymond Torrey in New York especially, who led a small crew building the first A.T.-specific miles in Harriman–Bear Mountain State Park under the aegis of Maj. William A. Welch, who soon shifted the goal to “Maine to Georgia” and designed the iconic diamond Trail marker.  By March 3, 1925, MacKaye and the Regional Planning Association had enough support to convene the first “Appalachian Trail conference…for the purpose of organizing a body of workers (representative of outdoor living and of the regions adjacent to the Appalachian range) to complete the building of the Appalachian Trail.”  On August 14, 1937, the Appalachian Trail finally was on the ground, a continuous “wilderness” footpath of an estimated 2,000 miles from Mt. Oglethorpe, Ga., to Baxter Peak on Katahdin in central Maine.  While the end of World War II allowed the restoration of the A.T., it also triggered a vast wave of residential and highway development that threatened it anew.  Almost half the Trail was still on roads and private property people wanted for vacation homes.  In the early 1960s, Maine-born Stanley A. Murray of Kingsport, Tenn., who would become the ATC’s second-longest-serving chair, hatched with a small group of Maine and Washington, D.C., Trail veterans a campaign to both reenergize the organization (by sharply building up its base of individual members) and revive the idea of the federal government’s protecting of the Trail and its surrounding lands from adverse development.  Both MacKaye and Avery had advocated such protection from the beginning, despite the volunteer origins of the whole project.  The campaign had its fits and starts, but, on October 2, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the National Trails System Act (NTSA), creating within the national park and forest systems a new class of public lands, national scenic trails—with the A.T. and the unfinished Pacific Crest Trail the first designated.  In March 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the ATC-generated NSTA amendments directing the federal agencies to move forward and authorizing almost $100 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund for that purpose.  The most complicated public-land acquisition program in history was begun, NPS formed an A.T. Project Office and special A.T. Land Acquisition Office, and the ATC led the way in securing the required annual appropriations—an effort now in its fourth decade and more than 99 percent complete.  That has been the story of the ATC for the past quarter-century, reflected in the July 2005 change of its name to Appalachian Trail Conservancy, still volunteer-based.  Read more at:  http://www.appalachiantrail.org/about-the-trail/history 

Gabriel García Márquez was born on March 6, 1928, in Aracataca, a small town near the Colombian city of Cartagena.  Like Cuban revolutionary leader Fidel Castro, García Márquez studied law in a Jesuit college.  However, the soon to be famous novelist dropped out of school and started working as a journalist.  In 1954 he was sent to Rome on an assignment by the daily El Espectador newspaper.  Since then he has lived outside his homeland in a self-imposed exile.  In the early 1980s he returned to his native Colombia, where he mediated a peace accord between the government and leftist guerillas.  In 1955 he published his first book, Leaf Storm and Other Stories.  In 1966, while in Mexico City and suffering from writer's block, he had a vision of his next novel.  Eighteen months later he finished One Hundred Years of Solitude, which has been called the greatest novel in Latin American history.  Since its publication in 1967, it has sold more copies world-wide than any other work by a Latin American author and has made the literary genre "magical realism" a household term.  Another of his novels, Autumn of the Patriarch -- written in 16 gigantic sentences -- tells the grotesquely phantasmagorical story of a prototypical Latin American dictator who refuses to leave power even after everything around him has rotted and died.   In 1982 García Márquez received the Nobel Prize for Literature "for his novels and short stories, in which the fantastic and the realistic are combined in a richly composed world of imagination, reflecting a continent's life and conflicts."  http://www.myhero.com/go/hero.asp?hero=g_garciamarquez 

Navy Week is in 15 cities in 2012.  The remaining ones this year are in: 

Cleveland Aug. 27-Sept. 4,  Detroit September 3-10, Buffalo September 10-17and Houston
October 22-28.  http://www.navyweek.org/

In the end, a university is only as good as its library. 

Theresa Liedtka, dean of Lupton Library, The University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

See Library News (right side of screen) at: http://www.lib.utc.edu/  and choose a caption for an eel that appears to be smiling.

The videogame Minecraft has more than 37 million registered users, and as that number has grown, so has the intensity of the community.  Minecraft fans make Minecraft baked goods, create Minecraft pointillism art and marry each other in Minecraft weddings.  And they create parody music videos of hit songs, rewritten to feature Minecraft characters and themes.  Read more and see pictures at:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443404004577580993745506930.html

David Shipley, the executive editor of Bloomberg View and a former Op-Ed editor at The New York Times, and Will Schwalbe, authors of “Send: Why People Email So Badly and How to Do It Better,” speculate that the trend towards exclamation points stems in part from the nature of online media.  “Because email is without affect, it has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be,” they write.  But what if a particular point needs to be stressed beyond where it would normally be?  Well, you need to kick it up an additional notch, with another exclamation point, or three.  The unsurprising result has been Weimar-level exclamation inflation, where (it sometimes seems) you have to raise your voice to a scream merely to be heard, and a sentence without blingy punctuation comes across like a whisper.  Internet writing also encourages extravagant combining of exclamation points and question marks.  This punctuation yoking, traditionally confined to comic-book ejaculations such as “What the ?!…,” had a brief moment in the sun in the 1960s, when, according to a  Web site devoted to this tale http://www.interrobang-mks.com/ (see interrobang and how to make one in Microsoft Word's Fonts) an ad man named Martin K. Speckter promoted the idea of combining the two marks into one, called the “Interrobang.”  The Wall Street Journal endorsed the idea, giving the example “‘Who forgot to put gas in the car?’ where the question mark alone just isn’t adequate.”  Interrobang was included in some dictionaries, and for a time you could buy a typewriter with a key dedicated to the mark, but it never quite caught on.  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/06/the-point-of-exclamation/

July 1, 2012  Attorney David Ellis, best known for successfully prosecuting Gov. Rod Blagojevich in his Senate impeachment trial in early 2009, has spent the past few weeks working on legal briefs for the U.S. Supreme Court defending the state's redistricting plan.  In May, he slogged through another complex case involving Medicaid financing.  A couple weeks ago, his ninth novel — a legal thriller titled "The Wrong Man," his third featuring the similarly hard-working defense lawyer Jason Kolarich — was being published, just three months after the appearance of "Guilty Wives," co-written with the publishing juggernaut James Patterson.

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2012-07-01/features/ct-prj-0701-david-ellis-20120701_1_jason-kolarich-james-patterson-girls-and-sports

America’s Aversion to Taxes by Eduardo Porter  When my son developed a rash on an Italian vacation in Liguria last month, the pharmacist showed me to the doctor downstairs, who diagnosed the problem at no charge and sent me off with a handshake and a joke about a daughter in med school at the University of California, San Diego.  Italy may be in a funk, with a shrinking economy and a high unemployment rate, but the United States can learn a lot from it, and not just about the benefits of public health care.  Italians live longer.  Their poverty rate is much lower than ours.  If they lose their jobs or suffer some other misfortune, they can turn to a more generous social safety net.  Citizens of most industrial countries have demanded more public services as they have become richer.  And they have been by and large willing to pay more taxes to finance them.  Since 1965, tax revenue raised by governments in the developed world have risen to 34 percent of their gross domestic product from 25 percent, on average.  The big exception has been the United States.  In 1965, taxes collected by federal, state and municipal governments amounted to 24.7 percent of the nation’s output.  In 2010, they amounted to 24.8 percent.  Excluding Chile and Mexico, the United States raises less tax revenue, as a share of the economy, than every other industrial country.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/15/business/economy/slipping-behind-because-of-an-aversion-to-taxes.html 

Siletz, Oregon  An American Indian language with only about five speakers left — once dominant in this part of the West, then relegated to near extinction — has, since earlier this year, been shouting back to the world:  Hey, we’re talking.  “We don’t know where it’s going to go,” said Bud Lane, a tribe member who has been working on the online Siletz Dee-ni Talking Dictionary for nearly seven years, and recorded almost all of its 10,000-odd audio entries himself.  In its first years the dictionary was password protected, intended for tribe members.  Since February, however, when organizers began to publicize its existence, Web hits have spiked from places where languages related to Siletz are spoken, a broad area of the West on through Canada and into Alaska.  That is the heartland of the Athabascan family of languages, which also includes Navajo.  And there has been a flurry of interest from Web users in Italy, Switzerland and Poland.  “They told us our language was moribund and heading off a cliff,” said Mr. Lane, 54, sitting in a storage room full of tribal basketry and other artifacts here on the reservation, about three hours southwest of Portland, Ore.  He said he has no fantasies that Siletz will conquer the world, or even the tribe.  Stabilization for now is the goal, he said, “creating a pool of speakers large enough that it won’t go away.”  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/04/us/siletz-language-with-few-voices-finds-modern-way-to-survive.html?_r=1 

Churchill:  The Power of Words through September 23  The Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, New York  (212) 685-0008

Sir Winston Churchill's impact upon the twentieth century is difficult to overestimate.  A master orator and writer, Churchill's use of spoken and written words will be explored in this exhibition that covers more than a half century of his life—from Victorian childhood letters to his parents, to Cold War correspondence with President Eisenhower, and featuring some of his most famous wartime oratory.  Drawn from the Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, the presentation uses drafts, speaking notes, personal and official correspondence, public statements, and recordings from some of his most compelling speeches and broadcasts as lenses to examine the main events in Churchill's life.  Of particular focus will be Churchill's lifelong relationship with the United States, homeland of his Brooklyn-born mother, from first visit in 1895 to award of Honorary Citizenship in 1963; and the ways in which he used the written and spoken word to develop, complement and advance his political career.  In conjunction with the exhibition, the Morgan and the Churchill Archives Centre have also launched DiscoverChurchill.org.  The site, created to generate interest in Churchill among a younger audience and educators, features fun facts, videos, quotes, and links to Churchill-related content.

http://www.themorgan.org/exhibitions/exhibition.asp?id=60

Toledo Museum of Art through Sept. 20  Pick up your napkin, draw away, turn it in.  New doodles are still being accepted for this exhibit.  So far, 300 are up in "Doodle! A Community Drawing Exhibition."  Subjects include boars, street scenes and an octopus whose tentacles hold human puppets.  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444318104577589183216815556.html?mod=googlenews_wsj