Image gallery: eating in a hat  Buildings shaped like what they sell are known as “ducks.”  Usually they sold simple foods rather than entire meals.  They were often located on busy roads where it wasn’t easy to get cars to stop.  But proprietors realized that even the most humble shed, if masquerading as a giant dog or coffee pot, just might get speeding motorists to stop for closer examination.  Ducks, which became popular in the 1930s, could be found all over the country but their birthplace is usually cited as Southern California, the land of fantasy and car culture.  The slogan “eat in the hat” was, in fact, created in Los Angeles for the Brown Derby restaurant that opened in 1926 on Wilshire Blvd.  To be considered a genuine duck, the Brown Derby should have been selling hats, but it was a restaurant, and one with a standard menu rather than just grab-and-go food.  Its fame derived from its successful courtship of gossip columnists and film stars.  Jan Whitaker  copyright 2017  See picture of the original Brown Derby Restaurant a few years after it enlarged and added a patio at https://restaurant-ingthroughhistory.com/

National Geographic Magazine/Volume 31/Number 6/Our State Flowers/List of Illustrations  Paintings by Mary E. Eaton  I typed ctrl f, Ohio--and found Ohio (red carnation) and Delaware (peach blossom) in one painting.  Iowa's state flower is the low or pasture rose.  https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/National_Geographic_Magazine/Volume_31/Number_6/Our_State_Flowers/List_of_Illustrations

Mary Emily Eaton was born November 27, 1873, in Coleford, Gloucestershire.  She attended private schools in London, and received formal tuition in art at the Taunton School of Art, also attending classes at the Royal College of Art in South Kensington, and the Chelsea Polytechnic.  She worked for a time as a painter of Worcester porcelain, before going to Jamaica in 1909 to visit her siblings.  During her two-years stay, she began painting detailed studies of butterflies and moths.  In June 1911 Eaton left for New York City, where she would remain until January 1932, employed by The New York Botanical Garden.  Among other duties, she was the principal illustrator for the Botanical Garden's journal Addisonia, painting over three-quarters of the 800 plates.  She was the principal illustrator for Britton & Rose's monumental work The Cactaceae, and her illustrations also appeared in the National Geographic Magazine.  Contemporary authorities rated her work very highly, one source calling her "the greatest of living wildflower painters" and another stating that one could not fully appreciate her talent from the sometimes mediocre reproductions of her work in Addisonia and other publications.  She was awarded the silver-gilt Grenfell Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society twice, first in 1922 and again in 1950.  In 1932, due to the Great Depression, Eaton lost her position at the Botanic Garden, after which she struggled to find enough work in America.  In 1947, she returned to England, where she died on August 4, 1961, in Cossington, Somerset.  Many of her paintings are at the British Museum of Natural History.  The Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation also has a number of her works.   Six hundred of her watercolours are part of the permanent collections of the National Geographic Society, The New York Botanical Garden, and the Smithsonian Institution.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Emily_Eaton  See also https://www.asba-art.org/article/botanica-collected-mary-emily-eaton

Homophones (literally "same sound") are usually defined as words that share the same pronunciation, regardless of how they are spelled.  If they are spelled the same then they are also homographs (and homonyms); if they are spelled differently then they are also heterographs (literally "different writing").  http://www.homophone.com/h/champagne-champaign  

March 27, 2018  Goroke, Victoria, a former stagecoach stop in southeastern Australia, pop. 200, is not the sort of place you would expect to host a daylong academic symposium.  About five hours from Melbourne by car, the town has the feel of an evacuation nearly complete.  But last December, about 40 scholars, critics, editors and general readers made the journey for a series of lectures on the work of Gerald Murnane.  The author, who has lived in Goroke for the last decade, prefers not to travel, and he had suggested the scholars convene at the local golf club, where he plays a weekly game and also regularly tends bar.  A strong case could be made for Murnane, who recently turned 79, as the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of.  Even in his home country, he remains a cult figure; in 1999, when he won the Patrick White Award for underrecognized Australian writers, all his books were out of print.  Yet his work has been praised by J.M. Coetzee and Shirley Hazzard, as well as young American writers like Ben Lerner and Joshua Cohen.  Teju Cole has described Murnane as “a genius” and a “worthy heir to Beckett.”  Last year, Ladbrokes placed his odds at winning the Nobel Prize for Literature at 50 to 1—better than Cormac McCarthy, Salman Rushdie and Elena Ferrante.  Next year, to coincide with his 80th birthday, Murnane will publish a book of poetry and outtakes from a previous novel.  But other than the poems, composed in Goroke over the last few years, Murnane says he has retired once again.  Gingerly, I prodded Murnane.  All his books had been so deeply personal, but also something any reader could enter into.  But with the Antipodean Archive, Murnane had created countries where only he could travel.  Did he harbor any second thoughts about diverting so much of his creativity into such a private pursuit?  Murnane smiled.  He could see another connection forming.  From one of his cabinets, he retrieved a typewritten manuscript page from his poetry collection.  Read it, he instructed.  That’s where we’d stop.  The poem, after explaining the archive over many lines, “the perfect summation/of my lifelong belief in the sport of horse-racing/as a better source of inspiration/than opera, theater, film, you name it,” ended like this:  Reader, if you’re urged to learn more about this imagined world, outlive me and my siblings and visit the library where my archives end up.  You’ll find there a filing cabinet full of the sort of detail that I wanted to include in this poem but failed.  You’ll read thousands of pages, though you’ll never see, unfortunately, what they revealed to me.  Mark Binelli  Read extensive article at https://www.nytimes.com/.../gerald-murnane-next-nobel-laureate-literature-australia.html  See also The Still-Breathing Author by Gerald Murnane at https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/the-still-breathing-author-gerald-murnane/

Champagne is a sparkling wine made from grapes grown in the Champagne region of France.  Champaign was a 1980s American R&B band.  Champaign, Illinois was originally called "West Urbana", the name is derived from Champaign County.  The song "Champaign, Illinois" was written by Carl Perkins and Bob Dylan.

Indignation is used to deflect further discussion or criticism of a topic.  Changing the subject abruptly deflects further discussion.  Calling people names deflects serious discussions.  Comparing unlike subjects causes confusion.

Tomato Pudding had been a staple at the Tally Ho, a tearoom at 133 22nd Street in Toledo, Ohio.  The key, apparently, to duplicating this “treasured Toledo dish” is to follow the measurements and directions exactly.  The recipe came from turncoat Carrie Wall, who made the pudding many years at the Tally Ho before defecting to the Gladieux Corp.  Find recipe at https://www.toledohistorybox.com/2012/07/25/tomato-pudding-a-toledo-original/

The last Blue Moon of 2018 is just around the corner.  If you miss it, you'll have to wait to 2020 for the next one.  The upcoming Blue Moon—the name given to the second full moon to occur in a single calendar month—rises on Saturday (March 31).  Blue Moons aren't actually blue, and they don't look different from any other full moon in the sky.  The term, which has been around for hundreds of years, apparently originally signified something that's absurd, but then shifted over time to refer to exceedingly rare events, Philip Hiscock wrote in a 2012 article for Sky & Telescope.  (Interestingly, a Blue Moon previously meant the third full moon in a season that had four of them. This sense of an "extra" full moon morphed into the definition most  people recognize today.  Language is a slippery and changeable thing!)  But Blue Moons aren't all that rare, really:  On average, they occur about once every 2.7 years.  Blue Moons are possible because it takes Earth's nearest neighbor 29.5 days to circle our planet, but each calendar month (except February) contains 30 or 31 days.  Mike Wall  https://www.space.com/40134-blue-moon-2018-last-one-until-2020.html

Kindness is always fashionable. - Amelia Barr, novelist (29 Mar 1831-1919)

Word of the Day  clerihew  noun  A humorous rhyme of four lines with the rhyming scheme AABB, usually regarding a person mentioned in the first line.  English humourist and novelist Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who invented the clerihew, died on March 30, 1956.  Wiktionary  Find clerihew examples at http://www.shadowpoetry.com/resources/wip/clerihew.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1866  March 30, 2018