Indirect and direct object examples, grammar rules

In the English language verbs can often be followed by two different types of objects.

I sent Mary some flowers.  I sent some flowers to Mary.
These two sentences contain both kinds of objects.  Flowers are the direct object.  It refers to what I sent.  Mary is the indirect object.  It refers to whom I sent it.
See more information at:  http://www.e-grammar.org/direct-indirect-object/

New France (French: Nouvelle-France) was the area colonized by France in North America during a period beginning with the exploration of the Saint Lawrence River by Jacques Cartier in 1534 and ending with the cession of New France to Spain and Great Britain in 1763.  At its peak in 1712 (before the Treaty of Utrecht), the territory of New France extended from Newfoundland to the Rocky Mountains and from Hudson Bay to the Gulf of Mexico.  The territory was then divided into five colonies, each with its own administration:  Canada, Acadia, Hudson Bay, Newfoundland (Plaisance), and Louisiana.  The Treaty of Utrecht resulted in the relinquishing of French claims to mainland Acadia, the Hudson Bay and Newfoundland, and the establishment of the colony of Île Royale (Cape Breton Island) as the successor to Acadia.  France ceded the rest of New France, except the islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon, to Great Britain and Spain at the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Seven Years War (the French and Indian War).  Britain received the lands east of the Mississippi River, including Canada, Acadia, and parts of Louisiana, while Spain received the territory to the west – the larger portion of Louisiana.  Spain returned its portion of Louisiana to France in 1800 under the secret Treaty of San Ildefonso, but French leader Napoleon Bonaparte sold it to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, permanently ending French colonial efforts on the North American mainland.  The only remnant of the former colonial territory of New France that remains under French control to this day is the French overseas collectivity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon (French: Collectivité territoriale de Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon), consisting of a group of small islands 25 kilometres (13 nmi; 15 mi) off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada.  Read much more and see maps at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_France

New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.  New England is bordered by New York state to the west, Quebec to the north, and New Brunswick and the Atlantic Ocean to the east.  In one of the earliest English settlements in North America, Pilgrims from England first settled in New England in 1620, to form Plymouth Colony.  Ten years later, the Puritans settled north of Plymouth Colony in Boston, thus forming Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Some of the first movements of American literature, philosophy, and education originated in New England.  The region played a prominent role in the movement to abolish slavery, and was the first region of the United States to be transformed by the Industrial Revolution.  New England is the only one of the United States Census Bureau's nine regional divisions whose name does not derive from its geography, and it is the only multi-state region with clear, consistent boundaries.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England

New Hampshire  Early historians record that in 1623, under the authority of an English land-grant, Captain John Mason, in conjunction with several others, sent David Thomson, a Scotsman, and Edward and Thomas Hilton, fish-merchants of London, with a number of other people in two divisions to establish a fishing colony in what is now New Hampshire, at the mouth of the Piscataqua River.  Nine years before that Captain John Smith of England and later of Virginia, sailied along the New England coast.  So it remained until the "War of the Revolution."  Smith first named it "North Virginia" but King James later revised this into "New England."  To the map was added the name Portsmouth, taken from the English town where Captain John Mason was commander of the fort, and the name New Hampshire is that of his own English county of Hampshire.  http://www.nh.gov/nhinfo/history.html

New Jersey was named for the Channel Island of Jersey in honor of Sir George Carteret (one of the two men to whom the land was originally given).  http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/New_Jersey/NewJerseyName.html

New Mexico was named by the Spanish for lands north of the Rio Grande River (the upper region of the Rio Grande was called Nuevo Mexico as early as 1561).  The name was anglicized and applied to the land ceded to the United States by Mexico after the Mexican American War.  Mexico is an Aztec word meaning "place of Mexitli" (an Aztec god).  http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/New_Mexico/NewMexicoNameOrigin.html 

New York was named after the English Duke of York and Albany (and the brother of England's King Charles II) in 1664 when the region called New Amsterdam was taken from the Dutch.  http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/New_York/name_origin.html 

Traces of a common psychiatric medication that winds up in rivers and streams may affect fish behavior and feeding patterns, according to a study in the journal Science.  Researchers in Sweden exposed wild European perch to water with different concentrations of Oxazepam, an anti-anxiety medication that can show up in waterways after being flushed, excreted or discarded.  Researchers reported that fish exposed to Oxazepam became less social, more active and ate faster, behaviors they said could have long-term consequences for aquatic ecosystems.  Scientists who study pharmaceuticals in waterways said the research was intriguing because it examined the potential effect on animals of a specific medication intended to affect human behavior.    The study joins a small but growing body of research exploring the possible environmental impact of chemicals in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics and other products. Many of these chemicals are not removed by wastewater treatment plants, which are intended to remove bacteria and nutrients, experts said.  The topic is difficult to study partly because concentrations of chemicals in waterways can vary with season, hour and distance from treatment plants, and other medications in water may influence a chemical’s effects.  The United States Geological Survey has found “intersex fish,” or male fish that develop female sexual characteristics, in the Potomac River and its tributaries, raising questions about whether hormone residues might be responsible.  A study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology found antidepressants like Prozac and Zoloft in the brains of fish collected downstream from wastewater discharge in Colorado and Iowa.   Pam Belluck  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/science/traces-of-anxiety-drug-may-affect-fish-behavior-study-shows.html?_r=0 

Pam Belluck, an American journalist and author, is a health and science writer for The New York Times.  Belluck has been a staff writer for The Times since 1995, writing about topics as varied as floating islands, Alzheimer's disease, cattle rustling, and the effect of music on the brain.  She joined the science and health staff of The Times in 2009 after more than a decade as a national correspondent leading the paper's Midwest and New England bureaus.  Belluck is the author of the non-fiction book Island Practice, about Dr. Timothy Lepore, a surgeon on Nantucket, published in June 2012 by PublicAffairs.  In July 2012, Imagine Entertainment optioned the book to develop a TV series with 20th Century Fox Television, and in August 2012 the medical drama was bought by CBS.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pam_Belluck

Eleven of the most beautiful museum libraries in the world  Thanks, Paul 

http://www.flavorwire.com/368444/11-of-the-most-beautiful-museum-libraries-in-the-world/view-all

What does conchiglie mean?  Seashell-shaped pasta   See list of pastas, names, descriptions and pictures at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pasta

British Royal Family:  the Plantagenets  See history of King Richard III (1452-1485) and link to all Plantagenets from the menu at the center top.  There are five Edwards, four Henrys and two Richards.  http://www.britroyals.com/plantagenet.asp?id=richard3 

King Richard I (1157-1199) was called Richard the Lion Heart and you can go to his page, then link to the entire British royal line at:  http://www.britroyals.com/kings.asp?id=richard1 

From either of these Web pages, you can link to frequently asked questions about the British royal family.   

Exalted by a suite of fifteen classical pieces by Russian composer, (Modest) Petrovich Mussorgsky, the Great Gate of Kiev, is not actually a gate but a design submitted by artist Victor Hartmann to commemorate the attempted assassination of Tsar Alexander II in the city of Kiev in 1866.  Hartmann's majestic design for The Great Gate of Kiev caused a sensation, and the artist believed it was the finest work he had ever done.  The sketch for stone gates to replace the wooden gates of Kiev incorporated a cupola in the form of a Slavonic helmet.  In the design, the archway rested on granite pillars and its peak was to be decorated with a huge headpiece of Russian carved designs including the Russian state eagle.  To commemorate what was referred to by the Tsar as "the event of April 4, 1866", a design competition commenced.  Though proposals poured in including a drawing by Hartmann, Russian authorities scrapped the effort and while the Tsar may have been relieved to dodge assassination, explicit acknowledgement of the event may have led to the cancellation of the competition.  Hartmann's early death at the age of thirty-nine devastated Mussorgsky, a close personal friend.  Distraught by his friend's passing, Mussorgsky agreed to become involved in a commemorative art exhibition of over 400 paintings by his friend.  The exhibition inspired Mussorgsky to complete a classical piano suite, Pictures at an Exhibition, representing pieces of Hartmann's artwork.  Mussorgsky's homage to his friend was universally ignored until Ravel arranged the work to be played by a symphonic orchestra.  Pictures in an Exhibition has since been orchestrated by at least ten different composers.   

http://www.ukraine.com/blog/fun-facts-about-ukraine-the-great-gate-of-kiev

Victor Hartmann was a painter, architect and designer whose paintings went back to traditional Russian legends and folktales.  As an architect, he rejected the neo-classical Roman styles that were becoming fashionable, and designed buildings based on medieval and traditional styles.  In 1873 Hartmann died suddenly at the age of 39.  Vladimir Stassov, an art critic and mutual friend, organised a posthumous exhibition of Hartmann's paintings, sketches and designs, over 400 in total.  Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is a musical representation of wandering through an art gallery.  Few of Hartmann's original paintings survive, but the few that do may be seen at:  http://www.good-music-guide.com/reviews/057_mussorgsky_pictures.htm   

Any list of the leading novelists of the 19th century, writing in English, would almost surely include Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain.  But they do not appear at the top of a list of the most influential writers of their time.  Instead, a recent study has found, Jane Austen, author of “Pride and Prejudice, “ and Sir Walter Scott, the creator of “Ivanhoe,” had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes.  These two were “the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve,” Matthew L. Jockers wrote in research published last year.  He based his conclusion on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900.  It was a lot of digging, and a computer did it.  The study, which involved statistical parsing and aggregation of thousands of novels, made other striking observations.  For example, Austen’s works cluster tightly together in style and theme, while those of George Eliot (a k a Mary Ann Evans) range more broadly, and more closely resemble the patterns of male writers.  Using similar criteria, Harriet Beecher Stowe was 20 years ahead of her time, said Mr. Jockers, whose research will soon be published in a book, “Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History” (University of Illinois Press).  These findings are hardly the last word.  At this stage, this kind of digital analysis is mostly an intriguing sign that Big Data technology is steadily pushing beyond the Internet industry and scientific research into seemingly foreign fields like the social sciences and the humanities.  The new tools of discovery provide a fresh look at culture, much as the microscope gave us a closer look at the subtleties of life and the telescope opened the way to faraway galaxies.   Steve Lohr  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/technology/literary-history-seen-through-big-datas-lens.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

"The presidents of the twelve Federal Reserve Banks have submitted a joint letter responding to the Financial Stability Oversight Council's proposal on money market mutual fund (MMF) reform.  The presidents support the Council's efforts to address the structural vulnerabilities of MMFs.  They also agree with the Council's determination that MMFs' activities and practices could create or increase the risk of liquidity and credit problems spreading through the financial system."  See Feb. 12, 2013 letter on Financial Stability Oversight Council’s Proposed Recommendations Regarding Money Market Mutual Fund Reform (the “Proposal”), FSOC–2012–0003, 77 FR 69455, November 19, 2012.  http://www.bostonfed.org/news/press/2013/pr021213-letter.pdf

Mardi Gras  ("Fat Tuesday") is an annual Carnival celebration held in Mobile, Alabama and New Orleans, Louisiana.  The celebration of Mardi Gras was brought to Louisiana by early French settlers.  The first record of the holiday being celebrated in Louisiana was at the mouth of the Mississippi River in what is now lower Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, on March 3, 1699.   The traditional colors of Mardi Gras are purple (justice), green (faith) and gold (power).   These colors are said to have been chosen by Grand Duke Alexis Alexandrovitch Romanoff of Russia during a visit to New Orleans in 1872.  Inexpensive strings of beads and toys have been thrown from floats to parade-goers since at least the late 19th century.  Until the 1960s, the most common form was multi-colored strings of glass beads made in Czechoslovakia.  These were supplanted by less expensive and more durable plastic beads, first from Hong Kong, then from Taiwan, and more recently from China.  Lower-cost beads and toys allow riders to purchase greater quantities and throws have become more numerous and common.  In the 1990s, many people lost interest in small, cheap beads, often leaving them where they landed on the ground.  Larger, more elaborate metallic beads and strands with figures of animals, people, or other objects have become the sought-after throws.  In a retro-inspired twist, glass beads have returned to parades.  Now made in India, glass beads are one of the most valuable throws.  Celebrations begin early on Mardi Gras Day, which can fall on any Tuesday between February 3 and March 9 (depending on the date of Easter).  Monday is known as Lundi Gras ("Fat Monday").  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Orleans_Mardi_Gras

Before Elvis Presley and Elton John, there was Liberace, at one time the highest paid entertainer in Las Vegas.  Liberace was a trained classical pianist who realized playing contemporary pop songs would broaden his appeal to a much wider audience.  His performances would be a mix of classical and pop, topped off with his humorous interactions with the audience.  In addition to his remarkable talent as a pianist, Liberace attracted attention for his legendary flamboyant stage costumes usually consisting of a jacket or cape adorned with thousands of rhinestones and crystals.  He took this look one step further having his pianos and cars covered in jewels.  A large assortment of Liberace's pianos, cars and capes are on display at the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas.  Liberace originally opened the museum himself back in 1979 as a fundraising arm for his foundation, the Liberace Foundation for the Performing and Creative Arts.  Grateful for the 17-year scholarship he was awarded as a child back in Wisconsin to study classical piano, Liberace wanted to do his part to help future generations of musicians by granting scholarships.  When starting out his career in Las Vegas, Liberace was earning $50,000 a week back in 1955 and from that point on would earn an average of $5 million a year. He was listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the world's highest paid musician and  pianist.  This abundance of wealth enabled Liberace to collect a vast amount of antiques, pianos, cars and homes.  Nicknamed "The King of Bling", Liberace also loved large pieces of jewelry and would wear extremely large rings even as he played the piano.  He also owned the world's largest rhinestone, a 115,000-karat stone received as a gift from the famous Swarovski crystal maker in Austria, which is on display at the Liberace Museum.  His flamboyant showmanship influenced Elvis Presley as well as famous rock pianist, Elton John.  Liberace and Elvis first met in 1956 in Las Vegas when Liberace was a big star playing at the Riviera.  Liberace told Elvis, "You're not going to make it in Vegas unless you put some glitz in your costumes."  Elvis took that to heart when he played Las Vegas in the 1970s, and his jumpsuits and capes in turn influenced Liberace.  http://www.examiner.com/article/discover-liberace-the-king-of-bling-at-his-own-las-vegas-museum Trina Yannicos   NOTE that the Liberace Museum closed on Oct. 17, 2010 due to decreasing number of visitors leading to insufficient funding.  See http://www.lasvegassun.com/blogs/kats-report/2010/sep/10/liberace-museum-closing-final-day-operation-longtm/  http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/18/us/18liberace.html?_r=0

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

onomastics  (on-uh-MAS-tiks)  noun
The study of proper names or of terms used in a specialized field.  From Greek onomastikos (of names), from onomazein (to name), from onoma (name).  Also see onomasticon.  
Earliest documented use:  1904.
implacable  (im-PLAK-uh-buhl, -PLAY-kuh-)  adjective
Impossible to pacify or appease.  From Latin placare (to quiet or appease).  Ultimately from the Indo-European root plak- (to be flat), which is also the source of fluke, flake, flaw, plead, please, supple, supplicatory, and archipelago.  Earliest documented use:  1522.  

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day

Subject:  Overmorrow  Day after tomorrow
This exact concept is found in Norwegian as well. "Overimorgen" or "Overigår" for "the day before yesterday".  It was interesting to learn that there is such a word as "overmorrow" in English -- I thought it didn't exist!  In Swedish we have the equivalent "övermorgon" - a common word meaning the day after tomorrow.  Mongolian has a single word for yesterday, today, and tomorrow as in English.  But they also have a single word for "day after tomorrow" (nogoodor).  My Mongolian friends and I settled for "tomorrow tomorrow".  I'll be heading back to Mongolia soon and am delighted I can now provide a one-word equivalent for nogoodor.   The French word for the day after tomorrow is après-demain, literally, "after-tomorrow".  Le lendemain is the day after some event, while le surlendemain is two days after.  'Overmorrow' is indeed unusual in English, but its equivalent is perfectly common in Afrikaans, one of the official languages in South Africa.  'Tomorrow' in Afrikaans is 'more' (pronounced 'more-a') and 'oormôre' (above or over tomorrow) is used in everyday language for the rather clumsy 'the day after tomorrow', as is 'eergister' -- 'before yesterday'.  I am Czech (living in the USA). Czech has "pozítří" which is derived from the word "zítra" (tomorrow) and means the day after tomorrow.  "Po" is a frequently found prefix which means "after".  In Yiddish we have ibermorgn, used all the time.  In Hindi, the word for day after tomorrow is parso (परसों).  German for day after tomorrow is "übermorgen".  By the way, we sometimes even use "überübermorgen" for the second day after tomorrow, so *overovermorrow*?   Even with its relatively small vocabulary, Hebrew also has a word for the day after tomorrow -- macharotyim. (מחרתיים).  Like its English counterpart, it's derived from the word for tomorrow -- "mah-CHAR" (מחר) -- but would deconstruct literally as "a pair of tomorrows".   From the attic of the English language into a frequently used Dutch word:  we do say "over-morgen" when we mean "in two days" just as we say "eergisteren" when we mean "the day before yesterday".   In Japanese the equivalent in everyday use (not obscure) is asatte.

Bryan, Ohio  Feb. 9, 2013  Ohio Art Co. has created a heartfelt advertisement to honor the late Andre Cassagnes, the 86-year-old French inventor of the famed Etch A Sketch toy who died in Paris on Jan. 16.  The ad shows an upside down Etch A Sketch with a frown on its screen.  Below the toy is an epitaph that states:  Andre Cassagnes, Inventor of the Etch A Sketch, 1926-2013.  The company bought the rights and has produced the toy ever since.  See picture of advertisement at:  http://www.toledoblade.com/Culture/2013/02/09/Ohio-Art-ad-pays-tribute-to-late-French-inventor-with-unique-advertisement.html 

Andre Cassagnes created what would become the Etch A Sketch in his garage in 1950.  The drawing toy was made up of a joystick, glass and aluminum powder.  Initially dubbed the Telecran, the toy was renamed L'Ecran Magique, or 'The Magic Screen,' and made its debut at a toy fair in Nuremberg, Germany in 1959.  The toy's "magic screen" was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998, and it was added by the Toy Industry Association to its "Century of Toys" list in 2003.  http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/03/us/etch-a-sketch-creator-death 

A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose:  Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them?   And when, not long afterward, the dial gave way to push buttons, new questions arose:  round buttons, or square? How big should they be?  Most crucially, how should they be arrayed?  In a circle?  A rectangle?  An arc?  For decades after World War II, these questions were studied by a group of social scientists and engineers in New Jersey led by one man, a Bell Labs industrial psychologist named John E. Karlin.  By all accounts a modest man despite his variegated accomplishments (he had a doctorate in mathematical psychology, was trained in electrical engineering and had been a professional violinist), Mr. Karlin, who died on Jan. 28, at 94, was virtually unknown to the general public.  But his research, along with that of his subordinates, quietly yet emphatically defined the experience of using the telephone in the mid-20th century and afterward, from ushering in all-digit dialing to casting the shape of the keypad on touch-tone phones.  And that keypad, in turn, would inform the design of a spate of other everyday objects.   Margalit Fox  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/john-e-karlin-who-led-the-way-to-all-digit-dialing-dies-at-94.html?ref=obituaries&_r=0

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809–April 15, 1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865.  Lincoln successfully led the United States through its greatest constitutional, military, and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union.  Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated, and became a country lawyer, a Whig Party leader, Illinois state legislator during the 1830s, and a one-term member of the United States House of Representatives during the 1840s.  Lincoln appears on the penny and the $5 bill, and on many postage stamps.  He has been memorialized in many town, city, and county names, including the capital of Nebraska.  The most famous and most visited memorials are the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.; Lincoln's sculpture on Mount Rushmore;  Ford's Theatre and Petersen House (where he died) in Washington and the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, located in Springfield, Illinois.  Read much more and see images at:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln

Text of Pope Benedict XVI's resignation

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2013/02/11/pope-resignation-text/1908791/

First novel by Ayana Mathis  In 1923, a teenage Hattie flees Georgia for Philadelphia, where, though her first two babies die because she can't afford medicine, she keeps nine children alive with old southern remedies and sheer love.  Saddled with a husband who will bring her nothing but disappointment, she prepares her children for a world she knows will not be kind to them.  The story of human persistence in the face of insurmountable adversity resonated with critics.  The Publishers Weekly starred review surmised, “Mathis weaves this story with confidence, proving herself a gifted and powerful writer.”  And Marilynne Robinson, Pulitzer Prize winner and a mentor to Mathis during her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, says of the debut novel, “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is a vibrant and compassionate portrait of a family hardened and scattered by circumstance and yet deeply a family.  Its language is elegant in its purity and rigor.  The characters are full of life, mingled thing that it is, and dignified by the writer’s judicious tenderness towards them.  This first novel is a work of rare maturity.”  Although Mathis has written throughout her life, she says she never really thought writing would be her career.  “I thought that I would always write, and publish a book at some point, but I assumed that I would always have some other means of making a living and that I'd write on the side,” she says.  “I did lots of things, from waiting tables to fact-checking and freelance writing for magazines in New York.  But life has a strange way of leading you where you need to go—at least sometimes it does—and I ended up in a great writing class where I met an incredible teacher and the person who was to become my best friend.  He came to the Writers’ Workshop and a year later I decided to apply as well.”  It was at Iowa where Mathis was able to put writing at the center of her life, in every way.  She had time to write; she had financial support; she had exposure to great contemporary writers, studying with Robinson (“she taught me so much about being a writer and a human being”) and Lan Samantha Chang, Paul Harding, and Allan Gurganus.  “Learning with them made me want to be better, to do better, even when it was hard,” Mathis says.  “Especially when it was hard.”  And now, as the spotlight shines bright, Mathis is back at the workshop, serving as a visiting faculty member for the spring semester. 

http://now.uiowa.edu/2013/01/it-still-doesnt-quite-seem-real

The Michael Feinstein Great American Songbook Initiative hosts the only high school vocal academy and competition in the U.S. dedicated solely to the music from Broadway, Hollywood musicals and the Tin Pan Alley era of the early to mid-twentieth century.  The Great American Songbook Vocal Academy and Competition has proven to be one of the Michael Feinstein Initiative’s most exciting education programs.  “The competition this year was a tremendous success, and we are excited to announce that our plan to expand the event nationally continues with the addition of 11 states in 2013 for a total of 22 states,” said Chris Lewis, Director of the Vocal Academy & Competition.  Judges will select students for regional competitions held in five cities across the country.  The regional competitions, held May-June 2013, include a full day of workshops followed by an evening performance.  Two finalists will be selected in each region.  The ten regional finalists will be invited to the Feinstein Initiative’s headquarters in Carmel, IN, July 21-26, 2013, to participate in a five-day “boot-camp” on interpreting and performing the music of the Great American Songbook.  Five-time Grammy nominee, Michael Feinstein, and other top music industry professionals will conduct workshops and master classes throughout the week.  The final competition performance will be held in the 1,600 seat Palladium Concert Hall at the Center for the Performing Arts.  http://currentincarmel.com/michael-feinstein-launches-search-for-2013-great-american-songbook-youth-ambassado 

Facebook Inc. (FB) is developing a smartphone application that will track the location of users, two people with knowledge of the matter said, bolstering efforts to benefit from growing use of social media on mobile computers.  The app, scheduled for release by mid-March, is designed to help users find nearby friends and would run even when the program isn’t open on a handset, said one of the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans aren’t public.   Facebook is adding features to help it profit from the surging portion of its more than 1 billion users who access the service via handheld devices.  The tracking app could help Facebook sell ads based on users’ whereabouts and daily habits.  It may also raise the hackles of consumers and privacy advocates concerned about the company’s handling of personal information.    Facebook’s data-use policy tells users that the company may use information on location “to tell you and your friends about people or events nearby, or offer deals to you that you might be interested in.”  The company said it may also put together data “to serve you ads that might be more relevant.”  “When we get your GPS location, we put it together with other location information we have about you (like your current city),” the data use policy reads.  “But we only keep it until it is no longer useful to provide you services, like keeping your last GPS coordinates to send you relevant notifications.”  A host of apps, including Apple’s Find My Friends and Math Camp Inc.’s Highlight, constantly track user locations to help them find friends or places of interest. Many of the programs have failed to gain wide audiences because of privacy concerns and the heavy toll such apps have on the battery life of mobile phones. 

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-02-04/facebook-is-said-to-create-mobile-location-tracking-app.html

Social Security Annual Statistical Supplement, 2012  issued February 2013

About 55.4 million persons received Social Security benefits for December 2011, an increase of 1,372,512 (2.5 percent) since December 2010.  Sixty-nine percent were retired workers and their spouses and children, 11 percent were survivors of deceased workers, and 19 percent were disabled workers and their spouses and children.  Seventy-four percent of the 35.6 million retired workers received reduced benefits because of entitlement prior to full retirement age.  Relatively more women (76.4 percent) than men (71.3 percent) received reduced benefits.  The number of beneficiaries aged 65 or older rose from about 34.5 million in 2006 to more than 38.2 million in 2011 (10.9 percent).  The number of beneficiaries aged 85 or older increased at a greater rate during the 5-year period (14.5 percent), from fewer than 4.7 million in 2006 to more than 5.3 million in 2011.  In 2011, about 53,000 centenarians were receiving Social Security.  About 21.5 million women aged 65 or older received benefits for December 2011.  About 9.7 million (45.1 percent) were entitled solely to a retired-worker benefit.  About 6.3 million (29.1 percent) were dually entitled to a retired-worker benefit and a wife's or widow's benefit, and about 5.6 million (25.8 percent) were receiving wife's or widow's benefits only.  More than 3.2 million children under age 18 received benefits, including 1,224,280 children of deceased workers, 1,706,029 children of disabled workers, and 314,970 children of retired workers.  About 9.8 million persons received benefits based on disability—8,575,544 disabled workers, 977,026 disabled adult children, and 251,011 disabled widows and widowers. In addition, 164,030 spouses and 1,768,493 minor and student children of disabled workers received benefits.

https://www.socialsecurity.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/supplement/2012/highlights.html  See entire supplement at:  https://www.socialsecurity.gov/policy/docs/statcomps/supplement/2012/

Feb. 8, 2013  Longbourn, by Jo Baker, was snapped up by US and UK publishers last week.  "Jane Austen was my first experience of grown-up literature," said Baker.  "But as I read and re-read her books, I began to become aware that if I'd been living at the time, I wouldn't have got to go to the ball; I would have been stuck at home with the sewing."  The 39-year-old British author said she drew her inspiration from her family's years in service.  "Aware of that English class thing, Pride and Prejudice begins to read a little differently," she explained.  Longbourn follows a romance between a newly arrived footman and a housemaid in the Bennet household that runs parallel to the love story between Mr Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet.  "I sent it out last week," said Clare Alexander, Baker's agent. "[US publisher] Knopf bought it Monday.  On Wednesday, it was bought by Doubleday in the UK.  "By Thursday the film rights had gone.  By Friday, we had signed up two foreign translations."    A contemporary version of Sense and Sensibility, written by Joanna Trollope, will be published later this year, one of six Austen re-workings by modern-day writers.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-21379834 

Despite being among the brightest objects in the sky, Mercury is a planet very rarely seen by even experienced stargazers.  The next couple of weeks offer the best opportunity in 2013 for observers in the Northern Hemisphere to spot Mercury's tiny speck of light in the evening twilight sky.  The trick for spotting Mercury is first to find an observing location with a low unobstructed western horizon, wait for half an hour after sunset for the sky to darken, and then sweep to the left of the sunset with binoculars.  Once you've initially located the planet with binoculars, you can usually see Mercury with the unaided eye.  Don't wait too late, or Mercury will have set.  In a telescope, Mercury appears as a tiny "half moon."  Probably the earliest you can spot Mercury will be on Friday night (Feb. 8).  This is a special night because Mars will appear very close to Mercury in the sky, giving observers a view of two planets at once.  http://www.space.com/19688-mercury-night-sky-observing-tips.html

Michael Jay Feinstein (born September 7, 1956) is an American singer, pianist, and music revivalist.  He is an interpreter of, and an anthropologist and archivist for, the repertoire known as the Great American Songbook. In 1988 he won a Drama Desk Special Award for celebrating American musical theatre songs. Feinstein is also a multi-platinum-selling, five-time Grammy-nominated recording artist.  He currently serves as Artistic Director for The Center for the Performing Arts in Carmel, Indiana.  Feinstein was born in Columbus, Ohio, the son of Florence Mazie (née Cohen), an amateur tap dancer, and Edward Feinstein, a sales executive for the Sara Lee Corporation and a former amateur singer.  At the age of five, he studied piano for a couple of months until his teacher became angered that he wasn't reading the sheet music she gave him, since he was more comfortable playing by ear.  As his mother saw no problem with her son's method, she took him out of lessons and allowed him to enjoy music his own way.  After graduating from high school, Feinstein worked in local piano bars for two years, moving to Los Angeles when he was 20.  Through the widow of legendary concert pianist-actor Oscar Levant, in 1977 he was introduced to Ira Gershwin, who hired him to catalogue his extensive collection of phonograph records.  The assignment led to six years of researching, cataloguing and preserving the unpublished sheet music and rare recordings in Gershwin's home, thus securing the legacy of not just Ira but also that of his composer brother George Gershwin, who had died four decades earlier.  Feinstein's extended tenure enabled him to also get to know Gershwin's next-door neighbor, singer Rosemary Clooney, with whom Feinstein formed an intensely close friendship lasting until Clooney's death.  Feinstein served as musical consultant for the 1983 Broadway show My One and Only, a musical pastiche of Gershwin tunes.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Feinstein

Quotes by Joseph Joubert, essayist (1754-1824)  

Never cut what you can untie.

To teach is to learn twice.
See more quotes at:  http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/joseph_joubert.html

Since 2010 an Afghan music scholar trained in Australia, aided by a Juilliard-educated violinist and with government backing, has kept a small music school going in Kabul, putting musical instruments into the hands of street kids and striving to make space for girls in a country where education is often denied them.  The very existence of the school, the Afghanistan National Institute of Music, is a significant achievement.  Now it is sending a group of youngsters, ages 9 to 21, to the United States for a 13-day tour.  They arrive Feb. 3, with performances scheduled for the Kennedy Center in Washington (on Feb. 7) and Carnegie Hall (on Feb. 12), not to mention an ice-skating trip to Yonkers and a visit to “The Lion King” on Broadway.  “It’s the responsibility of a musician to defend the right of human beings everywhere to be musical and to express themselves through music,” said William Harvey, the American violinist who is the conductor of the school’s Afghanistan Youth Orchestra.  “We’re celebrating a victory: the return of music.”  The 48 Afghan students on the tour will perform in traditional ensembles and in a Western-style orchestra in tandem with players from the Maryland Classic Youth Orchestra and the Scarsdale High School Orchestra, which helped raise money for the tour.  The Afghans will also play at the State Department, the Italian Embassy and the World Bank.  They will stay together in hotels, traveling under the eyes of security guards.  United States Embassy officials here have warned the students not to abscond.  The organizers say the tour has special significance in a country so marked by violence and misery.  “We are taking the message of peace and stability to the international community to show what a positive change has occurred,” said the school’s founder and driving force, Ahmad Sarmast, who has a Ph.D. in music from Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.  Yet worries linger.  Music in Afghanistan still draws strident censure from the many conservative mullahs, who insist that it is un-Islamic.  And once the American military withdraws next year, the school’s existence could become precarious if such conservative forces come to power.   Alissa J. Rubin  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/arts/music/afghanistan-national-institute-of-music-students-to-tour-us.html?hpw 

Stefan Kudelski, the inventor of the first professional-quality portable tape recorder, which revolutionized Hollywood moviemaking and vastly expanded the reach of documentarians, independent filmmakers and eavesdroppers on both sides in the cold war, died Jan. 26 in Switzerland.  He was 83.  The Polish-born Mr. Kudelski was an engineering student at a Swiss university in 1951 when he patented his first portable recording device, the Nagra I, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, about the size of a shoe box and weighing 11 pounds, that produced sound as good as that of most studio recorders, which were phone-booth-size.  Radio stations in Switzerland were his first customers.  The bigger breakthrough came seven years later, when Mr. Kudelski introduced a high-quality tape recorder that could synchronize sound with the frames on a reel of film. Mr. Kudelski’s 1958 recorder, the Nagra III, weighed about 14 pounds and freed a new generation of filmmakers from the conventions and high cost of studio production.  Along with the newly developed portable 16-millimeter camera, the Nagra recorder became an essential tool for the on-location, often improvisational techniques of New Wave directors like François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, and American documentarians like D. A. Pennebaker, who used the Nagra to record the 1965 Bob Dylan tour featured in his classic film “Don’t Look Back,” released in 1967.  In various interviews, Mr. Pennebaker, Mr. Godard and Mr. Truffaut have all credited Mr. Kudelski with helping to make possible the informality and journalistic realism of their work.  Mr. Kudelski received Academy Awards for his technical contributions to filmmaking in 1965, 1977, 1978 and 1990, and Emmy Awards in 1984 and 1986.  Paul Vitello  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/business/stefan-kuldelski-inventor-of-the-nagra-dies-at-83.html?ref=obituaries&_r=0

The Royal Canadian Mint will no longer distribute the coin to financial institutions around the country, but it will remain legal tender.  The government has advised shop owners to round out prices to the nearest nickel (5p) for cash transactions.  Other countries that no longer use the penny include New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Finland and Sweden.  Despite the change on Feb. 4, 2013, electronic transactions can still be billed to the nearest cent.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-21328892 

Jan. 24, 2013  SACRAMENTO — Alarmed that pranksters have called 911 to report false emergencies at the homes of celebrities including Justin Bieber and Tom Cruise, two Southern California legislators have proposed laws to get tougher with anyone engaged in "swatting."  A bill announced Jan. 23 by state Sen. Ted Lieu (D-Torrance) would allow longer sentences for and greater restitution from those convicted of making false reports to the police. Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca asked for the measure.  A similar proposal has been introduced by Assemblyman Mike Gatto (D-Los Angeles).  "The recent spate of phony reports to law enforcement officials that the home of an actor or singer is being robbed or held hostage is dangerous, and it's only a matter of time before there's a tragic accident," said Lieu.  Gatto and Lieu both propose that those convicted of making false 911 reports be liable for all costs associated with the police response.  Such pranks are "a complete waste of law enforcement resources," said Gatto.  http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan/24/local/la-me-swatting-bill-20130124 

The Postal Service is expected to announce that it will stop delivering letters and other mail on Saturdays, but continue to handle packages, a move the financially struggling agency said would save about $2 billion annually as it looks for ways to cut cost.  The agency has long sought Congressional approval to end mail delivery on Saturdays.  But Congress, which continues to work on legislation to reform the agency, has resisted.  It is unclear how the agency will be able to end the six-day delivery of mail without Congressional approval.  News of the move was first reported by The Associated Press.  The announcement, which is expected at a Wednesday, Feb. 6  morning news conference, comes as the agency continues to lose money, mainly due to a 2006 law which requires it to pay about $5.5 billion a year into a future retiree health benefit fund.  http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/postal-service-plans-to-end-saturday-delivery.html?_r=0