The origin of blackballing or blacklisting lies in Ancient Greece. Ostraka, (singular ostrakon, ὄστρακον) refers to the shards of broken pottery that were used as writing material for the purpose of voting.  Once a year Athenians were offered the opportunity to ostracize, or exile, someone in the community.  The citizens wrote the name of the individual they wanted to exile on the pottery shards and put them in an urn.  The votes were counted, and if certain criteria were met, then the person with the most votes was exiled for ten years.  The penalty for returning before the ten years expired was death; after ten years the exiled one was allowed to return and resume life as usual.  Blackballing was a way for members of clubs and organizations to discreetly reject prospective members.  Members put either a white ball of support or a black ball of rejection into a covered ballot box.  Specific rules concerning the vote varied depending on the club and time period.  http://www.ehow.com/about_5379348_meaning-blacklisted.html

Phil Libin, chief executive of Evernote, turned to his wife last year and asked if she had suggestions for how the software company might improve the lives of its employees and their families.  His wife, who also works at Evernote, didn’t miss a beat:  housecleaning.   Today, Evernote’s 250 employees — every full-time worker, from receptionist to top executive — have their homes cleaned twice a month, free.  It is the latest innovation from Silicon Valley:  the employee perk is moving from the office to the home.  Facebook gives new parents $4,000 in spending money.  Stanford School of Medicine is piloting a project to provide doctors with housecleaning and in-home dinner delivery.  Genentech offers take-home dinners and helps employees find last-minute baby sitters when a child is too sick to go to school.  These kinds of benefits are a departure from the upscale cafeteria meals, massages and other services intended to keep employees happy and productive while at work.  And the goal is not just to reduce stress for employees, but for their families, too.  If the companies succeed, the thinking goes, they will minimize distractions and sources of tension that can inhibit focus and creativity.  Now that technology has allowed work to bleed into home life, it seems that companies are trying to address the impact of home life on work.  There is, of course, the possibility that relieving people of chores at home will simply free them up to work more.  But David Lewin, a compensation expert and management professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, said he viewed the perks as part of a growing effort by American business to reward people with time and peace of mind instead of more traditional financial tools, like stock options and bonuses.  Matt Richtel  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/20/us/in-silicon-valley-perks-now-begin-at-home.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ref=todayspaper

Saunter into the yards of chef David Bouley's house in Kent, Conn., or chef Jose Garces's country home in Bucks Country, Pa., and you'll stumble upon the ultimate status symbol for today's culinary crowd.  It isn't a wood-burning pizza oven or whole-hog rotisserie.  It's a farm.  "I seed, I weed, I cultivate. I do everything," said Mr. Bouley, owner of Michelin-rated restaurants Bouley and Brushstroke in New York City.  Now in his second year of farming, Mr. Bouley drives a John Deere tractor and works his 1-acre plot, where he experiments with growing conditions that will yield the tastiest and healthiest produce.  Farm-to-table has become a popular food-industry catch phrase—even McDonald's launched an ad campaign celebrating farmers earlier this year.  Now, chefs are cutting the farmer out of the deal by becoming farmers themselves.   Zakary Pelaccio, the founding chef of trendy New York restaurants Fatty Crab and Fatty 'Cue, traded the city earlier this year for a farm in Old Chatham, N.Y., near where he is planning to open a new restaurant later this year.  Katy McLaughlin  Read much more at:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443294904578048412121179622.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5

"You can disagree without being disagreeable" is attributed to both Ronald Reagan and Gerald Ford.  An October 16 Google search for the phrase brought 391,000 results.  Most people realize the need for civility and are muting attack ads on TV.

America’s first native landscape painter by William Tylee Ranney Abbott 

The paintings of Thomas Doughty (1793-1856) represent America’s earliest tradition of landscape painting.  His intense admiration for nature resulted in painterly depictions of the utmost truthfulness. The popularity of this new development facilitated the advancement of the landscape painting tradition in the United States, paving the way for future masters such as Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church.  Thomas Doughty was born on July 19, 1793 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to the local ship carpenter James Doughty.  The young Thomas Doughty was locally educated and became a leather worker, before utilizing his largely self-taught skills as an artist.  By 1814, Doughty was working as a leather currier in Philadelphia, and just two years later he was registered as a painter at 16 Pennsylvania Avenue, Philadelphia.  In this same year, Doughty exhibited for the first time at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.  At this stage in his career, Doughty sought to improve upon his artistic skills by painting from Old Masters including Jan Van Goyen, Gaspard Poussin, and Nicholas Poussin.  By 1824, his commitment to art in Philadelphia paid off when he was elected to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts as an Academician.  A year later, Doughty received another honor, this time in the form of a recommendation from Rembrandt Peale to Thomas Jefferson for the position of art instructor at the University of Virginia.  http://www.questroyalfineart.com/artist/thomas-doughty 

In a nation where sheep are given names and kept inside homes as companion animals, the most popular television show is "Khar Bii," or literally, "This Sheep," in the local Wolof language.  It's an American Idol-style nationwide search for Senegal's most perfect specimen.  Now in its fourth season, the show airs several times a week in the months leading up to Eid al-Adha, or Tabaski, as it's known here.  The TV show's Facebook page has nearly 9,000 fans.  The sheer volume of entries and its loyal viewership are testaments to just how much the Senegalese love their sheep.  As the country has urbanized, many have kept alive the tradition of sheep raising.  It's not unusual to see them grazing in an urban traffic circle or seeking shade near cars at a taxi rank.  The TV show "Khar Bii" follows a team of judges as they make housecalls to scope out potential candidates for regional finals.  Trekking down sandy side streets and up on to rooftops, the crews set off in search of an animal with both size and composure.  The finalists from home visits then square off at regional finals, where one doting owner even brought a special umbrella to protect his sheep Dogo from the blazing sun overhead.  "Some people love cats, some people love dogs.  Here we have sheep," says Abou Aziz Mare, 27, who says he spends three to four hours a day on his terrace with his animals.  "I live with him like a close friend," he says of Dogo.  Samba Fall, 44, keeps seven sheep at his home in Dakar's Medina neighborhood though his clear favorite is blue-eyed Papis General Fall.  "He is like my little son," Fall says, stroking Papis between his horns. "I prefer being with my sheep to being with people.  Sheep don't talk about insignificant things."  http://www.omaha.com/article/20121011/AP07/310119938

On October 25, 1854,  one of the most famous battles of military history was fought at Balaclava, in the Crimea.  Upon reading reports of the disaster in the Times five weeks later, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote "The Charge of the Light Brigade," composing the poem while raking leaves, he later said, and writing it out in a few minutes.  As poet laureate, Tennyson wrote a number of nationalistic poems, but he was anxious not to be perceived as a jingoist or war-lover.  His epilogue to "The Charge of the Heavy Brigade," a poem written decades later, contains the lines, "And who loves War for War's own sake, / Is fool or crazed or worse."   But the story behind Tennyson's later, "Heavy Brigade" poem is an interesting and more complicated one.  Many of the surviving Balaclava soldiers, long returned to England and long forgotten, were so destitute that a charity drive was undertaken on their behalf.  When little money was raised, the charity organizers suggested that the veterans visit Tennyson, who might rally support.  When they did so, he wrote his "Heavy Brigade" poem and appealed for more donations.  http://www.todayinliterature.com/stories.asp?Event_Date=10/25/1854