Monday, February 22, 2016

There are methods of baking pasta without boiling the pasta first.  You can soak the pasta for 45 minutes in warm salted water before adding it to the other ingredients and put the mixture into the oven.  You can also add dried pasta directly to sauce and then bake.  Recipes:  http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/secret-baked-pasta-cook-pasta-36571211 and

Noodles and pasta are rich sources of carbohydrates.  According to the standards published by the National Pasta Association, noodles must contain at least 5.5% egg solids by weight.  Noodles can be added to soups and casseroles while pasta can be made a complete meal with addition of a few vegetables.  Pasta is much lighter and, under Italian law, can only be made with durum wheat.  Read more and link to recipes at http://www.diffen.com/difference/Noodles_vs_Pasta

The myth of Daedalus and Icarus is one of the most known and fascinating Greek Myths, as it consists of both historical and mythical details.  While in Crete Daedalus created the plan for the Minoan Palace of Knossos, one of the most important archaeological sites in Crete and Greece today.  It was a magnificent architectural design and building, of 1,300 rooms, decorated with stunning frescoes and artifacts, saved until today.  The Labyrinth was a maze built by Daedalus; King Minos wanted a building suitable to imprison the mythical monster Minotaur, and according to the myth, he used to imprison his enemies in the labyrinth, making sure that they would be killed by the monster.  King Minos and Daedalus had great understanding at first, but their relationships started deteriorating at some point; there are several versions explaining this sudden change, although the most common one is that Daedalus was the one who advised Princess Ariadne to give Theseus the thread that helped him come out from the infamous Labyrinth, after killing the Minotaur.  Minos imprisoned Daedalus and his son Icarus in the Labyrinth.  Daedalus managed to create gigantic wings, using branches of osier and connected them with wax.  He taught Icarus how to fly, but told him to keep away from the sun because the heat would make the wax melt, destroying the wings.  Daedalus and Icarus managed to escape the Labyrinth and flew to the sky, free.  The flight of Daedalus and Icarus was the first time that man managed to fight the laws of nature and beat gravity.  Although he was warned, Icarus got excited by the thrill of flying and carried away by the amazing feeling of freedom and started flying high to salute the sun, diving low to the sea, and then up high again.  Icarus fell into the sea and drowned.  The Icarian Sea, where he fell, was named after him and there is also a nearby small island called Icaria.  http://www.greekmyths-greekmythology.com/myth-of-daedalus-and-icarus/

Undoubtedly the best known labyrinth of its type, the beautifully preserved pavement labyrinth in Chartres Cathedral, France, was constructed during the second decade of the 13th century.  The labyrinth is 12.9 metres (42.3 ft.) in diameter and fills the width of the nave.  While much has been written about the purpose of this labyrinth, little contemporary documentation survives, although it is known that labyrinths in the French cathedrals were the scene of Easter dances carried out by the clergy.  It is also popularly assumed that they symbolise the long tortuous path that pilgrims would have followed to visit this, and other shrines and cathedrals, during the medieval period.  Many are surprised to find the labyrinth often covered with chairs.  See beautiful pictures at  http://www.labyrinthos.net/photo_library14.html


Labyrinths Across the U.S.  You may link to a worldwide locator at http://www.wellfedspirit.org/U.S._map/US_Map.html

There’s no dispute that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died February 13, 2016 at age 79, was a polarizing figure.  But the very things that made him so divisive—his forceful opinions, his colorful behavior during oral arguments, and his contempt for those he disagreed with—also gave him a theatrical aura.  A play last year at the Arena Stage in Washington D.C., “The Originalist,” made a fictionalized Scalia its star character.  The man tasked with portraying the late justice was actor Edward Gero, who happens to bear an uncanny resemblance to Justice Scalia.  Still, Gero spent a year studying Scalia, attending oral arguments, reading the Federalist Papers and numerous biographies.  He finally met the justice only after doing enough research to have a "substantive conversation."  "He had great mannerisms...his physical demeanor, he's predominantly right-handed—no surprise there—but he never really used his left hand at all," said Gero of his observations of Scalia.  http://www.scpr.org/programs/the-frame/2016/02/16/46433/dc-actor-edward-gero-justice-antonin-scalia/

Harper Lee, whose first novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird,” about racial injustice in a small Alabama town, sold more than 40 million copies and became one of the most beloved and most taught works of fiction ever written by an American, died on February 19, 2016  in Monroeville, Ala., where she lived.  She was 89.  The instant success of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which was published in 1960 and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction the next year, turned Ms. Lee into a literary celebrity, a role she found oppressive and never learned to accept.  The enormous popularity of the film version of the novel, released in 1962 with Gregory Peck in the starring role of Atticus Finch, a small-town Southern lawyer who defends a black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, only added to Ms. Lee’s fame and fanned expectations for her next novel.  But for more than half a century a second novel failed to turn up, and Ms. Lee gained a reputation as a literary Garbo, a recluse whose public appearances to accept an award or an honorary degree counted as important news simply because of their rarity.  Then, in February 2015, long after the reading public had given up on seeing anything more from Ms. Lee, her publisher, Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins, dropped a bombshell.  It announced plans to publish a manuscript—long thought to be lost and now resurfacing under mysterious circumstances—that Ms. Lee had submitted to her editors in 1957 under the title “Go Set a Watchman.”  Ms. Lee’s lawyer, Tonja B. Carter, had chanced upon it, attached to an original typescript of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” while looking through Ms. Lee’s papers, the publishers explained.  It told the story of Atticus and his daughter, Jean Louise Finch, known as Scout, 20 years later, when Scout is a young woman living in New York.  It included several scenes in which Atticus expresses conservative views on race relations seemingly at odds with his liberal stance in the earlier novel.  The book was published in July with an initial printing of 2 million and, with enormous advance sales, immediately leapt to the top of the fiction best-seller lists, despite tepid reviews.  “To Kill a Mockingbird” was really two books in one:  a sweet, often humorous portrait of small-town life in the 1930s, and a sobering tale of race relations in the Deep South during the Jim Crow era.  It told the story of a small-town lawyer who stands guard outside a jail to protect his client against an angry mob, a central incident in the novel-to-be, whose title Mr. Crain changed to “Atticus” and later, as the manuscript evolved, to “To Kill a Mockingbird.”  The title refers to an incident in the novel, in which Atticus, on giving air rifles to his two children, tells them they can shoot at tin cans but never at a mockingbird.  Scout, puzzled, learns from Miss Maudie Atkinson, the widow across the street, that there is a proverb, “It’s a sin to kill a mockingbird,” and the reason for it:  The birds harm no one and only make beautiful music.  In the months after the novel was published, she contributed two wispy articles to McCall’s and Vogue.  To inquiring reporters, she threw out tantalizing hints of a second novel in progress, but the months and the years went by, and nothing appeared in print.  In one of her last interviews, with a Chicago radio show in 1964, Ms. Lee talked in some detail about her literary ambition:  to describe, in a series of novels, the world she grew up in and now saw disappearing.  News of the rediscovery of “Go Set a Watchman” threw the literary world into turmoil.  Many critics, as well as friends of Ms. Lee, found the timing and the rediscovery story suspicious, and openly questioned whether Ms. Lee, who was shielded from the press by Ms. Carter, was mentally competent to approve its publication.  It remained an open question, for many critics, whether “Go Set a Watchman” was anything more than the initial draft of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” from which, at the behest of her editors, Ms. Lee had excised the scenes from Scout’s childhood and developed them into a separate book.  “I was a first-time writer, and I did what I was told,” Ms. Lee wrote in a statement issued by her publisher in 2015.  Many readers, who had grown up idolizing Atticus, were crushed by his portrayal, 20 years on, as a staunch defender of segregation.  “The depiction of Atticus in ‘Watchman’ makes for disturbing reading, and for ‘Mockingbird’ fans, it’s especially disorienting,” Michiko Kakutani wrote in a review of the book in The New York Times.  “Scout is shocked to find, during her trip home, that her beloved father, who taught her everything she knows about fairness and compassion, has been affiliating with raving anti-integrationist, anti-black crazies, and the reader shares her horror and confusion.”  In her statement, Ms. Lee, who said that she had assumed the manuscript was lost, wrote, “After much thought and hesitation, I shared it with a handful of people I trust and was pleased to hear that they considered it worthy of publication.”  Producer Scott Rudin announced that he planned to bring “To Kill a Mockingbird” to Broadway in the 2017-18 season, with the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin adapting the novel and Bartlett Sher directing.  William Grimes

Umberto Eco  (5 January 1932–19 February 2016) was an Italian novelist, essayist, literary critic, philosopher, and semiotician.  He is best known for his groundbreaking 1980 historical mystery novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), an intellectual mystery combining semiotics in fiction, biblical analysis, medieval studies and literary theory.  He later wrote other novels, including Il pendolo di Foucault (Foucault's Pendulum) and L'isola del giorno prima (The Island of the Day Before).  His novel Il cimitero di Praga (The Prague Cemetery), released in 2010, was a best-seller.  Eco also wrote academic texts, children's books and essays.  He was founder of the Dipartimento di Comunicazione (Department of Media Studies) at the University of the Republic of San Marino, President of the Scuola Superiore di Studi Umanistici (Graduate School for the Study of the Humanities), University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei, and an Honorary Fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols and how they are used.  http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/semiotics

The site known as “Britain’s Pompeii” just keeps yielding more finds. 
Archeologists working at Must Farm in Peterborough, Britain, recently discovered a 3,000-year-old wheel that has been completely preserved.  It is the first and largest example of its kind to be discovered on the isle.  “This remarkable but fragile wooden wheel is the earliest complete example ever found in Britain," said Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, in a press release announcing the discovery.  "The existence of this wheel expands our understanding of Late Bronze Age technology and the level of sophistication of the lives of people living on the edge of the Fens 3,000 years ago.”  Must Farm has been dubbed “Britain’s Pompeii” because, like Pompeii in Italy, it is remarkably well-preserved from a fire that occurred at the site approximately three thousand years ago.  The site contains some of the best-preserved historical evidence about Bronze-Age Britain.  It was first discovered in 2006 and is now the subject of a £1.1 million (approximately $1.5 million) excavation project, which has unearthed wooden houses, bowls, and tools.  Olivia Lowenberg  See pictures at http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0219/What-this-3-000-year-old-wheel-tells-us-about-Britain-s-Pompeii

You’ve heard of a blue moon, you’ve heard of a blood moon, but have you ever heard of a 'snow' moon?   If you haven’t, you’ll get the chance to see one over North America’s night skies on Monday, February 22, 2016.  Since the lunar cycle is about 29 days long, February has no full moon once almost every 19 years.  This year, the snow moon will be visible at 1:20 p.m. EST Monday, and maintain its full appearance into the night.  It’s called a snow moon because each full moon has a different name for the month it falls in.  For February, it’s a snow moon since the second month of the year typically sees the highest snow average.  (January gives it close competition).  Moon names trace all the way back to Native Americans in the northern and eastern U.S., according to the Farmers’ Almanac.  Tribes made full moon names in order to help track the seasons and make each moon unique.  Another nickname for the full moon was ‘hunger’ moon.  Tribes coined that name from the brutal weather conditions that made hunting near impossible, says Moon Connection.  'Bone' moon was also used since there was a shortage of food and people gnawed on bones and ate bone marrow soup.  See beautiful pictures at https://weather.com/science/nature/news/february-snow-moon

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1430  February 22, 2016  On this date in 1853, Washington University in St. Louis was founded as Eliot Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri.  On this date in 1855,  The Pennsylvania State University was founded in State College, Pennsylvania as the Farmers' High School of Pennsylvania.


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