Friday, August 7, 2015

Cincinnati is the third-largest city in Ohio and the 65th-largest city in the United States.  It had a population of 296,945 at the 2010 census.  According to the census, the population of the metropolitan area was 2,214,954--the 28th-largest Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) in the United States and the largest centered in Ohio.  Settled in 1788, the city is located on the north side of the confluence of the Licking with the Ohio River.  The latter forms the border between the states of Ohio and Kentucky.  Because it is the first major American city founded after the American Revolution as well as the first major inland city in the country, Cincinnati is sometimes thought of as the first purely "American" city.  Cincinnati is home to two major sports teams, the Cincinnati Reds, the oldest franchise in Major League Baseball, and the Cincinnati Bengals of the National Football League.  The University of Cincinnati, founded in 1819, is one of the 50 largest in the United States.  In the late 1800s, Cincinnati was commonly referred to as "Paris of America", due mainly to such ambitious architectural projects as the Music Hall, Cincinnatian Hotel, and Shillito Department StoreThe original surveyor, John Filson, named it "Losantiville".  Read more and see pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati

John Aldrich Ruthven (born November 12, 1924 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is an American artist best known for his paintings of wildlife.  After serving in the U.S. military in World War II, Ruthven opened a commercial art studio in Cincinnati.  His work for clients included the Play-Doh Boy, used in that product's original 1950s advertising.  Ruthven's focus, however, was on wildlife painting in the style of John James Audubon.  In 1960, his painting "Redhead Ducks" won the Federal Duck Stamp competition.  Ruthven's wildlife paintings are on display at many museums including the Smithsonian Institution, and his work was featured in a 1994 retrospective at the Cincinnati Museum of Natural History.  He designed two pigs for Cincinnati's Big Pig Gig in 2000.  Other artwork include a passenger pigeon mural on the wall of a six-story building in Cincinnati which can be seen in the 2014 documentary From Billions To None by David Mrazek and Joel Greenberg.  Ruthven was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2004.  He now lives on a farm near Georgetown, Ohiohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Ruthven_(artist)

Find a list of flatbreads and their substitutes from arepa (a Venezuelan bread that's round and flat and usually made of cornmeal) to taco shells at http://www.foodsubs.com/Flatbread.html

A drawing room is a room in a house where visitors may be entertained.  The name is derived from the sixteenth-century terms withdrawing room and withdrawing chamber, which remained in use through the seventeenth century, and made their first written appearance in 1642.  In a large sixteenth- to early eighteenth-century English house, a withdrawing room was a room to which the owner of the house, his wife, or a distinguished guest who was occupying one of the main apartments in the house could "withdraw" for more privacy. It was often off the great chamber (or the great chamber's descendant, the state room or salon) and usually led to a formal, or "state" bedroom.  The term drawing room was historically also applied to certain passenger train accommodations, designating some of the most spacious and expensive private accommodations available on board a sleeping car or private railroad car.  In North America, it meant a room which slept three or more persons, with a private washroom.  Although Amtrak has retired its sleeping cars that were built with drawing rooms, they are still used by Via Rail Canada; the traditional nomenclature is seen as archaic, so they are officially marketed as "triple bedrooms".  The drawing room, being a room in the house to entertain visitors, gave its name to drawing room plays, a genre of theatrical productions and motion pictures.  Beginning with the early forms of drama, the drawing room play has evolved to encompass comedy as well as to include the forms of the dramatic monologue.  While the drawing room itself has fallen out of favor, the play format has continued to provide a source of entertainment.  Drawing room comedy typically features wit and verbal banter among wealthy, leisured, genteel, upper class characters.  Drawing room comedy is also sometimes called the "comedy of manners." Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and several of the plays of Noël Coward are typical works of the genre.  George Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House adds an undercurrent of social criticism to the genre.  Cary Grant appeared in a number of filmed drawing-room comedies.  Ernst Lubitsch was especially known as a director of drawing-room comedies.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawing_room


Sarah Baker and her boyfriend wanted to have a natural lawn, to cultivate plants instead of mowing.  She lost that fight with St. Albans Township trustees, who called the yard a nuisance and wanted it mowed.  Her story has been picked up in major newspapers, on message boards and all over social media.  Turns out, Baker says, it might have been a good thing that the trustees didn’t buy Baker’s plea and instead ordered her to mow her seven-eighths-of-an-acre yard outside of Alexandria in rural Licking County, Ohio.  The Dispatch wrote about her fight with the township on July 20, 2015.  More than 62,000 people read the story online that day, and more than 100,000 people shared it with friends on social media.  Then The Washington Post took notice.  An editor called Baker at her work, Baker’s Acres, a greenhouse and garden center owned by her parents in Licking County, and asked her to write an op-ed piece for their web feature, “ PostEverything”  Baker’s own authored piece appeared on the Washington Post website August 3, 2015, and by day’s end, it was the most-read piece on the site, drawing more than 1,500 comments from Post readers.  On August 4, Post columnist Christopher Ingraham followed Baker’s attention-getting piece with a second editorial, headlined, ”Lawns are a soul-crushing timesuck and most of us would be better off without them.”  Eric Lyttle  http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2015/08/05/lawn-fight.html

A Rarity Reclaimed:  Stolen Stradivarius Recovered After 35 Years by Nina Totenberg   My father, virtuoso violinist Roman Totenberg played his beloved Stradivarius violin all over the world.  And then one day, he turned around and it was gone.  Stolen.  While he was greeting well-wishers after a concert, it was snatched from his office at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass.  It was a crushing loss for my father.  As he put it, he had lost his "musical partner of 38 years."  And when he would ultimately buy a Guarneri violin from the same period as the Stradivarius, he'd have to rework the fingering of his entire repertoire for the new instrument.  My father would dream of opening his violin case and seeing the Strad there again, but he never laid eyes on it again. He died in 2012, but the Stradivarius lived on — somewhere.  Then, on the last day in June 2015, I got a call from FBI Special Agent Christopher McKeogh.  "We believe that the FBI has recovered your father's stolen violin," he said.  On August 6, 2015, at the U.S. attorney's office in New York, there is a formal ceremony turning the violin over to the Totenberg sisters—Nina, Jill and Amy—under an agreement filed in federal court. (This story will be updated.)   "It's nice to return something of great value to a family or a country or an institution," says U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, adding that these "are moments of celebration that we don't have that often here."  Of course, Stradivarius owners are really just guardians of these great artistic instruments.  We will sell the Ames Strad—now perhaps the Ames-Totenberg Stradivarius.  We will make sure it is in the hands of another virtuoso violinist.  And once again, the beautiful, brilliant and throaty voice of that long-stilled violin will thrill audiences in concert halls around the world.  Stolen with my father's violin was a bow made by the Stradivarius of bow makers, Francois Tourte.  Special Agent McKeogh is "hopeful" that in light of this story, someone with information about the bow will come forward.  In addition, there is another stolen Stradivarius out there, the Davidoff-Morini Strad, taken from the apartment of violinist Erica Morini in 1995.  Anyone with information about either the bow or the violin is asked to contact the New York office of the FBI at 212-384-5000 and to ask for agent McKeoghRead more and see many pictures at http://www.npr.org/2015/08/06/427718240/a-rarity-reclaimed-stolen-stradivarius-recovered-after-35-years

Republican Party presidential debates, 2016  Find a table listing all 12 debates (plus the "forum" broadcast shortly before the officially sanctioned televised debates—which because candidates will speak one at a time is technically not an RNC-sanctioned "debate" and thus is not considered a violation of RNC prohibitions against any candidate participating in non-sanctioned "debate" events), their locations, their broadcasters, and all candidates who will participate in each debate at

Democratic Party presidential debates, 2016  Find a table listing all 6 debates (with venues to be determined) and the dates for the first 4 debates at


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1334  August 7, 2015  On this date in 1794, President George Washington invoked the Militia Acts of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion (also known as the Whiskey Insurrection) in western Pennsylvnia.  This tax protest began in 1791.  The so-called "whiskey tax" was the first tax imposed on a domestic product.  On this date in 1927, the Peace Bridge opened between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.

No comments: