Friday, February 13, 2015

“A library is many things,” E.B. White once wrote in a letter to the children of a little town to inspire them to fall in love with their new library.  “But particularly it is a place where books live, and where you can get in touch with other people, and other thoughts, through books… Books hold most of the secrets of the world, most of the thoughts that men and women have had.”  Maria Popova:  As the daughter of a formally trained librarian and an enormous lover of, collaborator with, and supporter of public libraries I was instantly enamored with The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by photographer Robert Dawson — at once a love letter and a lament eighteen years in the making, a wistful yet hopeful reminder of just what’s at stake if we let the greatest bastion of public knowledge humanity has ever known slip into the neglected corner of cultural priorities.  Read more at http://www.bespacific.com/public-library-photographic-love-letter-humanitys-greatest-sanctuary-knowledge-freedom-democracy/

Galette is a term used in French cuisine to designate various types of flat round or freeform crusty cakes, or, in the case of a Breton galette (galette bretonne), a pancake made with buckwheat flour usually with a savoury filling.  In French Canada the term galette is usually applied to pastries best described as large cookies.  This terminology is also used in Brittany, context providing differentiation with the Breton galette.  Galette, or more properly Breton galette is also the name given in most French crêperies to savoury buckwheat flour pancakes, while those made from wheat flour, much smaller in size and mostly served with a sweet filling, are branded crêpes.  This type of galette is a large, thin pancake mostly associated with the region of Brittany, where it replaced at times bread as basic food, but it is eaten countrywide.   Buckwheat was introduced as a crop suitable to impoverished soils and buckwheat pancakes were known in other regions where this crop was cultivated, such as Limousin or Auvergne.  It is frequently garnished with egg, meat, fish, cheese, cut vegetables, apple slices, berries, or similar ingredients.  One of the most popular varieties is a galette covered with grated Emmental cheese, a slice of ham, and an egg cooked on the galette.  In France, this is known as a galette complète (a complete galette).  Another variety is a hot sausage wrapped in a galette (called galette saucisse, a tradition of Rennes, France) and eaten like a hot dog.  See pictures at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galette  Find recipe for Bread Galettes on Salad Greens by Jacques Pépin at http://www.foodandwine.com/recipes/bread-galettes-on-salad-greens

The world’s largest archive of animal vocalizations and other nature sounds is now available online.  This resource for students, filmmakers, scientists and curious wildlife aficionados took archivists a dozen years to assemble and make ready for the web.  “In terms of speed and the breadth of material now accessible to anyone in the world, this is really revolutionary,” audio curator Greg Budney said in a press release, describing the milestone just achieved by the Macaulay Library archive at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.  The collection goes way back to 1929. It contains nearly 150,000 digital audio recordings equaling more than 10 terabytes of data with a total run time of 7,513 hours.  About 9,000 species are represented.  Many are birds, but the collection also includes sounds of whales, elephants, frogs, primates and more.  Jennifer Viegas  http://news.discovery.com/animals/insects/largest-archive-of-animal-sounds-now-available-online-130116.htm  Search recordings at http://macaulaylibrary.org/search?tab=audio  OWL TRIVIA:  Santa Duc   The name comes from Grand-Duc, the largest European owl who sings during the night.  In Provencal it translates as Canta Duc, which in time became Santa Duc

Collage derives its name from the French verb coller, to glue.  The work of art is made by gluing things to the surface.  Collage became an art form during the Synthetic Cubist period of Picasso and Braque.  At first, Pablo Picasso glued oil cloth to his surface of Still Life with Chair Caning in May of 1912.  He glued a rope around the edge of the oval canvas.  Georges Braque then glued imitation wood-grained wallpaper to his Fruit Dish and Glass (September 1912).  Braque's work is called papier collé (glued or pasted paper), a specific type of collage.  During the Dada movement, Hannah Höch (German, 1889-1978) glued bits of photographs from magazines and advertising in such works as Cut with a Kitchen Knife, (1919-20).  Fellow Dadaist Kurt Schwitters (German, 1887-1948) also glued bits of paper he found in newspapers, advertisements and other discarded matter beginning in 1919.  Schwitters called his collages and assemblages Merzbilder, a word derived from the German word "Kommerz" (Commerce, as in banking) which had been on a fragment of an advertisement in his first work, and bilder ("pictures").  The exclusive use of photos in collage is called photomontage.  http://arthistory.about.com/od/glossary_c/a/c_collage.htm

The refined table sugar we now consider a staple was once so rare and expensive it was called "white gold".  Sugar cane, which was the first source of sugar, is a perennial grass that originated in Asia but is now grown in tropical and subtropical areas.  (Before the arrival of sugar cane, honey and fruit were the only sweeteners.)   During the Napoleonic war, when the supply of cane sugar was cut off, the development of an alternative source of sugar was discovered, beets.  The sugar derived from these two sources is 99.8% pure sucrose, a complex sugar composed of glucose and fructose.  When using sugar most people think of it only as a sweetener.  But when sugar is used in baking its role becomes more complex as it also adds volume, tenderness, texture, color, and acts as a preservative.  There are different types of sugar and the size of the granules can differ.  Sugars vary in color from white to dark brown depending on the amount of molasses added during processing.  The size of the sugar crystal affects the amount of air that can be incorporated into the batter during the creaming of the sugar and fat.  For example, granulated sugar will incorporate more air into the batter than confectioner's sugar. The size of the crystal will also affect how quickly the sugar will dissolve in the batter.  Therefore confectioner's sugar will dissolve quicker in the batter than granulated sugar.  White sugar is a refined sugar derived from sugar cane and sugar beets.  Read about various sugars such as superfine (castor or caster), coarse (decorators or pearl), crystal, confectioners (powdered or icing), invert, brown, raw, Demerara, Muscovada (or Barbados sugar), and

LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Feb. 10, 2015 reversed a decision in a copyright lawsuit against founders of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees the Four Seasons and developers of the group’s biographical musical “Jersey Boys.”  Donna Cobrello, whose late husband ghostwrote the autobiography of ex-Four Seasons member and Las Vegas resident Tommy DeVito, may be entitled to royalties, according to the ruling from the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit.  The case was sent back to Nevada federal court.  Besides DeVito, Cobrello’s copyright suit named Four Seasons members Frankie Valli and Bob Gaudio and businesses associated with “Jersey Boys.”  A Nevada federal judge in 2011 denied Cobrello’s claims of copyright infringement and failure to pay royalties.  Her late husband, Rex Woodard, finished DeVito’s biography in 1991, according to court documents.  But Woodard died from lung cancer the same year, Cobrello said, before the duo could find a publisher.  DeVito registered a near-identical copy of the autobiography with the U.S. Copyright Office under only his own name four months before her husband’s death, Cobrello said.  That work eventually became the basis for “Jersey Boys” and other works that should have earned her royalties as her husband’s heir.  The federal court in Nevada denied Cobrello’s claims in 2011, saying DeVito granted a “selectively exclusive license” to the eventual producers of the musical, not copyright interest.  But in its decision, the 9th Circuit cited a 1984 decision from a case it heard, Oddo v. Ries, saying “a co-owner of a copyright must account to other co-owners for any profits he earns from licensing or use of the copyright.”   Daniel Mayeda, the attorney for Valli and Gaudio, said he is still analyzing the decision but expects a positive outcome for his clients.  “At the end of the day, I think we will get a finding that there was no infringement of the autobiography in ‘Jersey Boys,’” Mayeda said.  Las Vegas copyright attorney Mark Borghese called this case “extremely complex.”  “Not only do we have a situation where there are co-copyright owners, but one of the owners entered into multiple agreements without the knowledge or consent of the other,” he said.  “It is one of the peculiarities of intellectual property law.  When you have two owners, they both have an equal right to do whatever they want with their rights.  This inevitably leads to disputes.”  The Tony Award-winning stage version of “Jersey Boys” debuted on Broadway in 2005 and expanded to the Strip in 2009, opening at the Palazzo.  It’s now at the Paris Las Vegas.  Colton Lochhead 


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1256  February 13, 2015  On this date in 1633, Galileo Galilei arrived in Rome for his trial before the Inquisition.  On this date in 1914, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers was established to protect the copyrighted musical compositions of its members.

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