Meat Loaf with Eggplant  Slice and peel 1 large or 2 small eggplants, cut into cubes.  Place in boiling water and cook 5 minutes.  Quickly scoop out eggplant with slotted spoon and stir into your favorite meat loaf mixture.  Bake as usual.  Add 1 teaspoon curry (unless curry is already in the meat loaf mixture.)  Betty Houston  adapted from Culinary High Notes, a full score of recipes from the Toledo Opera Guild  copyright 1984 

  

Writing for busy people--comments by Tayari Jones   Having a job means there’s time you’re not writing, but that’s true with anything in your life.  The world isn’t going to stop spinning for you to write your book.  No matter who you are, no matter what situation you have, life beckons.  It is challenging, sometimes, to find time to write.  But I don’t have to have the whole day to write.  If I can write for two or three hours in a day, I can make a lot of progress by the end of the week.  Small, workable goals make progress.  Even when I’m not writing, I’m thinking about my writing, so I feel like I’m writing all the time.  I think it’s a new thing, this idea that writers believe that doing anything other than writing is an imposition.  Art has never been convenient for anyone.  No one’s life is convenient.  With artists, it seems like more of an outrage that your life is inconvenient.  But it can be done.  When we tell people that they must write every day, it makes people who work, people who perform childcare, eldercare, people who have other responsibilities think, “Oh, I can never be a writer.”  It makes people feel that writing is for a privileged class of people who, if they weren’t writing, would be eating bonbons.  But we make the time.  Slow but steady.  A page a day is more than 300 pages in a year.  The majority of writers do things other than write.  Quite often with the people who are “writing full-time,” it’s not because they’re supporting themselves from their books; it’s that something in their life supports them. Tayari Jones is the author of the novels Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow and An American Marriage.  She has written for The New York Times, Tin House, The Believer and Callaloo.  Her awards and honors include the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Debut Fiction, a Lifetime Achievement Award in Fine Arts from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Radcliffe Institute. https://www.authorsguild.org/industry-advocacy/q-a-council-member-tayari-jones/

Pearl S. Buck (birth name Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker) (1892-1973) was the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, with her novel The Good Earth, in 1932.  Born in Hillsboro, West Virginia to Caroline (Stulting) and Absalom Sydenstricker, Buck and her southern Presbyterian missionaries parents went to Zhejiang, China in 1895.  She was brought up there and first knew the Chinese language and customs, especially from Mr. Kong, and then was taught English by her mother and her teacher.  She was encouraged to write at an early age.  By 1910, she left for America and went to Randolph-Macon Women's College, where she would earn her degree in 1914.  She then returned to China, and married an agricultural economist, John Lossing Buck, on May 13, 1917.  In 1921, she and John had a daughter with phenylketonuria, Carol.  The small family then moved to Nanjing, where Pearl taught English literature at University of Nanking.  In 1925, adopted Janice (later surnamed Walsh) and subsequently 8 more adoptees.  In 1926, she left China and returned to the United States for a short time in order to earn her Master of Arts degree from Cornell University.  Buck began her writing career in 1930 with her first publication of East Wind:  West Wind.  In 1931 she wrote her best known novel, The Good Earth, which is considered to be one of the best of her many works.  The story of the farmer Wang Lung's life brought her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1932.  Her career would keep flourishing, and she won the William Dean Howells Medal in 1935.  Pearl was forced to flee China in 1934 due to political tensions.  She returned to the United States, and obtained a divorce from her husband.  She then married Richard J. Walsh, president of the John Day Publishing Company, on June 11, 1935, and adopt six other children.  In 1938 she won the Nobel Prize for Literature, after writing biographies of her parents, The Fighting Angel.  In her lifetime, Pearl S. Buck would write over 100 works of literature.  She wrote novels, short stories, fiction, and children's stories.  She dealt with many topics including women, emotions (in general), Asians, immigration, adoption, and conflicts that many people go through in life.  In 1949, she established Welcome House Inc., the first adoption agency dedicated to the placement of bi-racial children, particularly Amerasians.  https://www.biblio.com/pearl-s-buck/author/258

           

The English word colonel stems from the Italian word colonnello, which was first used around the 15th century, during the Italian Renaissance.  Colonnello derives from the Italian word for ‘column’, which is columna.  A colonnello, then, was the commander of a column of soldiers.  Colonnello was one of many words from Italy that began to spread across Europe during this time period.  Eventually, colonnello was adopted by the French.  However, when translating the word to their own language, colonnello became coronel.  Why?  In linguistics, this process is called dissemination.  It occurs when two instances of the same sound occur close to each other in a word, and people change one of the instances to something else.  In this case, the first ‘l’ was changed to ‘r’.  Over time, the French word coronel made its way over to Britain.  The English accent further transformed the word, overshadowing the second ‘o’, and emphasizing the ‘r’.  The word eventually came to be pronounced similar to ‘kernel’ in Britain.  By the late 16th century, scholars in Britain began producing translations of old Italian treatises.  The original spelling of the word began to influence how the word was spelled in both Britain and France.  Eventually, France would switch from their coronel spelling back to ‘colonel’, which was more in line with the original Italian word.  The French would even alter their pronunciation.  The British weren’t so eager to switch though.  While they reverted to the same spelling as the French, they kept their pronunciation with the ‘r’ sound.  Mark Heald 

https://www.sporcle.com/blog/2017/08/why-is-colonel-pronounced-kernel/

Traditionally, when you speak of your own good fortune, you follow up with a quick knock on a piece of wood to keep your luck from going bad.  More recently, simply saying the phrase “knock on wood”—or “touch wood” in the UK—has replaced actually knocking.  Authors Stefan Bechtel and Deborah Aaronson both suggest two connections between knocking on wood and these spirits in their respective books, The Good Luck Book and Luck:  The Essential Guide.  The first possible origin of knocking on wood is that it's a much more laid-back version of the ruckus that pagan Europeans raised to chase away evil spirits from their homes and trees or to prevent them from hearing about, and ruining, a person’s good luck.  The other origin they suggest is that some of these tree worshippers laid their hands on a tree when asking for favor from the spirits/gods that lived inside it, or did it after a run of good luck as a show of gratitude to the supernatural powers.  Over the centuries, the religious rite may have morphed into the superstitious knock that acknowledges luck and keeps it going.  Matt Soniak  http://mentalfloss.com/article/50079/why-do-we-knock-wood

Greenland is an autonomous country of the Kingdom of Denmark located east of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago between the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans.  While part of the North American continent, Greenland is more culturally associated with Europe, particularly Norway and Denmark.  In 2018, Greenland has an estimated population of 56,565, which ranks 192nd in the world.  Greenland is the 12th largest country in the world in terms of area, but its population is just 56,565 in 2018 with a population density of only 0.026 people per square kilometer, which ranks 244th in the world (the least densely populated country).  In Greenlandic (or Kallallisut), the country is Kalaallit Nunaat, or "land of the Kalaallit," who are the indigenous Greenlandic Inuit people who live in the western part of the country.  The languages of Danish and Greenlandic have been used officially since the country established home rule in 1979 and most people can speak both languages, although Kalaallisut became the only official language in 2009.  Danish remains the most widely used language in the country's administration and higher education.  http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/greenland-population/

Toledo-Lucas County Public Library presents:

Authors! Authors! presents Michael Pollan 
March 27 | 7 p.m. | Stranahan Theater
Authors! Authors! presents Natalie Morales
April 19 | 7 p.m. | Stranahan Theater

Authors! Authors! presents Piper Kerman
May 9 | 7 p.m. | Stranahan Theater  

Do Not Miss Out - Get Your Tickets Now!

ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, on March 21, 2018 named John L. Hennessy, former President of Stanford University, and David A. Patterson, retired Professor of the University of California, Berkeley, recipients of the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award for pioneering a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures with enduring impact on the microprocessor industry.  Hennessy and Patterson created a systematic and quantitative approach to designing faster, lower power, and reduced instruction set computer (RISC) microprocessors.  Their approach led to lasting and repeatable principles that generations of architects have used for many projects in academia and industry.  Today, 99% of the more than 16 billion microprocessors produced annually are RISC processors, and are found in nearly all smartphones, tablets, and the billions of embedded devices that comprise the Internet of Things (IoT).  Hennessy and Patterson codified their insights in a very influential book, Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach, now in its sixth edition, reaching generations of engineers and scientists who have adopted and further developed their ideas.  Their work underpins our ability to model and analyze the architectures of new processors, greatly accelerating advances in microprocessor design.  The ACM Turing Award, often referred to as the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” carries a $1 million prize, with financial support provided by Google, Inc.  It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing.  Hennessy and Patterson will formally receive the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award at the ACM’s annual awards banquet on Saturday, June 23, 2018 in San Francisco, California.  Read more at https://www.acm.org/media-center/2018/march/turing-award-2017

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1862  March 23, 2018