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