In early 1964, Gene Roddenberry--a former World War II pilot and writer of mostly Western television--began a draft for a new science fiction series that he called Star Trek.  Roddenberry pitched the series to Desilu Productions.  With heavy influences from the likes of Horatio Hornblower and the film Forbidden Planet, Desilu saw promise in the concept and took both Roddenberry and the show to CBS.  Using his experience writing for the popular Western genre of the time, Roddenberry pitched the series as “Wagon Train to the Stars” (referencing the popular series Wagon Train and its episodic formula of self-contained adventure stories).  Unfortunately, due to the fact that they already had the similarly themed sci-fi series Lost in Space in production, CBS passed on Roddenberry's pitch.  Not letting that get them down, Roddenberry and Desilu’s director of production, Herb Solow, began production on a pilot episode that would be shopped to NBC (Solow’s old stomping grounds).  Said pilot episode--titled The Cage--starred Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike, Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock, Majel Barrett as the ship’s first officer and John Hoyt as Dr. Phillip Boyce.  The episode varied a little bit from Roddenberry’s original pitch thanks, in part, to some help from Solow.  The Cage followed the adventures of the USS Enterprise as they respond to a distress call on the planet Talos IV.  However, instead of finding distressed humans, the crew finds only illusions of people and a hyper-intelligent alien race that captures Captain Pike.  The intent is to have Pike mate with the one actual surviving human from the shuttle the Enterprise thought they were rescuing and to study their behavior.  Much like later episodes in the series, the pilot emphasized a lot of mature and controversial themes than your typical science fiction show of the era dealt with.  The notion of having one’s freedom stripped away from them for the purposes of a superior race was a particularly strong undertone of the episode.  Ultimately, NBC would pass on the series after deeming that the pilot was “too cerebral.”  Still determined to get his vision on the air, Gene Roddenberry was yet again undeterred.  He would revise his concept and re-pitch it to the network.  In an astonishing turn of events, NBC commissioned a second pilot--something unheard of both then and today.  With a mostly new cast and a slightly different series structure, NBC reviewed the new pilot (Where No Man Has Gone Before) and the rest, as they say, is history.  In September of 1966, NBC unknowingly made television history when they aired The Man Trap as the first broadcast episode of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek (the second pilot wouldn’t air until later in the month as the series’ third episode).  The show now starred William Shatner (known for a lot of work, notably the classic episode of The Twilight Zone, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet) as Captain James T. Kirk.   Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock transitioned to the series as the only original character from The Cage (though Majel Barrett also remained in the series, it was as a new character named Nurse Chapel).  The rest of the new cast rounded out with DeForest Kelley as Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy, George Takei as Sulu, Nichelle Nichols as Uhura and James Doohan as Montgomery Scott.  Walter Koenig’s popular character of the young Russian, Pavel Chekov, wouldn’t premier until the second season as a stand in for Sulu’s scripted lines while George Takei filmed The Green Berets.  It’s often noted that when Takei returned for filming he had to share a script with Koenig for rehearsals.  This was even referenced as a joke on the Trek themed episode of The Simpsons creator Matt Groening’s sci-fi cartoon series, Futurama (Where No Fan Has Gone Before).  James Thomas  Read more and see pictures at https://moviepilot.com/posts/3728172

13 FASCINATING FACTS ABOUT WARD BOND AND 'WAGON TRAIN'  http://www.metv.com/lists/13-fascinating-facts-about-ward-bond-and-wagon-train

"A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is a short story written by Flannery O'Connor in 1953.  The story was first published in 1953 in the anthology The Avon Book of Modern Writing.  In 1960, it was collected in the anthology The House of Fiction, published by Charles Scribner's Sons.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Good_Man_Is_Hard_to_Find_(short_story)  See also http://www.shmoop.com/good-man-hard-to-find/ and http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/goodman.html

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" (the song) was written by Eddie Green in 1918.

Bessie Smith - A Good Man is Hard to Find  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZVD8QqNoak  3:09 

Marion Harris - A Good Man is Hard to Find (1919) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVTfiITxbH0  3:08  See also https://secondhandsongs.com/work/97180/all and https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Good_Man_Is_Hard_to_Find

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg   "Etymologists are linguistic Sherlock Holmeses.  They track down a word’s history to find out its travel through time.  A word might take a circuitous path, winding through many languages before reaching its current stop.  An example is the word mandarin, which started from Sanskrit with layovers in Hindi, Malay, and Portuguese before reaching English.  But there are many words for which we’ve come empty-handed in our search for their origins.  We know what these words mean, we have usage examples from the past, but where these words came from, how they were coined, who coined them, it’s all a big mystery.  But that doesn’t prevent us from enjoying (and employing) them."

Mrs. Grundy  (MIS-iz GRUND-ee)  noun  An extremely conventional or priggish person.   After Mrs. Grundy, a character in the 1798 play Speed the Plough by Thomas Morton.  Mrs. Grundy never appears on the stage, but her neighbor Dame Ashfield constantly worries about “What will Mrs. Grundy say?”  Earliest documented use:  1813.

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From:  Robert A. Rushton   Subject:  Mrs. Grundy  I was introduced to the name “Mrs. Grundy” by Robert A. Heinlein in his novel Time Enough For Love.  She appears as a quotation by the main character, Lazarus Long:  “Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite.”

On February 19, 1941, Stephen Dobyns was born in Orange, New Jersey.  He graduated from Wayne State University and has an MFA from the University of Iowa.  Dobyns has published ten books of poetry and twenty novels.  His books of poetry include Winter’s Journey (Copper Canyon Press, 2010); Mystery, So Long (2005); The Porcupine’s Kisses (2002); Do They Have a Reason? (2000)Pallbearers Envying the One Who Rides (Penguin, 1999); Common Carnage (1996); Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966-1992 (1994); Cemetery Nights (1987), which won a Melville Cane Award; Black Dog, Red Dog (1984), which was a winner in the National Poetry Series; Heat Death (1980); and Concurring Beasts (1972), which was the 1972 Lamont Poetry Selection of The Academy of American Poets.  His novels include Boy in the Water (Holt/Metropolitan, 1999), The Church of Dead Girls (1997), Saratoga Fleshpot (1995), The Wrestler’s Cruel Study (1993), and Saratoga Haunting (1993).  His novels have been translated into more than ten languages.  Dobyns is also the author of a collection of short stories, Eating Naked (2000) and a book of essays, Best Words, Best Order (1996).  Among his many honors and awards are fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation.  He has taught at a number of colleges and universities, including the University of Iowa and Boston University.  https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/stephen-dobyns  See also POETRY QUESTIONS:  STEPHEN DOBYNS, an interview by Rebecca Foresman at http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/poetry-questions-stephen-dobyns

Increasing evidence suggests that a growing amount of social media content is generated by autonomous entities known as social bots.  In this work we present a framework to detect such entities on Twitter.  We leverage more than a thousand features extracted from public data and meta-data about users:  friends, tweet content and sentiment, network patterns, and activity time series.  We benchmark the classification framework by using a publicly available dataset of Twitter bots.  Our estimates suggest that between 9% and 15% of active Twitter accounts are bots.  Analysis of content flows reveals retweet and mention strategies adopted by bots to interact with different target groups.  Read the report titled Online Human-Bot Interactions:  Detection, Estimation, and Characterization at https://arxiv.org/pdf/1703.03107.pdf

Robert James Waller, author of the novel “The Bridges of Madison County”, died on March 9, 2017.  He was 77.  Waller was born in 1939, in Rockford, Iowa, and went on to receive two degrees from the University of Northern Iowa (then known as Iowa State Teachers College).  In 1968, he received his doctorate degree in business from the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University Bloomington.  Later that year, he returned to Iowa to teach management and economics, becoming a full professor by 1977.  By 1992, Waller famously wrote “Bridges” in a mere 11 days.  The novel chronicles the wandering National Geographic photographer Robert Kincaid.  He spends four days wooing Francesca Johnson, a war bride from Italy married to a no-nonsense Iowa farmer.  By 1993, the novel reached No. 1 on the New York Times best sellers list, remaining there for over three years.  Clint Eastwood directed and starred in the film adaptation in 1995, which grossed $182 million worldwide.  The story was also brought to the Broadway stage with music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown.  In 2014, the show as nominated for four Tony awards and won two.  In 2002, Waller wrote a sequel to the novel entitled “A Thousand Country Roads.”  Sarah Ahern  http://variety.com/2017/film/obituaries-people-news/robert-james-waller-dead-bridges-of-madison-county-author-dies-1202006294/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1676  March 13, 2017  On this date in 1845, Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto received its première performance in Leipzig with Ferdinand David as soloist.  On this date in 1947, Brigadoon, a musical with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, and music by Frederick Loewe, directed by Robert Lewis and choreographed by Agnes de Mille, opened at the Ziegfeld Theatre, where it ran for 581 performances.