The King's Stilts
The King's Stilts is a children's book written and illustrated by Theodor Geisel under the pen name Dr. Seuss, published in 1939 by Random House. Unlike many Dr. Seuss books, it is narrated in prose rather than verse; the King's Stilts tells the story of King Birtram of Binn, who dedicates himself to safeguarding his kingdom, which lives in a precarious existence. It is surrounded by water, held back from flooding the land by a ring of dike trees, which are in turn subject to attack from flocks of nizzards. To protect the kingdom, a legion of Patrol Cats is organized to keep the nizzards at bay, King Birtram sees to their care personally; when not attending to his royal duties, the King enjoys himself with a rigorous cavorting on his personal red stilts, which distresses his minister Lord Droon. When Droon manipulates the King's page boy Eric to steal and hide the stilts, the King grows depressed and begins to neglect his duties; as a result, the Patrol Cats become less vigilant, soon the nizzards make headway in eating away the dike trees.
Seeing the results of his actions, Eric resolves to return the stilts to the King and succeeds in doing so despite Lord Droon's efforts to stop him. King Birtram summons the energy to mobilize the Patrol Cats to fight off the nizzards and save the kingdom. Lord Droon is imprisoned and forced to eat nizzard every day while Eric is rewarded with his own pair of red stilts, joining the King on his outings; the King's Stilts was published in 1939, as Geisel's second book for Random House and his fourth book overall. Although it was more successful than his previous book, The Seven Lady Godivas, its sales were still a disappointment: 4,648 copies were sold in 1939 and 394 in 1940. Cohen, Charles; the Seuss, the Whole Seuss and Nothing But the Seuss: A Visual Biography of Theodor Seuss Geisel. Random House Books for Young Readers. ISBN 0-375-82248-8. OCLC 53075980
Brooklyn
Brooklyn is the most populous borough of New York City, with an estimated 2,648,771 residents in 2017. Named after the Dutch village of Breukelen, it borders the borough of Queens at the western end of Long Island. Brooklyn has several bridge and tunnel connections to the borough of Manhattan across the East River, the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge connects Staten Island. Since 1896, Brooklyn has been coterminous with Kings County, the most populous county in the U. S. state of New York and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, after New York County. With a land area of 71 square miles and water area of 26 square miles, Kings County is New York state's fourth-smallest county by land area and third-smallest by total area, though it is the second-largest among the city's five boroughs. Today, if each borough were ranked as a city, Brooklyn would rank as the third-most populous in the U. S. after Los Angeles and Chicago. Brooklyn was an independent incorporated city until January 1, 1898, after a long political campaign and public relations battle during the 1890s, according to the new Municipal Charter of "Greater New York", Brooklyn was consolidated with the other cities and counties to form the modern City of New York, surrounding the Upper New York Bay with five constituent boroughs.
The borough continues, however. Many Brooklyn neighborhoods are ethnic enclaves. Brooklyn's official motto, displayed on the Borough seal and flag, is Eendraght Maeckt Maght, which translates from early modern Dutch as "Unity makes strength". In the first decades of the 21st century, Brooklyn has experienced a renaissance as an avant garde destination for hipsters, with concomitant gentrification, dramatic house price increases, a decrease in housing affordability. Since the 2010s, Brooklyn has evolved into a thriving hub of entrepreneurship and high technology startup firms, of postmodern art and design; the name Brooklyn is derived from the original Dutch colonial name Breuckelen, meaning marshland. Established in 1646, the name first appeared in print in 1663; the Dutch colonists named it after the scenic town of Netherlands. Over the past two millennia, the name of the ancient town in Holland has been Bracola, Brocckede, Brocklandia, Broikelen and Breukelen; the New Amsterdam settlement of Breuckelen went through many spelling variations, including Breucklyn, Brucklyn, Brookland, Brockland and Brookline/Brook-line.
There have been so many variations of the name. The final name of Brooklyn, however, is the most accurate to its meaning; the history of European settlement in Brooklyn spans more than 350 years. The settlement began in the 17th century as the small Dutch-founded town of "Breuckelen" on the East River shore of Long Island, grew to be a sizeable city in the 19th century, was consolidated in 1898 with New York City, the remaining rural areas of Kings County, the rural areas of Queens and Staten Island, to form the modern City of New York; the etymology of Breuckelen may be directly from the dialect word Breuckelen meaning buckle or from the Plattdeutsch Brücken meaning bridge. The Dutch were the first Europeans to settle Long Island's western edge, largely inhabited by the Lenape, an Algonquian-speaking American Indian tribe who are referred to in colonial documents by a variation of the place name "Canarsie". Bands were associated with place names, but the colonists thought their names represented different tribes.
The Breuckelen settlement was named after Breukelen in the Netherlands. The Dutch West India Company lost little time in chartering the six original parishes: Gravesend: in 1645, settled under Dutch patent by English followers of Anabaptist Lady Deborah Moody, named for's-Gravenzande, Netherlands, or Gravesend, England Brooklyn Heights: as Breuckelen in 1646, after the town now spelled Breukelen, Netherlands. Breuckelen was located along Fulton Street between Smith Street. Brooklyn Heights, or Clover Hill, is where the village Brooklyn was founded in 1816. Flatlands: as Nieuw Amersfoort in 1647 Flatbush: as Midwout in 1652 Nieuw Utrecht: in 1657, after the city of Utrecht, Netherlands Bushwick: as Boswijck in 1661 The colony's capital of New Amsterdam, across the East River, obtained its charter in 1653 than the village of Brooklyn; the neighborhood of Marine Park was home to North America's first tide mill. It was built by the Dutch, the foundation can be seen today, but the area was not formally settled as a town.
Many incidents and documents relating to this period are in Gabriel Furman's 1824 compilation. What is Brooklyn today left Dutch hands after the final English conquest of New Netherland in 1664, a prelude to the Second Anglo–Dutch War. New Netherland was taken in a naval action, the conquerors renamed their prize in honor of the overall English naval commander, Duke of York, brother of the monarch King Charles II of England and future king himself as King James II of England and James VII of Scotland; the English reorganized the six old Dutch towns on southwestern Long Island as Kings County on November 1, 1683, one of the "original twelve counties" established in New York Pro
The Cat in the Hat
The Cat in the Hat is a children's book written and illustrated by Theodor Geisel under the pen name Dr. Seuss and first published in 1957; the story centers on a tall anthropomorphic cat, who wears a red and white-striped hat and a red bow tie. The Cat shows up at her brother one rainy day when their mother is away. Despite the repeated objections of the children's fish, the Cat shows the children a few of his tricks in an attempt to entertain them. In the process he and his companions, Thing One and Thing Two, wreck the house; the children and the fish become more and more alarmed until the Cat produces a machine that he uses to clean everything up and disappears just before the children's mother comes home. Geisel created the book in response to a debate in the United States about literacy in early childhood and the ineffectiveness of traditional primers such as those featuring Dick and Jane. Geisel was asked to write a more entertaining primer by William Spaulding, whom he had met during World War II and, director of the education division at Houghton Mifflin.
However, because Geisel was under contract with Random House, the two publishers agreed to a deal: Houghton Mifflin published the education edition, sold to schools, Random House published the trade edition, sold in bookstores. Geisel gave varying accounts of how he created The Cat in the Hat, but in the version he told most he was so frustrated with the word list from which he could choose words to write his story that he decided to scan the list and create a story based on the first two words he found that rhymed; the words he found were hat. The book was met with immediate commercial success. Reviewers praised it as an exciting alternative to traditional primers. Three years after its debut, the book had sold over a million copies, in 2001 Publishers Weekly listed the book at number nine on its list of best-selling children's books of all time; the book's success led to the creation of Beginner Books, a publishing house centered on producing similar books for young children learning to read.
In 1983, Geisel said, "It is the book I'm proudest of because it had something to do with the death of the Dick and Jane primers." The book was adapted into a 2003 live-action film. The story begins as a girl named Sally and her brother, who serves as the narrator of the book, sit alone in their house on a cold, rainy day, staring wistfully out the window, they hear a loud bump, followed by the arrival of the Cat in the Hat, a tall anthropomorphic cat in a red and white striped hat and a red bow tie. The Cat proposes to entertain the children with some tricks; the children's pet fish refuses. The Cat responds by balancing the fish on the tip of his umbrella; the game becomes trickier, as the Cat balances himself on a ball and tries to balance lots of household items on his limbs until he falls on his head, dropping everything he was holding. The fish admonishes him again; the Cat brings in a big red box from outside, from which he releases two identical characters, or "Things" as he refers them to, with blue hair and red suits called Thing One and Thing Two.
The Things cause more trouble, such as flying kites in the house, knocking pictures off the wall and picking up the children's mother's new polka-dotted gown. All this comes to an end. In response, Sally's brother catches the Things in a net, the Cat ashamed, stores them back in the big red box, he takes it out the front door as the fish and the children survey the mess he has made. But the Cat soon returns, riding a machine that picks everything up and cleans the house, delighting the fish and the children; the Cat leaves just before their mother arrives, the fish and the children are back where they started at the beginning of the story. As she steps in, the mother asks the children what they did while she was out, but the children are hesitant and do not answer; the story ends with the question, "What would you do if your mother asked you?" Theodor Geisel, writing as Dr. Seuss, created The Cat in the Hat in response to the May 24, 1954, Life magazine article by John Hersey titled "Why Do Students Bog Down on First R?
A Local Committee Sheds Light on a National Problem: Reading". In the article, Hersey was critical of school primers like those featuring Dick and Jane: In the classroom boys and girls are confronted with books that have insipid illustrations depicting the slicked-up lives of other children... All feature abnormally courteous, unnaturally clean boys and girls.... In bookstores anyone can buy brighter, livelier books featuring strange and wonderful animals and children who behave i.e. sometimes misbehave... Given incentive from school boards, publishers could do as well with primers. After detailing many issues contributing to the dilemma connected with student reading levels, Hersey asked toward the end of the article: Why should not have pictures that widen rather than narrow the associative richness the children give to the words they illustrate—drawings like those of the wonderfully imaginative geniuses among children's illustrators, Howard Pyle, "Dr. Seuss", Walt Disney? This article caught the attention of William Spaulding, who had met Geisel during the war and, the director of Houghton Mifflin's education division.
Spaulding had read the best-selling 1955 book Why Johnny Can't Read by Rudolf Flesch. Flesch, like Hersey, criticized primers as boring but criticized them for teaching reading through word recognition rather than phon
Horton Hears a Who!
Horton Hears a Who! is a children's book written and illustrated by Theodor Seuss Geisel under the pen name Dr. Seuss and was published in 1954 by Random House, it is the second Dr. Seuss book to feature Horton the Elephant, the first being Horton Hatches the Egg; the Whos would reappear in How the Grinch Stole Christmas!. Miranda Richardson read the book as part of her second audio collection of Dr. Seuss books; the other three books she narrated were Oh, the Places You'll Go!, Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?, Happy Birthday to You!. The book tells the story of Horton the Elephant, while splashing in a pool, hears a small speck of dust talking to him. Horton surmises that a small person lives on the speck and places it on a clover, vowing to protect it, he discovers that the speck is a tiny planet, home to a community called Whoville, where microscopic creatures called Whos live. The Mayor of Whoville asks Horton to protect them from harm, which Horton agrees to, proclaiming throughout the book that "a person’s a person, no matter how small."
Throughout the book, Horton is trying to convince the Jungle of Nool that "A person is a person no matter how small" and that everyone should be treated equally. In his mission to protect the speck, Horton is ridiculed and harassed by the other animals in the jungle for believing in something they can't see or hear, he is first criticized by her joey. The splash they make as they jump into the pool reaches the speck, so Horton decides to find somewhere safer for it, but the news of his odd new behavior spreads and he is soon harassed by a group of monkeys. They give it to Vlad Vladikoff, a black-bottomed eagle. Vlad flies the clover a long distance, with Horton in pursuit, until Vlad drops it into a field of clovers. After a long search, Horton finds the clover with the speck on it. However, the Mayor informs him that Whoville, the town on the speck, is in bad shape from the fall, Horton discovers that the sour kangaroo and the monkeys have caught up to him, they threaten to incinerate the speck in a pot of "Beezle-Nut" oil.
To save Whoville, Horton implores the little people to make as much noise as they can, to prove their existence. So everyone in Whoville shouts and plays instruments, but still no one but Horton can hear them. So the Mayor searches Whoville until he finds a small shirker named JoJo, playing with a yo-yo instead of making noise; the Mayor carries him to the top of Eiffelberg Tower, where Jojo lets out a loud "Yopp!", which makes the kangaroo and the monkeys hear the Whos. Now convinced of the Whos' existence, the other jungle animals vow to help Horton protect the tiny community. Geisel began work on Horton Hears a Who! in the fall of 1953. The book's main theme, "a person's a person no matter how small", was Geisel's reaction to his visit to Japan, where the importance of the individual was an exciting new concept. Geisel, who had harbored strong anti-Japan sentiments before and during World War II, changed his views after the war and used this book as an allegory for the American post-war occupation of the country.
He dedicated the book to a Japanese friend. Horton Hears a Who! is written in anapestic tetrameter, like many other Dr. Seuss books. Unlike some of his books, Horton contains a strong moral message, which Thomas Fensch identifies as "universal, multi-ethnic. In a word: Equality." Fensch contends that the Mayor of Whoville's lines, "When the black-bottomed birdie let go and we dropped,/ We landed so hard that our clocks have all stopped" is a reference to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The story, along with Horton Hatches the Egg provides the basic plot for the 2000 Broadway musical Seussical. Horton Hears a Who! was adapted into a half-hour animated TV special by MGM Animation/Visual Arts in 1970, directed by Chuck Jones, produced by Theodor Geisel, with narration by Hans Conried, who voiced Horton. In this direction, the Sour Kangaroo's name is Jane. Horton's contact in Whoville was not the Mayor. Jane was voiced by June Foray. In Russia, Alexei Karayev directed I Can Hear You in 1992, a 19-minute paint-on-glass-animated film, based on the Russian translation of Seuss's poetry but features a different visual style.
Horton Hears a Who! was adapted into a computer-animated feature-length film of the same name in 2008, using computer animation from Blue Sky Studios, the animation arm of 20th Century Fox. The cast included Steve Carell, it was released on March 14, 2008. In 1992, The book was made into a direct-to-video, narrated by Dustin Hoffman, and included the other story, Thidwick the Big-Hearted Moose. The central character of the book inspired a design rule for cryptographic systems, known as the Horton Principle. Fensch, Thomas; the Man Who Was Dr. Seuss. Woodlands: New Century Books. ISBN 0-930751-11-6. Morgan, Neil. Dr. Seuss Mr. Geisel: a biography. New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 978-0-306-80736-7. Scott, A. O.. "Sense and Nonsense". The New York Times. Retrieved 15 December 2013. Smith, Amanda. "Dr. Seuss: Icon and Iconoclast..." Book Talk. Radio National. Retrieved 15 December 2013; the New Dictionary of Cultural Literacy, 3rd ed. edited by E. D. Hirsch, Jr. et al. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002 "Ontario: Use of Seuss protested", National Post, Jan.
29, 2001
A Fish out of Water (book)
A Fish out of Water is a 1961 American children's book written by Helen Palmer Geisel and illustrated by P. D. Eastman; the book is based on a short story by Palmer's husband Theodor Geisel, "Gustav, the Goldfish", published with his own illustrations in Redbook magazine in June 1950. The story is about a boy; the store owner, Mr. Carp, gives the boy instructions on how to care for the fish, including strict feeding instructions: "Never feed him a lot. So much, no more! Never more than a spot! Or something may happen. You never know what." When the boy disobeys these instructions out of compassion for his new pet, Otto begins to grow uncontrollably outgrowing his fishbowl. This leads the boy to move him into a series of successively larger containers, ending with the bathtub; when Otto outgrows the tub, the house begins to flood. The boy requests help from a police officer and the fire department, who help him take Otto down to the local pool. There, they drop the fish in, causing it to expand to the size of the pool and scare off all of the swimmers.
Since Otto keeps on growing, the boy calls Mr. Carp, he is not surprised. When Mr. Carp arrives, he pulls Otto below, he emerges with the fish, back to its normal size. He refuses to say how he did it but tells the boy to never overfeed Otto again, the boy takes his advice to heart. "Gustav, the Goldfish", the short story that served as the basis for this book, was written and illustrated by Dr. Seuss and published in the June 1950 edition of Redbook magazine as the first installment in his series of children's stories for Redbook; this story has much in common with A Fish Out including its plot and characters. However, the goldfish's name is Gustav instead of Otto, the pet shop owner's name is Mr. VanBuss instead of Mr. Carp; the original story was collected, along with six other Dr. Seuss stories published in magazines, in the 2011 collection The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories. In 1959, in a letter to his wife, he gave her formal permission to write a book for the Beginner Books series based on his original story, writing, "You have the right to use any of the situations or any of the words from the original story that your little heart desires.
You must, comply with all necessary steps in protecting my original copyright." Palmer's work involved, in part and simplifying the original text to comply with Beginner Books' policies. She finished A Fish Out of Water in 1961, at the Hotel Madison in New York City where she and her husband were staying for six weeks while their home in La Jolla, was being remodeled, she had been working at it as she jokingly described this last revision as "the 9,373th version" of the book
International Standard Serial Number
An International Standard Serial Number is an eight-digit serial number used to uniquely identify a serial publication, such as a magazine. The ISSN is helpful in distinguishing between serials with the same title. ISSN are used in ordering, interlibrary loans, other practices in connection with serial literature; the ISSN system was first drafted as an International Organization for Standardization international standard in 1971 and published as ISO 3297 in 1975. ISO subcommittee TC 46/SC 9 is responsible for maintaining the standard; when a serial with the same content is published in more than one media type, a different ISSN is assigned to each media type. For example, many serials are published both in electronic media; the ISSN system refers to these types as electronic ISSN, respectively. Conversely, as defined in ISO 3297:2007, every serial in the ISSN system is assigned a linking ISSN the same as the ISSN assigned to the serial in its first published medium, which links together all ISSNs assigned to the serial in every medium.
The format of the ISSN is an eight digit code, divided by a hyphen into two four-digit numbers. As an integer number, it can be represented by the first seven digits; the last code digit, which may be 0-9 or an X, is a check digit. Formally, the general form of the ISSN code can be expressed as follows: NNNN-NNNC where N is in the set, a digit character, C is in; the ISSN of the journal Hearing Research, for example, is 0378-5955, where the final 5 is the check digit, C=5. To calculate the check digit, the following algorithm may be used: Calculate the sum of the first seven digits of the ISSN multiplied by its position in the number, counting from the right—that is, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, respectively: 0 ⋅ 8 + 3 ⋅ 7 + 7 ⋅ 6 + 8 ⋅ 5 + 5 ⋅ 4 + 9 ⋅ 3 + 5 ⋅ 2 = 0 + 21 + 42 + 40 + 20 + 27 + 10 = 160 The modulus 11 of this sum is calculated. For calculations, an upper case X in the check digit position indicates a check digit of 10. To confirm the check digit, calculate the sum of all eight digits of the ISSN multiplied by its position in the number, counting from the right.
The modulus 11 of the sum must be 0. There is an online ISSN checker. ISSN codes are assigned by a network of ISSN National Centres located at national libraries and coordinated by the ISSN International Centre based in Paris; the International Centre is an intergovernmental organization created in 1974 through an agreement between UNESCO and the French government. The International Centre maintains a database of all ISSNs assigned worldwide, the ISDS Register otherwise known as the ISSN Register. At the end of 2016, the ISSN Register contained records for 1,943,572 items. ISSN and ISBN codes are similar in concept. An ISBN might be assigned for particular issues of a serial, in addition to the ISSN code for the serial as a whole. An ISSN, unlike the ISBN code, is an anonymous identifier associated with a serial title, containing no information as to the publisher or its location. For this reason a new ISSN is assigned to a serial each time it undergoes a major title change. Since the ISSN applies to an entire serial a new identifier, the Serial Item and Contribution Identifier, was built on top of it to allow references to specific volumes, articles, or other identifiable components.
Separate ISSNs are needed for serials in different media. Thus, the print and electronic media versions of a serial need separate ISSNs. A CD-ROM version and a web version of a serial require different ISSNs since two different media are involved. However, the same ISSN can be used for different file formats of the same online serial; this "media-oriented identification" of serials made sense in the 1970s. In the 1990s and onward, with personal computers, better screens, the Web, it makes sense to consider only content, independent of media; this "content-oriented identification" of serials was a repressed demand during a decade, but no ISSN update or initiative occurred. A natural extension for ISSN, the unique-identification of the articles in the serials, was the main demand application. An alternative serials' contents model arrived with the indecs Content Model and its application, the digital object identifier, as ISSN-independent initiative, consolidated in the 2000s. Only in 2007, ISSN-L was defined in the
If I Ran the Zoo
If I Ran the Zoo is a children's book written by Dr. Seuss in 1950; the book is written in anapestic tetrameter, Seuss's usual verse type, illustrated in Seuss's pen-and-ink style. It tells the story of a child named Gerald McGrew who, when visiting a zoo, finds that the exotic animals are "not good enough", he says that if he ran the zoo, he would let all of the current animals free and find new, more bizarre and exotic ones. Throughout the book he lists these creatures, starting with a lion with ten feet and escalating to more imaginative creatures, such as the Fizza-ma-Wizza-ma-Dill, "the world's biggest bird from the island of Gwark, who eats only pine trees, spits out the bark." The illustrations grow wilder as McGrew imagines going to remote and exotic habitats and capturing each fanciful creature, bringing them all back to a zoo now filled with his wild new animals. He imagines the praise he receives from others, who are amazed at his "new Zoo, McGrew Zoo"; some of the animals featured in If I Ran the Zoo have been featured in a segment of The Hoober-Bloob Highway, a 1975 CBS TV special.
In this segment, Hoober-Bloob babies don't have to be human if they don't choose to be, so Mr. Hoober-Bloob shows them a variety of different animals; such animals include: Obsks, a flock of Wild Bippo-No-Bungus, a Tizzle-Topped Tufted Mazurka, a Big-Bug-Who-Is-Very-Surprising, Chuggs, a Deer with Horns-That-Are-Just-A-Bit-Queer, a New Sort-Of-A-Hen, an Elephant-Cat, an Iota. If I Ran the Zoo is credited with the first printed modern English appearance of the word "nerd," although the word is not used in its modern context, it is the name of an otherwise un-characterized imaginary creature, appearing in the sentence "And just to show them, I'll sail to Ka-Troo/And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep, a Proo,/A Nerkle, a Nerd, a Seersucker too!" Dr. Seuss's Zoo book is the main theme for one of the children's play areas at Universal Studios' Islands of Adventure; the small play area is located inside the area of the park known as Seuss Landing. An animation short directed and produced by Ray Messecar and narrated by Brett Ambler was released in 1992.
If I Ran the Circus
