Grace Hopper (born Grace Brewster Murray 1906) joined the U.S. Navy during World War II and was assigned to program the Mark I computer.  She continued to work in computing after the war, leading the team that created the first computer language compiler, which led to the popular COBOL language.  After graduating from Vassar in 1928, she proceeded to Yale University, where, in 1930, she received a master's degree in mathematics.  Starting in 1931, Hopper began teaching at Vassar while also continuing to study at Yale, where she earned a Ph.D. in mathematics in 1934—becoming one of the first few woman to earn such a degree.  After the war, Hopper remained with the Navy as a reserve officer.  As a research fellow at Harvard, she worked with the Mark II and Mark III computers.  She was at Harvard when a moth was found to have shorted out the Mark II, and is sometimes given credit for the invention of the term "computer bug"—though she didn't actually author the term, she did help popularize it.  Wanting to continue to work with computers, Hopper moved into private industry in 1949, first with the Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corporation, then with Remington Rand, where she oversaw programming for the UNIVAC computer.  In 1952, her team created the first compiler for computer languages (a compiler renders worded instructions into code that can be read by computers).  This compiler was a precursor for the Common Business Oriented Language, or COBOL, a widely adapted language that would be used around the world.  Though she did not invent COBOL, Hopper encouraged its adaptation.  Hopper retired from the Naval Reserve in 1966, but her pioneering computer work meant that she was recalled to active duty—at the age of 60—to tackle standardizing communication between different computer languages.  She would remain with the Navy for 19 years.  When she retired in 1986, at age 79, she was a rear admiral as well as the oldest serving officer in the service.  In 1997, the guided missile destroyer, USS Hopper, was commissioned by the Navy in San Francisco.  In 2004, the University of Missouri has honored Hopper with a computer museum on their campus, dubbed “Grace’s Place.”  On display are early computers and computer components to educator visitors on the evolution of the technology.  The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women In Computing Conference is a technical conference that encourages women to become part of the world of computing, while the Association for Computing Machinery offers a Grace Murray Hopper Award.  Additionally, on her birthday in 2013, Hopper was remembered with a "Google Doodle."  In 2016, Hopper was posthumously honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.  http://www.biography.com/people/grace-hopper-21406809#later-years-and-legacy

Ralph Branca spent the last 65 years of his life watching that fastball, watching Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard ‘Round the World, remembering his own voice fruitlessly plead with the ball—Sink! Sink! Sink!”—before seeing it disappear over Andy Pafko’s head and into the stands, watching his shoulders slump, taking that eternal walk to the visiting clubhouse in center field, destined forever to be one half of the most famous at-bat of all time.  Branca was 25 that day.  He’d been a 21-game winner at 21, started Game 1 of the 1947 World Series for the Dodgers.  There would be a famous picture taken a few minutes after he entered the clubhouse after surrendering the home run to Thomson four years later, him lying on a staircase on his stomach, his arms over his eyes, a Brooklyn coach named Cookie Lavagetto sitting next to him, clearly helpless in trying to make him feel better.  Branca and Thomson became something of a vaudeville act over the decades, regulars on the rubber-chicken circuit, beginning the very next week at Yankee Stadium, where they posed for pictures together.  That winter, the two performed a skit at the New York baseball writers’ dinner, the lyrics to “Because of You”  Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca remained lifelong friends.  Mike Vaccaro  http://nypost.com/2016/11/23/ralph-branca-gave-shot-heard-round-the-world-its-perfect-dignity/

“The Thomson homer continues to live because it happened decades ago when things were not replayed and worn out and run down and used up before midnight of the first day.  The scratchier an old film or an old film or an old audiotape, the clearer the action in a way."  Underworld, a novel by Don DeLillo

The 25,000-word prologue to Don DeLillo's Underworld first appeared in Harper's magazine as a self-contained novella.  It's a 1951 championship play-off game between the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, won by the Giants at the last gasp with a home run by Bobby Thomson, celebrated in the next morning's papers as 'the shot heard around the world'.   https://www.theguardian.com/books/1998/jan/10/fiction.dondelillo

Underworld is the title of the archetypal first gangster movie (written by Ben Hecht and directed in 1927 by Josef von Sternberg), from which so many conventions of plot and lighting and characterization and incidental business still employed today directly descend.  The term “underworld” used as the title of Don DeLillo's 1997 novel now carries the title’s sense—that of gangland, of a separate criminal sphere existing just under the skin of ordinary life—almost exclusively, so that its original metaphorical connotation has been nearly lost.  The movie Don DeLillo refers to in his panoramic novel, however, is Unterwelt, the product of Sergei Eisenstein’s period of exile in Berlin in the 1930s.  The film, unlike anything Eisenstein is actually known to have made, seems peculiarly plausible—maybe your imagination, prompted by DeLillo, devises its own montage of fragments from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Dr. Mabuse, intercut with landscapes from Que Viva Mexico.  The book’s historical range is as sweeping as its bulk suggests, from 1951 to some not quite definite present day, which might be right now or might lie a few years hence.  Between those two points, the chronology runs backward; successive clumps of narrative are terraced in stages from 1992 back to 1951.  We enter and leave the 1951 Dodgers and Giants game with Cotter Martin, skipping school for the day to sneak into the Polo Grounds, and make rapid visits to Willie Mays’s inability to shake a radio jingle, the announcer Russ Hodges’s oncoming cold and drift of memories, and the assortment of observations and emotions that succeed each other in J. Edgar Hoover’s mind.  Hoover is attending the game as the unlikely fourth member of a group also composed of Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and Toots Shor.  They really were all there together, as DeLillo has noted in interviews.  The significance of the game in both baseball history and New York City folklore—the most dramatic event of the numerous subway series that took place in the 1940s and 1950s, when the city still had three teams and distinct neighborhoods to support them—was buttressed in DeLillo’s mind, he has also said, by a coincidence:  the report of the game in The New York Times was balanced across the page by another story with a headline the same size, an account of a Soviet nuclear test in Kazakhstan.  Hoover receives word of this test from an agent during the game.  People throw paper from the stands in the final innings, including, page by page, an entire issue of Life; a page that falls on Hoover’s shoulder reproduces half of Brueghel’s Triumph of Death.  After Thomson’s homer the ball rolls through the stands as people scramble for it.  Cotter Martin snatches it and takes it home to his family’s Harlem apartment.  He makes the mistake of telling his father about it, though, and the father, Manx Martin, who is unemployed and always looking for an angle, takes the ball up to Yankee Stadium to sell it to someone in the line of those waiting to buy World Series tickets.  Thus the ball begins to roll through the book as a sort of Grail, one of those migratory objects that are part character and part leitmotif, like the overcoat in Gogol’s The Overcoat and in Julien Duvivier’s 1942 film Tales of Manhattan.  Here, though, we’re never exactly sure what happens to the ball.  Luc Sante  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1997/11/06/between-hell-and-history/

NAME CHANGES  William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton (born William Jefferson Blythe III 1946)  Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. (born Leslie Lynch King, Jr. 1913)  Melania Trump (born Melanija Knavs 1970, changed to Melania Knauss)

Country music group Little Big Town performs the Star Spangled Banner at the College Football Playoff National Championship Game between Alabama and Clemson January 9, 2017  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wns9i83CZWM  2:06  See the American Eagle Foundation's free-flying bald eagle towards the end of the song.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1676  January 11, 2017  On this date in 1759, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the first American life insurance company was incorporated.  On this date in 1787, William Herschel discovered Titania and Oberon, two moons of Uranus.  On this date in 1908, Grand Canyon National Monument was created.