Confessions of Kwame Alexander  “Being sort of uncool and goofy [as a teenager], I was always trying to figure out the best way to communicate with girls,” he said.  What I discovered that I did have, and a lot of guys didn’t, was a way with words.  I knew how to arrange words and make them dance on a page.  And, of course, that came from reading.”  Alexander will headline the October 22, 2015 Authors! Authors! lecture at the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, co-sponsored by The Blade.  To be honest, he clarified, adolescence meant “rediscovering” reading after being introduced to the joy of books early on by his parents.   “My parents were my first librarians,” he said.  “My father wrote 16 books; he was a book publisher—and my mother was an English teacher.  From a very early age we were reading and writing, and certainly I enjoyed being read to as a child.   “But I think once I got to middle school I sort of fell out of love with books.  I was being forced to read at home, and a lot of these books were these huge texts my father made me read.  Both at home and school I wasn’t really being given books that I was interested in, so I sort of lost the interest and excitement I had as a kid.”  In February 2015, Alexander won the Newbery Medal, the American Library Association’s highest honor in children’s literature, for The Crossover, which details the exploits of basketball-playing twins JB and Josh.  Written in verse, the writer said it was designed to introduce children to poetry, while also targeting a neglected segment of the youth market:  boys.  “I know I wanted to play outside with my friends when I was a boy, and my sister was probably more apt to be in the house reading a book,” he said.  “If you give boys books that are interesting to them they will read, and that’s ultimately the goal.  That’s what I set out to do with The Crossover, write a book that boys couldn’t put down.  “Books are like amusement parks; sometimes you have to let kids choose the ride.  I think boys do want to read and imagine a world for themselves.  But you have got to give them something that will connect with them. That really goes for anybody.” Authors! Authors! with Kwame Alexander  October 22, 2015, 7 p.m.  McMaster Center at the Toledo Lucas County Public Library, 325 N. Michigan St.  Tickets are $10 for adults, $8 for students   Information:  419-259-5266 or visit toledolibrary.org.  Mike Pearson   http://www.toledoblade.com/Books/2015/10/18/Celebrated-writer-makes-books-cool-to-speak-at-Authors-Authors-Kwame-Alexander.html  See also Five questions for Kwame Alexander

http://www.hbook.com/2015/02/authors-illustrators/interviews/five-questions-kwame-alexander/ and 2015 Newbery-Caldecott-Wilder Banquet June 28, 2015  Kwame Alexander--The Crossover  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnh3JNCMLq8  27:04

Brothers Stephen Quay and Timothy Quay are esteemed filmmakers, film directors and animators.  They are identical twins most famously known as both either Brothers Quay or the Quay Brothers.  Indeed their collaborative stop-motion animations are extremely well known for the ways in which they have been influential to the field.  They were born on June 17, 1947 in Norristown, Pennsylvania, a town that had an important European immigrant influx.  They attended art school together at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, USA and at the Royal College of Art in London, UK in the late 1960s where they would set their studio and where they still live today as well.  They are both professors of Animated Film at The European Graduate School where they have taught an intensive summer seminar, typically in the form of a workshop.  It is during their time studying in Philadelphia that they would take film courses and in doing so would see for the first time the surrealist movies of Luis Buñuel (1900-1983), the ones by the Danish film director Carl Theodor Dreyer (1889-1968), who is considered by many critic as being one of the most important directors of all times.  But the two brothers would also be introduced to the films of the Russian movie director Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-1986) as well as the ones of Swedish movie and theater director Ingmar Bergman (1918- ).   With their first movies, Stephen and Timothy Quay would show a particular taste for esoteric influences.  Indeed they began with the Polish animators Walerian Borowczyk (1923 - 2006) and Jan Lenica (1928-2001).  They would then show their inspiration was grounded by the work of writers such as the famous Czech novelist Franz Kafka (1883-1924), the Swiss writer Robert Walser (1878-1956), the avant-gardes Belgian dramatist Michel de Ghelderode (1898-1962), the Russian and French animator Wladyslaw Starewicz (1882-1965).  Moreover, Czech composers Leoš Janáček (1854-1928) as well as Zdeněk Liška (1922-1983) would be a great source of inspiration for them.  The same would be true with the Polish composer Leszek Jankowski (1956- ) who would in fact write original musical scores for a good deal of their films.  The Quay Brothers would create films that the critics would often call surreal and which usually involve inanimate objects coming to life.  In 1998 they were the recipient of the prestigious Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Set Design for their outstanding effort on the play The Chairs (originally “Les Chaise”) by the Romanian and French Theatre of the Absurd playwright Eugène Ionesco (1909-1994).  The other recipient that same year was Richard Hudson (1954- ) for his work on the famous musical The Lion King.  http://www.egs.edu/faculty/stephen-timothy-quay/biography/  Interview with Stop Motion Animation Pioneers, The Brothers Quay

by Edward Douglas  http://www.comingsoon.net/movies/features/474489-interview-with-stop-motion-animation-pioneers-the-brothers-quay

The next generation of drones, which are just beginning to roll out, doesn’t require users to hold remote controllers:  They are hands-free.  Simply toss them in the air, and they will follow you like Tinker Bell.  With names such as Lily (around $700 on pre-order) and Nixie (not yet available for pre-order), they are capable of recording breathtaking video footage and trailing adventure travelers across bridges and streams, down ski slopes and into secluded gardens.  Nixie, which you can wear on your wrist until you want to fling it off for a photo or video, has a “boomerang mode” that allows it to fly back to you as if it were a trained raptor.  There is no denying that the latest drone technology is impressive.  And the footage is striking.  Adventure travelers who wish to watch themselves scale Kilimanjaro or surf in Hawaii along the North Shore of Oahu will no doubt want one.  But if selfie-drones become staples of every traveler who can afford them, we stand to lose more than we stand to gain when it comes to privacy, safety and quality-of-life factors like peace and beauty.  Strolling Sheep Meadow in Central Park in New York on a warm spring day is already an art with all of the dodging of footballs and Frisbees one must perfect to survive.  If a drone is in midair when its battery dies, it falls from the sky.  Pitfalls abound.  Yet when it comes to travel, there is no greater concern than drone use near airports.  The Federal Aviation Administration said in August 2015 that pilot reports of close calls with drones had increased drastically in 2015, to more than 650 sightings by Aug. 9, up from 238 in all of 2014.  “Pilots of a variety of different types of aircraft—including many large, commercial air carriers—reported spotting 16 unmanned aircraft in June of 2014, and 36 the following month,” the F.A.A. said in a statement.  “This year, 138 pilots reported seeing drones at altitudes of up to 10,000 feet during the month of June, and another 137 in July.”  Drones have been spotted near all of the New York area’s major airports, including John F. Kennedy International, La Guardia and Newark Liberty International in New Jersey.  Last year, pilots on major carriers reported seeing drones 100 feet off a wing (Delta) and flying under the plane’s nose (JetBlue).  Stephanie Rosenbloom  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/travel/selfie-camera-drones.html

A compound noun is a noun that is made with two or more words.  A compound noun is usually [noun + noun] or [adjective + noun], but there are other combinations.  Each compound noun acts as a single unit and can be modified by adjectives and other nouns.  There are three forms for compound nouns:  open or spaced (tennis shoe); hyphenated (six-pack); and closed or solid (bedroom).  See examples at https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/nouns-compound.htm

John Tukey (1915-2000) as an American mathematician best known for development of the FFT algorithm and box plot.  The Tukey range test, the Tukey lambda distribution, the Tukey test of additivity, and the Teichmüller–Tukey lemma all bear his name.  Mr. Tukey coined many statistical terms that have become part of common usage, but the two most famous coinages attributed to him were related to computer science.  While working with John von Neumann on early computer designs, Tukey introduced the word "bit" as a contraction of "binary digit".  The term "bit" was first used in an article by Claude Shannon in 1948.  In 2000, Fred Shapiro, a librarian at the Yale Law School, published a letter revealing that Tukey's 1958 paper "The Teaching of Concrete Mathematics" contained the earliest known usage of the term "software" found in a search of JSTOR's electronic archives, predating the OED's citation by two years.  This led many to credit Tukey with coining the term, particularly in obituaries published that same year, although Tukey never claimed credit for any such coinage.  In 1995, Paul Niquette claimed he had originally coined the term in October 1953, although he could not find any documents supporting his claim.  The earliest known publication of the term "software" in an engineering context was in August 1953 by Richard R. Carhart, in a Rand Corporation Research Memorandum.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Tukey

suffix:  ware  [in uncountable nouns]  1 things made of a particular material, especially for use in the home:  glassware, silverware  2 things used in a particular place for the preparation or serving of food:  ovenware, tableware  3 things used in operating a computer:  software (programs), shareware  (programs which can be shared via the Internet)  http://www.ldoceonline.com/dictionary/-ware

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1366  October 21, 2015  On this date in 1879, Thomas Edison invented a workable electric light bulb at his laboratory in Menlo Park, N.J. which was tested the next day and lasted 13.5 hours.  This would be the invention of the first commercially practical incandescent light.  Popular belief is that he invented the first light bulb, which he did not.  On this date in 1959, in New York City, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, opened to the public.