In 2011, Quentin Rowan - the owner of a bookstore in Brooklyn writing under the penname "Q.R. Markham" - was found to have extensively plagiarised from several authors in his debut novel, Assassin of Secrets, one week after it was released in the United States. Rowan's novel included passages taken from John le Carre, Robert Ludlum, Christopher McCrary, Charles McCarry and James Bond continuation writers Raymond Benson and John Gardner. As many as thirteen different authors were identified as having been plagiarised by Rowan. Author Jeremy Duns, who had supported Markham as a writer, recounted how the episode had come about. Duns was first alerted to the plagiarism after a post on a James Bond-themed fan forum pointed out that large sections of the text had been taken directly from Gardener's Licence Renewed, and in a blog posting on his website, described how he found that most of the novel was plagiarised with only minor alterations to the text. While researching the depth of Rowan's plagiarism, Edward Champion of the online blog "Reluctant Habits" discovered that Rowan had also plagiarised in several poems, short stories and essays that he had had published in The Paris Review and BOMB. Rowan, who had signed a two-book contract with Mulholland Books (an imprint of Little, Brown and Company) at the time of publication, had his contract cancelled and the publisher recalled Assassin of Secrets from bookstores. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_plagiarism_controversies

Assassin of Secrets "It’s dunce’s cap time for me." Jeremy Duns wrote a blurb for the book and explains that he was duped.
http://jeremyduns.blogspot.com/2011/11/assassin-of-secrets.html

Comparisons of Rowan's text to texts lifted from various books: http://www.edrants.com/q-r-markham-plagiarist/

When your vacations home becomes everybody's vacation home
Kathleen Hughes and her husband recently learned the hard way after buying a loft in Manhattan as a future retirement spot. We suddenly found ourselves facing a series of hints or outright requests from friends to use the space when we're not there—as a crash pad. "Great! Now we'll have a place to stay in New York!" was the enthusiastic response of friends, colleagues and even a few distant acquaintances. There are roughly 7.9 million vacation homes in the U.S., according to the National Association of Realtors, and the recent plummet in housing prices is leading more people to consider taking the leap. The typical owner spends only 39 nights a year in a vacation home. That leaves 326 days a year up for grabs. Kathleen A. Hughes
Read stories about second homes in Tuscany, Italy, Ocean City, MD, Bretton Woods, NH and other places--and of problems and solutions at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903885604576488062713503134.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Rachel Louise Carson (1907–1964) was an American marine biologist and conservationist whose writings are credited with advancing the global environmental movement. Carson began her career as a biologist in the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries, and became a full-time nature writer in the 1950s. Her widely praised 1951 bestseller The Sea Around Us won her financial security and recognition as a gifted writer. Her next book, The Edge of the Sea, and the republished version of her first book, Under the Sea Wind, were also bestsellers. Together, her sea trilogy explores the whole of ocean life, from the shores to the surface to the deep sea. In the late 1950s, Carson turned her attention to conservation and the environmental problems caused by synthetic pesticides. The result was Silent Spring (1962), Silent Spring http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silent_Spring which brought environmental concerns to an unprecedented portion of the American public. Silent Spring, while met with fierce denial from chemical companies, spurred a reversal in national pesticide policy—leading to a nationwide ban on DDT and other pesticides—and the grassroots environmental movement the book inspired led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Carson was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Jimmy Carter. Rachel Carson was born on a small family farm near Springdale, Pennsylvania, just up the Allegheny River from Pittsburgh. An avid reader, she also spent a lot of time exploring around her family's 65-acre (26 ha) farm. She began writing stories (often involving animals) at age eight, and had her first story published at age eleven. See her list of works, posthumous honors and centennial events at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Carson

The Volcker Rule is a specific piece of the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act originally proposed by American economist and former United States Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker to restrict United States banks from making certain kinds of speculative investments that do not benefit their customers. Volcker argued that such speculative activity played a key role in the financial crisis of 2007–2010. The rule is often referred to as a ban on proprietary trading by commercial banks, whereby deposits are used to trade on the bank's personal accounts, although a number of exceptions to this ban were included in the Dodd-Frank law. The rule's provisions are scheduled to be implemented as a part of Dodd-Frank on July 21, 2012. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcker_Rule

The Durbin Rule http://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/press/bcreg/20110629a.htm
The final rule governs debit card interchange fees, the fraud prevention adjustment, and routing and exclusivity restrictions. To summarize the final rule:
Debit interchange cap - $0.21 plus 5 bps (for both signature debit and PIN debit)
Fraud prevention adjustment - $0.01 (interim rule)
Routing restrictions and network exclusivity - Option A (two unaffiliated debit network)
See relevant dates at: http://www.paymentsnews.com/2011/06/federal-reserve-final-rules-on-durbin-amendment.html

The Great Falls of the Passaic River is a prominent waterfall, 77 feet (23 m) high, on the Passaic River in the city of Paterson in Passaic County in northern New Jersey. The Congress authorized its establishment as a National Historical Park in 2009. One of the United States' largest waterfalls, it played a significant role in the early industrial development of New Jersey starting in the earliest days of the nation. It is part of the Great Falls of Paterson-Garrett Mountain National Natural Landmark. It has also been designated as a National Historic Landmark District since 1976. The Great Falls' raceway and power systems were designated an List of Historic Civil Engineering Landmarks in 1977. Geologically, the falls were formed at the end of the last ice age approximately 13,000 years ago. Formerly the Passaic had followed a shorter course through the Watchung Mountains near present-day Summit. As the glacier receded, the river's previous course was blocked by a newly-formed moraine. A large lake, called Glacial Lake Passaic, formed behind the Watchungs. A s the ice receded, the river found a new circuitous route around the north end of the Watchungs, carving the spectacular falls through the underlying basalt, which was formed approximately 200 million years ago. In 1778, Alexander Hamilton visited the falls and was impressed by its potential for industry. Later when Hamilton was the nation's Secretary of Treasury, he selected the site of the nation's first planned industrial city, which he called a "national manufactory." In 1791, Hamilton helped found the Society for the Establishment of Useful Manufactures (S.U.M.), state-chartered private corporation to fulfill this vision. The town of Paterson was founded by the society and named after New Jersey Governor William Paterson in appreciation of his efforts to promote the society.
Hamilton commissioned civil engineer Pierre Charles L'Enfant, responsible for the layout of the new capital at Washington, D.C. to design the system of canals known as raceways supplying the power for the watermills in the new town. As a result the Paterson became the nucleus for a burgeoning mill industry. In 1793, two years after the society's foundation, the falls was the site of the first water-powered cotton spinning mill in New Jersey. In 1812, it was the site of the state's first continuous roll paper mill. The unique history of the falls and the city were described in the five-volume philosophical poem Paterson by William Carlos Williams . The falls were featured in the pilot as well as episode 6 of the first season of The Sopranos on television. Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park was added to the National Park System of the United States, authorized under the Omnibus Public Land Management Act. On March 30, 2009, President Obama signed legislation authorizing the falls as a national historical park, which would provide additional federal protections for the 77-foot waterfall. Great Falls State Park and other land along the Passaic River may be transferred to the federal government for the creation of the park. Formal establishment as a unit of the National Park System required action by the Secretary of the Interior. On November 7, 2011, Secretary Salazar formally dedicated the park. See pictures at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Falls_(Passaic_River)#cite_note-Salazar-12

Researchers in Britain are about to embark on a 10-year, multimillion-dollar project to build a computer — but their goal is neither dazzling analytical power nor lightning speed. Indeed, if they succeed, their machine will have only a tiny fraction of the computing power of today’s microprocessors. It will rely not on software and silicon but on metal gears and a primitive version of the quaint old IBM punch card. What it may do, though, is answer a question that has tantalized historians for decades: Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing? The machine on the drawing boards at the Science Museum in London is the Babbage Analytical Engine, a room-sized mechanical behemoth that its inventor envisioned but never built. The project follows the successful effort by a group at the museum to replicate a far simpler Babbage invention: the Difference Engine No. 2, a calculating machine composed of roughly 8,000 mechanical components assembled with a watchmaker’s precision. That project was completed in 1991. John Markoff
http://www.bendbulletin.com/article/20111108/NEWS0107/111080368/

Oklahoma Geological Survey Open-File Report, OF1-2011, Examination of Possibly Induced Seismicity from Hydraulic Fracturing in the Eola Field, Garvin County, Oklahoma, August 2011
Read the 31-page report at: http://www.ogs.ou.edu/pubsscanned/openfile/OF1_2011.pdf

A federal district court judge in Washington D.C. has issued a preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of new rules by the Food and Drug Administration that require cigarette manufacturers to display graphic warning labels on every pack of cigarettes sold. The judge found that the requirement violated cigarette manufacturers' rights under the First Amendment since it forced them to engage in commercial speech that goes beyond the conveyance of purely factual or uncontroversial information.
Read the 29-page document at: http://blogs.findlaw.com/courtside/2011/11/judge-extinguishes-cigarette-warning-label-law.html

Grand Jury Report on the Penn State Sex Abuse Scandal
http://www.scribd.com/doc/72061109/Grand-Jury-Report-on-Penn-State-Sex-Abuse-Scandal

Librarians who save the world If information is power, then there's no hero mightier than a librarian. Librarians are superheroes, adventurers, explorers and invaluable guides to other heroes.
The Cheshire Cat in Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series
Renamed "the Unitary Authority of Warrington Cat" due to changing boundaries, this cat is the overseer in the Great Library, a library within the book world, which contains every book ever written.
Rex Libris in the Rex Libris comics
Rex Libris is the "tough-as-nails Head Librarian at Middleton Public Library," who strikes fear into recalcitrant borrowers — and also battles "loitering zombies" and alien warlords who refuse to pay their late fees.
See other powerful librarians at:
http://io9.com/5671047/20-heroic-librarians-who-save-the-world

The Librarian Who Measured the Earth
Eratosthenes (AIR-uh-TOS-thuh-neez) was born in Cyrene, a Greek city in the country now called Libya in the third century B.C. At six, he went to school, called the gymnasium. Between questions, the students learned reading, writing, arithmetic, music, and poetry. They learned to play the lyre and recite poetry at the same time. At 30, Ptolemy III, ruler of Egypt, asked him to serve as tutor for his son Philopator in Alexandria. At the Alexandria Museum, there were laboratories, libraries, dining halls and private studios. Here the first dictionaries and enclopedias were written, the scientist Herophilius recognized the connection between heartbeat and pulse, and discovered the artieries and veins. Here Ctesibius invented the first water-driven clock and the first keyboard musical instrument. Here punctuation and grammar were invented by Aristophanes. Eratosthenes was appointed head librarian. He wrote the first complete geography book and measured the circumference of the earth. Kathryn Lasky

Pennsylvania Mineral Rights have a rich history all the way back to 1859 in Titusville, PA when the first successful oil well was drilled in America. The Drake well was drilled by Colonel Edwin L. Drake. More recently, the most active oil and gas formation providing value for Pennsylvania mineral rights has been the Marcellus Shale. Find link to other short articles about mineral rights by state at: http://www.mineralweb.com/mineral-rights-by-state/pennsylvania-mineral-rights/ Please note that MineralWeb is the online presence of The Oil and Gas Mineral Service Company. The company provides consulting, advice, and intelligence to America’s mineral owners, in addition to owning and managing oil and gas mineral and royalty interests. http://www.mineralweb.com/about/

A pending case in Pennsylvania considers whether Marcellus shale is a mineral.
The answer could determine whether contracts transferring mineral rights to Marcellus shale also transfer rights to Marcellus natural gas, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reports: http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/regional/s_758065.html "For anyone who's played the game 'Animal, Vegetable, Mineral,' it might seem obvious that the Marcellus shale isn't alive and doesn't grow—it's a rock layer in the ground, so it's a mineral," the story says. "In the Pennsylvania courts, the answer is not so clear." Under the state’s so-called “Dunham rule,” Pennsylvania courts have held that a grant of mineral rights in a deed generally does not mean that the parties intended to grant or reserve oil or gas rights, according to a summary by the law firm K&L Gates. In a ruling earlier this month, a Pennsylvania superior court asked a Susquehanna County court to decide whether the shale is a mineral and, if so, whether anyone who owns the shale also owns the shale gas, according to a summary by McGuireWoods. The superior court ruled in an action to quiet title filed by John and Mary Josephine Butler. Their deed gives them the rights to half the minerals on their 244 acres of property, the Tribune-Review says. he case is now pending in Susquehanna County. “If the Marcellus shale is not a mineral,” the newspaper says, “it could change everything drillers have assumed about the state's oil and gas laws.” http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/is_marcellus_shale_a_mineral_pa._courts_answer_will_affect_gas_rights/

Quotes
I know the price of success: dedication, hard work, and an unremitting devotion to the things you want to see happen.
It is by way of glass that sunlit space as a reality becomes the most useful servant of the human spirit.
The house of moderate cost is not only America’s major architectural problem but the problem most difficult for her major architects.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959) U.S. architect

Frank Lloyd Wright was born in Richland Center, Wisconsin, on June 8, 1867, and died in Phoenix, Arizona, on April 9, 1959, at the age of 91. (He often gave his birthdate as 1869, but records indicate that he was actually born in 1867.) His father was William Carey Wright, a preacher and a musician. His mother was Anna Lloyd Jones, a teacher whose large Welsh family settled the valley area near Spring Green, Wisconsin, where Wright later built his home, Taliesin. Wright had two sisters, Jane (1869) and Maginel (1877). His family life was nomadic and unsettled in the early years. Before arriving in Madison in 1878, Wright lived in Rhode Island, Iowa, and Massachusetts, in addition to Wisconsin. At age 11 Wright also began spending summers with his uncle James Lloyd Jones on his farm located near the Taliesin hill. Those early years in the Wisconsin countryside had a profound effect on Wright: "As a boy," he wrote in his autobiography, "I learned to know the ground plan of the region in every line and feature. For me now its elevation is the modeling of the hills, the weaving and fabric that clings to them, the look of it all in tender green or covered with snow or in full glow of summer that bursts into the glorious blaze of autumn. I still feel myself as much a part of it as the trees and birds and bees are, and the red barns." Find links to more information at:
http://www.franklloydwright.org/fllwf_web_091104/Biography.html

Q: Are there $3 bills?
A: The government never has printed a $3 bill. But, during the early 1800s, banks with federal or state charters issued $3 notes printed by contractors. U.S. Treasury Department.
http://www.thecourier.com/Opinion/columns/2011/Oct/JU/ar_JU_103111.asp?d=103111,2011,Oct,31&c=c_13

Larking about: Play the fool, in a childish or careless manner.
Origin: There are several possible derivations of the word 'lark' in this context. 'Larking about' or 'lark about' (sometimes used as 'larking around' or 'lark around') has been used to mean 'getting up to mischief; playing the fool' since at least the middle of the 19th century. At source its origins may well be somewhat earlier than that; how much earlier depends on which of the proposed origins proves to be correct. The principal theories are that either:
'Larking' derives from the Yorkshire dialect word 'lake', meaning 'to amuse oneself' ('The Yorkshire pronunciation of 'lake' sounds like 'laik', which could be mistaken for 'lark' outside the county) or: 'Larking' derives from 'skylark' and alludes to the well-known aerial acrobatics of the European Skylark. When they are on the ground these inconspicuous little birds look like what birdwatchers disparagingly call SBJs - 'small brown jobs'. In the air and singing they are transformed into one of nature's wonders - spiralling upward and trilling an exquisite song. Of course, skylarks were the inspiration for the UK's favourite piece of classical music - Ralph Vaughn Williams' The Lark Ascending. They also appear to have inspired sailors to describe lads who played around in the rigging of ships as skylarks. This term appears to have been coined with reference to the earlier name 'mudlarks' - the children who played and scavanged about the shoreline. Skylarks were first defined in a rather unlikely source, The Student's Comprehensive Anglo-Bengali Dictionary, Kanta, 1802:
Skylarking, the act of running about the rigging of a vessel in sport; frolicking. The use of 'lark' as a verb begins soon after that, as in an entry for 1813 in the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Peter Hawker: "Having larked all the way down the road." The first mention that I can find of 'larking about' in print comes from an edition of the American magazine The Living Age, 1844: One of the young genelmen was called Mr. Larkins, and I'm blessed but the name he hailed by tallied exactly with the cast of his figure-head and the trim of his craft, for he was eternally larking about somut or other, and his very face displayed a mixture of fun and mischief. Of the two theories presented above, it does seem that the 'skylarking' origin is by far the more likely. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/lark-about.html

An asteroid that is 400m (1,300ft) wide has passed by Earth, much to the delight of astronomers. Although invisible to the naked eye, scientists said they spotted strange structures on its surface as it spun past at 30,000mph (48 280.32 km/h). Asteroid 2005 YU55's was the closest an asteroid has been to Earth in 200 years, according to Nasa. It is also the largest space rock fly-by Earth has seen since 1976; the next visit by a large asteroid will be 2028. The aircraft-carrier-sized asteroid was darkly coloured in visible wavelengths and nearly spherical, lazily spinning about once every 20 hours as it raced through our neighbourhood of the Solar System. Nasa said it had been no closer than 201,700 miles (324,600km), as measured from the centre of the Earth. The rock reached its closest point to Earth at 23:28 GMT on Tuesday. It will now trace a path across the whole sky through to Thursday. The asteroid often travels in the vicinity of Earth, Mars and Venus, but Nasa said this fly-by had been the closest the asteroid had come to Earth in at least 200 years. Earth has several regular visitors like 2005 YU55 - most famously the Apophis asteroid. Apophis has in the past been claimed as a possible future impactor when it returns to our neighbourhood in 2029 and again in 2036. There is, according to the latest calculations, no danger from Apophis either. However, it will pass much closer to Earth on 13 April 2029 - at a distance of 18,300 miles (29,500km). See picture plus links to related stories at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15572634

On South Carolina's once-isolated Sea Islands, Gullah is still spoken, African traditions are carried on, and salty marshes perfume the air. After the Civil War, the Gullahs were abandoned in the islands flung off the Carolina coast because the land was considered worthless. That abandonment and the century of isolation that followed have preserved the Gullah language, culture, and daily way of life. Families live for generations on the same farm, grow much of their own food, pick sweet grass to make baskets, and attend the one-room praise houses of their slave ancestors, where hymns are harmonized in Gullah and Geechee. Gullah comes from a west African language and means "a people blessed by God." Throughout most of the South, African culture perished with the slaves. But in the Sea Islands it has been kept powerfully alive by women like Marquetta L. Goodwine. Queen Quet, as she's known locally, travels the country, spreading her love of Gullah life by performing what she calls "histo-musical" presentations in both English and Gullah. Another woman, Natalie Daise, shares Gullah art and culture by means of Ms. Natalie's Workshop on St. Helena. Batik-patterned burlap lines the walls, and the gallery and studio floors are painted sky blue and decorated with turtles and fish. Shelves hold locally made candles, woven banana- and pineapple-fiber frames, African rain sticks, and Australian didgeridoos. In the back room, Daise shows children how to make bracelets using crystals and African ceramic beads—typical of a scene from her Gullah Gullah Island show on Nickelodeon, which ended its run last year. But cultural proponents like Daise and Goodwine may not be enough to preserve the Sea Islands, says Hurriyah Asar, owner of the No Pork Café. Since the Georgia native moved to St. Helena six years ago, 30 percent of the island has been sold off. "Developers come in with cash, so they don't even have to deal with the banks," she says. http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/nothing-could-be-finer

The South Carolina Sea Islands are a low-lying chain of sandy sea islands stretching from Florida north along the coastlines of Georgia and South Carolina. These beautiful islands are alive with wildlife of all description. Considered some of the best fishing venues in the southeastern United States, many of these isolated palm covered islands have stunning white sand beaches. The most visited, and most famous island in the chain is Hilton Head. See a map at: http://www.worldatlas.com/aatlas/infopage/scisles.htm

Frogmore Stew and Other Lowcountry Recipes http://www.beaufortcountylibrary.org/htdocs-sirsi/frogmore.htm

With its abundant farms and shrimp docks, St. Helena Island, just 5 miles east of Beaufort, offers visitors a glimpse into rural Lowcountry life past and present. St. Helena is home to the Penn Center, one of the first schools for the children of freed slaves the location of a small rural cottage, where Martin Luther King, Jr. drafted his famous “I have a dream speech”.
http://www.beaufortsc.org/more/like-a-local/sthelenaisland.stml

Considered the grandfather of long grain rices in the Americas, Carolina Gold (which emanated from Africa and Indonesia ) became a commercial staple grain in the coastal lands of Charles Towne in the Carolina Territory by 1685. Possessing superior flavor, aroma, texture and cooking qualities (and a beautiful golden hue in the fields), Carolina Gold rice brought fortunes to those who produced it and created an influential culture and cuisine in the city of Charleston . Though the culture and cuisine disappeared with the Civil War, Carolina Gold continued to set quality standards for long grain rice well into the 20th century. In fact, the terms “Carolina Rice” and “long grain” became interchangeable worldwide, underscoring the impact of Charleston ’s contribution to Colonial Carolina Gold Rice production. After the Depression Carolina Gold rice lost its prominence to new varieties and became virtually extinct. But in the mid 1980s Dr. Richard Schulz, an eye surgeon and plantation owner from Savannah, collected stores of Carolina Gold from a USDA seed bank and repatriated the rice to its former home along coastal wetlands around Charleston . By 1986 he produced enough rice to sell. Clemson University Coastal Research and Education Center began growing Carolina Gold rice for sustainable farming research in 2001 for the Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. Today there are 60 acres planted to this near extinct heirloom rice along the South Carolina Coast. Find recipe at: http://www.carolinagoldricefoundation.org/recipes/classic_rice/classic_rice.html

If you squint your eyes in the afternoon light of the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, you can just make out what looks like an unassuming structure of metal and glass. Look closer and you'll see Richard Neutra's VDL Research House, which exemplifies the dream of American Modernism—an architecture with as much promise and optimism as any ever conceived. As the architect's own home, it was a labor of love and a laboratory for some of his most radical ideas. This is actually Neutra's second building on the site. The first was built in 1932 with a grant from an ardent supporter (VDL stands for C.H. Van der Leeuw, a Dutch industrialist so taken with Neutra's 1929 Lovell House that he immediately wrote a check just to see what the architect would build for himself). After a disastrous fire destroyed the structure in 1963, the Austrian-born architect conceived VDL II in collaboration with his son Dion. What rose from the ashes is a more interesting building than the one that was lost, from the colossal metal louvers on the entrance facade to the hanging gardens of the interior courtyard. It represents both the beginning and the high point of the humane-organic Modernism spearheaded by Neutra, embraced by Los Angeles and captured so memorably in the photographs of Julius Shulman. Economic use of materials as well as the teasing out of sensuality by water elements and manipulations of light, all within forms of surprisingly modest scale, express perfectly Neutra's position as the anti–Mies van der Rohe, the architect who would deliver us a future that was friendly and usable. It is one of the most important buildings in America. The VDL Research House, at 2300 Silver Lake Boulevard, is open to the public Saturdays from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. David Netto
See pictures at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653521365695968.html

In the world of chef José Andrés, if the dozens of projects he has constantly simmering aren't marinated in conviviality, then he wants no part of it. "José has always been smart enough to know that it is not enough to just be a 'chef' in the traditional sense," says Rob Wilder, his business partner and CEO of ThinkFoodGroup, their umbrella company. "He steps back and looks at the whole business, the people, the guests, the flow." Nowhere has he been more active than at DC Central Kitchen, an astonishingly well-run organization responsible for feeding the area's large homeless population as well as eight local schools. The DC Central Kitchen isn't big enough for Andrés, so he's set up his own nonprofit, the World Central Kitchen, with the goal of replicating the DC Central Kitchen model—one that doesn't just turn donations into meals, but uses the food they cook to create revenue that helps keep the business running—on the largest scale possible. Of all the kitchens under Andrés's thumb, Minibar is the one that matters most, not just because it represents the highest expression of avant-garde cuisine, but because it connects him literally and figuratively to the best kitchens of Spain, above all, to El Bulli and Ferran Adrià. It was there, as a 19-year-old just out of the Navy, that Andrés worked under the young Catalan destined to become the most influential chef of the 21st century. "As a chef, the best thing and the worst thing that ever happened to me was being a good friend of Ferran," says Andrés. With El Bulli having shuttered its doors in July, Andrés believes Minibar is the closest remaining thing to the El Bulli experience. "I could be in Minibar every day, 18 hours a day, but then I couldn't be doing seven other restaurants, World Central Kitchen, speaking engagements, all of it." Matt Goulding
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653392488212366.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Q: Why isn't Veterans Day always observed on a Monday?
A: The Uniform Holiday Bill of 1968 required that it, Washington's Birthday, Memorial Day and Columbus Day be celebrated on Monday to give three-day weekends to federal employees. But there was much confusion when the first Veterans Day under the law was celebrated on Oct. 25, 1971, and many legislatures and veterans groups complained. In 1975, Congress returned it to Nov. 11, regardless of the day of the week. This year, it is Friday, 11-11-11. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
Q: How many veterans are there?
A: The United States has nearly 22 million military veterans. About 15 percent have a service-related disability. U.S. Census Bureau. http://www.thecourier.com/Opinion/columns/2011/Nov/JU/ar_JU_110711.asp?d=110711,2011,Nov,07&c=c_13
Note that there are nine 5-digit palindromes (11-1-11 through 11-9-11) and one 6-digit palindrome (11-11-11) in November this year.

The General Assembly of the International Union of Pure and Applied Physics (IUPAP), taking place at the Institute of Physics in London, has approved the names of three new elements. Elements 110, 111 and 112 have been named darmstadtium (Ds), roentgenium (Rg) and copernicium (Cn). The elements are so large and unstable they can only be made in the lab and quickly break down into other elements. They are known as Super-heavy elements. Roentgenium was originally discovered in 1994 when a team at the GSI Helmholtz Centre for Heavy Ion Research in Germany created three atoms of the element. It has been named after Nobel Prize winning German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen, who was the first to produce and detect X-rays in 1895. Darmstadtium was discovered by the same group in 1994 and is named after the city of Darmstadt, where the GSI Helmholtz Centre is based. Copernicium was named after Prussian astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus, who died in 1543 and first suggested that the Earth revolves around the sun. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/8871840/Periodic-Table-swells-as-three-new-elements-named.html

What trees are to Paris, fountains are to Rome. Read an essay by Robert Hughes on The Forever City at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653383557101562.html

Richard George Adams (born 1920) is an English novelist who is best known as the author of Watership Down. He studied modern history at university before serving in the British Army during World War II. He completed his studies after the war and joined the English Civil Service. In 1974, two years after Watership Down was published, Adams became a full-time author. Adams had originally begun telling the story of Watership Down to his two daughters, and they insisted that he publish it as a book. It took two years to write . In 1972, after seven other publishers had turned down the manuscript for Watership Down, Rex Collings agreed to publish the work. The book gained international acclaim almost immediately, and established Adams as one of the foremost contemporary English writers. Over the next few years Watership Down sold over a million copies worldwide. It has become a modern classic, and in 1972 was awarded both the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award for Children's Fiction. To date, Adams' best-known work has sold over 50 million copies worldwide. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975.
Just before his 90th birthday, he wrote a new story for a charity book Gentle Footprints to raise funds for The Born Free Foundation. See a list of his books at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Adams I have just finished reading Traveller, a novel by Richard Adams. In the story, Traveller, companion and devoted horse of Robert E. Lee, narrates his views, including his perceptions and misperceptions, of the Civil War.

Traveller (1857–1871) was Confederate General Robert E. Lee's most famous horse during the American Civil War. Traveller, originally named Jeff Davis, was born near the Blue Sulphur Springs, in Greenbrier County, Virginia (now West Virginia), raised by Andrew Johnston. An American Saddlebred, he was of the Gray Eagle stock, and, as a colt, took the first prize at the Lewisburg, Virginia, fairs in 1859 and 1860. As an adult gelding, he was a sturdy horse, 16 hands high and 1,100 pounds (500 kg), iron gray in color with black points, a long mane and flowing tail. In the spring of 1861, a year before achieving fame as a Confederate general, Robert E. Lee was commanding a small force in western Virginia. The quartermaster of the 3rd Virginia Infantry, Captain Joseph M. Broun, was directed to "purchase a good serviceable horse of the best Greenbrier stock for our use during the war." Broun purchased the horse for $175 (approximately $4,000 in 2008) from Andrew Johnston's son, Captain James W. Johnston, and named him Greenbrier. See a picture of Traveller and Robert E. Lee at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveller_(horse)
Quotes by Richard Adams http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7717.Richard_Adams
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/r/richard_adams.html

The School of Information at the University of Michigan is heading a cooperative effort by four major universities to create better methods for data-sharing among scientists and researchers in the new and growing field of sustainability. The National Science Foundation awarded a two-year, $2 million grant to the School of Information, with $8 million anticipated over the course of the project. This grant will enable the School of Information and its partners at Indiana University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to develop a system whereby sustainability scientists can manage and share their data. http://www.annarbor.com/business-review/people-achievements-in-the-greater-ann-arbor-area-including-arbor-hospice-and-thomson-shore/

Innovators of the Year 2011 from WSJ Magazine November 2011
Art: Ai Weiwei by Kelly Crow http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653413127075114.html
Architecture: Bjarke Ingels by Richard B. Woodward http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653421385657578.html
Design: Joris Laarman by Tom Vanderbilt http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653500690674230.html
Gretchen Craft Rubin (born Kansas City, Missouri) is an American author and attorney. She is author of Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill, along with Forty Ways to Look at JFK. Her first book, Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, parodied self-help books by analyzing and exposing the techniques used to exploit those who strive for those worldly ambitions. Her newest book is The Happiness Project. Rubin received her undergraduate and law degrees from Yale University and was editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal. She clerked on the U.S. Supreme Court for Justice Sandra Day O'Connor and served as a chief adviser to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Reed Hundt. She has also been a lecturer at the Yale Law School and the Yale School of Management. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gretchen_Rubin

The Happiness Project blog http://www.happiness-project.com/

View the 36-page 112th Congress Gold Mouse Awards: Best Practices in Online Communications on Capitol Hill at:
http://congressfoundation.org/storage/documents/CMF_Pubs/cmf-112-gold-mouse-awards.pdf
The nonprofit Congressional Management Foundation (CMF) graded 618 congressional websites and found the most common grade moved from an F in the 111th Congress to a B in the 112th Congress.
View the Platinum, Gold, Silver and Bronze winners at: http://congressfoundation.org/projects/gold-mouse-project/112th-congress-gold-mouse-award-winners

Granita (grah-NEE-tah) are ices made of water, sugar and a flavoring. They are grainy in texture and are frozen in a pan in the freezer. Choose a large, shallow pan (8 x 12 x 2-inches) that allows the mixture to spread out. While you are assembling the recipe, place the empty pan and your stirring fork in the freezer to chill. Also chill the glasses you will be using to serve the granita in later. Pour the mixture into the pan and place in the freezer. Every 30 minutes, using a fork, stir the granita, scraping it off the bottom and sides of the pan. Break up the frozen parts near the edges into smaller chunks and rake them toward the center. Continue to freeze and break up ice crystals until completely
frozen, about 3 hours. If at any time the granita freezes too hard, simply leave it out at room temperature for a few minutes until it softens enough to be stirred again with a fork. Then return it to the freezer. Find granita recipes using espresso, lemon, raspberry, peach, chocolate and other flavors at: http://www.mangiabenepasta.com/granita.html

An overzealous cleaner in Germany has ruined a piece of modern art worth £690,000 after mistaking it for an eyesore that needed a good scrub. The sculpture by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, widely regarded as one of the most talented artists of his generation until his death in 1997, had been on loan to the Ostwall Museum in Dortmund when it fell prey to the cleaner's scouring pad. The work, called When It Starts Dripping From the Ceiling (Wenn's anfängt durch die Decke zu tropfen), comprised a rubber trough placed underneath a rickety wooden tower made from slats. Inside the trough, Kippenberger had spread a layer of paint representing dried rainwater. He thought it was art: the cleaner saw it as a challenge, and set about making the bucket look like new. A spokeswoman for the museum told German media that the female cleaner "removed the patina from the four walls of the trough". "It is now impossible to return it to its original state," she said, adding that it had been on loan to the museum from a private collector and was valued by insurers at €800,000 (£690,000). She said that cleaning crews had been told to keep 20cm (8in) away from artworks, but it was unclear if the woman – who worked for a company to which cleaning had been outsourced – had received the memo. If Kippenberger is now turning in his grave, he may find solace in the fact that he is not the only artist to have his works ruined by cleaners. In 1986, a "grease stain" by Joseph Beuys valued at about €400,000 was mopped away at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf. In 2004, a cleaner at Tate Britain in London threw away part of a work by another German artist, Gustav Metzger, after mistaking it for rubbish. The cleaner failed to realise that a plastic bag containing discarded paper and cardboard was an integral part of Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto-Destructive Art, and not just some litter. The bag was later recovered, but it was too damaged to display, so Metzger replaced it with another bag. Germans are not the only victims. In 2001, Damien Hirst lost a pile of beer bottles, ashtrays and coffee cups, meant to represent the life of an artist, when a caretaker at the Eyestorm Gallery in London cleared it away. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2001/oct/19/arts.highereducation1
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/nov/03/overzealous-cleaner-ruins-artwork

Colum McCann (born 1965) is an Irish writer of literary fiction. He is a Professor of Contemporary Literature at European Graduate School and Professor of Fiction at CUNY Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing with fellow novelists Peter Carey and Nathan Englander. McCann's fiction has been published in 30 languages. His novels include Songdogs, This Side of Brightness, Dancer, Zoli and Let the Great World Spin. He has written for numerous newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, The Times, The Irish Times, Granta, and La Repubblica. His short story "Everything in this Country Must" was made into a short film directed by Gary McKendry. It was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005. In 2003 McCann was named Esquire Magazine's "Best and Brightest" young novelist. He has also been awarded a Pushcart Prize, the Rooney Prize, the Irish Novel of the Year Award and the 2002 Ireland Fund of Monaco Princess Grace Memorial Literary Award. He was recently inducted into the Hennessy Hall of Fame. His novel Let the Great World Spin (2009), uses the true story of Philippe Petit as a "pull-through metaphor," and "weaves together a powerful allegory of 9/11." The novel has won numerous honours, notably the National Book Award and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. J. J. Abrams has optioned the film rights and has promised to work with McCann on the screenplay. In 2010, McCann and musician Joe Hurley cowrote a song-cycle – “The House That Horse Built (Let the Great World Spin)” – based on the character of Tillie. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colum_McCann

Konstantin Kakanias knows that 200 years ago porcelain was considered an art form easily comparable in importance to painting or tapestry weaving (not to mention 2,000 years ago, when vase painting was basically the only game in town). So when the Greek-born artist was asked by several friends and patrons to create sets of painted ceramic plates 14 years ago, Kakanias seized the opportunity to revive this ancient art form. Kakanias, a multimedia artist, lives in Los Angeles and Greece and is best known for his whimsical cartoonlike drawings and watercolors based on the lives of fictional characters. Chickens were the theme for a recent commission by a collector who raises exotic breeds on his Connecticut farm. As a gift for his partner's 55th birthday, the collector ordered an equal number of plates. After the plates are thrown and baked once, Kakanias sits with the bare earthenware dish between his hands, not unlike his predecessor Euphronios. While classical vase painters used something like a pastry bag, Kakanias paints on the plate directly. Like a jeweler, he uses a loupe to achieve the ornate detailing along the borders. Today the chicken plates are lovingly showcased in a display case—specifically designed for them by the owner—in the dining room. Though this might be the most grand commission, it is not his biggest one. Kakanias has made up to 300 dishes for one set, but he is adamant that he will not be transitioning into any kind of standardized production. David Netto
See pictures at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204644504576653401047581640.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Some people may question whether prison can truly be a place for rehabilitation. Michael Levi Fuller doesn't. Inmate #46565 here at the Southern Desert Correctional Center, Mr. Fuller has watched some hard cases come into his institution for years, then leave practically reborn. The cases in question are cars—very cool vintage cars. They come in rough and battered, and inmates restore them to their original glory. It may be the penal system's most unusual workshop. "We've got a '56 Jaguar, a '48 Rolls Royce and a Studebaker pickup," says Mr. Fuller in a phone interview. The 51-year-old Mr. Fuller joins 32 fellow medium-security inmates at the prison's auto shop every weekday. It's quite an operation and perhaps the most creative use of captive labor in a multibillion dollar business-behind-bars archipelago that stretches from New England to Hawaii. The inmates restore vehicles for a unit of Silver State Industries, a wholly owned subsidiary of another "holding" institution,"We Have the Time to Do It Right," is one of the mantras on the unit's corporate website; "Built with Conviction" is another. Although 40 of 50 states still produce license plates behind bars, prison businesses have diversified. Inmates at Arizona Correctional Industries at the Lewis prison complex in Buckeye fix diesel tractors. Nearly a thousand Tennessee and South Carolina convicts use draw knives and hand scrapers to "antique" floors for a company that markets interiors with a vintage look. The Pendleton, Ore., penitentiary sells a line of Prison Blue work apparel. California has a product in development: its own denim collection, Folsom Prison Blues. Joel Millman http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203911804576653670533388508.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_editorsPicks_1

Architect Daniel Libeskind, known as the master planner for the World Trade Center site, has produced a head-turning extension to the German army's military museum in Dresden. Like a piece of shrapnel freshly fallen from the sky, Mr. Libeskind's five-story, 200-ton wedge of steel and glass juts out of the austere neoclassical structure that first opened to the public in 1897 as part of Kaiser Wilhelm I's armory. The Kaiser opened the site, now known as the Military History Museum, to boast of Germany's bellicose military culture, which ultimately culminated in two world wars and the Holocaust. In that period, 85 members of Mr. Libeskind's family perished. It was this history and his childhood experiences with anti-Semitism in Poland that inspired Mr. Libeskind's widely admired design of Berlin's Jewish Museum, which opened in 2001. The 65-year-old says his passion for resurrecting the dilapidated armory is apropos. "Precisely because I'm a child of Holocaust survivors," he says, "I had no qualms about speaking in a democracy about the importance of a military for democracy. If Germany had been a democracy, those horrors would never have happened." The museum was long a medium for military propaganda. As a Nazi military museum, it survived the bombing of Dresden in February 1945 because it was on the city's outskirts. Until reunification in 1990, the building housed a Soviet propaganda museum to educate East Germans about the proletarian struggle. The museum has been mostly closed since 2004. From the outset, Mr. Libeskind sought to slice into the former armory—catalyzing a visual "shift in axis." "I wanted my building to penetrate the opacity of the armory's rigid structure," he says. Mr. Libeskind's design includes a 99-foot-high viewing platform. "From the platform you see a Dresden that rose from the ashes of its bombing," says the architect. Inside the Libeskind extension are 11 mini-exhibitions emphasizing how the military—and often subsequent violence—permeates all cultures and societies. In a section on "War and Fashion," visitors learn how trench coats, khakis, standardized sizing and even Ray-Ban sunglasses were developed to improve military efficiency. There's a charred Nazi toy tank found in a bombed-out Dresden home. Mary M. Lane
See picture of the museum at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204479504576639191201461686.html

Historic Artists' Homes and Studios selected by the National Trust for Historic Preservation See 32 at: http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/sites/hahs.html?related_state=&related_region= Search by state or region at: http://www.preservationnation.org/travel-and-sites/sites/artists-homes.html

The fossils seemed hardly worth a second look. The one from England was only a piece of jawbone with three teeth, and the other, from southern Italy, was nothing more than two infant teeth. But scientists went ahead, re-examining them with refined techniques, and found that one specimen’s age had previously been significantly underestimated and that the other’s dating and identity had been misinterpreted. They had in fact discovered the oldest known skeletal remains of anatomically modern humans in the whole of Europe, two international research teams reported November 2. In tests conducted at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit in England, the baby teeth from Italy were dated at 43,000 to 45,000 years old. Other analysis showed the teeth to be those of a modern human, not a Neanderthal, as previously thought when the fossil was unearthed in 1964 from the Grotta del Cavallo. Similar tests at Oxford established that the age of the jawbone, from Kents Cavern near Torquay, Devon, had been significantly underestimated, by about 7,000 years, probably because of contamination when it was originally dated in 1989. The age is now set at 41,500 to 44,200 years old, making this the oldest known modern human fossil from northwestern Europe.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/science/fossil-teeth-put-humans-in-europe-earlier-than-thought.html

Diederik Stapel, a psychologist working at Tilburg University in the Netherlands, said he had "failed as a scientist" and was ashamed of what he had done, but had been driven to falsifying research by constant pressure to perform. The respected journal Science, which published some of Diederik Stapel's work earlier this year, issued an "expression of concern" editorial in which it said it now had serious concerns about the validity of Stapel's findings. Stapel was suspended from his position at Tilburg University in the Netherlands in September when an investigation was launched by the university into his work. "The official report ... indicates that the extent of the fraud by Stapel is substantial," Science's editor-in-chief Bruce Alberts wrote in the journal's online edition Science Express. The editorial was posted online late on November 1. In a statement posted on the internet via the Dutch newspaper Brabants Dagblad this week, Stapel admitted to falsifying data and apologized for his actions.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/02/us-dutch-scientist-fraud-idUSTRE7A12PL20111102

Caffeinated meat. That’s right, an Army lab is testing a beef jerky stick that looks and tastes just like your average Slim Jim but contains an equivalent of a cup of coffee’s worth of caffeine to give even the sleepiest soldier that up-and-at-’em boost. After a decade of war, military food scientists have been hard at work at a little-known research facility outside Boston transforming the field ration — known as the Meal, Ready to Eat, and perhaps the most complained about food in the world — into something not just good-tasting but full of energy-enhancing ingredients.
“There is a lot of science that goes into this,” said David Accetta, a spokesman for the Natick Soldier Research, Development & Engineering Center, where every item put into an MRE is tested and tasted. In addition to caffeine, military technologists are lacing food with supplements such as omega 3s and curcumin, which act as anti-inflammatories. Maltodextrin, a complex carbohydrate that gives service members a little turbo charge, is injected into an amped-up applesauce called Zapplesauce. Napoleon said that an army marches on its stomach. But as many battlefield veterans can attest, the Pentagon for years largely paid no heed to the meals soldiers were offered. Feeding thousands of service members during war has always been a challenge. To provide fresh meat during the Civil War, the Army drove cattle alongside soldiers to be slaughtered on the spot. In World War I, soldiers got “trench rations” of “hard bread,” beef, salmon and sardines but scant vegetables. World War II brought more variety and even cigarettes. But during the Vietnam years, rations were still basic meat and potatoes. The first MREs, developed in the early 1980s, weren’t much better. During the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which at one point helped increase demand for MREs to 8 million cases a year, the taste of the food has become increasingly important. Natick scientists doubled the number of MRE options from 12 to 24, started asking soldiers for feedback and paid closer attention to not only the way meals tasted but how they looked. The military also began experimenting with energy-enhancing supplements for ordinary rations as well as specialized ones. They created what’s called the First Strike Ration, a lightweight, 2,900-calorie meal designed in particular for Special Operations forces in Iraq or Afghanistan. MREs overall have become more diverse and attuned to market trends. Food technologists study menus at T.G.I. Friday’s and Applebee’s for inspiration. http://bangordailynews.com/2011/11/01/health/caffeinated-meat-anyone-army-food-goes-high-tech/

Do you enjoy writing the date? Do you get particular satisfaction when you do so on days that provide a pattern, such as 01:02:03, which presented itself for Americans on January 2nd 2003 and for Europeans a little later, on February 1st? Sometimes the different order of day and month in American and European practice is unimportant: June 6th 2006 is 06:06:06 either way. In 2011, Europeans will get little patterns on the 11th of every month except October and December. Americans can look forward to a thrilling first nine days of November. Everyone will have their own 9:10:11. And 2011 will be special in two respects. First, it will bring 11:11:11. November 11th has been a significant date in many countries since 1918, when, at 11 a.m. that day, the armistice ending the first world war came into effect. Second, it will bring a sprinkling of dates with nothing but noughts and ones. Ultra cool in 2011 will be to write the date in the sequences used in the binary system. That will be easy enough on January 1st (1:1:1011), but it will get harder: 31:12:11 is 11111:1100:1011. http://www.economist.com/node/17492949
Note that when you count four digits of a year rather the last two and use 02 rather than 2 for the second of the month, 11/02/2011 is also a palindrome.

Just how rare is an eight-digit palindrome day? In an interview with The Los Angeles Times, Aziz Anin, professor of engineering at the University of Portland, has taken on the discovery of palindrome dates as a sort of hobby, explained that there will only be 12 eight-digit palindrome days this entire century. In addition to the automatic awesomeness of a date being a palindrome, Anin points out that 11/02/2011 is extra special because it is 1001 x 11 x 1001, or the product of a mathematical expression in which both sides are almost mirror images of one another.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/nationnow/2011/11/happy-palindrome-day.html

For those with an uncontrollable urge to learn more about special dates, it is important to note that throughout the world different formats are used to write down dates. Some common formats are:
• month / day / year: English language
• day - month - year: other European languages
• year . month . day: Chinese language
Find examples of same number dates, double dates. square root dates and other kinds of special dates at: http://www.iwriteiam.nl/Dates.html

Amazon's opened its Kindle lending library, offering over 5,000 titles for loan, including over 100 current and former New York Times Bestsellers. Users subscribing to the company's Prime service - which costs $79 per year - can borrow them for free. There's no time limit on how long you can keep the book, although it's only possible to borrow one book per month, and only one at a time. http://www.tgdaily.com/hardware-features/59422-kindle-lending-library-launches-with-thousands-of-books Information on Amazon Prime at: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=13819211

Occupy Wall Street, an unincorporated association, applied for the trademark to its name on October 24. In an application with the same filing date, Arizona-based Fer-Eng Investments, LLC, applied for the same trademark. In the case of two applications filed the same day, the trademark office says the application with the lowest serial number -- meaning it was filed first -- earns the trademark, according to Steven Berk, senior supervisory attorney with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. That would give Occupy Wall Street preference: Its serial number is 281 numbers lower than Fer-Eng's. There is also a pending trademark application for a variation on the name of the movement: "Occupy Wall St." Robert and Diane Maresca applied for that trademark after Robert had spent several days at the protest in Zuccotti Park making t-shirts for free with a permanent marker. "I made about 20 on the second day, and then it went up to 80 by the fifth day. And then I realized it's not very healthy to smell the fumes, so then I decided that I should get in touch with a silk-screener," Robert Maresca said. The minimum order was 200 shirts and the couple was concerned that they might be sued if someone else obtained the trademark, so they applied for it. Robert has said he would sell it to the Occupy Wall Street group for $1 after his costs are covered. There's also a wave of trademark applications for slogans related to the movement. Applications have been filed for the trademarks to "We are the 99%," "I am the 99%" and "Occupy D.C. 2012," among other phrases. Merchandise with those and similar slogans is on sale all over the Internet. Self-described "entre-protester" Ray Agrizone sells t-shirts, hats and stickers emblazoned with "Occupy Wall Street" and some of the movement's mantras on his website, TheOccupyStore.com. Agrizone says he is not concerned about a potential lawsuit because he is using his sales to give money to the cause. He says 10% of his proceeds go to Occupy Wall Street.
http://money.cnn.com/2011/10/31/news/economy/occupy_wall_street_trademark/index.htm

The Pope-Leighey House, formerly known as the Loren Pope Residence, is one of three suburban homes in Virginia designed by American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. The house, which belongs to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, has been relocated twice and sits on the grounds of Woodlawn Plantation, Alexandria, Virginia. Along with the Andrew B. Cooke House and the Luis Marden House, it is one of three Frank Lloyd Wright designs in Virginia. Commissioned in 1939 by journalist Loren Pope and his wife Charlotte Pope, the design followed Wright's Usonian principles and was completed in 1941 at an initial cost of $7,000 — at 1005 Locust Street, Falls Church, Virginia. Loren Pope, at the time a writer for the Washington Evening Star had grown interested in Wright after studying his Wasmuth Portfolio, a 1938 Time Magazine article and Wright's recently published autobiography. Pope met Wright in 1938 when the architect made a presentation in D.C. while working on another project that would remain un-built. Pope approached Wright at his presentation, indicating he'd like Wright to design his home. Wright indicated that he did not design speculative work, rather only designed homes for “people who deserved them.” Pope subsequently wrote the architect, beginning his letter “Dear Mr. Wright, There are certain things a man wants during life, and of life. Material things and things of the spirit. The writer has one fervent wish that includes both. It is a house created by you.” After Wright agreed, Pope subsequently visited another Usonian home of Wright's design and met Wright at Taliesin. The architect originally designing a house of 1,800 square feet (170 m2), Mr. Pope at the time making $50 per week. Borrowing the money for the house proved difficult, with one lender counseling Pope the home would be a "white elephant." Pope's employer, the Evening Star, eventually offered a loan of $5,700 and construction commenced after Wright sized the plan down from 1800 sf to 1200 sf. Pope and his family lived in the house for 6 years, moving in 1946 to a 365 acre farm in Loudon County, planning to subsequently build a larger Wright-designed home. Limitations on his income precluded Pope from affording the new home until 1959, when Wright was busy with the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pope-Leighey_House
See picture of Pope-Leighey house at: http://popeleighey1940.org/

Early manuscripts had no punctuation at all, and those from the medieval period suggest haphazard innovation, with more than 30 different marks. The modern repertoire of punctuation emerged as printers in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Parentheses were first used around 1500, having been observed by English writers and printers in Italian books. Commas were not employed until the 16th century; in early printed books in English one sees a virgule (a slash like this /), which the comma replaced around 1520. Another mark, now obscure, is the point d'ironie, sometimes known as a "snark." A back-to-front question mark, it was deployed by the 16th-century printer Henry Denham to signal rhetorical questions, and in 1899 the French poet Alcanter de Brahm suggested reviving it. More recently, the difficulty of detecting irony and sarcasm in electronic communication has prompted fresh calls for a revival of the point d'ironie. But the chances are slim that it will make a comeback. Though it is not unusual to hear calls for new punctuation, the marks proposed tend to cannibalize existing ones. In this vein, you may have encountered the interrobang, which signals excited disbelief. Such marks are symptoms of an increasing tendency to punctuate for rhetorical rather than grammatical effect. Instead of presenting syntactical and logical relationships, punctuation reproduces the patterns of speech. One manifestation of this is the advance of the dash. It imitates the jagged urgency of conversation, in which we change direction sharply and with punch. Dashes became common only in the 18th century. Their appeal is visual, their shape dramatic. That's what a modern, talky style of writing seems to demand. By contrast, use of the semicolon is dwindling. Although colons were common as early as the 14th century, the semicolon was rare in English books before the 17th century. The hyphen, traditionally, has been used to link two halves of a compound noun and has suggested that a new coinage is on probation. But now the noun is split (fig leaf, hobby horse) or rendered without a hyphen (crybaby, bumblebee). It may be that the hyphen's last outpost will be in emoticons, where it plays a leading role. Henry Hitchings See a chart showing pilcrow, interrobang, hedera, exlamation comma, question comma, and snark at: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204618704576641182784805212.html

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also described as the Pacific Trash Vortex, is a gyre of marine litter in the central North Pacific Ocean located roughly between 135°W to 155°W and 35°N to 42°N. The patch extends over an indeterminate area, with estimates ranging very widely depending on the degree of plastic concentration used to define the affected area. The Patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of pelagic plastics, chemical sludge, and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. The existence of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was predicted in a 1988 paper published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of the United States. The prediction was based on results obtained by several Alaska-based researchers between 1985 and 1988 that measured neustonic plastic in the North Pacific Ocean. This research found high concentrations of marine debris accumulating in regions governed by ocean currents. Extrapolating from findings in the Sea of Japan, the researchers hypothesized that similar conditions would occur in other parts of the Pacific where prevailing currents were favorable to the creation of relatively stable waters. They specifically indicated the North Pacific Gyre. Charles J. Moore, returning home through the North Pacific Gyre after competing in the Transpac sailing race in 1997, came upon an enormous stretch of floating debris. Moore alerted the oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer, who subsequently dubbed the region the "Eastern Garbage Patch" (EGP). The area is frequently featured in media reports as an exceptional example of marine pollution. Moore's claim of having discovered a large, visible debris field is, however, a mischaracterization of the polluted region overall, since it consists primarily of particles that are generally invisible to the naked eye. It is thought that, like other areas of concentrated marine debris in the world's oceans, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch formed gradually as a result of marine pollution gathered by oceanic currents. The garbage patch occupies a large and relatively stationary region of the North Pacific Ocean bound by the North Pacific Gyre (a remote area commonly referred to as the horse latitudes). The gyre's rotational pattern draws in waste material from across the North Pacific Ocean, including coastal waters off North America and Japan. As material is captured in the currents, wind-driven surface currents gradually move floating debris toward the center, trapping it in the region. The size of the patch is unknown, as large items readily visible from a boat deck are uncommon. Most debris consists of small plastic particles suspended at or just below the surface, making it impossible to detect by aircraft or satellite. Instead, the size of the patch is determined by sampling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch

The North Atlantic Garbage Patch is an area of marine debris found floating within the North Atlantic Gyre, originally documented in 1972. The patch is estimated to be hundreds of kilometers across in size, with a density of over 200,000 pieces of debris per square kilometer. The debris zone shifts by as much as 1,600 km (990 mi) north and south seasonally, and drifts even farther south during the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, according to the NOAA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Garbage_Patch

The Indian Ocean Garbage Patch, discovered in 2010, is a gyre of marine litter suspended in the upper water column of the central Indian Ocean, specifically the Indian Ocean Gyre, one of the five major oceanic gyres. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Ocean_Garbage_Patch

The five oceanic gyres are: South Atlantic, South Pacific, and Indian Ocean, North Pacific and North Atlantic.

The most dangerous animal in North America isn't the bear or the shark, but may well be the deer, and the deadliest time of year is fall. On average, more collisions between cars and deer occur in November than in any other month, according to State Farm Insurance. This is because late October through early December is mating season for North American deer, reports Rob Found, a biologist from the University of Alberta, in Edmonton. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, there are about 1 million car accidents with deer each year that kill 200 Americans, cause more than 10,000 personal injuries, and result in $1 billion in vehicle damage. By comparison, sharks have killed 10 people in the USA in the past 10 years, according to the International Shark Attack File. As for bears, a list of known attacks maintained by Bearplanet.org says about 28 people have been killed by bears the past decade.
For the fifth year in a row, West Virginia tops the list of states where a driver is most likely to run into a deer, State Farm reports. The other states in the top 10 are Iowa, South Dakota, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Montana, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota and Wyoming.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/story/2011-10-31/deer-car-accidents-rise/51019604/1