Friday, June 19, 2015

Thousands of tree species grow across our world, shaped, like all living things, by their environments.  But few trees reflect the succeed-at-all-cost aspect of nature's handiwork as clearly as the giant baobab trees of Africa, Madagascar and Australia.  These species of Adansonia (named in honor of French botanist Michel Adanson) are native to harsh, sun-soaked plains where rainfall is a rarity.  In response, they've evolved with obese water-storing trunks, stubby branching, sparse foliage and deeply plunging root systems.  Remarkably, baobabs, particularly the African baobab (Adansonia digitata), thrive in our humid climate if planted on sunny, well-drained sites.  Also known as upside-down tree, the African baobab, among Earth's longest-lived plants, slowly grows 75 feet tall with a trunk circumference that can exceed 85 feet.  Its crown of short, thick, tapering branches, covered with twiggy stems that are frequently   leafless, strongly resembles a root system, making the baobab seem like a tree that's been yanked from the ground and shoved back upside down.  When cultivated in wetter climes, such as Florida and Hawaii, the African baobab develops more foliage and retains it most of the year.  The glossy, moisture-hoarding leaves are composed of several 6-inch-long leaflets.  Increased numbers of those handsome leaves mean heavy production of the baobab's bizarre, wonderfully fragrant flowers.  These strange-looking blossoms, dangling on lengthy stems, are about 6 inches in diameter with snow-white petals that curl back to reveal masses of red stamens.  Charles Reynolds  http://www.theledger.com/article/20090807/COLUMNISTS/908075002  
NOTE that one of the largest collections of Madagascan baobab trees under glass is in the Cleveland Botanical Garden & Conservatory.  http://www.cbgarden.org/come-visit/the-eleanor-armstrong-smith-glasshouse/madagascar.aspx and http://www.gundpartnership.com/Cleveland-Botanical-Garden-and-Conservatory

List of states by order of admission into the union  Take a guess on a particular state's date of admission and then find the answer here:  http://www.50states.com/statehood.htm?sort_by_date#.VWyHoc9VhBc 

John Rogers (1829–1904) was an American sculptor who produced very popular, relatively inexpensive figurines in the latter 19th century.  He became famous for his small genre sculptures, popularly termed "Rogers Groups", which were mass-produced in cast plaster.  Often selling for $15 apiece, the figurines were affordable to the middle class.  Instead of working in bronze and marble, he sculpted in more affordable plaster, painted the color of putty to hide dust.  Rogers was inspired by popular novels, poems and prints as well as the scenes he saw around him.  John Rogers portrayed in his plaster statuettes ordinary, everyday, urban and rural people doing ordinary, everyday things.  Through his Rogers Groups he offered an unrivaled transcript of the manners, sports, amusements, social customs, domestic interests, costumes, and even modes of furnishing of the period.  John Rogers made statues of Civil War soldiers, family groups, literary topics, theater scenes and historical figures.  His statues ranged from eight to forty-six inches tall.  Between 1860 and 1893 Rogers sculpted approximately 85 different, mostly patented groups of statuary.  During that period, some 25 workman in his New York factory turned out thousands of plaster castings of his works.  Of some subjects executed by John Rogers, only a few copies were cast and sold.  Of other John Rogers Groups, thousands were sold.  In Rogers' 30-year career, the artist sold over a million dollars of sculpture, a lot of money for art in those days.  It is estimated that a total of 80,000-100,000 plaster casting of his groups were produced during John Rogers’ lifetime.  His studio at The New Canaan Historical Society, 13 Oenoke Ridge, New Canaan Connecticut, now known as the John Rogers Studio, was designated a U.S. National Historic Landmark in 1965.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rogers_%28sculptor%29

2013:  The Astor family name conjures up images of the Gilded Age and one of American’s richest families at a time of great prosperity and optimism for the country, but the family’s 420-acre estate has fallen on hard times.  Rokeby in Hudson Valley, New York has been owned by the Astors for nearly 180 years.  The 43-room main house was built in 1815 and then added to by every new owner so that it came to represent the classic 'American Gothic style.'  Today it remains home to a slew of less-than-wealthy heirs to the Astor and Livingston fortunes, but looks more like a rundown museum than the home of what was once one of America's richest families.  
2012:  Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson's nine-screen installation The Visitors (2012) is a pop-music video in extremis, breaking every protocol for the genre.  It's long (at 64 minutes), slow and repetitive.  There are no quick cuts, cool costumes or visual hijinks.  The work—one of the most enthralling I've seen in years—was created at Rokeby Farm, a once magnificent but now faded Hudson Valley mansion (still inhabited by an eccentric cast of descendants of the original owners).  While playing a spare, enigmatic song, from a poem ("A pink rose, in the glittery frost, a diamond heart, and the orange red fire . . . ") by Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir—Kjartansson's former wife—the musicians were isolated in different rooms and filmed on single, stationary cameras.  Their performances were recorded in one take, and while they could hear the others through headphones, they couldn't see one another, making for a poignant mix of togetherness and solitude.  Gregory Volk  http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/reviews/ragnar-kjartansson/

Gravadlax (also called gravlax, grav laks, cured salmon) is Scandinavian salmon,"lax"  being the Middle English word for that mighty fish, and “grave” a relic of the time when fish was put into holes in the ground and covered in salt to preserve it for the wild and freezing winter ahead.   Felicity Cloake   Find pictures and recipe at http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/wordofmouth/2015/jan/07/how-to-make-perfect-gravadlax-cured-salmon-recipe  See also http://www.marthastewart.com/319516/gravad-lax

On June 17, 2015 the Unicode Consortium released Unicode 8, which includes 37 new emojis such as the Face With Rolling Eyes, Hugging Face, Taco,Cheese Wedge and Hockey—both ice and field varieties.  Five emoji modifiers are included with Unicode 8, bringing the total number of new characters to 41.  

Unicode is a standardised encoding system that provides a unique number for every character, no matter what the platform, no matter what the program, no matter what the language, without any risk of corruption.  Before Unicode, no single encoding could contain enough character to cover all languages used by European Union.  The Unicode Standard has been adopted by such industry leaders as Apple, HP, IBM, JustSystem, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, Sun, Sybase, Unisys and many other products.  Unicode is the official way to implement ISO/IEC 10646 (Universal Multiple-octet Code character Set or UCS)  Members of the Unicode Consortium (non-profit organization founded to develop, extend and promote use of the Unicode Standard) include major computer corporations, software producers, database vendors, research institutions, international agencies, various user groups, and interested individuals.  http://ec.europa.eu/ipg/standards/unicode/index_en.htm


http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1313  June 19, 2015  On this date in 1586, English colonists left Roanoke Island, after failing to establish England's first permanent settlement in North America.  On this date in 1910, the first Father's Day was celebrated in Spokane, Washington.

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