John Green is one of the biggest young-adult authors
in the world. Now he wants to get small. Four of his best-selling
novels—including “The Fault in Our Stars”—will be released in October, 2018
in a radically new miniature format. All
the original words will be there, but the pages will be squeezed down to
something about the size of a cellphone.
Green first saw these mini-books in the Netherlands, where they’re
called Flipbacks or Dwarsliggers (dwarscrossways; liggen to lie).
“I thought the quality of the bookmaking was really magnificent,” he
says. When his U.S. publisher asked
whether he wanted to be a guinea pig for Flipbacks in the United States, he readily
agreed. Dutch printer Royal Jongbloed,
which started as a Bible publisher, debuted the format in 2009. Since then, Jongbloed has helped publish more
than 1,000 titles—including works by Dan Brown, John le Carré and Agatha
Christie—in Flipback format in several European countries. The spine, a unique hinge that allows the
chunky little book to remain open, is the heart of this feat of
miniaturization. And the special paper—long
used for Bibles—is miraculously thin without being see-through. When Strauss-Gabel decided to work with
Jongbloed to bring Flipback versions of Green’s titles to the United States,
everything about the appearance of his books had to be rethought, from how big
the font should be to how many lines could fit on the pages. Ron Charles
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/john-green-wants-you-to-read-tiny-books/2018/08/02/3110b5bc-94e6-11e8-a679-b09212fb69c2_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.74330ac5f70e See also http://www.dwarsligger.com/
IN THE
SUMMER, TAKE IT LOW AND SLOW Find recipes
for slow-cooked meats at
https://www.spicesinc.com/p-6332-low-slow-oven-baked-ribs.aspx
and http://www.geniuskitchen.com/recipe/low-and-slow-boston-butt-pork-bbq-oven-method-436350
and https://houseofnasheats.com/slow-roasted-oven-bbq-beef-brisket/
and https://www.delicioustable.com/pulled-pork-oven-roasted-low-slow/
Saphar meaning to number was the ancient Hebrew word for the
English "cipher". The word was
and still may be used as a term of derision to mock an unworthy ignorant
person. Organ makers refer to the word
as meaning a sound volunteered by a imperfect organ without pressing any key. It may be nothing; a naught, a zero,
according to mathematicians. But we
shall speak of it as indicating a method of secret communication. According to the comprehensive Oxford English
Dictionary, these forms of the word cipher were also acceptable in the
Seventeenth Century: sipher, cyfer,
cifer, ciphre, sypher, ziphre, scypher, cyphar, cyphre, ciphar, zifer,
cypher. Francis Bacon who wrote about it
spelled it as ciphras in Latin. Perhaps
the earliest allusion is in Homer's Iliad. Cryptography prospered during the Middle Ages,
but most systems were elementary and based on the substitution of a different
letter of the alphabet (a "Caesar") while others used numerals or
invented symbols. Examples of these have
been found in 9th and 10th Century manuscripts.
But with the European Renaissance and the later English revival of
interest in arts and literature cryptology became a separate science at the
same time that its practitioners searched for a new universal language. The mysteries of cryptology had been well
guarded and kept in monasteries or in the secret archives of princes and kings;
few of its methods were openly published.
But the thirst for means of clandestine communication became stronger in
England and on the Continent. War and
politics demanded such tools. Wayne Shumaker, a master of old Latin and
German, has discussed the copious writings of Johannes Trithemius (1462-1526)
who was a German monk. Trithemius' book Polographiae libri sex (1518),
written in Latin, was mostly concerned with history and theology but the author
has been called the first theoretician of cryptography. His Steganographia was
circulated while the manuscript was still in composition and John Dee, who
owned the largest private library in England copied at least half of it in
1563. Thomas Penn Leary Read
much more and see graphics at https://igw.tuwien.ac.at/peterf/dud_npr/kryptologie_im_16ten_jh/cryptolo.htm
Every industry has its jargon.
Catering is no different. Some terms are: Dead
Stock – this is left-over
wine stock (bottles) ordered by the crate for a special event that has taken
place. Dualing Menus –
this is another term for Split Entrees. Instead of having an eight ounce
steak, you can have a four ounce steak and a four ounce piece of fish (surf and
turf). This is a good way to introduce
exotic items to a meat and potato crowd.
It also allows attendees to ‘trade’ an item they do not like. Intermezzo – an
intermission in meal service just before the main course. Sorbet is usually served, to cleanse the
palate. Napery –
tablecloths, overlays, runners, napkins and other linens used on the dining
table. Read more at https://blog.cvent.com/events/finances-budget/catering-terms-mean/
August 14, 2018 Last week, two tourists in Italy both
tried to snap a selfie in front of Rome's Trevi
Fountain in at the same time. They
confronted one another--first verbally, but then the interaction became
physical, before disintegrating into an eight-person brawl as their family
members joined in the fight. The
police said that two
Canadian tourists had been fined 450 euros ($513) each for bathing in the
fountain--another strict no-no, despite the scene from Federico Fellini's 1960 movie
"La Dolce Vita." The baroque water structure opened in
1762 and has a starring role in classic movies including "Three Coins in
the Fountain," and "Roman Holiday," starring Audrey Hepburn. Meanwhile,
in the Italian island of Sardinia, officials are cracking down on another kind of tourism issue: sand
thievery. Thieves are being
warned that they could be fined anywhere from 500 euros (roughly $580) to 3,000
euros (roughly $3,482) if they are caught pilfering from the island's beautiful
beaches. Tourism issues aren't confined
to Italy, though. Chile's Easter Island is limiting the number of people who can visit the
island as well as the length of stay and Mount Everest is
attempting to deal with the human impact of waste on the world's highest peak. Francesca Street
August 16, 2018 A
battery of forensic chemical tests carried out on a mummy that dated from
3,700-3,500 BC revealed the recipe and confirmed that it was developed far
earlier and used more widely than previously thought. The Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, is now
home to the mummy in question. The
findings are published in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Dr Stephen Buckley, an archaeologist from the
University of York, told BBC News that this mummy "literally embodies the
embalming that was at the heart of Egyptian mummification for 4,000
years". Dr Buckley and his
colleagues worked out the chemical "fingerprint" of every ingredient,
although each element could have come from a number of sources. So the basic recipe was: a plant oil - possibly sesame oil; a
"balsam-type" plant or root extract that may have come from
bullrushes; a plant-based gum--a natural sugar that may have been extracted
from acacia; crucially, a conifer tree
resin, which was probably pine resin. When
mixed into the oil, that resin would have given it antibacterial properties,
protecting the body from decay. Victoria
Gill Read more and see pictures at https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45175764
August
16,2018 Scientists decoded the genome
of rice in 2002. They
completed the soybean
genome in 2008. They
mapped the maize
genome in 2009. But only
now has the long-awaited
wheat genome been fully sequenced. It is arguably the most critical crop in the
world. It’s grown on more land than
anything else. It provides humanity with
a fifth of our calories. While the
genome of Arabidopsis—the first plant
to be sequenced—contains 135 million DNA letters, and the human genome contains
3 billion, bread wheat has 16 billion.
Just one of wheat’s chromosomes—3B—is
bigger than the entire soybean genome. The
bread-wheat genome is really three genomes in one. About 500,000 years ago, before humans even
existed, two species of wild grass hybridized with each other to create what we
now know as emmer wheat. After humans
domesticated this plant and planted it in their fields, a third grass species
inadvertently joined the mix. This
convoluted history has left modern bread wheat with three pairs of every
chromosome, one pair from each of the three ancestral grasses. In technical lingo, that’s a hexaploid genome.
Ed
Yong Read more, see picture, and link to
video at https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/08/wheat-genome-is-best-thing-since-sliced-bread/567673/
Aretha Franklin,
who died August 16, 2018 at 76, was more than the undisputed “Queen of Soul.” She was one of the most important musicians of
our time, a genius who soared above genres and expectations to create music
that will live forever. She was not an
opera singer, yet she brought down the house at the Grammys in 1998 when she filled in for an ailing Luciano Pavarotti
and delivered an unforgettable version of the Puccini aria “Nessun Dorma.” She was not a jazz singer, but her renditions
of standards such as “Love for Sale” and “Misty” were cited by
the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz in awarding her the organization’s
highest honors. Jerry Wexler, the
legendary producer at Atlantic Records who shepherded much of Franklin’s
oeuvre, wrote a piece for Rolling Stone in 2004
in which he recalled the day she told him about her idea for reworking a song
that had been a hit for the great Otis Redding. “It was already worked out in her head,”
Wexler wrote. The song was titled
“Respect.” When Redding heard Franklin’s
version, Wexler recalled, he said simply, “She done took my song.” “She was a brilliant pianist, a combination
of Mildred Falls—Mahalia Jackson’s accompanist—and Thelonious Monk,” Wexler
wrote. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-queen-is-dead-long-live-the-queen/2018/08/16/8888a6b4-a18a-11e8-83d2-70203b8d7b44_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.6c72bacf08ac See Why Nobody Sang the Beatles Like Aretha by Rob Sheffield at https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/aretha-franklin-beatles-eleanor-rigby-712267/
http://librariansmuse.blogpost.com Issue 1936
August 17, 2018
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