March 25, 2025  The United States Marine Band was forced to cancel a concert with students of colour following President Donald Trump’s decision to ban diversity programmes within the federal government and military.  The concert, due to take place May, 2025 was to feature top pre-college musicians of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds who had been auditioned by Equity Arc, a nonprofit based in Chicago which connects students of colour with music mentors and opportunities.  The group of marines and young musicians were programmed to perform Nobles of the Mystic Shrine by American composer John Philip Sousa, who directed the band in the late 19th century.  https://www.classicfm.com/music-news/us-marine-band-cancel-concert-students-colour-kennedy-center/       The island of Lampedusa is Italy's southernmost piece of land—it's so far south of mainland Europe that it's geologically a part of Africa.  Just off its shore, there is a small islet called Isola dei Conigli (Rabbit Islet) with a rather misleading name.  Rabbit Islet is actually not always an island, and sometimes a small isthmus of sand connects it to Lampedusa.  Because of this peculiar feature, the island was called Rabit Islet in an 1824 nautical map, referring to the Arabic term rabit, meaning "link" or "connection."  In later maps, this name was thought to be a spelling mistake and "rabit" became "rabbit."  Another theory about the origin of the island's name says that the small land connection allowed some rabbits to reach the islet from Lampedusa.  But when the tide swallowed the land bridge, the rabbits got stuck on the island and, doing what rabbits do, rapidly reproduced and overpopulated the place.  According to this theory, the rabbit colony later died off, but the island's name survived.  Today, the islet is part of a natural reserve and its beach is one of the few places where the loggerhead sea turtle lays eggs.  It is also populated by many gulls and lizards, but no rabbits.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/rabbit-islet  McGuffin or MacGuffin was coined by film director Alfred Hitchcock (1899-1980).  He borrowed it from a shaggy-dog story where a train passenger is carrying a large odd-shaped package.  The passenger calls it a MacGuffin and explains:  A device that helps propel the plot in a story but is of little importance in itself.  McGuffin could be a person, an object, or an event that characters of a story are interested in but that, intrinsically, is of little concern.  For example, in Hitchcock's movie North by Northwest, thugs are on the lookout for a character named George Kaplan.  Roger Thornhill, an ad executive, gets mistaken for Kaplan and so he is chased instead. Meanwhile Thornhill himself tries to find Kaplan who doesn't even exist.  Hitchcock explained the term in a 1939 lecture at Columbia University:  "In regard to the tune, we have a name in the studio, and we call it the 'MacGuffin'.  It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story.  In crook stories it is always the necklace and in spy stories it is always the papers. We just try to be a little more original."  (quoted from the Oxford English Dictionary)  Hitchcock to the curious fellow passengers that it's a device used to catch lions in Scottish Highlands.  When they protest that there are no lions in the Highlands, he simply replies, "Well, then this can't be a MacGuffin."

https://wordsmith.org/words/mcguffin.html   

http://librariansmuse,blogspot.com  Issue 2924  April 4, 2025