Friday, September 7, 2018


To the press alone, checkered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.  James Madison, Report on the Virginia Resolutions, 1798  http://www.marksquotes.com/Founding-Fathers/Madison/index5.htm

Air fryers are convection ovens in a bucket, meaning that like a regular oven, they have a heating element and like a slightly fancier oven with a convection feature, they have a fan that circulates the hot air, keeping the temperature consistent throughout the cooking area.  Thanks to faster-than-a-normal-oven heat transfer capabilities from that rapidly circulating air, convection ovens can shorten the cooking time of some foods, potentially giving them a crispier exterior that brand-conscious marketeers seem to consider to be similar to fried food.  These things take up a lot of counter space—pretty much the footprint of a five-gallon bucket, and two-thirds the height.  The fan that that runs whenever it's on is loud, effectively sucking the conversation or ambient music right up into the ether.  Another thing was how ridiculously tiny the cooking basket is; at nine inches by nine inches by two and three-quarter inches high, two large potatoes effectively maxed out its capacity.  They're loud, even the big ones have a surprisingly small capacity, they don't do anything significantly better than an oven and you probably have an oven anyway.  They'd also require bumping your toaster and coffeemaker onto a storage shelf.  Instead, if you're into the air-frying idea, save the potentially significant amount of money you'd spend on one (high-end models can cost $400 or more) and upgrade to a convection feature the next time your real oven croaks.  Joe Ray  Read about the pros and cons of air fryers at https://www.wired.com/story/air-fryers/

Avocado + Coconut Noodles with Edamame Beans, Lime and Ginger by Jessica Elliott Dennison

Author Debbie Macomber's name is pronounced MAY-cumber
https://www.bookbrowse.com/authors/author_pronunciations/detail/index.cfm/author_number/1956/debbie-macomber  Debbie Macomber is a #1 New York Times bestselling author and one of today’s most popular writers with more than 200 million copies of her books in print worldwide.  Macomber’s novels have spent over 1,000 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.  Thirteen of these novels hit the number one spot.  Link to her blog and sign up for her newsletter at  https://debbiemacomber.com/about

Mox nix! – From the German phrase, "Es macht nichts!"  Often used by U.S. servicemen to mean "It doesn't matter" or "It's not important".  stein or beer stein – A beer mug made of stoneware or earthenware.  The term is derived from German Steinzeug, "stoneware," a material that went out of fashion for beer mugs at the end of the 19th century and was replaced by glass.  Find other phrases from German at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pseudo-German_words_adapted_to_English

Moxie is a brand of carbonated beverage that was among the first mass-produced soft drinks in the United States.  It continues to be regionally popular today.  It is produced by the Moxie Beverage Company of Bedford, New Hampshire, which, through several levels of wholly owned subsidiaries, is part of the Kirin Holdings Company of TokyoJapan.  As a result of widespread brand advertising, the brand name has become the word "moxie" in the English language, meaning "courage, daring, or spirit".  Moxie's flavor is unique, as it is not as sweet as most modern soft drinks and is described by some as bitter.  Moxie is flavored with gentian root extract, an extremely bitter substance that was reputed to possess medicinal properties.  It originated around 1876 as a patent medicine called "Moxie Nerve Food".  Moxie is closely associated with the state of Maine and was designated the official soft drink of Maine on May 10, 2005.  Its creator, Dr. Augustin Thompson, was born in Union, Maine, but Moxie was created and first produced in Lowell, Massachusetts.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moxie  

Find a list of state beverages as designated by the various states at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_beverages  The first known usage of declaring a specific beverage a "state beverage" within the US began in 1965 with Ohio designating tomato juice as their official beverage.  The most popular choice for state beverage designation is milk (or a flavored milk) with 21 out of the 28 states (26 states and 2 territories with official beverages) making milk their official beverage, while Rhode Island chose coffee-flavored milk.  Alabama and Virginia are the only two U.S. states to have alcoholic beverages as their state beverages. 
                                                                                                         
Turmeric is a spice that comes from the turmeric plant.  It is commonly used in Asian food.  You probably know turmeric as the main spice in curry.  It has a warm, bitter taste and is frequently used to flavor or color curry powders, mustards, butters, and cheeses.  But the root of turmeric is also used widely to make medicine.  It contains a yellow-colored chemical called curcumin, which is often used to color foods and cosmetics.  Find uses for turmeric at https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-662/turmeric


August 24, 2018  A 109-year-old Montana woman once again celebrated her birthday at the popular Big Sky Country restaurant chain, Montana Club.  Helen Self was once again dining at the Montana Club to take advantage of their generous birthday discount.  So generous, in fact, that they pay her to eat there.  The Montana Club has a unique birthday special.  Whatever your age is, that’s the percentage you get off your bill.   By the birthday laws of Montana Club, Self, who was born in 1909, gets 109% off of her tab.  In other words, she gets money back for dining there.  Rob Fox  See picture at https://rare.us/rare-life/food-and-drink/100-year-old-birthday-discount/

September 6, 2018  Experts use a combination of language use, statistics and computer science to help figure out who wrote documents that are anonymous or possibly plagiarized.  They’ve even solved crimes and historical mysteries that way.  Some call the field forensic linguistics, others call it stylometry or simply doing “author attribution.”  The field is suddenly at center stage after an unidentified “senior administration official” wrote in the Times that he or she was part of a “resistance” movement working from within the administration to curb Trump’s most dangerous impulses.  “My phone has been ringing off the hook with requests to do that analysis and I just don’t have the time,” says Duquesne University computer and language scientist Patrick Juola.   “Language is a set of choices.  What to say, how to say and when to say it,”Juola says.  “And there’s a lot of different options.”  One of the favorite techniques of Juola and other experts is to look at what’s called “function words.”  These are words people use all the time but that are hard to define because they more provide function than meaning.  Some examples are “of,” ”with,” ”the,” ”a,” ”over” and “and.”  “We all use them but we don’t use them in the same way,” Juola says.  “We don’t use them in the same frequency.”  Same goes with apostrophes and other punctuation.  For example, do you say “different from” or “different than?” asks computer science and data expert Shlomo Argamon of the Illinois Institute of Technology.  Women tend to use first- and second-person pronouns more—“I,” ”me” and “you”—and more present tense, Argamon says.  Men use “the,” ”of,” ”this” and “that” more often, he says.  But he is less optimistic that the Trump opinion piece case will be cracked for various reasons, including the New York Times’ editing for style and possible efforts to fool language detectives with words that someone else likes to use such as “lodestar.” Mostly, he’s pessimistic because to do a proper comparison, samples from all suspects have to be gathered and have to be similar, such as all opinion columns as opposed to novels, speeches or magazine stories.  Juola testified in about 15 trials and handled even more cases that never made it to court.  His biggest case was in 2013, when a British newspaper got a tip that the book “The Cuckoo’s Calling” by Robert Galbraith was really written by Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling.  In about an hour, Juola fed two Rowling books, “The Cuckoo’s Calling” and six other novels into his computer, analyzed the language patterns with four different systems and concluded that Rowling did it.  A couple of days later, Rowling confessed.  It was far from the first time that language use fingered the real culprit.  The Unabomber’s brother identified him because of of his distinctive writing style.  Field pioneers helped find a kidnapper who used the unique term “devil strip” for the grassy area between the sidewalk and road.  The phrase is only used in parts of Ohio.  Even in politics, words are poker tells.  In 1996, the novel “Primary Colors” about a Clintonesque presidential candidate set Washington abuzz trying to figure out who was the anonymous author.  An analysis by a Vassar professor and other work pointed to Newsweek’s Joe Klein and he finally admitted it.  But the literary sleuthing goes back to the founding of the republic.  Historians had a hard time figuring out which specific Federalist Papers were written by Alexander Hamilton and which were by James Madison.  A 1963 statistical analysis figured it out:  One of the many clues came down to usage of the words “while” and “whilst.”  Madison used “whilst”; Hamilton preferred “while.”

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1948  September 7, 2018 

No comments: