"Nothing is useless if you learn from it"  Leaving Van Gogh, a novel by Carol Wallace

Carol Wallace is the great-great-granddaughter of Lew Wallace, author of the novel Ben-Hur:  A Tale of the Christ which was first published in 1880.  Carol has written more than twenty books. She is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller To Marry an English Lord, an inspiration for Downton Abbey.  Carol holds degrees from Princeton University and Columbia University.  http://www.carolwallacebooks.com/about/

The word album comes from Latin albus, “white.”  In ancient Rome, an “album” was a blank tablet into which edicts and other public matters were inscribed.  In the 17th century, German scholars kept autograph books to which they gave the Latin term album amicorum.  Later the term was applied to scrapbooks that contained souvenirs.  In his 1755 dictionary Samuel Johnson defined album as “a book in which foreigners have long been accustomed to insert autographs of celebrated people.”  “Photograph albums” date from the 1850s.  “Record albums” (33 1/3 rpm) came along in 1957.  https://www.dailywritingtips.com/take-care-with-album/

Albus, meaning white in Latin, may refer to Albus, a family name of ancient Rome, later lengthened to Albinus.  Find other uses including  biology and fiction at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albus

In 1979 astronomer Carl Sagan popularized the aphorism “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” (ECREE).  But Sagan never defined the term “extraordinary.”  Ambiguity in what constitutes “extraordinary” has led to misuse of the aphorism.  ECREE is commonly invoked to discredit research dealing with scientific anomalies, and has even been rhetorically employed in attempts to raise doubts concerning mainstream scientific hypotheses that have substantive empirical support.  The origin of ECREE lies in eighteenth-century Enlightenment criticisms of miracles.  The most important of these was Hume’s essay On Miracles.  Hume precisely defined an extraordinary claim as one that is directly contradicted by a massive amount of existing evidence.  For a claim to qualify as extraordinary there must exist overwhelming empirical data of the exact antithesis.  Extraordinary evidence is not a separate category or type of evidence--it is an extraordinarily large number of observations.  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-016-9779-7

-ate  suffix   (forming adjectives) possessing; having the appearance or characteristics of:  fortunate, palmate, Latinate (forming nouns) a chemical compound, esp a salt or ester of an acid:  carbonate, stearate  (forming nouns) the product of a process: condensate  forming verbs from nouns and adjectives:  hyphenate, rusticate  Etymology:  from Latin -ātus, past participial ending of verbs ending in -āre  Collins Concise English Dictionary © HarperCollins Publishers  http://www.wordreference.com/definition/-ate

Jack Fredrickson’s first Dek Elstrom mystery, A Safe Place for Dying, was nominated for the Shamus Award for Best First Novel.  His short fiction has appeared in the acclaimed Chicago Blues and in Michael Connelly’s Burden of the Badge anthologies.  http://freshfiction.com/author.php?id=12809

PARAPHRASES from The Confessors' Club by Jack Fredrickson, #5 in the Dek Elstrom mysteries  The tailored suits sensed an intrusion of polyester--even though my blazer had a forty-five per cent wool content, a blend is a blend.  *  Movers and shakers, but I don't know what they moved and shook.  *  Sparks of culinary creativity fired into my skull, and for lunch I made peanut-buttered  sugared cereal squares.  *  Walter Newberry died aboard a ship and was preserved in a barrel of whiskey--returned to Chicago--and rolled to the cemetery still in the barrel, pickled and, no doubt, puckered.  *  Newsreaders abhor vacuums, and in talking the story up, add their own little suppositions that they are sure to be true.

Spaghetti with Pecorino Romano and Black Pepper by Rolando Beramendi  https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/spaghetti-with-pecorino-romano-and-black-pepper?utm_campaign=TST_WNK_20171227&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sfmc_Newsletter&utm_content=Weeknight%20Kitchen:%20Spaghetti%20Cacio%20e%20Pepe

The Newberry Library was founded in 1887 by a bequest of Chicago land developer and city leader Walter Loomis Newberry (1804-1868).  Newberry was an early Chicago resident, arriving in the city in 1833 from Detroit.  He quickly became involved in a variety of business ventures, and made his fortune in railroads, real estate, and banking.  The young city also counted on Newberry’s involvement in other ways:  he helped found Chicago’s Young Men’s Library Association in 1841, served on the city boards of health and education, and was president of the Chicago Historical Society from 1860 until his death.  Newberry is buried in Chicago in Graceland Cemetery.  Newberry’s will provided for the establishment of a free public library on the north side of Chicago— but only if his surviving daughters died without issue.  (At the time of Newberry’s death, Chicago did not have a public library.  The Chicago Public Library was founded six years after Newberry died, in 1874.)  The daughters, Mary Louisa Newberry and Julia Rose Newberry, both died within 10 years of their father.  Newberry’s wishes for a library were finally honored two years later, when half of his estate ($2.1 million) went towards the founding of the Newberry Library.  https://www.newberry.org/newberry-library-history-newberry-library

The Newbery Medal is named for the eighteenth-century English bookseller John Newbery.  The official proposal was approved by the American Library Association  Executive Board in 1922.  The purpose of the Newbery Medal was stated as follows:  "To encourage original creative work in the field of books for children.  To emphasize to the public that contributions to the literature for children deserve similar recognition to poetry, plays, or novels.  To give those librarians, who make it their life work to serve children's reading interests, an opportunity to encourage good writing in this field."  The Newbery Award thus became the first children's book award in the world.  http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/newberymedal/aboutnewbery/aboutnewbery

pil•fer  v.i., v.t.  to steal, esp. in small quantities.  Middle French pelfre.  verb, verbal use of late Middle English pilfre booty 1540–50  Random House Unabridged Dictionary of American English  © 2017  http://www.wordreference.com/definition/pilfer

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1822  January 8, 2018  On this date in 1904, the Blackstone Library was dedicated, marking the beginning of the Chicago Public Library system.  On this date in 1963,  Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa was exhibited in the United States for the first time, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_8