Wednesday, March 7, 2018


March 5, 2018  For scientists who monitor the health of the Chesapeake Bay, the nation's largest estuary, simply watching grass grow underwater can be very, very exciting.  The floor of the Chesapeake Bay off Solomon's Island "had no grass since 1972," says Robert Orth, a marine scientist at the College of William & Mary, and there's a undertone of amazement in his voice.  "It was just last year, for the first time, we saw small patches of grass appear in front of the lab.  Truly remarkable."  This week, Orth and a dozen other scientists published results from years of monitoring seagrass in the Chesapeake.  And the news is good.  The area covered by beds of seagrass has expanded dramatically over the past 30 years.  There have been setbacks during years, but Jonathan Lefcheck, the lead author of the new study, from the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Science, says they were caused by short-term changes in weather.  After accounting for those effects, he says, there's still a long-term trend of increasing seagrass cover.  What's more, he says, this trend is clearly the result of success in reducing the amount of a particular kind of pollution:  nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen.  Federal and state governments have paid farmers to adopt practices that keep nutrients from flowing into the bay.   are planting "cover crops" to capture nutrients that otherwise might wash away, installing fences to keep cattle out of streams, and spreading manure only when it's likely to stay where it belongs.  The government also has forced sewage treatment plants to stop releasing so much nitrogen and phosphorus.  When nutrient levels are lower, algae don't proliferate, which means the water is clearer and more sunlight can reach seagrass on the floor of the estuary.  "A small change in water clarity, and those grasses can expand to cover a lot more area," says William Dennison, from the University of Maryland's Center for Environmental Science, who is one of the new study's co-authors.  Dennison says that expanding seagrass beds lead to a "positive cascade" of effects on the entire ecosystem, because seagrass offers food and shelter to many other aquatic species.  "You go down into this [seagrass] bed, and you just sit still, and you watch the animals come out," he says.  "We call it the secret garden [for] all kinds of little animals and small fish and baby shellfish that spend part of their lives in this underwater forest."   In particular, seagrass plays an "incredible role" in the complicated life cycle of the blue crab, one of the bay's signature species, says Orth.   Among the bay's defenders, there's a lot of concern at the moment, because the Trump administration is proposing to cut federal funding for the Chesapeake Bay cleanup by 90 percent.  Dan Charles  https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/03/05/590347724/grass-is-back-in-the-chesapeake-and-crabs-will-follow

John Cleese:  how to write the perfect farce   In 1966 I saw Feydeau’s A Flea in Her Ear at the Old Vic, with Albert Finney, directed by Jacques Charon of the Comédie-Française.  It was the most brilliant comedy I’d ever seen.  In the following years I took in more of his work:  The Lady from Maxim’sCat Among the PigeonsHotel ParadisoFitting for Ladies and The Turkey.  Once I had fully realised what a master of construction Feydeau was (and knowing I could never match him) I conceived an evil and despicable plan.  In 2008 I began to work my way through Feydeau’s less known works.  My original plan was to steal a few of his best ideas and stitch them together into one play, but early on I read one, Monsieur Chasse, which the translator had retitled 13 Rue de L’Amour.  It immediately struck me as flabby and shapeless, and when I found Act 1 ended with an unmotivated physical attack, I discarded it.  A week later, though, I picked it up again, and ploughed on out of a sense of duty.  This time, bit by bit, I began to realise that a good plot was beginning to emerge from the uninspiring dialogue.  Excited, I raced through to Act 3, and was thrilled that I had discovered a heavily camouflaged gem.  Read more and see pictures at https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2017/feb/17/john-cleese-farce-bang-bang-fawlty-towers-rat-manuel-feydeau

Georges Feydeau (1862–1921) was a French playwright of the era known as the Belle Époque.  He is remembered for his many lively farces.  He wrote over sixty plays and was a forerunner of absurdist theatre.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Feydeau


Lobio, a bean stew, is served at every table in the Caucasus (the border region between Europe and Asia) for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  It is traditionally served in a clay pot with lavash bread.  Bakeries also sell bread stuffed with lobio for a delicious snack on the go.  Dried beans make the best stew, but four cans (15–16 ounces each) kidney beans, drained and rinsed, may be substituted.  Then, rather than bean cooking liquid, use canned vegetable broth to complete the dish.  Ground mustard seed can be substituted for fenugreek.  Find recipe at https://foodchannel.com/recipes/lobio-red-kidney-bean-stew

Presidents as Poets   Whether it be the anguished love poems of a youthful George Washington, the religious poetry of John Quincy Adams, the melancholy verse of Abraham Lincoln, or the sturdy, plainspoken poems of Jimmy Carter, many presidents of the United States have turned to poetry at certain points in their lives as an outlet for their feelings and thoughts, or to explore the resources of the English language.  Presidents as Poets:  Poetry Written by United States Presidents is a guide to the poetic endeavors of U.S. presidents.  Select a president from a list to learn about the context in which his poetry was written and to find samples of his poetry.  https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/prespoetry/

Poetic Presidents:  We’ve matched 12 commanders-in-chief with the poets that inspired them.  Read essay by Elizabeth Harball and see pictures at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69875/poetic-presidents

Home in means to direct on a target.  The phrasal verb derives from the 19th-century use of homing pigeons, but it resurged in the 20th century to refer to missiles that home in on their targets.  It’s also commonly used metaphorically, where to home in on something is to focus on and make progress toward it.  Hone in began as an alteration of home in, and many people regard it as an error.  It is a very common, though, especially in the U.S. and Canada—so common that many dictionaries now list it—and there are arguments in its favor.  Hone means to sharpen or to perfect, and we can think of homing in as a sharpening of focus or a perfecting of one’s trajectory toward a target.  So while it might not make strict logical sense, extending hone this way is not a huge leap.  Outside North America, home in prevails by a huge margin.  It also prevails in North America, but only by a ratio of about two to one.  Hone in is common even in technical, scientific, and military contexts, where one might expect home in to prevail.  A few American and Canadian publishers clearly favor home in as a matter of policy, but most apparently have no strictly enforced policy one way or the other.

A team of librarians at the White House Historical Association, which aims to preserve and provide access to White House history, has spent the past two years working to digitize about 25,000 behind-the-scenes photographs to offer a revealing glimpse of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.  As Betsy Klein of CNN reports, the images, which were previously uncatalogued, capture scenes from 1962 and 1987, spanning the Kennedy to the Reagan administrations.  Since the only information available for most slides in storage was the month and year the film was developed, librarians had to work like detectives, paying close attention to details of the photo slides to identify how the images fit into the timeline of historical events and other records.  For example, librarians were able to identify civil rights leaders in a photo from a 1966 meeting with President Lyndon Johnson by using Johnson’s daily diary.  A team of historians fact-checked the photo information, making revisions when neccessary, before the images were digitzed online.  Klein reports the ongoing project is part of a partnership with Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud storage and support.  Other images on the organization’s new online library include scenes of press reporters during the Johnson administration--men in workspaces on telephones and reporters relaxing on leather chairs.  The Gemini 4 NASA team also makes an appearance.  Not only do the images show the astronauts being presented with the Exceptional Service Medal, but they also capture the astronauts at a more candid moment, as they play in the White House pool with their families at the invitation of Johnson.  Founded in 1961 as an effort by Jacqueline Kennedy, the White House Historical Association works to preserve and provide access to White House history.  The organization also collects information on first ladies and other important figures in the White House, art and decorations from the space and architectural changes throughout the White House’s history.  Additionally, it’s charged with commissioning an annual White House christmas ornament.  Klein writes the team is only halfway done with its digitization project, and many more images are set to make their way from storage to digital library in the coming months.  For now, you can check out the trove of images at https://www.whitehousehistory.org/digital-library  Julissa Treviño  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/rare-images-depicting-life-work-white-house-being-digitized-180968269/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1854  March 7, 2018  Find events, holidays and observances, births, and deaths on this date at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March_7

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