The origin of the word forest is usually explained as coming from the late Latin phrase forestis silva, which was apparently applied to areas of land used by the Emperor Charlemagne for hunting.  Here, silva meant “woodland” (as in “sylvan” and “silviculture”) and forestis meant “outdoor, outside” (apparently related to the Latin fores, “door”), so that forestis silva meant something like “beyond the main or central area of administration; outside the common law”.  In time, the phrase became shortened to forest, but retained a sense of separateness and exclusion.  It was this sense that the Normans brought with them when they invaded England in 1066.  A forest for them and their successors was an area of unenclosed countryside, consisting of a highly variable mixture of woodland, heathland, scrub and agricultural land.  Its purpose was to raise deer, which needed a variety of land—woodland to rest and hide in during the day, and more open land in which to feed at night.  By the time of Domesday Book in 1086 about twenty-five such royal forests had been established, and at various times there were as many as eighty.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/articles/forest.htm

not see the forest for the trees  to be unable to get a general understanding of a situation because you are too worried about the details  Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press  https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/not-see-the-forest-for-the-trees

The Chrysler Building is a skyscraper in New York City, United States.  It is 319 meters (1046 feet) tall and has 77 floors.  It was built in 1931 and is one of the tallest buildings in the world.  The Chrysler Building was the tallest building in the world from 1930 to 1931.  The Empire State Building became the tallest one year later.  The Chrysler Building is still the tallest brick building in the world.  See pictures at https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Building  When you stand on the sidewalk directly in front of the Chrysler building and look up you cannot see its beautiful spire.

Charles Gourd's garden is so big that before he installed irrigation, it could take three hours to water everything by hand.  He grows beans and cucumbers that wind up archways you can walk underneath and pluck the ripe vegetables as though they're growing in thin air.  "I like the basics, the Three Sisters—corn, beans and squash," he says.  He describes making a pot of beans, adding a little bit of hickory nut meat, then some corn hominy and squash.  "You boil that up real good, and the more times you boil it, the better it tastes."  Gourd is the director of the Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, Okla., and one of the many Cherokee who order seeds from the Cherokee Nation's seed bank each year in February.  The seeds are free for any Cherokee; in 2019, recipients are limited to two varieties because demand is so high.  Last year, the bank sent 4,905 packages of seeds to citizens of federally recognized Cherokee tribes.  This year, they will distribute a record 10,000 seed packets.  The idea for the seed bank formed after one of the Cherokee council members came across an article about the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway. "  Tove K. Danovich   Read more and see pictures at  https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/04/02/704795157/how-a-seed-bank-helps-preserve-cherokee-culture-through-traditional-foods

The National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a partnership between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress (LC), is a long-term effort to develop an Internet-based, searchable database of U.S. newspapers with descriptive information and select digitization of historic pages.  Supported by NEH, this rich digital resource will be developed and permanently maintained at the Library of Congress.  An NEH award program will fund the contribution of content from, eventually, all U.S. states and territories.  Learn more about the Library's role in the NDNP 

See what states are participating in the program  https://www.loc.gov/ndnp/

James Thurber's Humorous Heart by Jonathan Yardley   "The Night the Bed Fell" by James Thurber is an American classic.  I have no recollection of when I first read it, but it may well have been read to me by one of my parents, who adored Thurber and passed that passion along to me.  Over the years I have read it dozens of times, heard it read onstage by Tom Ewell in the early 1960s on Broadway in "The Thurber Carnival," and listened to it dozens of times on the wonderful recording of that show.  But wonderful though "The Night the Bed Fell" most certainly is, it is but one among the nine brief chapters of "My Life and Hard Times," each of which is a gem.  "My Life and Hard Times," the memoir of his youth in Columbus that is, as Russell Baker writes in a column reprinted as an afterword to my HarperPerennial edition, "possibly the shortest and most elegant autobiography ever written."  "My Life and Hard Times" was published in book form in 1933, when Thurber was one year shy of his 40th birthday.  He had firmly established himself as a writer "of light pieces running from a thousand to two thousand words," and firmly denied that "such persons are gay of heart and carefree."  No, he said:  "They sit on the edge of the chair of Literature.  In the house of Life they have the feeling that they have never taken off their overcoats.  Afraid of losing themselves in the larger flight of the two-volume novel, or even the one-volume novel, they stick to short accounts of their misadventures because they never get so deep into them but that they feel they can get out."  Thurber then proceeded to disprove every syllable of that by writing a book that, though barely over 20,000 words, comes far closer to Literature and Life than all but a handful of other American memoirs, and into the bargain has something that no other memoirist can offer: drawings, in abundance, by James Thurber.  Read more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/11/AR2007051102377.html?noredirect=on  See also Jonathan Yardley’s Second Readings at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/19/LI2005041903474.html  In early 2003, Jonathan Yardley, dean of the Washington Post’s book critics began what was modestly called, “An occasional series in which The Post’s book critic reconsiders notable and/or neglected books from the past.”  https://neglectedbooks.com/?page_id=315

The Chicxulub impact is famed for having killed the dinosaurs and most other species alive on Earth at the time, and it left behind a thin layer of dust rich in rare elements.  Modeling of the impact has suggested almost too many ways it could have killed:  massive tsunamis, a magnitude 11 earthquake, global wildfires and searing heat, months of frigid darkness, acid rain, a massive surge of carbon dioxide, and more.  While we've had confirmation that some of these events occurred, we don't have a strong sense of their impact because we haven't found fossils that tell us much about what happened to the ecosystems of the time.  That may have changed, according to a report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (often abbreviated PNAS or PNAS USA).  https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/03/27/1817407116  The paper describes a large deposit residing just under the iridium-rich dust that marks the impact, apparently formed while heavier debris was still falling from the sky.  The site, in western North Dakota, contains a mix of fresh and saltwater species, and it seems to have formed when water rushed ashore from what was then a nearby ocean.  John Timmer  Read more and see pictures at

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/scientists-say-they-have-deposits-formed-hours-after-dino-killing-impact/  Thank you, Muse reader!

THOUGHT FOR TODAY  Good fiction creates empathy.  A novel takes you somewhere and asks you to look through the eyes of another person, to live another life. - Barbara Kingsolver, novelist, essayist, and poet (b. 8 Apr 1955)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2075  April 8, 2019