The word confit (pronounced
"kon-FEE") derives from the French verb confire, which
simply means to preserve. Traditionally, confit simply
refers to any sort of preserved food, whether it's meat, fruit, or vegetables. This preservation takes place by slowly
cooking food in a liquid that is inhospitable to bacterial growth. With fruits, this is generally a very
concentrated sugar syrup; with meats and vegetables, a pure fat. Once cooked, the food is then packed into
containers and completely submerged in the liquid, creating an impenetrable
barrier and preventing any further bacterial growth. Since the just-cooked food is nearly sterile
as it is submerged and is cut off from any potential bacterial contamination
sources, it can be stored for a very long time. One
common misperception many folks have about confit is that it is necessarily a
fatty food. That food is submerged in fat for hours, so that fat must
make its way inside, right? Not so. Indeed, the fat is
largely a surface treatment for muscles.
While it is true that it may find its way between the
larger muscle groups and will cover the entire piece of meat in a thin layer of
fat, it will not penetrate very far into the meat itself. This is easy to see simply by cutting open a
large muscle group and examining the inside.
It looks virtually the same as meat cooked through any other
low-and-slow method, such as braising or steaming. The fat's true purpose in a confit is
twofold: temperature regulation, and creating an environment inhospitable to
bacterial growth if preservation is the goal. http://www.seriouseats.com/2013/01/ask-the-food-lab-what-the-heck-is-confit.html
"Well, that's just the way it
is!" "Because I said so!"
There is no good reply to such statements. In a time of disagreements, we need less
pontificating and few claims of "my way or no way." Allow questions and conversations. Don E. Saliers The American Organist Magazine November 2017
October 24, 2017 200 universities just launched 560 free
online courses. Here’s the
full list from
Dhawal Shah at https://medium.freecodecamp.org/200-universities-just-launched-560-free-online-courses-heres-the-full-list-d9dd13600b04
"dressed to the nines" One theory is
that it comes from the name of the 99th Wiltshire Regiment,
known as the Nines, which was renowned for
its smart appearance. There are a couple
of problems with this suggestion, though.
To begin with, the regiment's sartorial reputation
seems to have dated from the 1850s, while the first recorded use of the phrase
is from 1837. Secondly, dressed
to the nines developed as an extension of
the much earlier phrase to the nines, meaning 'to perfection,
to the greatest degree': the 20-volume Oxford English
Dictionary's first example of this earlier form dates back to 1719. Why it should have been to the
nines rather than to the eights, to the sevens,
etc. remains unclear. https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/origin-of-dressed-to-the-nines
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_the_nines
You’ve long been able to get localized search results by visiting Google at different domains—like
google.com for the US, google.co.uk for England, or google.co.jp for Japan—but
that is not the case any more after October 27, 2017. Google said that it’ll now deliver search
results relevant
to your current location no matter which domain you visit. So if you’re in New York and visit google.ru,
you’ll still get results relevant to New York City. Fortunately, it’ll still be possible to
escape your country’s results. You’ll be
able to change locations, you’ll just have to do it through the settings menu
at the bottom of google.com (which I’m willing to bet you’ve never noticed
before because it’s hidden in the corner on the desktop and requires you to
scroll down on mobile; I didn’t know it existed before today). By going to settings and then “search
settings,” you’ll be able to pick a new location. Google says it’s making the change because
one out of five searches “is related to location,” and the company feels it’s
critical to offer local information to provide the best results. The feature seems to be tailored most toward
travelers: Google says that if you visit
another country, it’ll automatically serve results local to where you’re
visiting, then switch back again as soon as you arrive home. Jacob Kastrenakes
Elephants can communicate using very low frequency
sounds, with pitches below the range
of human hearing. These low-frequency
sounds, termed "infrasounds," can travel several kilometers, and
provide elephants with a "private" communication channel that plays
an important role in elephants' complex social life. Their frequencies are as low as the lowest
notes of a pipe organ. Although the
sounds themselves have been studied for many years, it has remained unclear
exactly how elephant infrasounds are made.
One possibility, favored by some scientists, is that the elephants tense
and relax the muscles in their larynx (or "voice box") for each pulse
of sound. This mechanism, similar to
cats purring, can produce sounds as low in pitch as desired, but the sounds
produced are generally not very powerful.
The other possibility is that elephant infrasounds are produced like
human speech or singing, but because the elephant larynx is so large, they are
extremely low in frequency. Human
humming is produced by vibrations of the vocal folds (also called "vocal
cords"), which are set into vibration by a stream of air from the lungs,
and don't require periodic muscle activity.
By this hypothesis, elephant infrasounds result simply from very long
vocal folds slapping together at a low rate, and don't require any periodic
tensing of the laryngeal muscles. To
find out, researchers at the University of Vienna, led by voice scientist
Christian Herbst and elephant communication expert Angela Stoeger, removed
the larynx from an elephant (which died of natural causes), and brought it into
the larynx laboratory of the Department of Cognitive Biology (headed by
Tecumseh Fitch). By blowing a controlled
stream of warm, humid air through the larynx (substituting for the elephants
lungs), and manually placing the vocal folds into the "vocal"
position, the scientists coaxed the vocal folds into periodic, low-frequency
vibrations that match infrasounds in all details. Since there can be no periodic tensing and
relaxing of vocal fold muscles without a connection to the elephant's brain,
low-frequency vibrations in the excised larynx clearly demonstrate that the
"purring" mechanism is unnecessary to explain infrasounds. Thus, elephants "sing" using the
same physical principles as we do, but their immense larynx produces very low
notes. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/08/120803103421.htm Mystery of Elephant Infrasounds
Revealed - Animal Super Senses - BBC https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQfDazQ9Rkg 3:25
John F. Kennedy was killed on November 22,
1963. Almost 30 years later, Congress
enacted the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of
1992. The Act mandated that all assassination-related
material be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records
Administration (NARA). The resulting Collection consists of more than 5
million pages of assassination-related records, photographs, motion pictures,
sound recordings and artifacts. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk The
National Archives is releasing documents previously withheld in accordance with
the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. The vast majority of the
Collection (88%) has been open in full and released to the public since the
late 1990s. The records at issue are
documents previously identified as assassination records, but withheld in full
or withheld in part. These releases
include FBI, CIA, and other agency documents (both formerly withheld in part
and formerly withheld in full) identified by the Assassination Records Review
Board as assassination records. The
releases to date are as follows: July
24, 2017: 3,810 documents; October 26, 2017: 2,891 documents; November 3, 2017: 676 documents. To view or download a released file, follow
the link in the “"Doc Date” column.
You can also download the full spreadsheet with metadata about all the
documents. The files are sorted by NARA
Release Date, with the most recent files appearing first. https://www.archives.gov/research/jfk/2017-release
Hear a Newly Found Kurt Weill Song That Surprised
Experts by Joshua Barone A previously unknown song by Kurt Weill, the
composer best known for “The Threepenny Opera,” has been discovered in Berlin
and taken some of the world’s pre-eminent Weill experts by total surprise. The piece, “Lied vom weissen Käse” (“Song of
the White Cheese”)—which was written for a Weimar-era musical revue and sung by
the actress Lotte Lenya, Weill’s wife—was recently found in an archive
unrelated to Weill at the Free University of Berlin and is the most significant
discovery of the composer’s music since the early 1980s. “It is stupefying in a way, because we are
all so familiar with the catalog,” said Elmar Juchem, managing editor of the
critical edition of Weill’s scores, who found the three-page manuscript for the
song. “This was put to rest and was really on nobody’s mind.” Weill discoveries like this are extremely
rare, though not unheard-of. The
composer fled Germany in 1933 under threat of Nazi persecution, and many of his
letters and manuscripts were either hidden or destroyed. The last major Weill discovery came in 1983,
when his sister-in-law unearthed a trove of unknown early pieces, said Kim
Kowalke, president of the Kurt Weill Foundation for Music in New
York. Mr. Juchem said that he was
recently researching “Happy End” (1929), Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s follow-up
to “The Threepenny Opera,” at the university in Berlin when he asked the
archivist whether there was anything else related to Weill in the collection. He was eventually shown the manuscript, which
came from the obscure actress Gerda Schaefer at the Volksbühne theater. Mr. Juchem said he didn’t believe the
archivist at first, but when he saw the handwriting, “My jaw dropped.” Then
the search for the song’s origin began. Lenya
had mentioned the song before, but under a different title, “Song of the Blind
Maiden.” In the 1960s, she attempted to
find the song but came up empty. “Nowhere
to be found,” she said at the time. “Probably
buried in some basement.” Weill scholars
thought the song Lenya remembered was written for “Das Lied von Hoboken,” a
German translation of the American play “Hoboken Blues” that starred Lenya at
the Volksbühne in 1930. But, Mr. Juchem
said, the lyric by Günther Weisenborn didn’t quite fit in the context of the
play. It
was in newspapers that Mr. Juchem eventually found the origin of “Song of the
White Cheese,” which Weill wrote for a politically charged revue to benefit
actors who had been laid off from the Volksbühne in November 1931. (Other artists who participated included
Brecht and the composer Hanns Eisler.)
Read more, see graphics, and link to music video at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/06/arts/music/kurt-weill-song-of-the-white-cheese-discovered.html
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1795
November 7, 2017 On this date in 1893, women in the state
of Colorado were granted the right to vote,
the second state to do so. On this date
in 1916, Jeannette Rankin was the first woman
elected to the United States
Congress.
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