"The opera ain't over until the fat lady sings."  This modern-day proverb is credited to San Antonio sports writer/broadcaster Dan Cook.  Cook wrote the phrase in an article in 1976 and then used it again on TV in 1978.  Cook, who used the quip during an NBA playoff game, was trying to give San Antonio Spurs fans hope after their team lost a game against the Washington Bullets and was on the brink of elimination.  But historians argue that the phrase may be older than that.  It may have originated from an old Southern proverb, "Church ain't over until the fat lady sings."  At any rate, this was the name chosen for Ireland’s own ‘The Fat Lady Sings’.  http://www.thefatladysings.net/welcome.shtml

Humphrey Bogart was not the model for the Gerber Baby, nor was the Gerber Baby drawn by Bogart’s mother, a commercial illustrator.  A drawing of Humphrey as an infant was made by his mother and was used in advertisements for a different brand of baby food many years before Gerber was founded, however.  Bogart’s mother, Maud Humphrey Bogart, enjoyed a successful career as a commercial illustrator.  The connection here is obvious:  Bogart’s mother was both a commercial artist and a portrait painter of children, her drawings of baby Humphrey were used in national advertisements for a brand of baby food, and Gerber is the most well-known brand of baby food in America.  Mix these facts together, shake well, and you’ve got the makings of a baby food legend.  But Gerber did not begin marketing baby food until 1928, by which time Humphrey Bogart was nearly 30.  When the company put out the call for baby face images to use in advertising campaigns for their newly-developed baby foods, they chose Ann Cook (née Turner) of Westport, Connecticut, the daughter of cartoonist Leslie Turner.  A charcoal drawing of four-month-old Ann had been prepared and submitted to Gerber by her neighbor, a New England artist named Dorothy Hope Smith.  Ann Cook’s image began appearing on Gerber products in 1928, and it became the company’s official trademark in 1931.  The famous “Gerber baby” has appeared in every Gerber advertisement and on the packaging of every Gerber product ever since.  The identity (and even the sex) of the Gerber Baby has been the subject of much speculation over the years. The Humphrey Bogart tale has been the most prominent rumor, and more than a few woman have come forward and claimed to be “the” Gerber baby (or the mother of said baby) over the years as well.  To settle any lingering identity and ownership issues, Gerber paid Cook a one-time cash settlement of $5,000 in 1951.  (Dorothy Hope Smith was originally paid $300 for the rights to her drawing; neither she nor Cook were paid royalties for the use of the image.)  As an adult, Ann Cook raised four children of her own and taught literature and writing in Tampa, Florida,schools for 26 years.  Since retiring from teaching in 1989, she has penned two mystery novels, Trace Their Shadows and Shadow Over Cedar Key.  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/heres-looking-at-you-kid/

The true grasses, family Poaceae (formerly Gramineae), is one of the most speciose plant families, comprising over 10,000 species with a Gondwanan origin approximated at about 80-100 million years ago (although there are fossil specimens that potentially push the origin earlier).  Distributed world-wide, the true grasses are absent only in parts of Greenland and Antarctica, and are the most economically important group of monocots, as this family includes the true grains, pasture grasses, sugar cane, and bamboo.  Species in this family have been domesticated for staple food crops (grains and sugar, for example), fodder for domesticated animals, biofuel, building materials, paper and ornamental landscaping, among other things.  Grasslands cover at least 20% of the earth’s surface.  http://eol.org/pages/8223/details  See also List of plants in the family Poaceae at https://www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-plants-in-the-family-Poaceae-2036227

speciose  adjective  (taxonomy)  Rich in species, such as when many species are members of a single genus.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/speciose

Forget Inspector Montalbano; Archimedes was Sicily’s first famous detective.  Archimedes was born in 287 B.C. in the coastal city of Syracuse.  The ancient Romans and Greeks considered Archimedes the greatest mathematician who had ever lived.  He also made great innovations in astronomy, geometry, mechanics, hydrostatics and optics and he made far more inventions--certainly far more which actually worked--than Leonardo Da Vinci.  Archimedes’ genius for engineering and general problem-solving made him the king’s “Go-To” man for all problems.  The best known story about Archimedes in modern times is the tale of how he solved a crime scientifically, CSI-style. King Hiero had given a large amount of gold to a goldsmith, to make a crown for a temple statue.  When the crown came back it was very beautiful, but looked a bit of a funny colour.  King Hiero suspected the goldsmith had kept some of the the gold for himself, and replaced it with the same weight of silver.  Could Archimedes prove whether he had really done this, King Hiero wanted to know?  The crown was very nice, he emphasised (even if it did look a bit silvery) so Archimedes had to figure it out without melting it down.  Silver and gold have different densities, so Archimedes needed to know both the weight and the volume of the crown.  The weight was easy, but how to figure out the volume of something so twiddly?  He realised that if he filled a container to the brim with water and then put the crown in it, the exact volume of the crown would be displaced and could be measured.  Legend has it that he tested this idea by filling his bath to the brim and getting into it, and was so excited he ran outside stark naked shouting “Eureka! I’ve got it!”  In reality he would not have shouted Eureka, as the ancient Greek for for “I’ve got it” was “Heureka”.  Since the letter H was a tiny weeny letter in the Greek alphabet, just the size of an apostrophe, people always seem to forget it.  Read more and see graphics at https://siciliangodmother.com/2014/02/03/eureka-archimedes-the-sicilian-detective/

Purple cauliflower gets its beautiful hue, which can vary from pale to jewel-toned, from the presence of the antioxidant anthocyanin, which is also found in red cabbage and red wine.  Orange cauliflower was first discovered in Canada in 1970, although it took years of crossbreeding before it was widely available.  The color comes from a genetic mutation that allows the plant to hold more beta carotene.  It also contains about 25% more vitamin A than white cauliflower.  Kelli Foster  Link to recipes at https://www.thekitchn.com/look-purple-and-orange-cauliflower-ingredient-intelligence-33348

When October Books, a small bookshop in Southampton, England, was moving to a new location down the street, it faced a problem.  How could it move its entire stock to the new spot, without spending a lot of money or closing down for long?  The shop came up with a clever solution:  They put out a call for volunteers to act as a human conveyor belt.  As they prepared to "lift and shift", they expected perhaps 100 people to help.  "But on the day, we had over 200 people turn out, which was a sight to behold," Amy Brown, one of the shop's five part-time staff members, told NPR.  Shoulder to shoulder, community members formed a line 500 feet long:  from the stockroom of the old shop, down the sidewalk, and onto the shop floor of the new store.  Cafes brought cups of tea to the volunteers.  People at bus stops joined in.  Passersby asked what was happening, then joined the chain themselves.  October Books, founded in 1977, calls itself "more than a bookshop."  It sells political and current affairs books, fiction and children's books, and and some food and fair-trade products.  "There's been people who've been visiting us and buying books from us for 40 years" as the store has moved around the city numerous times, Brown said.  "So a lot of people feel quite invested in it as a thing."  The new, permanent location of October Books has its grand opening on November 3, 2018.  Laurel Wamsley  See pictures at https://www.npr.org/2018/10/30/662134671/how-do-you-move-a-bookstore-with-a-human-chain-book-by-book

National Endowment for the Arts  Oct 30, 2018  In her novel, The Dark Descent of Elizabeth Frankenstein, young adult Kiersten White retells Mary Shelley’s classic.  In White’s book, we get the story from Elizabeth Lavenza—the childhood companion and then wife of scientist Victor Frankenstein.  Kiersten White closely follows the outline of Shelley’s Frankenstein, but by changing the point of view to Elizabeth, we get another story entirely about Victor Frankenstein, the monster, and Elizabeth herself.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bjfVB43B00  31:02

He's been referred to as the JRR Tolkien of Chinese literature and the grandfather of martial arts novels--but very few people have heard of him outside the Chinese-speaking world.  Novelist Louis Cha, who wrote under the name Jin Yong, died on October 30, 2018 in Hong Kong at the age of 94.  He had become a household name across many Chinese-speaking parts of Asia, having sold millions of books and inspiring a whole genre of TV shows, comics and even video games.

Read more and see pictures at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-46040266

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  October 31, 2018  Issue 1979  304th day of the year