Tsundoku is the stockpiling of books never consumed.  Sahoko Ichikawa, a senior lecturer in Japanese at Cornell University, explains that tsunde means “to stack things” and oku is “to leave for a while.”  The word originated in Japan’s late 19th century Meiji Era from a play on words.  Sometime around the turn of the century, the oku in tsunde oku was replaced with doku, meaning to read.  But because tsunde doku rolls awkwardly off the tongue, the mashup version became tsundoku.  http://lisnews.org/there_s_a_word_in_japanese_for_the_literary_affliction_of_buying_books_you_don_t_read

A Career to Die For by Jane Ayer   To look at him, you couldn’t tell that Scott Dion has health issues.  We meet outside Don’s Bakery in Bala, Ontario, on a brilliant, sunny day in July.  He’s wearing golf shirt and shorts, sports a brown goatee (ever so slightly speckled with grey) covering the lower part of a tanned face, his eyes crinkle at the corners with the onset of a ready smile or laugh, and sunglasses are pushed up onto his head.  Two earrings glint from his left ear.  His looks belie his 44 years.  Outside the walls of a bakery, Dion breathes easily.  Inside is a different story.  Scott Dion has occupational asthma.  His form of the illness is commonly known as baker’s asthma or even baker’s lung, provoked and made worse by exposure to certain allergens that are common in bakeries, including wheat, rye, barley, and soy flours, yeast, eggs, sesame seeds, nuts, molds, flax seed--the list is lengthy.  http://www.bakersjournal.com/health-safety/a-career-to-die-for-595  See also Occupational asthma from the U.S. National Library of Medicine at https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/000110.htm

The Open Data Impact Map, a project of the Open Data for Development Network (OD4D), is a public database of organizations that use open government data from around the world.  Open Data is publicly available data that can be accessed and reused by anyone free of charge.  The Map was developed to provide governments, international organizations, and researchers with a more comprehensive understanding of the demand for open data.  http://opendataimpactmap.org/

Concerns about Open Data Impact Map from Toledo area librarians:  "Is it really anyone’s business who used data?  It also is one step away from identifying what data XYZ used."  "A lot of our data is collected and shared, and we don’t even know what all that encompasses.  And although it might not always be tied to our identities, but rather mined for trends, I still wonder if that is an invasion of privacy."  "While I know that my searches are already used by Google and Facebook for instance, I do not think it is everyone's business to know what I am researching.  How will this impact lawyers, scientists, everyday folks?"

A New (Faster, Juicier) Way to Roast a Turkey by Melissa Clark  Like the turkey, the chicken has the same white/dark meat divide when it comes to cook times.  To compensate, I often splay the chicken’s legs, then sear the bird in a very hot pan before putting it into the oven to roast.  The dual strategy of splaying the legs to allow more hot air to circulate around them, combined with the initial searing, gives the dark meat a head start before the breast hits the heat of the oven.  You get an evenly roasted bird, with silky, juicy white meat and perfectly cooked dark meat.  And you get it fast, or at least faster than roasting it whole.   Would the same technique work with a fowl three times the size of your average chicken?  The answer was a resounding yes.  Unlike spatchcocking a turkey, which requires a certain amount of skill and strength, splaying is a cinch.  You can use a paring knife to cut through the skin that connects the legs to the body, then just press down and pull on the thighs until you hear them pop out of their sockets and lie flat.  Easy.  Read more, see picture of splayed turkey, and watch video at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/09/dining/thanksgiving-roast-turkey-splayed.html

Thistmus (interval between Thanksgiving and Christmas) and Friendsgiving (celebrating food with friends around Thanksgiving time) are recently coined words.

In 2015 Stefania Bortolami, the owner of the Bortolami Gallery in Manhattan, began a series of internal conversations that resulted in a project called “Artist/City,” a continuing effort to move the artists she represents out of her gallery and into the world at large.  Ms. Borotolami and Emma Fernberger, associate director of the gallery, undertook the first phase of the project, helping Daniel Buren install his paintings of vertical stripes on bedsheets in a storefront in Miami for a year.  The aim, as Bortolami’s website put it, was to create “a structure in which our artists can investigate their work without restriction.”  A second yearlong exhibition followed in May, when Eric Wesley moved his “burrito paintings” into an abandoned Spanish Colonial-style Taco Bell in Cahokia, Ill.  In winter 2016 a third Bortolami artist, Tom Burr, plans to install his own work for a year in the vacant former office of the Pirelli Tire Company in New Haven, a forbidding Brutalist structure originally designed in 1968 by the architect Marcel Breuer.  The building is owned by IKEA and sits in the middle of a parking lot of one of that furniture maker’s sprawling stores.  The terms Ms. Fernberger struck with the company were exceedingly budget-friendly:  IKEA agreed to let her use the space for an entire year for only $1.  And that was only one of the attractions of the site.  The audience for Mr. Burr’s coming show would probably include students and professors from Yale, and people passing by the site on Interstate 95, Ms. Bortolami said.  “Some will come to see the show just because it’s at an IKEA,” she added.  “And that’s great.”  Because of the exhibition’s length and low budget, the Artist/City project has allowed Mr. Burr to approach his installation with increased freedom and flexibility.  “I like showing in a place that doesn’t have the extreme pressure cooker that rents in New York impose,” he said, adding, “It can evolve over the course of a year, not only with the audience changing, but with the work itself reacting over time to the space.”  The Bortolami Gallery is not alone in seeking alternatives to the expensive push-the-product ethos that bigness brings.  The gallerist Gavin Brown, who is based on the Lower East Side and in Harlem, announced last year that he planned to open a space in a deconsecrated eighth-century church in Rome.  And John Berggruen, a California gallery owner, is currently showing works of sculpture in a garden on his 11-acre personal estate in St. Helena, California.  Alan Feuer  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/30/arts/design/art-dealers-move-out-of-the-gallery-and-into-a-taco-bell.html?_r=0

The Left Hand of Darkness is a science fiction novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, published in 1969.  The novel became immensely popular; in 1970 it won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards as the year's Best Novel, and established Le Guin's status as a major author of science fiction.  The novel follows the story of Genly Ai, a native of Terra, who is sent to the planet of Gethen as an envoy of the Ekumen, a loose confederation of planets.  Ai's mission is to persuade the nations of Gethen to join the Ekumen, but he is stymied by his lack of understanding of Gethenian culture.  Individuals on Gethen are "ambisexual", with no fixed gender identity.  This fact has a strong influence on the culture of the planet, and creates a barrier of understanding for Ai.  Left Hand was among the first books published in the feminist science fiction genre and the most famous examination of androgyny in science fiction.  The novel is part of the Hainish Cycle, a series of novels and short stories by Le Guin set in the fictional Hainish universe, which she introduced in 1964 with "The Dowry of the Angyar".  Left Hand has been reprinted more than 30 times, and received a highly positive response from reviewers.  The novel ranked third behind Frank Herbert's Dune and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End in a 1975 poll in Locus magazine.  In 1987, Locus ranked it second among science fiction novels after Dune.  The same year, Harold Bloom stated; "Le Guin, more than Tolkien, has raised fantasy into high literature, for our time".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Left_Hand_of_Darkness

           

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1554  November 22, 2016  On this date in 1928, the first performance of Ravel's Boléro took place in Paris.  On this date in 1968, The Beatles released The Beatles (known popularly as The White Album).