Hope is a Symbolist oil painting by the English painter George Frederic Watts, the first two versions of which were completed in 1886.  Radically different from previous treatments of the subject, it shows a lone blindfolded female figure sitting on a globe, playing a lyre which has only a single string remaining.  The background is almost blank, its only visible feature a single star.  Watts intentionally used symbolism not traditionally associated with hope to make the painting's meaning ambiguous.  Hope proved popular with the Aesthetic Movement, who considered beauty the primary purpose of art and were unconcerned by the ambiguity of its message.  Reproductions in platinotype, and later cheap carbon prints, soon began to be sold.  Although Watts received many offers to buy the painting, he had agreed to donate his most important works to the nation and felt it would be inappropriate not to include Hope.  Consequently, later in 1886 Watts and his assistant Cecil Schott painted a second version.  On its completion Watts sold the original and donated the copy to the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum); thus, this second version is better known than the original.  He painted at least two further versions for private sale.  As cheap reproductions of Hope, and from 1908 high-quality prints, began to circulate in large quantities, it became a widely popular image.  President Theodore Roosevelt displayed a copy at his Sagamore Hill home in New York; reproductions circulated worldwide; and a 1922 film depicted Watts's creation of the painting and an imagined story behind it.  By this time Hope was coming to seem outdated and sentimental, and Watts was rapidly falling out of fashion.  Despite the decline in Watts's popularity, Hope remained influential.  Martin Luther King Jr. based a 1959 sermon, now known as Shattered Dreams, on the theme of the painting, as did Jeremiah Wright in Chicago in 1990.  Among the congregation for the latter was the young Barack Obama, who was deeply moved. Obama took "The Audacity of Hope" as the theme of his 2004 Democratic National Convention keynote address, and as the title of his 2006 book; he based his successful 2008 presidential campaign around the theme of "Hope".  Read much more and see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hope_(painting)

Sounds of Kenya from Kenna Lehmann  The hyrax looks like an adorable fluffy, over-sized rodent.  Looking at it, one might guess that it is the African equivalent of a guinea pig or a small-eared rabbit.  A little bit of research reveals that the hyrax is not a rodent but is, in fact, the closest living relative to elephants and manatees.  Ages ago, the ancestors of our sleep-disturbing hyrax were the dominant grazers in Africa.  They were much, much larger and they were all over the grasslands.  Then the antelopes, impala, and wildebeest came along and won the competition for the grasslands by being more efficient grazers.  To cope, the hyrax became smaller and took to the trees, bushes, and rocks.  There are currently three species of tree hyrax, three species of bush hyrax and five species of rock hyrax.  Their calls can range anywhere from “The loudest, largest, longest bullfrog croak the earth has ever heard,” past “Is that really a dragon screeching outside my window,” to “Someone is torture-murdering a baby out there.”  It’s hard to know which version is worse.  I fully expect you to now be thinking, “Surely, you must be exaggerating, Kenna.  You’re jet-lagged and lonely in the cottage.”  This is exactly why I recorded the little monsters.  See how long you can listen to this auditory torture at http://msuhyenas.blogspot.com/2014/06/sounds-of-kenya-sweet-soothing-serenade.html

Ford Reiche bought Halfway Rock Lighthouse, halfway between Cape Elizabeth and Cape Small, on a two-acre ledge 10 miles out to sea at government auction in 2014.  Halfway Rock Lighthouse was abandoned by the Coast Guard in 1975.  No preservation group or agency had the resources to take over, and it was put up for auction.  Reiche paid $283,000, the highest price ever paid for a Maine lighthouse.  Reiche, who ran a successful rail-to-truck transfer business in Auburn and is active in historic preservation, bought Halfway Rock Lighthouse to restore a maritime landmark once listed as one of Maine’s 10 most endangered historic properties.  Halfway Rock is what’s known as a wave-swept lighthouse.  The ledge is frequently submerged.  A surging sea constantly nips at the perimeter from all directions.  In violent storms, monster waves 60 feet high can pummel the rock.  To safely make the 10-mile transit from his marina in Freeport, Reiche purchased a 25-foot Safe Boats International Defender-class vessel at a Coast Guard auction.  With its reinforced aluminum hull and enclosed pilothouse, the military-grade responder boat can cruise at more than 40 mph and slice through scary seas.  Even so, sometimes Reiche and a work crew arrive at the rock to find that it’s just too dangerous to get from the mooring onto the landing ramp in a 10-foot inflatable.  Halfway Rock Lighthouse is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  Reiche is restoring the keepers quarters inside the tower and the attached wooden boathouse, galley and bedrooms to what they looked like in the 1950s.  He has pulled the walls back to their Douglas fir paneling, creating a cozy kitchen and eating area, made weather-tight with new windows and warmed by a Queen Atlantic wood range.  The materials and construction techniques used to achieve this period of interpretation, as it’s called, are scrutinized by the Maine Historic Preservation Commission.  Tux Turkel  Read more at http://www.pressherald.com/2016/07/10/cumberland-man-works-to-restore-his-own-private-lighthouse/

They look a little like crop circles and a little like artistic earthworks.  Around the world, they have many names:  in the Namib Desert of Africa, they're called "fairy circles;" in Brazil they're dubbed "murundus," and in North America they're known as "Mima mounds."  In a recent paper for Nature titled "A theoretical foundation for multi-scale regular vegetation patterns," Princeton ecologist Corina E. Tarnita and her colleagues call them "landscapes of overdispersed (evenly spaced) elements."  All are regions where plants grow into such perfectly symmetrical, large-scale patterns that they seem unnatural.  Debates rage among ecologists about whether these patterned environments have a common cause and what it might be.  Two of the leading hypotheses involve plant cooperation and insect rivalries.  In areas where water resources are scarce or irregular, plants are known to engage in "scale-dependent feedbacks," where plants over a wide area grow into clusters rather than spreading out over a big area.  The plant clumps limit their sizes to make the best use of water, and this strategy leads to reproductive success.  It also might explain why we see patterns of plant growth that are characteristic of fairy circles and Mima mounds.  But some scientists who have studied the pattern say that more is going on.  They argue that water resources in these areas are being divvied up by warring groups of termites who suctioned water out of the dry areas and relocated it to their mounds.  Given that successful termite colonies tend to have territory sizes that are roughly comparable, this would explain why so many of these odd regions contain mounds as well as dry patches.  Tarnita and her colleagues' paper in Nature suggests that we're probably seeing an unusual interaction between plants and termites, both attempting to maintain access to water in dry areas.  Using a computer model that accounted for both plant and insect life cycles, the researchers were able to reproduce the exact patterns we see in fairy circles.  Annalee Newitz    Read more and see pictures at http://arstechnica.com/science/2017/01/all-over-the-globe-plants-are-growing-into-strange-circular-patterns/

NAME CHANGES  Gary Cooper (born Frank James Cooper 1901)  Sigourney Weaver (born Susan Alexandra Weaver 1949)  John Legend  (born John Roger Stephens 1978)  Dorothy Lamour  (born Mary Leta Dorothy Slaton 1914)   Robert Indiana (born Robert Clark 1928)  Billy the Kid, The Kid, William H. Bonney (born William Henry McCarty Jr. 1859)

Merle Rubin reviews the novel, Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry   William Bonney (1859-81), popularly known as Billy the Kid, was a cattle thief who managed to kill 21 people before being killed himself at age 22.  Billy has been the subject of dime-store novels, serious literary works, and even a ballet by Aaron Copland, the American composer.  But Billy may well have found his ablest expositor in Larry McMurtry, who, far from lengthening a tale tall or glamorizing an unattractive character, has coolly taken his measure.  http://www.csmonitor.com/1988/1227/dbkid.html

The Kid was a celebrity in his own time, but his legend only grew after his death.  Beginning with the 1911 silent film “Billy the Kid,” the gun-toting outlaw’s story has appeared on the big screen more than 50 times.  http://www.history.com/news/history-lists/9-things-you-may-not-know-about-billy-the-kid

QUOTES from Anything for Billy, a novel by Larry McMurtry   "I suppose we all—even nuns—dream of a life other than the one we actually live on this indifferent earth."  "Billy's death was simple, and yet even the simplest events grow mossy with the passage of years.  If the students accepted the simple view of events in past times, how would their stiff brains ever get any exercise?"

Top 10 U.S. Locations With the Most Snow Days Per Year by Jonathan Belles  https://weather.com/news/weather/news/cities-most-snow-days

A small Oklahoma town is echoing the story line of '80s movie "Footloose" by canceling a Valentine's Day dance because of an arcane city ordinance enforcing a strict moral code.  KTUL-TV reports (http://bit.ly/2logzET ) that the organizer canceled the dance in Henryetta because it would have taken place 300 feet from a church, in violation of an ordinance that forbids dancing within 500 feet of a place of worship.  Mayor Jennifer Clason, who was born in Henryetta, says she always knew about the old city ordinance but that it has never been enforced.  Police Chief Steve Norman says his department has no interest in doing so.  Clason says city councilors will consider abolishing the ordinance during their Feb. 22, 2017 meeting.  http://www.stltoday.com/news/national/oklahoma-town-cancels-dance-because-of-old-city-ordinance/article_3ca1236c-1632-5602-932d-ddf68f0588bc.html

                                                                                                     

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1691  February 10, 2017  On this date in 1840, Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.  On this day in 1942, the first gold record was presented to Glenn Miller for "Chattanooga Choo Choo".