Friday, August 24, 2012


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   

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. 

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.

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