Part and parcel  The Oxford English Dictionary illustrates its variety over the past couple of centuries with these:  parcel of work, parcel of weather, parcel of nonsense, parcel of spray, parcel of rogues and parcel of shares.  It can mean a quantity of a commodity offered as a single transaction, a lot, so a tiny package of diamonds offered for auction and your three-tonner load of equipment are both parcels.  All of these in various ways perpetuate the first sense of a parcel as being a constituent or part of some larger whole, a portion or division.  This reflects its origins:  parcel has come to us via Old French from the post-classical Latin particella, a part or portion.  That makes part and parcel a tautology, since both words in effect mean the same thing.  English loves this kind of doublet:  nooks and crannies, hale and hearty, safe and sound, rack and ruin, dribs and drabs.  Many derive from the ancient legal practice of including words of closely similar meaning to make sure that the sense covers all eventualities:  aid and abet, fit and proper, all and sundry.  Part and parcel is a member of this second group—it appeared in legal records during the sixteenth century.  Southern US English has the mildly humorous variant passel—deriving from a nineteenth-century pronunciation of parcel and often preceded by whole—suggesting a largish group of people or things (passel of problems, passel of accusations, passel of experts).  http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-par3.htm

On August 6,1926, on her second attempt, 19-year-old Gertrude Ederle became the first woman to swim the 21 miles from Dover, England, to Cape Griz-Nez across the English Channel, which separates Great Britain from the northwestern tip of France.  Ederle was born to German immigrants on October 23, 1906, in New York City.  She did not learn to swim until she was nine years old, and it was not until she was 15 that she learned proper form in the water.  Just two years later, at the 1924 Paris Olympics, Ederle won a gold medal in the 4 x 100 meter relay and a bronze in the 100- and 400-meter freestyle races. In June 1925, Ederle became the first woman to swim the length of New York Bay, breaking the previous men’s record by swimming from the New York Battery to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, in 7 hours 11 minutes.  That same summer, Ederle made her first attempt at crossing the notoriously cold and choppy English Channel, but after eight hours and 46 minutes, her coach, Jabez Wolff, forced her to stop, out of concern that she was swallowing too much saltwater.  Ederle disagreed and fired Wolff, replacing him with T.W. Burgess, a skilled Channel swimmer.  On August 6, 1926, Ederle entered the water at Cape Gris-Nez in France at 7:08 a.m. to make her second attempt at the Channel.  The water was predictably cold as she started out that morning, but unusually calm.  Ederle persevered through storms and heavy swells, and, finally, at 9:04 p.m. after 14 hours and 31 minutes in the water, she reached the English coast, becoming the sixth person and first woman to swim the Channel successfully.  Furthermore, she had bettered the previous record by two hours.  Ederle damaged her hearing during the Channel swim, and went on to spend much of her adult life teaching deaf children in New York City to swim.  She died in 2003 at the age of 98.  https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/gertrude-ederle-becomes-first-woman-to-swim-english-channel

Some countries have multiple capitals.  In some cases, one city is the capital for some purposes, and one or more others are capital for other purposes, without any being considered an official capital in preference to the others.  Find list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_multiple_capitals

If you live in or have ever visited a citrus-growing region like California or Florida, you may have come across a large tree with what looked like thousands of tiny, oval-shaped oranges.  However, these likely weren’t oranges but kumquats, the most diminutive member of the citrus family.  Kumquats may be the most radical of the citrus fruits, not just for their size, but because of how you eat them.  Kumquats are ready to go when you simply pluck them off the tree and eat away.  The paper-thin skin is where the sugar lies, and there’s virtually no bitter pith.  The flesh is extremely, mouth-puckeringly, sour.  The seeds, while sometimes a bit crunchy, are small and edible.  So what are kumquats used for?  Most people use them for kumquat marmalade to be used as a spread, or for baking and cooking purposes.  Others simply sliver them and add them to salads.  Many chefs also pickle and preserve them in sugar, salt, or vinegar and use them as condiments for other dishes.  In Chinese and Vietnamese cuisine, kumquats are often smashed with honey, ginger, or even salt and made into a tisane to heal colds and flu.  Garrett McCord  Read about different kinds of kumquats at https://www.thespruceeats.com/what-are-kumquats-2774810

Kiwi berries  Hmmm, the best way to describe these kumquat-sized  "Passion Poppers" ?  Well, first of all they are cute.  These grape-tomato-sized, greenish-brown fruits simply scream adorable.  They are not furry like kiwis (so no peeling is necessary) but they look and taste like kiwis.  Carolina Santos-Neves  https://www.epicurious.com/archive/blogs/editor/2008/10/candy-thats-goo.html  Link to recipes using kiwi berries at  https://food52.com/blog/9100-hardy-kiwi-small-in-stature-but-built-tough

beneficiate:  Treat (a raw material) to improve its properties.  It seems to be most commonly done through grinding, but can be accomplished in other ways, such as flotation, leaching, and magnetic separation.  Here’s a little on the topic of beneficiation, purely from the economic side, from the government of South Africa.  It’s all about adding value as materials move up the chain.  The first use of beneficiation in English is cited as 1873, in an American mining publication.  Christopher Daly  https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2018/09/30/beneficiation-it-probably-doesnt-mean-what-you-think-it-does/

Author Washington Irving’s fairytale character Rip Van Winkle is a prime exemplar of shuteye carried to the extreme.  During Colonial America times, the humble Dutch-American villager falls into a deep sleep in the bucolic Catskill Mountains of Upstate New York, awakening some twenty years later, having no clue that he’d slept through the entire Revolutionary War era.  Many literary scholars are of the opinion that Irving drew on earlier folktales of long-slumbering characters, awakening befuddled, finding themselves in another world, so to speak.  Similar yarns have come to us from ancient Greek, Germanic, Irish, Scots, Native American, and Talmudic lore.  Alex McCrae  http://www.wordsmith.org/awad/awadmail848.html

Orson Welles on Cold Reading  Welles describes a "shuteye" with a hotel clerk analogy  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjPsnfysrp8  3:40

The comedy of A Confederacy of Dunces is writ large in and between its many lines:  a grand farce of overeducated white trash, corrupt law enforcement, exotic dancing and the nouveau riche in steamy New Orleans.  The Pulitzer committee thought highly enough of Toole's comic prowess to give his only novel the Prize posthumously.  Therein lies the tragedy of this huge and hugely funny book:  John Kennedy Toole didn't live to see this now-classic novel published.  He committed suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two.  It was his mother who was responsible for bringing his book to public light, pestering the hell out of Walker Percy, who was teaching at Loyola in 1976, to read it until finally that distinguished author relented.  In his foreword to A Confederacy of Dunces, Percy laments the body of work lost to the world of literature with the author's death, but rejoices "that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers."  Sharon Shulz-Elsing  http://www.curledup.com/dunces.htm  A Confederacy of Dunces was ranked #58 on the Great American Read list.  See  https://www.pbs.org/the-great-american-read/results/

Despite its unique name, the Hunter’s Moon will not appear much different from other full moons throughout the year, becoming officially full at 12:45 p.m. EDT October 31, 2018 and continuing to appear full throughout Wednesday night.  Many of the names given to full moons date back hundreds of years to the Native Americans and were passed on to colonial Americans when they arrived in North America.  “The Algonquin Native American tribes referred to October’s moon as the full Hunter’s Moon because [it signaled the] time to go hunting in preparation for winter,” the Old Farmer’s Almanac said.  “Since the harvesters have reaped the fields, hunters can easily see the fattened deer and other animals that have come out to glean (and the foxes that have come out to prey on them)."  This is just one of many names given to October’s full moon over the centuries by cultures all around the world.  Brian Lada  https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/how-the-hunters-moon-got-its-name-and-how-to-see-it-on-wednesday-night/70006433

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  October 30, 2018  Issue 1978  303rd day of the year  Word of the Day  talaria  noun  (Greek mythology, Roman mythology)  The winged sandals worn by certain gods and goddesses, especially the Roman god Mercury (and his Greek counterpart Hermes).  Wiktionary