Fall 2010 Consumer Information Catalog Now Available
The new Fall 2010 edition of the Federal Citizen Information Center’s Consumer Information Catalog has arrived. Copies are available free, on a first-come-first-serve basis, on the octagonal display of new arrivals at the library entrance.
The Consumer Information Catalog lists dozens of free and low-cost brochures, pamphlets, books and other documents from a number of government agencies and departments on an extraordinary range of subjects – cars, computers, employment, family, federal programs, food, health, housing, and more — all available from the Federal Citizen Information Center.
(If you prefer, you may also order your own copy direct from the Federal Citizen Information Center website.)
Election 2010
Election 2010 is now in motion.
Tomorrow, the Sedgwick County Election Office will begin mailing advance voting ballots to those who have requested them, and on Wednesday October 20th advance voting in person will begin at the election office downtown. (Advance voting at the Election Office will continue until noon on Monday November 1st.)
If you haven’t yet registered to vote in the November 2nd General Election, you have just a few more days to do so. To be eligible to vote, you must be registered not later than Monday October 18th. (If you need any kind of assistance registering, stop by the library as soon as possible.)
Beginning on Tuesday October 26th and ending on Saturday October 30th, you will be able to vote at many of the satellite Advance Voting locations, such as the Haysville Activity Center.
And, of course, the polls will be open on General Election Day, Tuesday November 2nd from 6 am until 7 pm. (If you arrange for an advance ballot, it must be in the Election Office not later than 7 pm on election day.)
For much additional information, visit the website of the Sedgwick County Election Office.
Haysville Community Cookbook Now Available
The avidly anticipated Haysville Community Cookbook, featuring hundreds of recipes contributed by more than a hundred local citizens, is now available from the Haysville Chamber of Commerce.
Dedicated to both the first homesteaders to settle along Cowskin Creek and also those who make Haysville such a great community today, the Haysville Community Cookbook is an excellent home-grown resource that will please your palate for years to come.
I’m going to celebrate tonight by baking one of Ruby Bell’s rhubarb pies (page 104) to follow-up a dinner of Spinach and Artichoke Lasagna (page 74). Delicious.
For more information, or to secure your very own copy of the Haysville Community Cookbook, visit the Haysville Chamber of Commerce website.
Lost Libraries
“Herman Melville’s books? One bookstore bought an assortment for $120, then scrapped the theological titles for paper. Stephen Crane’s? His widow died a brothel madam, and her estate (and his books) were auctioned off on the steps of a Florida courthouse. Ernest Hemingway’s? To this day, all 9,000 titles remain trapped in his Cuban villa.”
With a glance at experimental novelist David Markson, Craig Fehrman looks at Lost Libraries: The Strange Afterlife of Authors’ Book Collections:
“An author’s library, like anyone else’s, reveals something about its owner. Mark Twain loved to present himself as self-taught and under-read, but his carefully annotated books tell a different story. Books can offer hints about an author’s social and personal life. After David Foster Wallace’s death in 2008, the Ransom Center bought his papers and 200 of his books, including two David Markson novels that Wallace not only annotated, but also had Markson sign when they met in New York in 1990. Most of all, though, authors’ libraries serve as a kind of intellectual biography. Melville’s most heavily annotated book was an edition of John Milton’s poems, and it proves he reread Paradise Lost while struggling with Moby-Dick.
“And yet these libraries rarely survive intact. The reasons for this can range from money problems to squabbling heirs to poorly executed auctions. Twain’s library makes for an especially cringe-worthy case study because, unlike a lot of now-classic authors, he saw no ebb in his reputation — and, thus, no excuse in the handling of his books. In 1908, Twain donated 500 books to the library he helped establish in Redding, Conn. After Twain’s death in 1910, his daughter, Clara, gave the library another 1,700 books. The Redding library began circulating Twain’s books, many of which contained his notes, and souvenir hunters began cutting out every page that had Twain’s handwriting. This was bad enough, but in the 1950s the library decided to thin its inventory, unloading the unwanted books on a book dealer who soon realized he now possessed more than 60 titles annotated by Mark Twain. Today, academic libraries across the country own Twain books in which ‘REDDING LIBRARY’ has been stamped in purple ink.”
End of the Slave Trade in Washington DC
Slave Code of the District of Columbia 1862 (Library of Congress)
One hundred seventy years ago today, as part of the Compromise of 1850 that hoped to stave off Civil War, the US Congress abolished the slave trade – but not slavery – in the nation’s capital.
From its founding in 1800, slaves had lived and worked in Washington DC. And, despite abolition of the traffic in human beings, slavery continued to exist in the District of Columbia until April 16, 1862, when President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation ending the District’s slave code and freeing 3,000 African Americans.
Constitution Day
Two hundred twenty three years ago today, as the final signers of the newly penned Constitution filed past to sign the document, Benjamin Franklin looked toward the chair in which the president of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington, had sat throughout the proceedings. Franklin noted to those about him that he had often wondered, during the long deliberations and negotiations, at an image of the sun which was painted there.
As James Madison reported in his Notes on the Convention, Franklin then observed, “I have, said he, often and often in the course of the Session, and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue, looked at that behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting: But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting Sun.”
How very right he was.
A New School Year Begins
As every Haysville parent surely knows, tomorrow and Wednesday mark the beginning of a new school year – tomorrow for Kindergarten through 6th and for 9th grades, and Wednesday for 7th, 8th, and 10th through 12th grades.
To help you start the new year off right, the Haysville Community Library has a variety of useful guides and brochures available in the foyer – for free. Among them:
Fresh New School Year! is a back-to-school guide for the parents of preteens and teens from KidsHealth, consisting of useful advice and practical tips in a quick summary format.
Net Cetera: Chatting With Kids About Being Online is a fifty-five page brochure from the Federal Trade Commission with a host of valuable observations and resources to help parents talk with their kids in an informed and productive way about both the values and the dangers of the internet.
And for those who may have misplaced their copy of the Haysville USD 261 Back-To-School Issue, we still a have a number of copies for distribution.
Ice Cream Cone at 106
Thomas Jefferson's Recipe for Vanilla Ice Cream (Library of Congress)
In one of a number of competing accounts, today is the anniversary of the day, 106 years ago, that the ice cream cone debuted at the St. Louis World’s Fair. (Importantly, nearly all the competing accounts also place the invention of the ice cream cone at that same Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in July of 1904). The story is that Charles E. Menches rolled a waffle pastry into a cone shape, filled it with two scoops of ice cream, and the ice cream cone was born.
Delightful.
Trinity
Nagasaki Bomb -- Mushroom Cloud -- August 9 1945
Sixty-five years ago today, at precisely 5:30 AM local time, the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated in the deserts of New Mexico.
Within one month, bombs had been dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima (August 6th) and Nagasaki (August 9th).
'Fat Man' -- The Atomic Bomb Dropped On Nagasaki)
