Shall has been frowned upon by careful legal thinkers and writers for some time because of its ambiguity.  If there’s a place you don’t want ambiguity, it’s in the letter of the law.  Many institutions, which are typically slower to change, have also been trying to get rid of shall:  the US Government joined the party with the Plain Writing Act of 2010.  (Ironically, the act uses “shall” 9 times, but we’ll justify that as the old giving birth to the new.)  The government’s plain language initiative has recommended purging shall for years.  Bryan Garner, who has been recommending the elimination of shall for at least a couple of decades, gives sound advice when a legal writer is faced with the choice of using it or not:  “ . . . delete shall in all legal instruments and . . . replace it with a clearer word more characteristic of American English:  must, will, is, may or the phrase is entitled to.”  Shall was once common, at least in written English.  It appears 318 times in the US Constitution and its ratified amendments.  Which might seem unremarkable, until you notice that there are only 7,591 words in those documents.  That means shall accounts for nearly 1 word in 24, or better than 4% of the entire text.  Lincoln used shall three times in his 1863 Gettysburg Address (a bit under 1% of the 272 word total).  Some sources suggest that the word was already fading from use at that time, and that he chose it for emphasis and style.  Whether it was unfashionable or not, it remained in the rhetorical toolbox:  John F. Kennedy pulled it out 5 times in his inaugural address (1961) and 4 times in his “man on the moon” speech a year later.  More recently, President Obama used it (3 times) in his 2009 inaugural address (but not at all in his second inaugural in 2013).  Christopher Daly  https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2018/04/28/thou-shalt-not-use-shall/

                                                                                                                                     

Nikujaga is literally meat (niku) and potatoes (jagaimo) in Japanese.  It is a stewed dish seasoned with mainly soy sauce and sugar.   It is very much mom’s cooking everyone loves.  Potatoes used in Nikujaga are anything you like.   If you like soft and fluffy, use Russet potatoes.   Or if you like smooth and creamy, use Yukon.   Russet potatoes, because they are soft, tend to dissolve in the broth, but that makes this dish taste good, too.   Meat in Nikujaga has to be beef (at least I believe that).   Where I’m from (Osaka), niku is beef.   If someone serves me Nikujaga and I don’t see beef in it, that someone is in trouble.  Some parts of Japan use pork for Nikujaga, I hear.  When beef was more precious back then, people may have used pork instead.  Well, we are OK now, so let’s use beef.  Find recipe at https://www.japanesecooking101.com/nikujaga/  A Muse reader says that Nikujaga originated in the U.K. and is now considered Japanese.

As many a dynasty in Chinese history is marked by some phase of success representing the thought and life of that period, the T'ang Dynasty is commonly recognized as the golden age of poetry.  Beginning with the founder of the dynasty, down to the last ruler, almost every one of the emperors was a great lover and patron of poetry, and many were poets themselves.  A special tribute should be paid to the Empress Wu Chao or the "Woman Emperor" (684-704), through whose influence poetry became a requisite in examinations for degrees and an important course leading to official promotion.  This made every official as well as every scholar a poet.  The poems required in the examination, after long years of gradual development, followed a formula, and many regulations were established.  Not only must the length of a line be limited to a certain number of the characters, usually five or seven, but also the length of a poem was limited to a certain number of lines, usually four or eight or twelve.  The maintenance of rhymes, the parallelism of characters, and the balance of tones were other rules considered essential.  This is called the "modern" or "ruled" poetry.  In the Ch'ing or Manchu Dynasty the examination poem was standardized as a five-character-line poem of sixteen lines with every other line rhymed.  This "eight-rhyme" poem was accompanied by the famous "eight-legged" literature ( a form of literature divided into eight sections ) as a guiding light for entrance into mandarin life.  The above-mentioned rules of poetry applied first only to examination poems.  But afterwards they became a common exercise with "modern" or "ruled" poems in general.  http://www.hornbill.cdc.net.my/e-class/oldchina/qt_inte.htm  See also http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat2/4sub9/entry-5436.html

Edwin Howland Blashfield (1848–1936) was an American painter and muralist.  He studied painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts  (founded in 1805 and the first and oldest art museum and art school in the United States) after initial coursework in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He moved to Europe in 1867 to study with Léon Joseph Florentin Bonnat in Paris and remained abroad until 1881, traveling, painting, and exhibiting his work in salon shows.  His academic background in painting and extensive travels in Italy to study fresco painting melded in work marked by delicacy and beauty of coloring.  Following his early success as a genre painter, Blashfield became a widely admired muralist whose work ornamented the dome of the Manufacturers' and Liberal Arts building at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, in Chicago, several state capitols, and the central dome of the Library of Congress.  Read more and see pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_Blashfield

Meghan Markle told Good Housekeeping that not only is there "nothing as delicious (or as impressive) as a perfectly roasted chicken".  Find recipes for Perfect Roast Chicken (Engagement Chicken) at

https://barefootcontessa.com/recipes/perfect-roast-chicken and https://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/ina-garten/engagement-roast-chicken-recipe-1948980

Glamour's famous "Engagement Chicken" recipe has been around for decades and even spawned a book,"1,000 Recipes Every Woman Should Know: Engagement Chicken and 99 Other Fabulous Dishes to Get You Everything You Want in Life."  The so-called legend began in the early 1980s when magazine editor Kim Bonnell relayed the recipe to Kathy Suder, her assistant at the time.  https://www.today.com/food/why-ina-garten-thinks-roast-chicken-romantic-t119371

Grant Wood:  American Gothic and Other Fables Whitney Museum of American Art

through June 10, 2018  It is clear that the enduring power of Wood’s art owes as much to its mesmerizing psychological ambiguity as to its archetypal Midwestern imagery.  An eerie silence and disquiet run throughout his work, complicating its bucolic, elegiac appearance. Wood’s landscapes do not depict Midwestern farm life in the 1930s.  Instead, they portray his idealized memories of the 1890s farm in Anamosa, Iowa, where he lived as a young boy before moving to Cedar Rapids with his family following the death of his father.  His desire was not so much to portray a world that was becoming extinct as to recover a mythical childhood that existed only in his imagination.  Wood began his career as a decorative artist.  Even after he shifted to fine arts, he retained the ideology and pictorial vocabulary of Arts and Crafts, a movement that promoted simplicity of design and truth to materials.  Wood created his first mural in his mature, hard-edge style in 1932 to decorate the coffee shop of the Hotel Montrose in Cedar Rapids.  Called Fruits of Iowa, the mural consisted of seven panels, three of which are on view in this gallery, depicting a farm, a fruit basket, and members of a plump, ruddy-cheeked farm family.  A year later, Iowa State University in Ames commissioned him to make murals for its library under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the federal government’s Depression-era relief program for artists established in December 1933.  Wood chose as his theme a quotation from Daniel Webster’s 1840 remarks on agriculture:  “When tillage begins, other arts follow.”  His concurrent appointment as state director of the PWAP for Iowa limited his role to designing two murals for the university and supervising their execution by other artists.  The first mural to be completed, devoted to agriculture, engineering, and homemaking, was installed at the top of the stairwell leading into the library in 1934; the second mural, showing a pioneer farmer plowing a field, was installed in the library’s lobby in 1937.  Both murals can be seen in the film projected in this gallery.  In addition to designing textiles, an armchair and accompanying ottoman, and a Steuben glass vase, he illustrated two books and made cover images for eight others.  The first book he illustrated was the 1935 children’s book Farm on the Hill, written by Madeline Darrough Horn.  In 1936, he illustrated a deluxe publication of Sinclair Lewis’s novel Main Street(1920).  As he often did with his paintings, he asked friends to pose for the illustrations, dressing them in costume for the occasion. http://arthistorynewsreport.blogspot.com/2018/04/grant-wood-american-gothic-and-other.html   The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 99 Gansevoort Street in Manhattan.  See also http://noonmarkantiques.com/blog/2018/4/27/grant-wood-american-gothic-other-fables-at-the-whitney-museu.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1889  May 18, 2018  Thought for Today  A book of verses underneath the bough, A jug of wine, a loaf of bread--and thou Beside me singing in the wilderness--Oh, wilderness were paradise enow! verse 12 of The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam, poet, mathematician, philosopher, astronomer, and physician (18 May 1048-1131)  http://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html  enow may be an adjective or adverb--it means enough.  Word of the Day  Bauhaus  proper noun  A modernist style characterized by the absence of ornamentation and by harmony between the function of a building or an object and its design.  German architect Walter Gropius, who founded the Bauhaus art school in 1919, was born on this day 135 years ago in 1883.  Wiktionary