How to Clean a DVD   You need to wipe a DVD in a straight line from the center of the disc to the outside edge of a disc because DVD lasers are lead astray more often by a circular scratch or a scratch that follows the path of the laser than by a straight scratch, perpendicular to the path of the laser.  Also, never use a paper towel or any paper product to clean your DVDs because these products often have pieces of dirt and particles that will scratch the surface of the DVD.  Microfiber cloths are a quick way to clean a DVD.  Rubbing alcohol is used to clean DVDs.  Window cleaner, like rubbing alcohol, is a great way to clean sticky residues and dirt off a DVD.  Read more at http://www.howtocleanthings.com/electronics/how-to-clean-a-dvd/

The Canada–United States border, officially known as the International Boundary, is the longest international border in the world between two countries.  The terrestrial boundary (including portions of maritime boundaries in the Great Lakes, and on the Atlantic, Pacific, and Arctic coasts) is 8,891 kilometres (5,525 mi) long, of which 2,475 kilometres (1,538 mi) is Canada's border with Alaska. Eight Canadian provinces and territories (Yukon, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick), and thirteen U.S. states (Alaska, Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine) are located along the border.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_border

Zucchini  This vegetable has, in its native Italian language, both a feminine form (zucchina with the plural zucchine) and a masculine form (zucchino with the plural zucchini).  We have imported a plural form and treat it as a singular noun.  It is a count noun when whole.  You can bring home six zucchini or zucchinis from the market.  When it is sliced, cooked and served, you have a dish of food that is talked about as a mass noun.  http://www.dictionary.com/browse/zucchini

In 1947 Willa Cather's fellow modernist Katherine Anne Porter—a writer of whom Cather left no signs of awareness but who was keenly aware of Cather—wrote an aggressively humorous essay about Gertrude Stein in which she characterized the "literary young" who gathered around Stein in Paris in the 1920s as children stranded "between two wars in a falling world."  Porter's metaphoric adjective for the interwar period—"falling"—is evocative, if ambiguous, summoning echoes both of the "fallen" on the battlefield and of the "fall" from innocence in Eden, as well as the common phrase about the bottom dropping out from under one.  Cather's metaphor for the postwar period (it could not yet be called interwar at the time she was writing) was, of course, a different one—a metaphor of brokenness.  In the preface to Not Under Forty(1936) she famously declared that the world "broke in two" in 1922 "or thereabouts" (812).  Cather was scarcely alone in feeling this sense of rupture.  The very year she alluded to (in so strangely evasive a way), 1922, was indeed the year of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with its insistent images of brokenness.  Michael North and others have pointed out that brokenness was a metaphor invoked not only by Eliot but by many writers struggling, during the postwar years, to convey their sense of how thoroughly their lives and life in general had been disrupted.  Europeans and Americans alike, perhaps people all around the world, were haunted by a feeling of having been severed from any intelligible past.  Janis P. Stout  Read much more at http://cather.unl.edu/cs006_stout.html

Read book review of Bill Goldstein's The World Broke in Two:  Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster and the Year That Changed Literature by Glen Weldon at http://www.npr.org/2017/07/25/537085202/the-world-broke-in-two-four-writers-one-transformational-year

For the 26th year, The Princeton Review has released its annual “Best Colleges” rankings*, including over 382 schools and 62 lists of rankings from “best classroom experience” to “biggest party school.”  Here are some of the 2018 list superlatives, ranging from the most beautiful campuses to the happiest student bodies to the biggest party schools.  One category is "Best campus food", and the winners are:  (1)  University of Massachusetts-Amherst (45,000 dining hall meals served daily); (2)  Bowdoin College; and (3)  Washington University in St. Louis.  Sophia Tulp   *Methodology:  Based on responses from 137,000 students at 382 schools (around 350 responses per school), Princeton Review compiled its 2016–17 data.  Students answered questions about academics, administration, student body and more, ranking their school in each category from “excellent to awful.”  Read the list at http://college.usatoday.com/2017/07/31/2018-princeton-review-rankings/ 

The College of William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia has a farm 17 miles from campus where a "sustainability intern" tends rows of zucchini and sweet potatoes.  Yale University has a 1-acre garden that is a hybrid farm and living-history laboratory.  Students thresh wheat and grind grain into a flatbread dough made from a recipe in Yale's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library.  Virginia Tech students demanded more free-trade coffee in 2008, and dining-services Ted Faulkner went to Nicaragua, picked beans at a coffee estate that now supplies the school.  Quint Forgey and Patrick McGroarty  The Wall Street Journal  September 7, 2017

A thriving ecosystem of websites that allow users to automatically generate millions of fake "likes" and comments on Facebook has been documented by researchers at the University of Iowa.  Working with a computer scientist at Facebook and one in Lahore, Pakistan, the team found more than 50 sites offering free, fake "likes" for users' posts in exchange for access to their accounts, which were used to falsely "like" other sites in turn.  The scientists found that these “collusion networks” run by spammers have managed to harness the power of one million Facebook accounts, producing as many as 100 million fake "likes" on the systems between 2015 and 2016.  A large number of “likes” can push a posting up in Facebook’s algorithm, making it more likely the post will be seen by more people and also making it seem more legitimate.  Quid-pro-quo sites that give users points for liking a post in exchange for getting their own posts liked have long existed, violating Facebook's terms of service.  The researchers found that this activity has now been turbocharged because scam artists found a loophole to exploit code Facebook uses to allow third-party applications such as iMovie and Spotify to access a user’s Facebook account, automating a process that formerly was manual and involved many fewer likes.  A paper outlining the research was first posted September 6, 2017 and will be presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Internet Measurement Conference in London in November.  One of the authors is Nektarios Leontiadis, a threat research scientist at Facebook.  The networks identified by these researchers do not appear to be linked to another, extensive Facebook scam involving fraudulent "likes" that Facebook said it had disrupted in April.  That operation targeted popular publishers' pages with false "likes" in an attempt to gain more Facebook friends.  Facebook purged millions of fake accounts connected to that scam from USA TODAY, one of the primary targets, and others.  In the Facebook hacking scam detected by the Iowa researcher, users are knowingly entering into a agreement to falsely obtain "likes."  But they may not realize what they're giving up.  “Users think it’s relatively benign, but actually they’re handing over full control of their Facebook account,” said Zubair Shafiq, professor of computer science at the University of Iowa.  “They can also access all the information that’s available on your profile, see your posts, get your friends list, even read your private messages. We can't tell if this information is being collected and sold to others,” he said.  Elizabeth Weise   https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/09/07/facebook-fake-likes-scammers-collusion-networks/642446001/

Since Kwame Alexander won the 2015 Newbery Medal for The Crossover, he’s been traveling far and wide in a whirl of evangelism for reading, poetry, friendship, self-expression, sports, music and love.  During a call to his Virginia home (where he was resting before lighting out for Ohio, Texas and beyond), Alexander says, “When I won the Newbery, I committed myself to being an ambassador of poetry and literature.  Nobody asked me to.  I just decided I’d give it two years and go everywhere.”  And so he has, from schools to TED talks, connecting with kids, teachers and librarians.  He also continued writing, and his latest YA novel-in-verse, Solo, co-written with Mary Rand Hess, weaves poetry, music and text conversations into a coming-of-age tale.  And now he does, through Solo and his other books, his speaking engagements and his work in Ghana, where this summer LEAP for Ghana will finish building a library.  There will be plenty more Alexander books, too, including novels-in-verse Swing (about baseball and jazz, written with Hess) and Rebound, the prequel to The Crossover.  “Most of us have forgotten that we love poetry, but it’s how we learn to communicate as children, in rhythm and rhyme and verse,” Alexander says.  “It’s my job to remind us how powerful it is, to help us become more confident, find and raise our voices, become more human . . . I want everyone to know words are cool, books are cool.  They’re the most transformative things.”  Interview by Linda M. Castellitto  August 2017  https://bookpage.com/interviews/21643-kwame-alexander#.WZYFJVWGOUk

September 13, 2017  The Stavros Niarchos Foundation is partnering with The New York Public Library and the City of New York to support the complete renovation of the system’s largest circulating branch, Mid-Manhattan Library.  The Foundation’s $55 million gift will support the creation of a modern, central branch to hold the Library’s largest circulating collection and offer countless programs for children, teens, and adults.  In addition, it will help establish a “Midtown campus” that will reconnect the circulating library with the Library’s iconic research center, the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, across Fifth Avenue, creating a free, open destination for thought and ideas in the center of Midtown.  The gift also establishes an endowment for programming at the renovated library.  The Mid-Manhattan Library renovation is expected to be complete in 2020, when the building will reopen as The Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library (SNFL).  Read more and see a list of the key elements of the new 100,000-square-foot library at https://www.nypl.org/press/press-release/september-13-2017/landmark-gift-55-million-stavros-niarchos-foundation

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1769  September 15, 2017  On this date in 1863, Horatio Parker, American organist, composer, and educator, was born.  On this date in 1907, Fay Wray, Canadian-American actress, was born.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_15