February 19, 2011   Here’s the church.  Up there was the steeple.  Open it up and there’s . . . no people.  Unless, of course, it’s party time at Dan Riccobon’s house, the former Emanuel Lutheran Church in East Pittsburgh.  He bought the brick building in 1998 from a congregation that by then had dwindled to about 40 elderly members, and he’s spent much of his free time over the past dozen years converting it into his home and studio.  In East Pittsburgh, acting as architect, contractor, carpenter and interior designer, Mr. Riccobon has done most of the work himself, from removing the rotting steeple to building the bathroom and kitchen to painting the ceiling of the nave, on his back on a scaffold, with the constellations and the creatures that inspired them.  The result is a sweet, magical, handcrafted space suffused with warmth and a playful spirit of creativity.  “I was giddy when I first moved in,” said Mr. Riccobon, a painter and retired Woodland Hills art teacher.  By then, some of the biggest jobs were behind him, including rewiring the building, vacuuming soot from the attic and insulating it, and installing a shower in the basement.  “It was a long two years traveling back and forth working on the weekends, I can tell you that.”  When Mr. Riccobon bought the church, the whole interior was painted white.  When some of the paint began to peel, he discovered a decorative border just beneath the ceiling.  He made a stencil from the fragment and restored the entire border, along with the church’s ochre-toned walls.  He’s also kept the painted angels-on-canvas that flank the apse, where his 15-foot balsam fir Christmas tree still soars.  The nave—the large open area that makes up most of the interior—holds Mr. Riccobon’s living space, with two sitting areas and a dining table near the new kitchen.  The former choir loft is his bedroom, with a homemade Murphy bed and a wall of IKEA cupboards painted to resemble an old Venetian screen.  But the showstopper is the adjacent tiled bathroom and its ogee-arch shower opening.  He made the turquoise tiles that frame it, glazing and firing them along with student work at Woodland Hills High.  He made the big harlequin head mounted on the west wall for a Mardi Gras party he threw in 2000 for the teachers he’d worked with at several Woodland Hills schools.  He created the King Kong head and the 11-foot-tall Frankenstein that looms over the library alcove for one of his Halloween parties.  For Mr. Riccobon, the best part of having home and studio in the same building is not the easy commute but having work in progress so close at hand.  Patricia Lowry  See fanciful pictures at http://phlf.org/category/religious-properties/

Yvan «Lozzi» Pestalozzi, sculptor (born December 13, 1937 in Glarus, Switzerland) served as cabinet-making apprenticeship, mainly self-taught, working as a freelance sculptor since 1964.  Works include:  small, mostly mobile, filigree wire sculptures; mobile iron sculptures often weighing several tons for outdoors which include wind sculptures, large-scale rollway tracks, and insect stabiles; small human and animal figures made of soft metal, life-size figures made of synthetic cement.  http://www.lozzi.ch/en/yvanpestalozzi/index.html  See also The Playground Project showing a picture of a Lozziwurm—a colorful, twisting, tubular play sculpture designed by Yvan Pestalozzi in 1972 at http://ci13.cmoa.org/playground

VOODLES  With a root vegetable of your choice (carrots, cucumber, courgette, aubergine, pepper etc.) simply glide your peeler vertically downwards to create thin shavings or “noodles”.  Link to eight voodles recipes at http://www.afoodieworld.com/natwong/3623-summer-prep-series-voodles

RIBOLLITA means reboiled in Italian.  Traditionally, it is prepared one day and reheated and eaten the next day.  Find recipes for this vegetable stew at http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/giada-de-laurentiis/ribollita-recipe-1916955 and http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2016/02/ribollita-tuscan-italian-vegetable-soup-stew-recipe.html

The Fear of Missing Out phenomenon was first identified in 1996 by Dr. Dan Herman, a marketing strategist, which researched it and published the first academic paper on the topic in the year 2000 in The Journal of Brand Management.  Apparently, he used the acronym "FoMO" for the first time in 2002.  The outbreak of the term occurred in 2004, after Author Patrick J. McGinnis published an op-ed in The Harbus, the magazine of Harvard Business School.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_missing_out

Most people would not look for illustrations in law books.  However, two exhibitions from the Yale Law Library challenge the stereotype of legal literature as a dreary expanse of dry text.  “Law’s Picture Books:  The Yale Law Library Collection,” opened September 13, 2017 at the Grolier Club in New York City, featureing 140 books and manuscripts containing a surprising and beguiling range of images that symbolize, describe, teach, argue, or criticize the law.  It is curated by Michael Widener, the Law Library’s rare book librarian, and Mark S. Weiner, a legal historian, filmmaker, and professor on leave from Rutgers Law School, who blogs at WorldsOfLaw.com.  A companion exhibition, “Around the World with Law’s Picture Books,” is at the Yale Law Library in New Haven, Connecticut, through December 15, 2017 and showcases illustrated law books from fifteen countries on six continents in ten different languages.  It is curated by Michael Widener and Emma Molina Widener.  The two exhibitions draw on a unique collection of over a thousand volumes assembled in the past decade by Michael Widener, the Yale Law Library’s rare book librarian.  They were originally published for lawyers, law students, lay readers, and even children.  Often they were tools in the workshops of legal practice.  “These images provide insight into ideas about the nature of law and justice, and also about the image of the law and the legal profession, in the eyes of the profession itself and the general public,” writes Widener. Today they will surprise and delight both book lovers and the legal community.  Accompanying the Grolier Club exhibition are five short videos created by Weiner through his production company Hidden Cabinet Films.  Mike Widener  http://library.law.yale.edu/news/yale-law-library-exhibits-laws-picture-books

updated September 28, 2017  Scientists have revealed the foods which fill us up best, by sending signals to the brain that we have had enough to eat.  Chicken, mackerel, pork shoulder and beef stirloin steak are among the most filling foods, according to researchers at the University of Warwick.  Plums, apricots, avocados, lentils and almonds have the same hunger-busting effect.  People no longer feel hungry after eating these foods because of the amino acids they contain.  These amino acids, arginine and lysine, have been found to activate newly discovered brain cells called tanycytes which control the appetite.  The key brain cells involved in curbing hunger pangs are revealed in the study led by the University of Warwick and published in the journal Molecular Metabolism.  Victoria Allen  Read much more at http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4925496/Plums-pork-mackerel-almonds-stop-hunger-pangs.html

The United States Code, a collection of all federal laws in the U.S., has a section dedicated to the flag—Title 4, Chapter 1—sometimes called the "Flag Code."  The Flag Code covers how the flag should be designed, whether it should be used in advertising, and how it ought to be displayed, among other subjects.  The President has the power to change the Flag Code unilaterally at any time.  Penalties for violating the Flag Code are not enforced; the Supreme Court has found it unconstitutional to prohibit desecrating the flag.  Instead, the Flag Code can be considered a list of guidelines for proper conduct regarding the flag.  From the Flag Code:  "No part of the flag should ever be used as a costume or athletic uniform.   "The flag should never be carried flat or horizontally, but always aloft and free."  "The flag should never touch anything beneath it, such as the ground, the floor, water, or merchandise."  Lisa Marie Segarra  http://time.com/4957112/flag-code-nfl-protests-national-anthem/   See also United States Code, 2011 Edition
Title 4 - FLAG AND SEAL, SEAT OF GOVERNMENT, AND THE STATES, CHAPTER 1 - THE FLAG  https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/USCODE-2011-title4/html/USCODE-2011-title4-chap1.htm   Section 8 covers respect for the flag.

Banned Books Week, September 24-30, 2017, celebrates the freedom to read.  Find a list of Top Ten Challenged Books of 2016 at http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/NLW-Top10

John Ashbery, a long-standing contributor to and friend of The New York Review, died September 3, 2017, aged ninety, at his house in Hudson, New York.  He was the author of twenty-eight books of poems (not counting Selecteds or Collecteds) as well as one novel, three plays, three volumes of essays and criticism, and three of translations from French.  Over the course of his career he received just about every major prize, including the triple crown:  the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975).  At the time of his death he was considered, by general acclaim, the greatest living American poet.  Luc Sante  http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/10/12/john-ashbery-1927-2017/  See also The 10 Best John Ashbery Poems at  https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/tip-sheet/article/73994-the-10-best-john-ashbery-poems.html and a transcript of an interview with John Ashbery at https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3014/john-ashbery-the-art-of-poetry-no-33-john-ashbery

September 26, 2017  The mostly submerged continent of Zealandia may have been much closer to land level than previously thought, providing pathways for animals and plants to cross continents from 80m years ago, an expedition has revealed.  Zealandia, a for the most part underwater landmass in the South Pacific, was declared the Earth’s newest continent this year in a paper in the journal of the Geological Society of America.   It includes Lord Howe Island off the east coast of Australia, New Caledonia and New Zealand.  Researchers drilled more than 860 metres below the sea floor in six different sites across Zealandia.  The sediment cores collected showed evidence of tectonic and ecological change across millions of years.  Naaman Zhou  Read more and see graphics at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/27/zealandia-drilling-reveals-secrets-of-sunken-lost-continent

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1777  September 29, 2017  On this date in 1547 – Miguel de Cervantes, Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright, was born.  On this date in 1810 – Elizabeth Gaskell, English author, was born.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_29