Hackney-based baker Claire Ptak has been selected to make Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding cake.  She will make a lemon elderflower cake which will be smothered in buttercream and decorated with fresh flowers.  Kensington Palace said the couple asked the professional to make a creation incorporating "the bright flavours of spring" for their May 19 wedding.  California-raised Claire formerly worked as a pastry chef for Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California.  She started her own business as a stall in Broadway Market, East London, cooking from home, before opening her organic bakery in 2010.  Find a Belvoir Fruit Farms recipe for lemon elderberry cake at https://www.thesun.co.uk/fabulous/food/5855421/how-make-lemon-elderflower-wedding-cake-meghan-markle-prince-harry-recipe-tips/  The royal wedding will be shown on CBS May 19, 2018.  Coverage begins at 4 a.m. ET (1 a.m. PT)

Log Cabin at Palmer Park by Amy Elliott Bragg for historicdetroit.org   Lizzie Merrill Palmer was growing weary of the traffic, noise and crowds of the city.  She longed for a retreat, a place where she could live as people had in the early days:  simply, peacefully and on plenty of land.  It just so happened that her husband, Sen. Thomas W. Palmer, had plenty of land--a few hundred acres of it along Woodward Avenue in what was then considered the country.  He had inherited it from his grandfather James Witherell, a Supreme Court judge of the Michigan Territory, and had ”played with it” since the 1860s, growing his holdings and farming the land.  He kept an orchard and raised herds of cattle and Percheron horses.  In 1885, Thomas Palmer gave his wife a present:  plans for a rustic log cabin, just like they used to see in the old days, built to her specifications, suitable for summering and entertaining.  The Cabin, designed by upstart architecture partners George D. Mason and Zachariah Rice, was completed in 1887.  (Rice later married the Palmer’s adopted daughter Grace.)  “On the outside, the Log Cabin looks like a substantial, genuine log house,” Crocket McElroy wrote in “Souvenir History of Palmer Park.”  “On the inside it comes pretty near being a good modern house.”  The two-story Log Cabin is built from oak logs (with the bark still on!) on a brick foundation.  Wooden awnings shade the windows.  Two chimneys rise from each end of the house.  Inside, red brick fireplaces warm the dining room on the north end and the parlor on the south end.  The walls were plastered, the floor laid with white maple and walnut planks, and the grand staircase carved from oak.  For a while, the Log Cabin was a major tourist attraction, and in the summer visitors from all over the world thronged in for a look.  It stayed open until 1979, when the city gave its artifacts to the Detroit Historical Society for safekeeping and closed the Log Cabin to the public.  On June 24, 2012, the cabin was opened to the public for a quick peek as part of a fund-raiser to restore the landmark.  Efforts are ongoing.  You can learn more at http://www.peopleforpalmerpark.org/   Read more and see pictures at http://historicdetroit.org/building/log-cabin-at-palmer-park/

Designed by Mies van der Rohe in 1945 and constructed in 1951, the Farnsworth House is an exemplary representation of both the International Style of architecture as well as the modern movement’s desire to juxtapose the sleek, streamline design of Modern structure with the organic environment of the surrounding nature.  Mies constructed this glass box residence of “almost nothing” for Dr. Edith Farnsworth as a country retreat along the Fox River in Plano, IL.  It continued to be a private residence for over 50 years until Landmarks Illinois and the National Trust for Historic Preservation purchased it in 2003.  Today it is owned and managed by the Trust and the site is open as a public museum.  The significance of the Farnsworth House was recognized even before it was built.  In 1947 a model of the Farnsworth House was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  Describing it, along with the unbuilt Resor House, as a “radical departure from his last European domestic projects,” Philip Johnson noted that it went further than the Resor house in its expression of the floating volume:  “The Farnsworth house with its continuous glass walls is an even simpler interpretation of an idea.  Here the purity of the cage is undisturbed.  Neither the steel columns from which it is suspended nor the independent floating terrace break the taut skin.”  In the actual construction, the aesthetic idea was progressively refined and developed through the choices of materials, colors and details.  While subsequent debates and lawsuits sometimes questioned the practicality and livability of its design, the Farnsworth House would increasingly be considered, by architects and scholars alike, to constitute one of the crystallizing and pivotal moments of Mies van der Rohe’s long artistic career.  See pictures at https://farnsworthhouse.org/

gyre  noun  a circular or spiral motion; whirl; revolution;

a circular or spiral form; ring or vortex

Classical Latin gyrus from Classical Greek gyros, a circle:  see gyrate

verb  gyred, gyr′ing  to whirl  Webster's New World College Dictionary, Fifth Edition Copyright © 2014 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.  All rights reserved  http://www.yourdictionary.com/gyre

gyro  noun  meat, usually lamb, roasted on a vertical spit, then thinly sliced,topped with onions, and usually served in a sandwich of pita bread  Modern Greek gŷros literally, turn, revolution; see gyre

gyro  a combining form meaning “ring,” “circle,” “spiral,” used in the formation of compound words:  gyromagnetic; gyroscope  http://www.dictionary.com/browse/gyro

An ocean gyre is a large system of circular ocean currents formed by global wind patterns and forces created by Earth’s rotation.  The movement of the world’s major ocean gyres helps drive the “ocean conveyor belt.”  The ocean conveyor belt circulates ocean water around the entire planet.  Also known as thermohaline circulation, the ocean conveyor belt is essential for regulating temperature, salinity and nutrient flow throughout the ocean.  Ocean gyres circle large areas of stationary, calm water.  Debris drifts into these areas and, due to the region’s lack of movement, can accumulate for years.  These regions are called garbage patches. The Indian Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, and North Pacific Ocean all have significant garbage patches.  The circular motion of the gyre draws in the debris, mostly small particles of plastic.  Eventually, the debris makes its way to the center of the gyre, where it becomes trapped and breaks down into a kind of plastic soup.  Read much more at https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/ocean-gyre/

Tom Wolfe, the brilliant, zeitgeist-channeling journalist and novelist who could absorb fascinating subcultures within American life and transform them into electric prose, died May 14, 2018 in a New York hospital.  As a reporter in the late 1950s, Wolfe quickly developed a nonfiction style that borrowed from the tenets of literature, delivering dynamic, character-driven pieces that would help give birth to a movement known as New Journalism.  Whether profiling One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey and his hippie pals the Merry Pranksters or America's first astronauts, Wolfe had a dramatist's gift for the telling detail and for crafting page-turning suspense.  Inventing household phrases like "the Me Decade" and "the Right Stuff," he eventually set his sights on a novel, using his journalistic talents to produce a deeply researched and utterly absorbing portrait of 1980s New York with the blockbuster 1987 book The Bonfire of the Vanities.  Born in March 1931, Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr. grew up in Richmond, Virginia, holding onto his genteel Southern accent all his life.  Attending Washington and Lee University, he studied English literature--there was no writing major--and edited the school newspaper's sports section, along the way co-founding the college's literary magazine Shenandoah.  After receiving his doctorate at Yale, he worked as a reporter in Springfield, Massachusetts before moving to The Washington Post and then landing at the New York Herald Tribune, whose brash reporting style was summed up by its motto:  "Who says a good newspaper has to be dull?"  Wolfe's first major breakthrough came in 1963 with a piece he pitched Esquire about Southern California's world of custom cars.  After doing the reporting, though, he panicked about how to write the piece.  On the advice of his editor, he sent over his typed-up notes, and the vivid, stream-of-consciousness observations became "There Goes (Varoom! Varoom!) That Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby," one of the landmark documents in the formation of New Journalism--a flashy, giddy prose style whose champions, including idiosyncratic writers like Hunter S. Thompson, were charting the country's changing, turbulent mood during the Sixties.  Wolfe continued to write in subsequent decades, earning good reviews and more terrific sales for his 1998 follow-up novel, the National Book Award-nominated A Man in Full.  But he never again quite captured the pulse of the times as seismically as he had with his previous work.  Along the way, he also accumulated famous detractors, such as novelists John Updike, Norman Mailer and John Irving, who accused The Bonfire of the Vanities of being a bastardization of the novelistic form.  In his inimitable, strutting, flamboyant style, Wolfe responded by writing a mocking piece called "My Three Stooges," criticizing them for failing to do any research for their own recent books, which left their work feeling sterile.  Tim Grierson  https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/tom-wolfe-right-stuff-author-and-new-journalism-legend-dead-at-87-w520325

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1888  May 16, 2018