NAME CHANGES  American actor Anthony Franciosa (Anthony Papaleo  October 25, 1928- January 19, 2006)   https://www.theguardian.com/news/2006/jan/23/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries  U.S. President Gerald Ford (Gerald Rudolph Ford, Jr. (Leslie Lynch King, Jr. July 14, 1913 –December 26, 2006)  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford

Most English speakers can correctly infer from the negative prefix dis- that disassemble means the opposite of assemble.  Dissemble is trickier because it sort of sounds like it should mean the opposite of assemble, but it actually means (1) to disguise (either oneself or something else) behind a false appearance, or (2) to obscure the truth with showy rhetoric.  It’s traditionally synonymous with disguise, but it has become a fancy word for lie in 21st-century political contexts.  Despite their similarity in sound, dissemble and disassemble do not share roots.  Assemble comes from the Old French verb assembler, which in turn has roots in the Latin assimulare, meaning to put together.  Dissemble comes from the Old French dissembler, whose root sembler means to appear or to seem.  http://grammarist.com/usage/dissemble-disassemble/

A song is but a little thing, and yet what joy it is to sing!  "The Poet and His Song" 

A blue-bell springs upon the ledge, a lark sits singing in the hedge;

Sweet perfumes scent the balmy air, and life is brimming everywhere.

What lark and breeze and bluebird sing, is Spring, Spring, Spring!  "Spring Song"

Don't talk to me of solemn days in autumn's time of splendor,

Because the sun shows fewer rays, and these grow slant and slender.

Why, it's the climax of the year--the highest time of living!--

Till naturally its bursting cheer just melts into thanksgiving.  "Merry Autumn"

October is the treasurer of the year, and all the months pay bounty to her store; The fields and orchards still their tribute bear, and fill her brimming coffers more and more.  "October"  

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Native Texan Martha Anne Turner heard a rollicking rendition of "The Yellow Rose of Texas" by a German band in 1969.  It led her to investigate the music and then to read a paper at the American Studies Association of Texas in that same year (later published in the Journal of the American Studies Association of Texas Vol. 1, 1970.)  In 1976, Eakin Press published Turner's The Yellow Rose of Texas:  Her Saga and Her Song with the Santa Anna Legend.  The song, first copyrighted in 1858, has had changes in words and melody over the years.  The "Yellow Rose" is Emily Morgan, an indentured servant of James morgan, who was captured by Santa Anna.  Her name was Emily D. West, and she adopted the name of her master and benefactor, a nineteenth-century custom. 

Nepotism is based on favoritism granted to relatives in various fields, including business, politics, entertainment, sports, religion and other activities.  The term originated with the assignment of nephews to important positions by Catholic popes and bishops.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nepotism

The Franz Kafka Prize is an international literary award presented in honour of Franz Kafka, the German language novelist.  The prize was first awarded in 2001 and is co-sponsored by the Franz Kafka Society and the city of Prague, Czech Republic.  The award earned some prestige in the mid 2000s by foreshadowing the Nobel Prize when two of its winners went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature the same year, Elfriede Jelinek (2004) and Harold Pinter (2005).  The criteria for winning the award include the artwork's "humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language and religious tolerance, its existential, timeless character, its generally human validity and its ability to hand over a testimony about our times."  Find list of winners at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka_Prize

Tea is a shrub grown to produce a beverage made from its leaves.  It is appreciated for its stimulant properties and health benefits, and as the centre of social rituals such as the Japanese tea ceremony and British teatime.  Two varieties are recognised; Camellia sinensis var. sinensis (Chinese tea) and C. sinensis var. assamica (Assam tea, Indian tea).  For centuries it was thought that black and green teas came from different plants.  In fact they come from the same species, but black tea is fermented.  Tea is one of the most important non-alcoholic beverages in the world, and over three million tonnes are grown annually.  http://powo.science.kew.org/taxon/urn:lsid:ipni.org:names:828548-1

Claude Monet was a plein air Impressionist who painted directly from nature.  In 1883, he moved to Giverny, a river valley that was a one hour train ride from Paris.  He saw an empty pink house, and convinced the landlord that he would pay him soon and, in the meantime, take good care of the property.  The family planted vegetables for the table and flowers for the spirit.  Monet created an organized concentrated color environment and spent the last 20 years of his life painting that world.  Monet's Passion:  Ideas, Inspiration and Insights from the Painter's Gardens by Elizabeth Murray  First Printing 1989.  Elizabeth Murray "Monet's Passion" Photography & Garden Lecture  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5VFAsWn8FA  11:29

Judith Jones, a consummate literary editor who helped revolutionize American cuisine by publishing Julia Child and other groundbreaking cookbook authors, worked for decades with John Updike and Anne Tyler and helped introduce English-language readers to The Diary of Anne Frank, has died at age 93.  Jones, who spent more than 50 years at Alfred A. Knopf before retiring in 2011, died August 2, 2017  at her summer home in Walden, Vermont.  Jones was herself an author and gourmet who collaborated on several cookbooks with her husband Evan Jones, contributed to numerous food magazines and wrote the memoir The Tenth Muse: My Life in Food, published in 2007. The year before, she received the James Beard Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, a fitting prize for Jones, who published Beard and was a close friend.  She majored in English at Bennington College, worked as an editorial assistant at Doubleday and by her early 20s was a reader for Doubleday in Paris.  Among her early achievements was finding a masterpiece amid the rejects:  The Diary of Anne Frank, which had been published in Europe.  Jones was among the first to realize that World War II soldiers returning from Europe might be ready for more sophisticated cuisine.  Jones herself was admittedly spoiled by the food in Paris.  In the 1950s, she found the bread in New York so tasteless she baked her own at home.  Jones' most famous discovery was Child, a middle-aged American chef in the early '60s who, like Jones, had returned to the states after living for years in Paris.  She and co-authors Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle were seeking a publisher for a cookbook (later titled by Jones Mastering the Art of French Cooking) which had been rejected by Houghton Mifflin.  As recounted in her memoir, Jones was soon convinced that "this was the book I been looking for" and thought Child's recipe for "boeuf bourguignon" worthy of the best dishes in Paris.  Hillel Italie  https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2017/08/02/judith-jones-julia-childs-editor-dies-93/534038001/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1748  August 4, 2017  On this date in 1790, a newly passed tariff act created the Revenue Cutter Service (the forerunner of the United States Coast Guard).  On this date in 1821, The Saturday Evening Post was published for the first time as a weekly newspaper.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_4