Panna Cotta:  cooked cream  Find recipes at http://www.foodnetwork.com/topics/panna-cotta-recipes.html  (first recipe is Espresso Panna Cotta courtesy of Giada De Laurentiis--takes five minutes)

Terra Cotta:  cooked/baked earth  How to Bake Bread or Cake in Terra Cotta Pots by Jennifer Loucks  http://www.livestrong.com/article/443734-how-to-bake-bread-or-cake-in-terra-cotta-pots/

Hibernation and brumation  Technically, the term hibernation from the Latin hibernus pertains to winter and is reserved for warm-blooded vertebrates like birds and mammals. A vertebrate is an animal that has a backbone.  Tortoises are both ectotherms and vertebrates. They will go to sleep in the winter and the pulse rate and respirations may dip as low as four per minute. The minimum body temperature will be between about 52 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit.  That is an adaptation that saves energy when food is sparse and ambient temperatures are too low to warm reptiles, frogs, and toads to support  activity.  So, who came up with brumation?  What is it?  How is it different from hibernation? The Latin bruma refers to the winter solstice – hence, winter.  Reptile authority Dr. William W. Mayhew proposed the word “brumation” to indicate winter dormancy in ectothermic vertebrates that demonstrate physiological changes that are independent of body temperature.  An ectothermic animal is one that receives the heat it needs to raise its body temperature from outside the body, such as heat of the sun directly on the body.  A certain level of warmth is needed to support movement, digestion, and other functions.  Betty Burge  http://www.tortoisegroup.org/tips/Brumation.pdf

18 Bookstores Every Book Lover Must Visit At Least Once  by Ashley Lutz  See outstanding pictures including John K. King Used And Rare Books that houses more than a million books in an abandoned glove factory in Detroit's industrial wasteland; bookstore is a converted Dominican church in Maastricht, Holland; Corso Como, Milan, Italy--named one of the 10 most beautiful in the world--it doubles as a flea market http://becauseimaddicted.net/2012/02/10-of-the-most-beautiful-bookstores-in-the-world.html; and Prairie Lights in Iowa City.  This bookstore is next door to the University of Iowa's famous Writer's Workshop, a program with famous alums including Kurt Vonnegut.   http://www.businessinsider.com/best-bookstores-in-the-world-2014-2014-2  Thanks, Paul

Gertie the Dinosaur is a 1914 animated short film by American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay.  It is the earliest animated film to feature a dinosaur.  McCay first used the film before live audiences as an interactive part of hisvaudeville act; the frisky, childlike Gertie did tricks at the command of her master.  McCay's employer William Randolph Hearst later curtailed McCay's vaudeville activities, so McCay added a live-action introductory sequence to the film for its theatrical release.  McCay abandoned a sequel, Gertie on Tour (c. 1921), after producing about a minute of footage.  Although Gertie is popularly thought to be the earliest animated film, McCay had earlier made Little Nemo (1911) and How a Mosquito Operates (1912).  The American J. Stuart Blackton and the French Émile Cohl had experimented with animation even earlier; Gertie being a character with an appealing personality distinguished McCay's film from these earlier "trick films".  Gertie was the first film to use animation techniques such as keyframes, registration marks, tracing paper, the Mutoscope action viewer, and animation loops.  It influenced the next generation of animators such as the Fleischer brothers, Otto Messmer, Paul Terry, and Walt Disney.  John Randolph Bray unsuccessfully tried to patent many of McCay's animation techniques and is said to have been behind a plagiarized version of Gertie that appeared a year or two after the original.  Gertie is the best preserved of McCay's films—some of which have been lost or survive only in fragments—and has been preserved in the US National Film Registry.  See many images at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertie_the_Dinosaur

A numeral is a symbol or name that stands for a number.  The number is an idea, the numeral is how we write it.  http://www.mathsisfun.com/numbers/numbers-numerals-digits.html

Example:  The numeral 2014 represents the numbered year 2014.

Ten Rules for Writing Numbers and Numerals by Michael  What is the difference between a number and a numeral?  A number is an abstract concept while a numeral is a symbol used to express that number.  “Three,” “3″ and “III” are all symbols used to express the same number (or the concept of “threeness”).  One could say that the difference between a number and its numerals is like the difference between a person and her name.  Find out about consistency, when to spell out numbers, use commas, two numbers next to each other, formal versus informal writing, starting sentences, and rounded or estimated numbers at  http://www.dailywritingtips.com/10-rules-for-writing-numbers-and-numerals/

Sixty-five years ago, residents lined up at the Toledo Museum of Art to see more than 90 European paintings Nazis had buried deep in a German salt mine.  This dramatic period in art history — when military forces and art experts saved masterpieces stashed, stolen, and threatened to be destroyed by Adolf Hitler — is depicted in the recently released movie The Monuments Men.  In 1949, more than 100,000 people streamed into the Toledo museum during the 10-day exhibit of works by masters such as Rembrandt, Rubens, and Titian.  The paintings, valued then at $50 million, had been recovered from the mine by the 3rd U.S. Army in 1945.  Unlike other art-cache discoveries, the paintings in the Merkers mine were not prizes looted by Nazis.  They hailed from Berlin museums and had been tucked underground as the city faced attack.  Once uncovered, many works came to the United States until they could be returned to Germany.  During their U.S. stay, some of the paintings toured major cities including New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh.  Toledo was the final stop.  The local museum’s then-assistant director Otto Wittmann, who died in 2001, joined the Army Air Force in 1941 and toward the end of the war investigated art stolen by Nazis to help return pieces to the appropriate country.  He’s listed as one of the Monuments Men, the term used for about 345 men and women of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives section of the Allied armies, by the Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art.  The foundation was started by author Robert Edsel, who wrote a book that was adapted into the movie.  Vanessa McCray  http://www.toledoblade.com/Art/2014/02/17/Toledoans-had-look-at-art-saved-by-real-life-Monuments-Men.html

Mavis Gallant (1922-2014) published her first story, “Madeline’s Birthday,” in The New Yorker, in 1951.  Over the next forty years, she contributed a hundred and sixteen short stories to the magazine, nearly as many as John Cheever.  In the 1976 story “Voices Lost in Snow,” Gallant uses the metaphor of snow to marvellous effect while describing a daughter’s strained relationship with her detached father.  The story’s winter imagery reflects the narrator’s feelings of confusion as she gazes up at unfamiliar adult scenarios and emotions.  Comparing the interactions between adult and child to a snowfall, Gallant highlights the precarious nature of childhood, when parents “seem to speak out of the lights, the stones, the snow; out of the crucial second when inner and outer forces join, and the environment becomes part of the enemy too.”

Mavis Gallant’s diaries were excerpted http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/07/09/120709fa_fact_gallantin in the magazine last year and will be published soon by Knopf.  If you’d like to explore more of Gallant’s work in the meantime, please check out her 1956 short story “In Italy,” http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1956/02/25/1956_02_25_032_TNY_CARDS_000254275 as well as this recent fiction podcast, http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/04/fiction-podcast-margaret-atwood-reads-mavis-gallant.html in which Margaret Atwood reads “Voices Lost in Snow.”

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/10/letter-from-the-archive-mavis-gallant.html  See Mavis Gallant obituary at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/books/mavis-gallant-short-story-writer-dies-at-91.html?hpw&rref=obituaries&_r=0

Issue 1113  February 21, 2014  On this date in 1947, Edwin Land demonstrated the first "instant camera", the Polaroid Land Camera, to a meeting of the Optical Society of America.