Berber Frittata  The Atlas Mountains are a huge draw for avid trekkers looking for challenging peaks and spectacular scenery—as well as for wandering chefs in search of authentic Berber cuisine.  I was staying in a tiny village called Tacheddirt to learn about traditional barbecue, and on my last night there, a trekking guide named Abdul arrived at my friend’s house, starving hungry.  He knocked up a frittata made with spiced vegetables, herbs, olives, and eggs.  Served with masses of soft bread, it was perfect for anyone who had had a long day on the mountain.  And if you’re not on the mountains, it’s superb served with a fresh salad as a light lunch.  https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/berber-frittata  Read about the Atlas Mountains and see pictures at https://www.intrepidtravel.com/adventures/atlas-mountains-guide/

THE 'FUTURE BOOK' IS HERE, BUT IT'S NOT WHAT WE EXPECTED   Researcher Alan Kay created a cardboard prototype of a tablet-like device in 1968.  He called it the "Dynabook," saying, “We created a new kind of medium for boosting human thought, for amplifying human intellectual endeavor.  We thought it could be as significant as Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press 500 years ago.”  In the 1990s, Future Bookism hit a kind of beautiful fever pitch.  Brown University professor Robert Coover, in a 1992 New York Times op-ed titled “The End of Books,” wrote of the future of writing:  “Fluidity, contingency, indeterminacy, plurality, discontinuity are the hypertext buzzwords of the day, and they seem to be fast becoming principles, in the same way that relativity not so long ago displaced the falling apple.”  And then, more broadly:  “The print medium is a doomed and outdated technology, a mere curiosity of bygone days destined soon to be consigned forever to those dusty unattended museums we now call libraries.”  By the mid-2000s, there still were no real digital books.  The Rocket eBook was too little, too early.  Sony launched the eink-based Librie platform in 2004 to little uptake.  Interactive CD-ROMs had dropped off the map.  We had Wikipedia, blogs, and the internet, but the mythological Future Book—some electric slab that would somehow both be like and not like the quartos of yore—had yet to materialize.  Peter Meirs, head of technology at Time, hedged his bets perfectly, proclaiming:  “Ultimately, there will be some sort of device!”  The iPhone launched in June 2007, the Kindle that November.  Then, in 2010, the iPad arrived.  High-resolution screens were suddenly in everyone’s hands and bags.  Physical books today look like physical books of last century.  And digital books of today look, feel, and function almost identically to digital books of 10 years ago, when the Kindle launched.  The biggest change is that many of Amazon’s competitors have gone belly up or shrunken to irrelevancy.  The digital reading and digital book startup ecosystem that briefly emerged in the early 2010s has shriveled to a nubbin.  Amazon won.  Trounced, really.  As of the end of 2017, about 45 percent (up from 37 percent in 2015) of all print sales and 83 percent of all ebook sales happen through Amazon channels.  There are few alternatives with meaningful mind- or market share, especially among digital books.  Yet here’s the surprise:  We were looking for the Future Book in the wrong place.  It’s not the form, necessarily, that needed to evolve—I think we can agree that, in an age of infinite distraction, one of the strongest assets of a “book” as a book is its singular, sustained, distraction-free, blissfully immutable voice.  Instead, technology changed everything that enables a book, fomenting a quiet revolution.  Funding, printing, fulfillment, community-building—everything leading up to and supporting a book has shifted meaningfully, even if the containers haven’t.  Perhaps the form and interactivity of what we consider a “standard book” will change in the future, as screens become as cheap and durable as paper.  But the books made today, held in our hands, digital or print, are Future Books, unfuturistic and inert may they seem.  Almost half of author earnings now come from independently published books.  Independent books don’t outsell big-five books, but they offer higher royalty rates—roughly 70 percent versus 25 percent.  For the first time—perhaps since the invention of the printing press—authors and small presses have viable independent options beyond the “traditional” publishing path with its gatekeepers.  Kickstarter launched in 2009.  Although it wasn’t the first crowdfunding platform, it quickly became the largest and most influential.  Since launch, Kickstarter has helped fund more than 14,000 “publishing”-related projects, collecting some $134 million.  The 10 best-funded publishing projects on Kickstarter alone generated more than $6 million in funding—and then reaped much more in post-publication sales.  The Library of Congress began distributing books on cassette tape in 1969, but audiobooks only gained significant publishing market share in recent years.  Once physical, now almost entirely digital and ephemeral, audiobooks have gone from a rounding error to generating $2.5 billion in revenue in 2017, up 22 percent from the prior year.  It turns out smartphones aren’t the best digital book reading devices (too many seductions, real-time travesties, notifications just behind the words), but they make excellent audiobook players, stowed away in pockets while commuting.  Top-tier podcasts like Serial, S-Town, and Homecoming have normalized listening to audio or (nonfiction) booklike productions on smartphones. In The Book of Sand, Borges wrote of an infinite book:  "It was then that the stranger told me:  'Study the page well.  You will never see it again.'"  Describing in many ways what it feels like to browse the internet or peek at Twitter.  Our Future Book is composed of email, tweets, YouTube videos, mailing lists, crowdfunding campaigns, PDF to .mobi converters, Amazon warehouses, and a surge of hyper-affordable offset printers in places like Hong Kong.  Craig Moo  Read much more and see graphics at https://www.wired.com/story/future-book-is-here-but-not-what-we-expected/

Historically, a bushel has sometimes been a measure of weight, sometimes of volume, sometimes of both.  As a standard unit it appears to date back to immediately after the Norman conquest of England (1066 CE), and was defined in terms of other measures (pounds or gallons).  Note that while these units had a fixed relationship with each other, precision was not great.  If you consider that a penny (twenty of which comprised an ounce) was fixed at thirty-two grains of dry wheat, then you can immediately see both a margin for error and the probability of greater uncertainty for larger quantities.  Trying to compare units from a past era and today isn’t always easy.  As another source notes, when discussing pre-Norman measures (including the sester, amber, and seam):  the values of these units, as well as their relationships to one another, varied considerably over the centuries so that no clear definitions are possible except by specifying the time and place in which the units were used.  A US bushel is 8 dry gallons; more precisely, it’s 2,150.42 cubic inches.  When used for weight, a bushel is dependent on the crop being measured, and so varies considerably:  a bushel of wheat weighs nearly double a bushel of oats.  In simple reverse order (which is easier to understand because it accumulates), 2 dry pints make a quart; 8 quarts make a peck; 4 pecks make a bushel.  A bushel is 8 dry gallons, or 4 pecks, or 32 quarts, or 64 pints (all dry, not liquid).  Christopher Daly  Read more at  https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2018/10/31/i-love-you-a-bushel-and-a-peck-a-kenning-and-a-quart-and-a-pint-and-a-firlot/

"There is a temptation for an actor to editorialize what they're doing.  And you can't do that with Pinter.  It's almost like a musical score.  His lines are so specific, but they can mean different things to different people, like an alternating current."  Peter Riegert  "The negative is the equivalent of the composer's score, and the print the performance."  Ansel Adams  "My parents are my backbone.  Still are.  They're the only group that will support you if you score zero or you score 40."  Kobe Bryant  "Sports are such a great teacher.  I think of everything they've taught me:  camaraderie, humility, how to resolve differences."  Kobe Bryant  "Golf is a great example to me.  Golf is a metaphor of life.  I mean, every  shot.  You have this beautiful hole, this beautiful opportunity to get a good score."  Nick Saban  https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/score  "Life is easier if you don't keep score"!  Muse reader

A GUIDE TO MIXES  (vary if you wish)  sides:  capers and raisins; sauces:  mustard and jelly; dips:  soft cheese and seeds, yogurt and spice or herb; sweetener:  cooked squash, carrots, sweet potatoes or a combination

PREFERRED PLACE NAME PRONUNCIATIONS  East Liberty (Pittsburgh neighborhood)  Sliberty * Wilkes-Barre ( Pennsylvania town)  Willks-BARRY * Carnegie Hall (New York City concert hall)  ker-NEGG-ee * Worcester (Massachusetts city)  WUSS-TER * Wooster (Ohio city)  WUSS tur * Kissimmee ( Florida city)  ka-SIM-mee * Biloxi (Mississippi city)  bih-LUCK-see

In 1699 French colonists formed the first permanent settlement in French Louisiana, at Fort Maurepas, now in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, and referred to as "Old Biloxi".  The name of Biloxi in French was Bilocci, a transliteration of the term for the local Native American tribe in their language.  Labeled along with "Fort Maurepas" on maps dated circa year 1710/1725, the name was sometimes used in English as "Fort Bilocci".  In 1720, the administrative capital of French Louisiana was moved to Biloxi (or Bilocci) from Mobile (or La Mobile).  French Louisiana, part of New France, was known in French as La Louisiane in colonial times.  In modern times it is called La Louisiane française to distinguish it from the modern state of Louisiana.  Due to fears of tides and hurricanes, colonial governor Bienville moved the capital of French Louisiana in 1722 from Biloxi to a new inland harbor town named La Nouvelle-Orléans (New Orleans), built for this purpose in 1718–1720.  Biloxi is the setting of Neil Simon's play and film Biloxi Blues, which starred Mathew Broderick.  Biloxi Blues is the story of army recruits during World War II training at Keesler Field, the present-day Keesler Air Force Base.  Biloxi is the setting of several John Grisham novels, including The Runaway Jury and The Partner.  2010 saw the grand opening of the new Frank Gehry designed Ohr-O'Keefe Museum Of Art.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biloxi,_Mississippi

A Pronunciation Guide to Places in Ohio  http://scrippsjschool.org/pronunciation/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  January 11, 2019  Issue 2020