A worker installed the first street sign in Costa Rica at the avenue central in San Jose September 27, 2012.  Municipal workers will install about 22,000 signs and plaques on street corners in the city, home to 1.4 million people, where the current informal system is tolerated by residents, but creates headaches for visitors and the post office.  "My current home address is 200 meters north of the Pizza Hut then 400 meters west, but in a few months, I will be able to give a proper street name and a number," San Jose Mayor Johnny Araya said during a ceremony where the first street sign was placed.  Other popular landmarks residents use to describe how to get somewhere include the McDonald's restaurant chain, former President and Nobel Prize-winner Oscar Arias' house, a famous fig tree that has long since died and the site of an old cattle shed turned gas station.  Many streets will be named after illustrious political and intellectual figures from Costa Rican history.  Araya hopes the plan will reduce economic losses caused by undelivered, returned or re-sent mail, estimated at $720 million a year by the Inter-American Development Bank in 2008.  Almost one-quarter of the country's mail never reaches its destination, a spokesman for the Costa Rican post office said.  Postal codes were introduced in 2007 to help matters, but no one uses them because they do not know how to find them.  Costa Rica embarked on a street-naming crusade about 30 years ago, but the signposts were never installed.  This time, funding from two different banks made the $1 million project possible.

Isabella Cota  http://www.reuters.com/article/us-costarica-streets-idUSBRE88Q1ZR20120928

Q:  How many times was a president elected who did not win the popular vote?  A:  It has happened four times.  In 1824, John Quincy Adams was elected president despite not winning either the popular vote or the electoral vote.  Andrew Jackson was the winner in both categories.  Jackson received 38,000 more popular votes than Adams, and beat him in the electoral vote 99 to 84.  Despite his victories, Jackson didn’t reach the majority 131 votes needed in the Electoral College to be declared president.  In fact, neither candidate did.  The decision went to the House of Representatives, which voted Adams into the White House.  In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won the election (by a margin of one electoral vote), but he lost the popular vote by more than 250,000 ballots to Samuel J. Tilden.  In 1888, Benjamin Harrison received 233 electoral votes to Grover Cleveland’s 168, winning the presidency.  But Harrison lost the popular vote by more than 90,000 votes.  In 2000, George W. Bush was declared the winner of the general election and became the 43rd president, but he didn’t win the popular vote either.  Al Gore holds that distinction, garnering about 540,000 more votes than Bush.  However, Bush won the electoral vote, 271 to 266.  http://www.factcheck.org/2008/03/presidents-winning-without-popular-vote/

thesis  noun  a long piece of writing on a particular subject that is done to earn a degree at a university; a statement that someone wants to discuss or prove

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thesis

A thesis can be seen as a single idea.  The idea contains a form of incompleteness that gives rise to the antithesis, a conflicting idea.  A third point of view, a synthesis, arises from this conflict.  It overcomes the conflict by reconciling the truths contained in the thesis and antithesis at a higher level.  The synthesis is a new thesis.  It generates a new antithesis, and the process continues until truth is arrived at.  Well, what got me thinking about this is the ongoing debate about whether online marketing is a direct response or a branding tool.  Branding is traditionally a “lean back” experience, a passive state of being awash in moods and tones tied to sound, motion, and images, which work in concert to elicit an emotional response from an audience that will connect with a given product or service.   Direct response is more of a “lean forward” experience, especially in the online space, where an audience is asked to actively submit to a call to action.  Engagement branding brings these two ideas together, allowing for the rhetorical exercise of convincing an individual that by interacting with a given product or service, she will alter her relationship with the world around her in a positive, meaningful way.  It allows users to satisfy that need within the confines of the medium.  Online marketing brings direct response and branding concepts together and allows them to be something more than the sum of their parts.  Jim Meskauskas   https://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/1703443/thesis-antithesis-synthesis

The deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history occurred in Texas.  Galveston, Texas, an island city located about 50 miles southeast of Houston, was once the nation’s biggest cotton port, a playground for millionaires and a major gateway for arriving immigrants.  But on September 8, 1900, a Category 4 hurricane slammed the area with a 15-foot storm surge and winds up to 140 miles per hour.  Relatively few residents evacuated, in part because U.S. weather forecasters had downplayed warnings from their Cuban counterparts, and an estimated 8,000 people died.  “We got caught flat-footed,” McCaslin said.  “It was horrendous.  The water literally swept over the island.”  In the hurricane’s aftermath, Galveston constructed a seawall and raised its elevation with sand from the Gulf of Mexico.  Two presidents were born in Texas.  Born in Denison, Texas, in 1890, Dwight D. Eisenhower moved to Kansas as a toddler and did not return to the Lone Star State until he was stationed there as a second lieutenant in the Army. Lyndon B. Johnson, on the other hand, was a Texan through and through.   He was born one town over from Johnson City, which his relatives had helped settle, grew up and went to college in state, and later served as a U.S. representative and U.S. senator from Texas.  He ascended to the White House less than three years after Eisenhower left it.  “Don’t mess with Texas” started as an anti-litter message.  In the 1980s Texas spent about $20 million a year cleaning up trash along its highways.  As a result, the state Department of Transportation hired an advertising agency to help with its anti-litter campaign.  The agency came up with the phrase “Don’t mess with Texas,” which first aired on television during the 1986 Cotton Bowl and has since turned into an unofficial slogan for Texas pride.  Jesse Greenspan  http://www.history.com/news/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-texas

In 1836, a scrappy Texas won its independence from Mexico in a bloody war.  The newly minted Republic of Texas experimented with running itself as its own country before going broke and voting to join the United States.  In 1861, Texans voted to secede and join the Confederacy during the Civil War.  When the war was over, the Supreme Court decided—in a case that involved none other than Texas, albeit on the non-secession side—that states can’t secede unilaterally and any attempt to do so will be “absolutely null.”  Amber Phillips  Read about modern-day secessionism at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/04/19/the-texas-secession-movement-is-getting-kind-of-serious/

Find recipe for Queen Elizabeth's Drop Scones (also called Scottish pancakes) from Elise Bauer at http://www.simplyrecipes.com/recipes/queen_elizabeths_drop_scones/  "Baking powder is just the combination of baking soda and cream of tartar with some corn starch thrown in, so if you don’t have cream of tartar, you can substitute both the baking soda and the cream of tartar with baking powder."

Amidst, Amongst, Whilst: You Stillst Shouldn’tst by Christopher Daly  A reader recently took issue with my long-standing recommendation to avoid the use of the “-st” variants of amid, among, and while.  See original 2013 post at https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/amidst-amongst-whilst-please-resist-usingst-themst/  Our exchange about it was growing unmanageably long for the comments section, so I’ve gone and turned it into a full post for today.  The reader’s actual question was, essentially:  “is it more appropriate to talk about being amidst people or amongst people?”  My response:  neither.  You should avoid using both amidst and amongst and stick to amid or among.  If you want to phrase it the way most people do, choose among (although I don’t have enough context, so perhaps amid works better).  You could also find a different word entirely:  With people?  Surrounded by people?  Hanging out with people?  Again, without knowing the precise context, I can’t know if these are better or worse solutions.  Read entire post at https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2016/05/04/amidst-amongst-whilst-you-stillst-shouldntst/ 

KENTUCKY DERBY  Post time:  6:34 p.m. ET May 7, 2016 at Churchill Downs.  Distance:  1 1/4 miles.  Purse:  $2 million.  TV:  NBC.  Radio:  Horse Racing Radio Network.  http://www.courier-journal.com/story/sports/horses/triple/derby/2016/05/04/kentucky-derby-2016--entries-odds-post-positions-for-saturdays-race-at-churchill-downs/83922364/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1467  May 6, 2016  On this date in 1915, Babe Ruth hit his first major league home run while pitching for the Boston Red Sox.  On this date in 1968, Lætitia Sadier, French singer and keyboard player, was born.