The American coot, also known as the mud hen, is a
duck-like waterbird. It is a common bird in the U.S. and is closely
related to rails and crakes, belonging to the same order as cranes. Ohio's minor league baseball team is also
known as the Toledo Mud Hens because of the high population of American coots
that lived near the team's stadium in Bay View Park. The mud hen grows to around 14 inches in
length, has a wingspan of almost 28 inches and weighs over 31 oz. It is black to dark gray in color with a white
patch below the tail. The bird's beak is
white with black markings near the tip, and is triangular in shape like that of
a chicken. The feet are not webbed like
a duck's, but have large, broad, separate toes that help the bird to swim. Its wings are short and rounded at the tips so
it is hard for the birds to take off, but once airborne they are good flyers. The bird is found year-round in the western
and south-central regions of the U.S. During
the winter months, the birds migrate to the southeastern U.S. and into Central
America. In summer, migration takes them
further east and north into much of Canada. It is a fresh water bird that can be found
near ponds, lakes and marshes. The bird
is also sometimes seen in tidal marshes where water is more salty. https://animals.mom.me/what-is-a-mud-hen-12578117.html
Original Mud Hens
Find recipe by Christy Jordan
for sugary bar cookies with chocolate chips and mini-marshmallows at https://www.southernplate.com/original-mud-hens/
Labneh--a
yogurt cheese of middle eastern origin--is remarkably versatile and very easy
to make at home. Also known as lebni,
labni or laban, labneh is found all across the middle east where it’s popularly
rolled into small balls, served with unrefined extra virgin olive oil and used
as a condiment. Preparing this labneh recipe at home requires little
more than fresh yogurt and a swath of cheesecloth. In our home we often substitute labneh for
regular cream cheese or for Neufchâtel or even sour cream when none is available.
Mixing labneh with olive oil and fresh herbs such as parsley, dill or marjoram
makes a dip for vegetables and breads that is charming and elegant in its
simplicity. Simple food is often the best food. Jenny
McGruther https://nourishedkitchen.com/labneh/
Glossary of sheep terms includes bummer, flerd, gummer, lanolin, mob and wool
pool
There are a number of different theories regarding the origins of domestic sheep. However, most sources agree that they originated from mouflon. There are two wild populations of mouflons still in existence: the Asiatic mouflon which is still found in the mountains of Asia Minor and southern Iran and the European mouflon of which the only existing members are on the islands of Sardinia and Corsica. Sheep were among the first animals domesticated. An archeological site in Iran produced a statuette of a wooled sheep which suggests that selection for woolly sheep had begun to occur over 6000 years ago. The common features of today's sheep were already appearing in Mesopotamian and Babylonian art and books by 3000 B.C. Another indication of the early domestication is the fact that they are the only species of livestock unable to return to a feral or wild state. Selection for wool type, flocking instinct and other economically important traits over the centuries has resulted in more than 200 distinct breeds of sheep occurring worldwide. Modern breeding schemes have also resulted in an increasing number of composite or synthetic breeds which are the result of a crossing of two or more established breeds. Find a list of breeds including American Blackbelly, Clun Forest, Dorper, Kooka, and mouflon at http://afs.okstate.edu/breeds/sheep/
a·plomb noun Self-confident
assurance; poise [French, from Old French a plomb,
perpendicularly : a, according to (from Latin ad-; see AD-) + plomb, lead weight (from Latin plumbum,
lead).] The
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition copyright
©2018 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. https://ahdictionary.com/
In classical
ballet, aplomb refers to an
unwavering stability maintained during a vertical pose or movement. The word is of French origin, coming
from à plomb, "according to the plummet". French ballet master Jean-Étienne Despréaux used the term in
1806 to refer to the dynamic balancing that is fundamental to all well-executed
ballet positions and movements. In 1887, German dance theorist Friedrich
Albert Zorn analogized aplomb in dancers as "the sureness of touch of the
pianist". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aplomb
"Whose woods these
are, I think I”—whoa! We can’t quote any
more of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” because it is
still under copyright as this magazine goes to press. But come January 1, 2019, we, you, and
everyone in America will be able to quote it at length on any platform. At
midnight on New Year’s Eve, all works first published in the United States in
1923 will enter the public domain. It
has been 21 years since the last mass expiration of copyright in the U.S. That deluge of works includes not just
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” which appeared first in the New Republic in 1923, but hundreds of
thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and
films. After January 1, any record label
can issue a dubstep version of the 1923 hit “Yes! We Have No Bananas,” any
middle school can produce Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian
can publish Winston Churchill’s The World
Crisis with her own extensive annotations. Any artist can create and sell a feminist
response to Marcel Duchamp’s seminal Dadaist piece, The Large Glass (The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors,
Even) and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s
original The Ten Commandments and
post it on YouTube. “The public domain
has been frozen in time for 20 years, and we’re reaching the 20-year thaw,”
says Jennifer Jenkins, director of Duke Law
School’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain. The release is unprecedented, and its impact
on culture and creativity could be huge. We have never seen such a mass entry into the
public domain in the digital age. The
last one—in 1998, when 1922 slipped its copyright bond—predated Google. “We have shortchanged a generation,” said
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. “The 20th century is largely missing from the
internet.” We
can blame Mickey Mouse for the long wait. In 1998, Disney was one of the loudest in a
choir of corporate voices advocating for longer copyright protections. At the time, all works published before
January 1, 1978, were entitled to copyright protection for 75 years; all
author’s works published on or after that date were under copyright for the
lifetime of the creator, plus 50 years. Steamboat Willie,
featuring Mickey Mouse’s first appearance on screen, in 1928, was set to enter
the public domain in 2004. At the urging
of Disney and others, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension
Act, named for the late singer, songwriter and California representative,
adding 20 years to the copyright term. Mickey
would be protected until 2024—and no copyrighted work would enter the public
domain again until 2019, creating a bizarre 20-year hiatus between the release
of works from 1922 and those from 1923. Glenn
Fleishman https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/first-time-20-years-copyrighted-works-enter-public-domain-180971016/?preview
What was your favorite library
story of 2018? LIS News (Scandalous Since 1999) takes a look back at some of the notable library
stories from the past year. See the list
at https://lisnews.org/ten_stories_that_shaped_2018
Forget Book Trailers: Book Playlists are the New Hotness posted by Tim Carmody
Read article at https://kottke.org/18/11/book-playlists-are-the-new-book-trailers
100 Notable Books of 2018 The
year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The
New York Times Book Review. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/19/books/review/100-notable-books.html
Jane Langton, a prolific New England author who
evoked a palpable sense of place in her mysteries and children's books, and who
illustrated many of her works herself, died December 22, 2018 near her home in
Lincoln, Mass. at the age of 95. The
titles of Langton's books reflect her devotion to the Concord/Lincoln region:
"The Transcendental Murder" (1964), "Dark Nantucket Noon"
(1975), "Emily Dickinson Is Dead" (1984), "God in Concord"
(1992). Langton received the Mystery
Writers of America's Grand Master Award last year for a series of 18 books,
published between 1964 and 2005, whose central character, Homer Kelly, is a
tweedy Harvard professor and erstwhile police lieutenant. The fifth in the series, "Emily Dickinson
Is Dead," received an award from the Nero Wolfe Society. After graduating as the valedictorian of her
high school class, she started studying astronomy at Wellesley College and
later transferred to the University of Michigan, where she met her future
husband, William Gale Langton. She had
hoped to continue with astronomy at Michigan. But since this was during World War II,
"all the scientists had left" to join the war effort, and there were
none left to teach. She switched to art
history, graduating with a bachelor's degree (and straight A's) in 1944. She earned a master's in art history at
Michigan in 1945. When her husband went
to Harvard to study physics, she earned a second master's in art history, at
Radcliffe, in 1948. They moved to
Lincoln in 1950, and she studied at the Boston Museum School from 1958 to 1959.
She illustrated a number of her books
with her own pen-and-ink drawings. Her
writing career began with children's books. Her first was "The Majesty of
Grace," later published as "Her Majesty, Grace Jones" (1961). She went on to write the Hall Family
Chronicles, a series of eight books for young adults set in Concord, starting
with "The Diamond in the Window" in 1962. The fourth in the series, "The
Fledgling" (1980) was a Newbery Honor book. Katharine
Q. Seelye, New York Times
Jolabokaflod--the Christmas book flood. In Iceland, people
exchange books on Christmas Eve and spend the night reading. Every year since 1944, the Icelandic book
trade has published a catalogue that is sent to every household in the country
in mid-November. Read about the
tradition at https://jolabokaflod.org/about/founding-story/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com December 28, 2018 Issue 2012
362nd day of the year
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