TREE TRIVIA  The average life of a street tree growing in a typical downtown area is only seven years.  Due to a lack of root space and poor, compacted soils, most downtown trees are essentially "potted plants."  The ginkgo tree is a "living fossil."  Unlike most other kinds of trees living today, the ginkgo was around during the days of the dinosaurs.  Trees make up an estimated 80% by weight of the 49 trillion tons of green plants on the planet.  Coal is formed from trees that lived during the prehistoric times.  Less than 1% of a tree is made up of living cells.  It takes 30 leaves to grow a Jonathan apple and 50 leaves to grow a big Delicious apple.  There are over 20,000 different kinds of trees in the world.  Kim Sebastian  http://dnr.wi.gov/wnrmag/html/supps/2002/oct02/trivia.htm  See State Tree Facts and Trivia

at http://www.usna.usda.gov/Gardens/collections/statetreetrivia.html

The Borough of Westmont in Pennsylvania has 195 elms planted on Luzerne Street and 15 on various other streets.  The Luzerne Street elms, the longest municipally owned, continuous stand of American Elms in the country, is nearly 3200 feet long.  It is the last cathedral-arched boulevard in the USA.  http://westmontborough.com/general-information/trees/

Portmanteau is a literary device in which two or more words are joined together to coin a new word.  A portmanteau word is formed by blending parts of two or more words but it always refers to a single concept.  http://literarydevices.net/portmanteau/  A portmanteau was a suitcase that opened into two equal sections.  The etymology of the word is the French porte-manteau, from porter, to carry, and manteau, cloak (from Old French mantel, from Latin mantellum).  In modern French, a porte-manteau is a clothes valet, a coat-tree or similar article of furniture for hanging up jackets, hats, umbrellas and the like.  It has also been used especially in Europe as a formal description for hat racks from the French words porter (to carry) and manteau (cloak).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portmanteau

Pinotage is South Africa's signature grape variety.  The variety, a crossing of Pinot Noir and Cinsaut, was first bred by scientist Abraham Perold in 1925, although the few seeds the crossing yielded were planted in his garden and consequently forgotten.  The vines were found by another researcher some years later, grafted onto disease-resistant rootstocks and the first commercial plantings were made in 1943.  The name Pinotage is a portmanteau of its two parents, as Cinsaut was then known in South Africa as Hermitage.

http://www.wine-searcher.com/grape-385-pinotage

In baseball, the dead-ball era was the period between around 1900 (though some date it to the beginning of baseball) and the emergence of Babe Ruth as a power hitter in 1919.  That year, Ruth hit a then-league record 29 home runs, a spectacular feat at that time.  During the dead-ball era, baseball was much more of a strategy-driven game, using a style of play now known as small ball or inside baseball.  It relied much more on stolen bases and hit-and-run types of plays than on home runs.  These strategies emphasized speed, perhaps by necessity.  Teams played in spacious ball parks that limited hitting for power, and, compared to modern baseballs, the ball used then was "dead" both by design and from overuse.  Low-power hits like the Baltimore Chop, developed in the 1890s by the Baltimore Orioles, were used to get on base.  Once on base, a runner would often steal or be bunted over to second base and move to third base or score on a hit-and-run play.  In no other era have teams stolen as many bases as in the dead-ball era.  The dead-ball era ended suddenly.  By 1921, offenses were scoring 40% more runs and hitting four times as many home runs as they had in 1918.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead-ball_era

A NASA spacecraft recently encountered Jupiter, and the University of Iowa was there for the rendezvous.  An instrument built at the UI is aboard the Juno spacecraft that made a star-spangled entry into Jupiter’s orbit on July 4. 2016.  William Kurth, research scientist in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the UI, is lead co-investigator for the Waves instrument.  Designed and built at the UI, Waves will sample the electric and magnetic fields of radio and plasma waves around Jupiter to determine how the planet’s auroras are produced.  Auroras, called northern or southern lights because they’re most visible in Earth’s polar regions, have dazzled humans for eons.  The atmospheric fireworks at Jupiter’s poles, powered by the planet’s rotation, are the brightest in the solar system, making the Earth’s display seem puny by comparison.  Jupiter also contains radiation belts that are hundreds of times more intense than Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts discovered by and named after UI space pioneer James Van Allen.  “It’s a place where you don’t want to spend much time if you don’t have to,” Kurth says.  Juno lifted into space on Aug. 5, 2011.  In October 2013, it executed a slingshot maneuver around the Earth, using our planet’s gravity to propel the spacecraft toward Jupiter.  The mission is scheduled to end in February 2018, after traveling 2.1 billion miles.  Since 1958, the UI has designed and built instruments for 69 successfully launched spacecraft.  Seventeen are currently carrying UI instruments.  Richard C. Lewis  https://now.uiowa.edu/2016/06/jupiter-rendezvous

The Prefixes “Bi” and “Semi”  If you receive a paycheck on the fifteenth and thirtieth of each month, are you paid bimonthly or semimonthly?  If a newspaper is published every two weeks, it is a biweekly or a bimonthly publication?  The answer is not simple.  If we check Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (10th edition) for definitions of each prefix, we find that although semi always means “half,” the prefix bi can mean either “every two” or “twice.”  Thus, bimonthly can mean either “every two months” or “twice a month.”  Webster’s warns us that when using the prefix bi, we should give the reader clues about which meaning we intend.  And when you are the reader, you should make sure you know which meaning the writer intends.  Before you decide to pay $19.95 for a bimonthly magazine, read the fine print to find out if you will receive six issues a year or twenty-four.  When we mean “twice” (as in “twice a week” or “twice a month”), we can avoid ambiguity by using the prefix semi (as in semiweekly for “twice a week” and semimonthly for “twice a month”) even though technically we could use the prefix bi.  Two final notes:  (1)  We have a special word--biennial--that means “occurring every two years.”  The word biannual has only one meaning:  “occurring twice a year.”  Biannual is thus interchangeable with semiannual, although biannual is less preferable if we wish to avoid any chance of misreading by folks who are not thoroughly familiar with these definitions.  (2)  Never use a hyphen with either of these prefixes unless the root word begins with the letter i, as in semi-independent, semi-invalid, and semi-infinite.  http://www.getitwriteonline.com/archive/051401bisemi.htm

The world's most valuable scientific books and manuscripts--an overview of the marketplace by Mike Hanlon   Just 500 years ago, print was emerging as the first mass medium and with it, the first commonly available access to knowledge.  Before Gutenberg's bible was completed (circa 1455), there were around 30,000 books in all of Europe.  Each one had been written by hand.  In the next 50 years, ten million books were printed.  That volume of books broadcast the knowledge of a few to many and the transformation that resulted has continued to accelerate societal development to this day.  Read extensive article and see pictures at  http://newatlas.com/50-most-valuable-scientific-books-and-manuscripts/45781/

jalousie noun  1.  a window blind or shutter constructed from angled slats of wood, plastic, etc.  2.  a window made of similarly angled slats of glass.  From Old French gelosie latticework screen, literally:  jealousy, perhaps because one can look through the screen without being seen  Collins English Dictionary – Complete and Unabridged, 12th Edition 2014 © HarperCollins Publishers  http://www.thefreedictionary.com/jalousie 

Jalousie, (Jalousie 'Tango Tzigane' /Jealousy 'Gypsy Tango' )  a tango written by Danish composer Jacob Gade in 1925.  Later, various composers in different countries added lyrics; Jealousy by Alain Robbe-Grillet  1995 novel; Jealousy  La Jalousie (original title) 2013 film

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1555  November 23, 2016  On this date in 1889, the first jukebox went into operation at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco.  On this date in 1924, Edwin Hubble's discovery that the Andromeda nebula is actually another island universe far outside of our own was first published in The New York Times.