February 17, 2017  MYSORE, India   It’s an unseasonably hot winter day in this southern city, and the midmorning sun is turning the crumbling yellow stucco of the 100-year-old City Central Library a shade paler.  A hawker is yelling on the busy road, trying to drum up business for his collection of old coins and medals.  As I take the stairs to the main level, I can see a bit of a line at the water fountain.  The occupants of the small reading room are all middle-age men poring over newspapers in at least three languages.  The ceiling fans whir.  Pages rustle.  Not one man is looking at his phone.  Overhead a framed poster features a paraphrase of a line from the novelist Neil Gaiman:  “Google can bring you 100,000 answers but a librarian can bring you the right one.”  Fighting words.  In the larger reading room the crowd is mixed.  An elderly woman looks up from her notebook; a lanky boy is mouthing the words he reads.  Every seat is occupied, and I wander between the stacks:  Astronomy, Home Economics, Satire in Kannada Literature.  Every so often, there are rumblings, among students gathered on the front steps or in the local press, that the library will close:  the predatory gaze of developers is never far.  And I’m more conscious than ever of the many things we would lose.  Wherever I’ve lived, I’ve used the library.  When I was growing up in Nairobi, Kenya, I would sometimes go to a tiny community library run by a church organization.  It was a stronghold of stalwarts; there were hardly ever any new faces.  The dust was thick.  Branches of a jacaranda tree pressed against the single large window.  The place had a vaguely medicinal smell, as though along with tonic for the mind, it administered tinctures and liniments.  One evening a few minutes before closing, the librarian and I were packing up at the same time.  He glanced over at one of my books and did a cinematic double take.  “That’s not from this library?” he asked.  “No, it’s mine,” I said, telling the truth but sounding cagey.  I was in early adolescence, and everything I said seemed like an admission of guilt.  “I’m reading it too,” he said, whipping out his own copy.  It was the same edition of Iris Murdoch’s “A Word Child.”  I looked at my copy for a few seconds and put it in my bag.  I felt a sudden rush to the head:  After years of longing to leave childhood behind, it felt as though I had finally become an adult.  Mahesh Rao  Read more at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/opinion/sunday/an-elegy-for-the-library.html?_r=0

Regretful and Regrettable--Commonly Confused Words by Richard Nordquist   Though clearly related in meaning, the adjectives regretful and regrettable aren't synonyms.  An important thing to keep in mind is that only people are regretful, while actions, circumstances, or conditions are regrettable.  By extension, a person's face, expression, eyes, voice, or words may also be described as "regretful."  The adjective regretful means full of regret--that is, feeling or showing sadness or disappointment.  The adjective regrettable refers to something unfortunate, sad, or disappointing--that is, something causing or deserving regret.  http://grammar.about.com/od/alightersideofwriting/a/regretgloss.htm

Pi Day is celebrated on March 14th (3/14) around the world.  Pi (Greek letter “π”) is the symbol used in mathematics to represent a constant—the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter—which is approximately 3.14159.  Pi has been calculated to over one trillion digits beyond its decimal point.  As an irrational and transcendental number, it will continue infinitely without repetition or pattern.  While only a handful of digits are needed for typical calculations, Pi’s infinite nature makes it a fun challenge to memorize, and to computationally calculate more and more digits.  Link to Pi sightings (including a Pi Pie Pan) and a video of a Pi song at http://www.piday.org/

Leading Australian producer Jan Chapman was “devastated” by another mistake in the 2017 Oscars telecast.  In addition to the best picture gaffe, during the show’s In Memoriam segment, a photo of a living woman was mistakenly used.  Janet Patterson, an Australian costume designer and four-time Oscar nominee (“The Piano,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Oscar and Lucinda” and “Bright Star”) passed away in October 2015.  Her name and occupation were correct in the montage, but the photo used was of Jan Chapman, a still-living Australian film producer.  Lawrence Lee and Patrick Frater  See the erroneous image at http://variety.com/2017/film/awards/oscars-in-memoriam-segment-janet-patterson-wrong-photo-jan-chapman-1201997597/

The mysterious woman who inspired a bestselling novel by Emma Jane Kirby  A romantic novel written more than half a century ago is so popular in Turkey that it has topped the country's bestseller list for the past three years.  Young people today seem to relate to the author, who was repeatedly censored, jailed and ultimately shot in mysterious circumstances.  Now, for the first time, Madonna in a Fur Coat is being published in English.  The author, Sabahattin Ali, had started two newspapers, both of which were destroyed almost as soon as they appeared.  And his very popular weekly satirical newspaper Marco Pasha, which he edited and owned, became a target of government censorship because of its political editorials.  He was twice imprisoned for his writing.  But today everyone wants to talk about Sabahattin Ali, especially the young for whom he's become a resistance icon, a man who dared stand up to the heavy hand of the state.  When I arrive at Filiz's apartment and recount this tale to her, Filiz becomes very emotional too.  For years she had to deny she was Ali's daughter--it was too dangerous in the 1940s to be associated with his outspoken socialist views.  If anyone asked who her father was, her mother told her she must politely change the subject.  "Nothing has changed in Turkey," Filiz says bitterly.  "The heavy censorship of the press, the imprisonment of journalists . . . now it's maybe even worse."  "We discovered some time ago that Maria, the Madonna, was a real woman," she tells me.  "My father wrote to a female friend when he was in prison and recounted the whole tale of his passion for this German lady to her."  Read much more and see pictures at http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-36213246

February 20, 2017  For more than a week, a popular West Frankfort, Illinois businessman and community leader has been in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in a detention facility in Montgomery City, Missouri, as his neighbors, family and friends work to bring him home.  Carlos Hernandez Pacheco, 38, from Mexico, was arrested at his home in West Frankfort on Feb. 9 and has since been held in the Montgomery County Jail, which is also an ICE detention facility about an hour west of St. Louis.  He is being held over questions about his legal status in the U.S., as confirmed on Friday by an ICE official in an emailed response to The Southern Illinoisan.  His wife and three young boys, two of whom attend Frankfort Community Unit School District 168 schools—the other is not of school age yet—remain in their West Frankfort home while a lawyer works to secure Pacheco’s release on bond, said Tim Grigsby, owner of Simple Solutions Printing in West Frankfort and a close friend of Pacheco’s.  Pacheco is the manager of La Fiesta Mexican Restaurant in West Frankfort.  Pacheco’s wife and children are U.S. citizens, and it was not well known in the community that Pacheco was not.  He pays taxes, is an active member of the West Frankfort community and has been working for years to obtain legal status, Grigsby said.  “Even though his status was illegal, he was still contributing to our society,” Grigsby said.  “There’s a lot of misconceptions about what it means to have an illegal status.”  Molly Parker  Read more at http://thesouthern.com/news/local/friends-family-rally-behind-west-frankfort-restaurant-manager-detained-by/article_d25f994c-4fb5-572c-9710-48e50ffb24c2.html

The Australian children’s book author Mem Fox has suggested she might never return to the US after she was detained and insulted by border control agents at Los Angeles airport.  Fox, who is famous worldwide for her best-selling books including Ten Little Fingers and Ten Little Toes and Possum Magic, was en route to a conference in Milwaukee earlier this month when she was stopped.  She told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation she was detained for one hour and 40 minutes and questioned by border agents for 15 minutes in front of a room full of people.  “I have never in my life been spoken to with such insolence, treated with such disdain, with so many insults and with so much gratuitous impoliteness,” Fox said.  Fox said she was questioned over her visa, despite having travelled to America 116 times before without incident.  She was eventually granted access to the country.  After lodging a complaint over her treatment with the Australian embassy in Washington and the US embassy in Canberra, Fox received an emailed apology from US officials.  Fox said she was shocked by her treatment and “couldn’t imagine” returning to the US.  Bonnie Malkin  https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/25/australian-childrens-author-mem-fox-detained-by-us-border-control-i-sobbed-like-a-baby

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1699  February 28, 2017  On this date in 1827, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad was incorporated, becoming the first railroad in America offering commercial transportation of both people and freight.  On this date in 1897, Queen Ranavalona III, the last monarch of Madagascar, was deposed by a French military force.  On this date in 1936, DuPont scientist Wallace Carothers invented nylon.