Rome Field of Mars  (Campus Martius) a floodplain of the Tiber River, the site of the altar of Mars and the temple of Apollo in the 5th century bc.  Originally used primarily as a military exercise ground, it was later drained and, by the 1st century bc, became covered with large public buildings—baths, amphitheatre, theatres, gymnasium, crematorium, and many more temples.  The Pantheon is the most notable structure extant.  The historian Livy (1st century bc) called the area campus ignifer because of the volcanic smoke often seen there.  https://www.britannica.com/place/Campus-Martius

Paris Field of Mars (Champ  de Mars)  Located in the 7th arrondissement, the area that is now Champ de Mars was, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a garden area where vegetables and grapes grew.  By the eighteenth century, however, it had become a training ground for the adjacent École Militaire, a military academy where cadet officers of poor aristocrat families were trained in the art of war.  A young Napoleon was a student here between 1784 and 1785.  The park was now closed off by a fence and soon became known as Champ de Mars because of the war training maneuvers that took place there, featuring as many as 10,000 men at a time.  The Champ de Mars originally measured 42 hectares (about 103 acres), but for the 1890 World Exposition, architect Jean-Camille Fromigé redesigned the park and reduced its size.  It was redesigned yet again in the early twentieth century to its current size, about 24.5 hectares (approximately 60 acres).  http://www.aviewoncities.com/paris/champdemars.htm

St. Petersburg Field of Mars (Marsovo Pole)  One of the most famous squares and green spaces in the city center, the Field of Mars is home to an eternal flame that burns in the center of the square commemorating the victims of the Russian revolutions of 1917.  At the beginning of the 18th century, the area was mostly a marshy swamp out of which flowed two small rivers, the Mya River and Krivusha River (later the Moyka River and Griboedov Canal respectively).  Peter I had the area drained due to its close proximity to his Summer Palace.  The drained area was called the Grand Meadow.  Later, military parades and folk festivals were organized here, and the space became known as the Amusements Meadow.  Residences of the nobility gradually filled up the surrounding area, and during the reigns of Anna Ioannovna and Catherine I, the meadow turned into a formal garden and was renamed Tsarina's Meadow.  After the flood of 1777 destroyed the garden, the meadow was once again used as a training ground for the Russian army.  The Field of Mars gained its present-day name after a monument to the military leader Alexander Suvorov, cast as the ancient god of war, was erected in the square.  The name was also an obvious reference to the Fields of Mars in Rome and Paris; a bold indication that Petersburg should be recognized as one of the great European capitals.  http://www.saint-petersburg.com/squares/field-of-mars/

Capital and capitol are homonyms.  Capital can be used in a financial sense to describe money, equipment, or property that is used in a business.  It can sometimes be used figuratively to describe a valuable resource such as “human capital.”  It can also refer to a type of letter, a capital or lowercase letter.  Capital refers to the most important city or town in a region, state, country, etc., and it generally refers to the seat of a government or administration center.  A capitol is a building or set of buildings where legislators meet and have session.  You can keep track of capitol vs. capital by visualizing the “O” in capitol as the top of a dome.  http://writingexplained.org/capital-vs-capitol

Chronicling America is a Website providing access to information about historic newspapers and select digitized newspaper pages, and is produced by the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP).  NDNP, a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.  http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/about/

At least 15 public libraries in Iowa have been targeted by a toner pirate scam in 2016.  That’s according to the Iowa Attorney General’s Office, which filed a consumer fraud lawsuit against three Orange County, California-based businesses  September 1, 2016.  The supposed scam came to light thanks to Cate St. Clair, an attorney by training and library director by trade.  When Robey Memorial Library in Waukon received a mysterious bill for about $400 for toner, St. Clair called the number printed on the invoice.  “They were very surly on the phone,” says St. Clair.  “They were like, ‘Just disregard it.  Just disregard it.’  So I was like, ‘Well, this is super sketchy.’”  St. Clair then shared her story with a librarian listserv.  Turns out at least 14 other Iowa libraries have received similar bills this year.  "A couple of them were really freaking out," she says.  "At lot of small rural libraries, the yearly budget is small, so getting a $400 invoice for something you don't remember getting or ordering . . . it's a ton of money."  St. Clair also told her father, Steve, who specializes in consumer fraud at the Iowa Attorney General's Office.  The elder St. Clair is the assistant AG for the lawsuit, which names Central Supply Solutions, Central Supply Center, and Elite Supplies.  None responded to requests for comment.  Sarah Boden  http://iowapublicradio.org/post/alleged-toner-pirate-scam-targets-iowa-libraries#stream/0

Crossover words   Terrible and terrific are both formed off the same root:  terror.  Both started out a few hundred years ago with the meaning of terror-inducing.  But terrific took a strange turn at the beginning of the 20th century and ended up meaning really great, not terrible or terror-inducing at all.  This happened through a slow reshaping of the connections and connotations of terrific.  First it acquired the sense, not just of terror-inducing but of general intensity. You could talk about a “terrific clamor,” meaning a whole lot of clamor.  This was a bit of hyperbole—“so much noise it was terror-inducing!”—that eventually got reduced to a general sense of “more intense than usual.”  Once a word like that gets established as a general intensifier, it may also be applied to positive experiences—terrific beauty, terrific joy—and from there the jump to a fully positive “terrific!” isn’t so unexpected.  The same thing happened to the word tremendous (“causing one to tremble in fear”).  It happened to formidable (fear-inducing) too, but only in French, where it means “really great!”  It hasn’t quite reached that stage in English, but it has acquired positive intensifier status (“a formidable talent”).  The path from fear to happy enthusiasm isn’t an inevitable one.  Awful also started as a fear word—“awe” used to have much stronger connotations of quaking with fear before powerful forces—and came to be a general intensifier (“that pie was awful good!”), but it hasn’t crossed over to the happy side.  On the other hand, its close relative, “awesome,” did make the jump.  The fully positive “awesome,” a child of the '80s, is a relatively recent innovation.  It began as slang, with a dash of irony or sarcasm to it.  That seems to be the crucial ingredient in these crossover words.  The positive “terrific” dates to the slang-heavy flapper era, where “killer” also became a playful positive.  “Egregious,” a word that made the opposite crossing from positive to negative (it used to mean notable, excellent), also appears to have arisen from an ironic use.  http://mentalfloss.com/article/56865/why-does-terrible-mean-bad-and-terrific-mean-good

Difference between mammoths and mastodons   Although they  might resemble their distant, mammoth cousins, mastodons came into existence even earlier, about 27 million to 30 million years ago.  They lived primarily in North and Central America and, like mammoths, began to disappear between 12,000 and 10,000 years ago.  While similar in size and stature, fossil evidence shows that mastodons were slightly smaller than mammoths, with shorter legs and lower, flatter heads.  Both species stood between 7 and 14 feet (2 meters to 4 meters) tall, and were covered in long, shaggy hair that protected them from the harsh conditions of their respective environments.  But mammoths also possessed fatty humps on their backs that provided them with the additional nutrients necessary in their more northerly, ice-covered habitats.  The most important difference between these two species, according to Smithsonian.com, lies in how they ate their food.   Both animals were herbivores, but mastodons had cone-shaped cusps on their molars designed to crush leaves, twigs and branches.  Mammoths, however, had ridged molars that allowed them to cut through vegetation and graze like modern-day elephants.  Both species had long, curved trunks that the animals may have used to scrape snow and ice off vegetation.  Elizabeth Palermo  http://www.livescience.com/34446-mammoth-or-mastodon.html  See also http://mentalfloss.com/article/54120/whats-difference-between-mammoth-and-mastodon

September 23, 2016  Thousands of years before cats took up residence in 37 percent of American households, and managed to outnumber dogs by roughly 75 million across the globe, they were hopping continents with farmers, ancient mariners, and even Vikings, scientists have found.  The first large-scale study of ancient feline DNA has finally been completed, and the results reveal how our inscrutable friends were domesticated in the Near East and Egypt some 15,000 years ago, before spreading across the globe and into our hearts.  The study was presented at the International Symposium on Biomolecular Archaeology in Oxford, UK last week, and sequenced DNA from 209 cats that lived between 15,000 and 3,700 years ago--so from just before the advent of agriculture right up to the 18th century.  Found in more than 30 archaeological sites in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, these ancient feline specimens are helping researchers to finally piece together the beginnings of an animal that we share our beds with, but know surprisingly little about.  "We don’t know the history of ancient cats.  We do not know their origin, we don't know how their dispersal occurred," one of the team, Eva-Maria Geigl, an evolutionary geneticist from the Institut Jacques Monod in France, told Ewen Callaway at Nature.  Analysing the DNA of cats found in ancient Egyptian tombs, burial sites in Cyprus, and an old Viking settlement in Germany, the team found that cats likely experienced not one, but two, waves of expansion during their early history.  The first wave is a story you’re probably familiar with.  When the team looked the mitochondrial DNA--genetic information that’s passed on from the mother only--they found that wild cats from the Middle East and the fertile eastern Mediterranean shared a similar mitochondrial lineage.  This suggests that small wild cats spread through early agricultural communities, because they were attracted to the mice that were attracted to the grains.  Then, thousands of years after this, the research points to a separate mitochondrial connection between cats descended from those in Egypt to ones in Eurasia and Africa.  "A mitochondrial lineage common in Egyptian cat mummies from the end of the 4th century BC to the 4th century AD was also carried by cats in Bulgaria, Turkey and sub-Saharan Africa from around the same time," Callaway reports.  This second wave of expansion has been attributed to ancient sea-faring people--farmers, sailors, and Vikings--because the cats were likely encouraged to stay on board to keep their rodent problem in check.  http://www.sciencealert.com/cats-sailed-with-vikings-to-conquer-the-world-genetic-study-reveals

September 24 was National Punctuation Day.  Find graphics with words like "Let's eat grandma.  Let's eat, grandma.  PUNCTUATION SAVES LIVES" at http://www.ibtimes.com/national-punctuation-day-2016-facts-common-mistakes-avoid-how-spot-errors-2421137  See How to Celebrate National Punctuation Day^® by Jeff Rubin at http://www.nationalpunctuationday.com/celebrate.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1531  September 25, 2016  On this date in 1789, the United States Congress passed twelve amendments to the United States Constitution:  The Congressional Apportionment Amendment (which was never ratified), the Congressional Compensation Amendment, and the ten that are known as the Bill of Rights.  On this date in 1930, Shel Silverstein, American author, poet, illustrator, and songwriter, was born.  Word of the Day  booklegging noun  The illicit publication and distribution of banned books.  Banned Books Week, organized by the American Library Association to celebrate the freedom to read and to draw attention to banned and challenged books, is held in 2016 from September 25 to October 1.