Christmas Salad and
Christmas Pasta Add red
and green ingredients to your salad or pasta--for instance: red peppers, radishes, tomatoes, green
peppers, broccoli florets, thawed frozen peas.
Christmas tales of Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol (1843)
The Chimes (1844)
Christmas Books (1843-49)
Pictures from Italy (1844-45)
The Cricket on the Hearth (1845)
The Battle of Life (1846)
The Haunted Man and the Ghost's Bargain (1848)
Short Christmas Stories
(A Christmas Tree, What Christmas
is as we Grow Older, The Poor Relation's Story, The Child's Story, The
Schoolboy's Story, Nobody's Story )
The
Cricket on the Hearth. A Fairy Tale of Home is a novella by Charles Dickens, published by Bradbury and Evans, and released 20 December 1845 with illustrations by Daniel Maclise, John
Leech, Richard
Doyle, Clarkson
Stanfield and Edwin
Henry Landseer. Like
all of Dickens's Christmas books, it was published in book form, not as a serial. It is subdivided into chapters
called "Chirps", similar to the "Quarters" of The
Chimes or
the "Staves" of A Christmas Carol. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cricket_on_the_Hearth
To take a statement with 'a grain of salt' or 'a pinch of salt' means to accept it but to maintain a degree of skepticism about its truth. The idea comes from the fact that food is more easily swallowed if taken with a small amount of salt. Pliny the Elder translated an ancient antidote for poison with the words 'be taken fasting, plus a grain of salt'. Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, 77 A.D. translates: After the defeat of that mighty monarch, Mithridates, Gnaeus Pompeius found in his private cabinet a recipe for an antidote in his own handwriting; it was to the following effect: Take two dried walnuts, two figs, and twenty leaves of rue; pound them all together, with the addition of a grain of salt; if a person takes this mixture fasting, he will be proof against all poisons for that day. The suggestion is that injurious effects can be moderated by the taking of a grain of salt. The figurative meaning that truth may require moderation by the notional application of 'a grain of salt', didn't enter the language until much later, no doubt influenced by classical scholars' study of Ancient Greek texts like the works of Pliny. The phrase has been in use in English since the 17th century. The 'pinch of salt' variant is more recent. The earliest printed citation that I can find for it is F. R. Cowell's Cicero & the Roman Republic, 1948:
"A more critical spirit slowly developed, so that Cicero and his friends took more than the proverbial pinch of salt before swallowing everything written by these earlier authors." http://www.english-for-students.com/Take-With.html
As if the work of Japanese fiction master Haruki
Murakami weren't strangely beautiful
by itself, his American publisher has just put out a stand-alone edition of his
2008 novella The Strange Library, in a new trade paperback
designed by the legendary Chip Kidd.
"The library was even more hushed than usual," we read in the
opening sentence (the entire book is set in a typeface called, appropriately,
Typewriter), calling attention to the fact that we're in for a special event. Murakami sets his story — newly translated
from Japanese by Ted Goossen — in a realm of words, an unnamed city
library. An inquiring schoolboy stops by
on the way home from class, returns some library books (How to Build a
Submarine and Memoirs of a Shepherd) and asks for
reading on a subject he says has just popped into his head: tax collection in the Ottoman Empire. An unfamiliar female librarian sends him down
to room 107, "a creepy room" where yet another strange librarian (a
bald man this time) hands him the requested volumes — then conducts him to a
secret space, behind a locked door and down a hall to a labyrinth of corridors,
where a small man dressed in a sheepskin puts him in a cell under lock and
key. A very strange library indeed! In that cell the boy must commit to memory
the three books he asked for, after which — the bald librarian says — he will
be allowed to leave.
Alan Cheuse http://www.npr.org/2014/12/02/363836249/watch-your-head-when-checking-out-murakamis-strange-library
The
prefix SUR
means OVER, ABOVE & MORE. Find a list of
words using sur, including survey, surcharge, surface, surprise, surround,
surtax, surveillance and survive at
The prefix SUPER means OVER, ABOVE, BEYOND &
GREATER IN QUALITY.
Find a list of words using super, including superintendent, superiority,
superlative, supernatural, supernova, supervise and supersede at
50 Words with the Most Whimsical Prefix b BE transforms nouns and adjectives into
verbs, as in besiege and beware (“be aware”).
It also changes intransitive verbs
(those that do not take an object) into transitive ones, as with becalm. Find a list of words using be including
bedazzle, bedaub, bedraggle, bemock, besprinkle and bewray at http://www.dailywritingtips.com/50-words-with-the-most-whimsical-prefix/
Dec. 10, 2014 Piano’s
‘Teaching Machine’ by Julie V. Iovine
The new Harvard Art Museums building, more than 15 years in the making,
brings together under one roof three very disparate collections—the
encyclopedic study collection of the fabled Fogg, founded in 1895; a stunning array
of Asian art masterworks from the Arthur M. Sackler Museum; a
medieval-to-modern array of central and northern European works from the
Busch-Reisinger Museum—in a conceptually generous and thoughtfully detailed
building by Renzo Piano. The Italian architect
has smoothly enveloped all three—plugging the new structure into the original
Fogg—in a way that allows each its own identity while choreographing them all
to serve a larger purpose and coherent aesthetic. Mr. Piano has designed or added to more contemporary
American museums than any other living designer, among them the New Wing at the
Chicago Art Institute; two expansions for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art;
the Kimbell Art Museum addition in Fort Worth, Texas; and the new Whitney
Museum nearing completion in New York, to name just a few recent ones. The new building is being called a “teaching
machine,” and for good reason. The focus
is on encouraging students, specifically—but really all visitors—to engage more
directly with art. Of its six floors,
four are actively involved in teaching activities, many also available to the
public. See picture at http://www.wsj.com/articles/pianos-teaching-machine-on-renzo-pianos-renovation-of-the-harvard-art-museums-1418256628
Dec. 11, 2014 Fitz
and Hercules like wrestling. Lilly
likes listening to a good book. Jeannie
likes watching squirrels. And belly
rubs? They're all up for those. Several University of Illinois libraries are
opening their doors to some very special guests in the coming days. With final exams beginning today and the end-of-semester
crunch now fully hitting students, staff have set aside some space in the
libraries for therapy dogs to visit with students. "We know finals are a stressful time for
students. We always look for ways to
help them out," said David Ward, reference services librarian with the
Undergraduate Library. "It's been a
big hit with students." About 100
people an hour are expected to visit with the dogs during their two-hour time
slots on campus. This is the third fall
the library has brought in therapy dogs.
See picture of Linda (a good friend of mine) and her dog Lilly at http://www.news-gazette.com/news/local/2014-12-11/dogging-it-during-finals.html
Dec. 11, 2014 Last Friday Yale became
the first Ivy team to knock off UConn in 28 years (Yale also being the last Ivy
team to do it, in 1986) when Jack Montague cashed a trey in the closing
seconds, right there in Gampel Pavilion.
In light of this, a Yale alumnus -- and current visiting assistant
professor of mathematics at UConn -- twisted the proud win of his alma mater
onto the bitter loss on his students in the form of an ornate word problem on a
final exam. "A very natural question
to ask after the game is: how often does
such an upset happen?" professor Joe Chen told CBSSports.com in an email. "So I set out and found all previous
UConn-Ivy League matches from the 1980s using Sports Reference. The fact that there were a sufficient number
of sample size (31), plus the fact that the games are virtually independent
(teams change, players change), means that the central limit theorem can be
applied to a very good approximation!"
So Chen made his students deduce a word problem related to Yale's win
probability against UConn in his Math 3160: Probability course. "My philosophy about teaching probability
is to try to make the topics/problems as applicable to real life as
possible," "When I came to
UConn, one of the things I want to do is to build in references to the
men's/women's basketball program as much and as reasonably as possible,"
he said. "And probability is the
best setting to achieve this." Matt
Norlander Read more and see actual exam problem
at http://www.cbssports.com/collegebasketball/eye-on-college-basketball/24880761/look-yale-alumuconn-math-prof-makes-yale-upset-into-exam-question
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1230 December 15, 2014 On this date in 1791, the United States
Bill of Rights became law
when ratified by the Virginia General Assembly. On this date in 1888, Maxwell
Anderson, American journalist and playwright, was born.
No comments:
Post a Comment