Terms of Endearment is a 1983 American comedy-drama film adapted from Larry McMurtry's 1975 novel, directed, written, and produced by James L. Brooks, and starring Shirley MacLaine, Debra Winger, Jack Nicholson, Danny DeVito, Jeff Daniels, and John Lithgow.  The film covers 30 years of the relationship between Aurora Greenway (MacLaine) and her daughter Emma (Winger).  The film received eleven Academy Award nominations, and won five.  Brooks won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, while MacLaine won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and Nicholson won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.  In addition, it won four Golden Globes:  Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Actress in a Drama (MacLaine), Best Supporting Actor (Nicholson), and Best Screenplay (Brooks).  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_Endearment  James L. Brooks added the character played by Jack Nicholson--there was no such character in McMurtry's novel.

Preparing Cucumbers for Freezing   Wash, remove wax and peel.  Remove the wax from non-organic cucumbers with detergent and a brush.  Slice cucumbers thinly with a food processor or knife.  Brine Recipe:  In a large bowl, mix 2 quarts of cucumbers with chopped onions and 2 tablespoons of salt.  Let stand for 2 hours.  Rinse well with cold water, drain and return to clean bowl.  Add 2/3 cup of oil, 2/3 cup vinegar, 2/3 cup of sugar, and 1 teaspoon of celery seed.  Mix well over and refrigerate overnight.  Freezing:  Pack cucumbers in brine in rigid plastic containers or glass jars, leaving 1 inch of head space.  Freeze.  Wait at least 1 week before defrosting and eating.  Cucumbers preserved in brine will last several months in the freezer.  https://www.thriftyfun.com/tf420799.tip.html  See also Freeze Cucumbers & Learn How to Use Them at  https://www.green-talk.com/freeze-cucumbers-learn-how-to-use-them/

“The richest person in the world--in fact all the riches in the world--couldn't provide you with anything like the endless, incredible loot available at your local library.” - Malcolm Forbes (1919-1990), publisher of Forbes magazine from 1957 to 1990  https://www.middlesex.mass.edu/Profiles/archives/fall_08/PDF/Profiles_F08_4-5.pdf

Authors! Authors! presented by the Library Legacy Foundation of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library  Sally Field discusses her memoir In Pieces  Stranahan Theater & Great Hall  4645 Heatherdowns Boulevard  Toledo  Tuesday, September 25, 2018 from 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM (EDT)  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/authors-sally-field-presented-by-the-library-legacy-foundation-tickets-48556199901

The National Education Association is building a nation of readers through its signature program, NEA’s Read Across America.  This year-round program focuses on motivating children and teens to read through events, partnerships, and reading resources.  "You're never too old, too wacky, too wild, to pick up a book and read with a child."  http://www.nea.org/grants/886.htm

National Read Across America Day is an annual event that is part of Read Across America, an initiative on reading that was created by the National Education Association.  Each year, National Read Across America Day is celebrated on March 2nd, the birthday of Dr. Seuss.  However, if it falls on a weekend, it is observed in the school systems on the school day closest to March 2nd.  This day is a motivational and awareness day, calling all children and youth in every community across the United States to celebrate reading.  The first National Read Across America Day was held on March 2, 1998.  Upcoming dates are:  March 1, 2019 and March 2 in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
https://nationaldaycalendar.com/national-read-across-america-day-dr-seuss-day-march-2-unless-weekend/

Crazy 8s is a recreational after-school math club that helps kids enjoy the math behind their favorite activities!  We're nothing like your usual math club.  With Crazy 8s kids will build glow-in-the-dark structures, crack secret spy codes and play games like Toilet Paper Olympics.  https://crazy8s.bedtimemath.org/home/what

March 27, 2018  Bedtime Math's Crazy 8s club reduces children's feelings of math-related anxiety, according to a study led by Johns Hopkins University psychologists.  Crazy 8s is the nation's largest recreational after-school math club for young children.  Kids in kindergarten through second grade and third through fifth grade explore math through play, engaging in high-energy, hands-on activities that use unconventional items like glow sticks, toilet paper and beach balls.  Since 2014, 140,000 children have participated in 10,000 Crazy 8s clubs across the country.  The results of the study found that children in both age groups experienced a significant reduction in math anxiety after eight weeks of participation in the club.  The effect was more pronounced among children in the kindergarten through second grade club.  https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bedtime-maths-crazy-8s-club-reduces-kids-math-anxiety-according-to-johns-hopkins-university-300620082.html

Long-deceased Viennese doctors, unless they’re called Freud, rarely make newspaper headlines.  But one has done so on both sides of the Atlantic.  On April 19, 2018, the academic open-access journal Molecular Autism published a detailed article by the Austrian medical historian Herwig Czech about Hans Asperger, the Viennese pediatrician whose name has since the 1980s designated a syndrome that forms part of the wider autism spectrum.  Like many prominent Austrian medical figures of his generation, Asperger’s wartime record of involvement in some of the deadliest aspects of Nazi medical practice had long remained unquestioned or was glossed over.  The historian Edith Sheffer’s book Asperger’s Children was published a month after Czech’s exposé.  The term “autistic” originated with the talented Eugen Bleuler, director of the Burghölzli, the pioneering psychiatric hospital in Zurich.  In the detailed description of the group of schizophrenias he included in a 1911 book, Bleuler coined the term “autistic” to characterize thinking—something that, unlike many, he was certain was going on in his patients—and feeling that were more than usually introverted, self-absorbed, and lashed with fantasies.  Autism as a separate diagnostic category did not exist for Bleuler, Freud, or indeed for any doctor until 1943.  What brought it into being was the birth of a new field:  child psychiatry, with its close observation of behavior and its measurements and assessments carried out in schools, hospitals, or institutions.   Asperger’s name first appeared in English-language medicine in 1981, when the British psychiatrist Lorna Wing published an account of a syndrome she named after him, drawing on his 1944 treatise on autistic psychopathy.  In that paper, Asperger described children, some of them “little professors,” who lacked the ability to interact with others.  “Asperger’s disorder,” a new subcategory of PDD included in DSM-IV, was distinguished by the fact that children showed no delay or deficit in intelligence or cognitive abilities or verbal communication, but like other autistic children exhibited impairments in social interaction and behaved in repetitive and ritualistic ways.  It is unclear whether this common usage contributed to Asperger’s disorder disappearing as a separate diagnosis from DSM–V (2013) and being merged into an autism spectrum disorder.  (Asperger’s remains in the International Classification of Diseases, which is maintained by the WHO.)  Lisa Appignanesi  https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/07/19/hans-asperger-dr-death/   Thank you, Muse reader!   See also What Is the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM)? by Kendra Cherry at https://www.verywellmind.com/the-diagnostic-and-statistical-manual-dsm-2795758

August 13, 2018  If  you happen to have a box of spaghetti in your pantry, try this experiment:  Pull out a single spaghetti stick and hold it at both ends.  Now bend it until it breaks.  How many fragments did you make?  If the answer is three or more, pull out another stick and try again.  Can you break the noodle in two?  If not, you’re in very good company.  The spaghetti challenge has flummoxed even the likes of famed physicist Richard Feynman, who once spent a good portion of an evening breaking pasta and looking for a theoretical explanation for why the sticks refused to snap in two.  Feynman’s kitchen experiment remained unresolved until 2005, when physicists from France pieced together a theory to describe the forces at work when spaghetti—and any long, thin rod—is bent.  They found that when a stick is bent evenly from both ends, it will break near the center, where it is most curved.   This initial break triggers a “snap-back” effect and a bending wave, or vibration, that further fractures the stick.  Their theory, which won the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize, seemed to solve Feynman’s puzzle.  But a question remained:  Could spaghetti ever be coerced to break in two?  The answer, according to a new MIT study, is yes—with a twist.  In a paper published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers report that they have found a way to break spaghetti in two, by both bending and twisting the dry noodles.  They carried out experiments with hundreds of spaghetti sticks, bending and twisting them with an apparatus they built specifically for the task.  The team found that if a stick is twisted past a certain critical degree, then slowly bent in half, it will, against all odds, break in two.  The researchers say the results may have applications beyond culinary curiosities, such as enhancing the understanding of crack formation and how to control fractures in other rod-like materials such as multifiber structures, engineered nanotubes, or even microtubules in cells.  Jennifer Chu  http://news.mit.edu/2018/mit-mathematicians-solve-age-old-spaghetti-mystery-0813

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1934  August 14, 2018