Chances are that whenever you hear the word “recording” you automatically think of music.  To do so is certainly natural.  For many years recordings of music were just about the only kind to be commercially produced, and it was not until the long-playing record was perfected in 1947 that any extensive or systematic recording of the spoken word was even undertaken.  Yet the phonograph is in a real sense a type of time-machine such as men have dreamed of for centuries.  “Long before Edison men of imagination had conceived of the possibility of keeping as permanent a record of uttered speech as of words committed to print.  Giovanni Battista Porta (1542-1597) had the idea of conserving words in sealed leaden tubes and of releasing them as and when necessary.  A century later Cyrano de Bergerac, in his Histoire Comique, imagined books that spoke, and at the end of the 18th century, F. Grundler of Nuremberg believed he could keep words, as preserved echoes, in a bottle.”  Thomas Edison, who invented the phonograph in 1877, was himself much less concerned with preserving musical performances than with capturing the voices of great men for posterity.  One of his machines, carried to England, recorded the speech of such eminent persons as Gladstone and Browning.  The inventor himself contributed to oral history with a recitation of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”  Lorna Tracy  https://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1306&context=bai

Contract bridge players convey information about the 13 cards in a hand (one arrangement of 635,013,559,600 possibilities). *  Puritans called cards the devil's tickets. * In 1931 Americans would spend an estimated $100 million on bridge lessons, books and supplies.  * In 1932 bridge player Ely Culbertson surpassed Pearl  Buck as American's bestselling author * Warren Buffet and Bill Gates jointly fund a program to teach bridge to teens in schools * Henry L. Mencken favored blondes, and Anita Loos turned this into a 1925 comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. *  The Devil's Tickets:  A Night of Bridge, a Fatal Hand, and a New American Age, based on true stories of bridge obsession, clashes and manipulations by Gary M. Pomerantz

This Filipino-inspired recipe for Barbecued Adobo Chicken from Weber's Ultimate Grilling is going to be your go-to grilling recipe of the season.  Chicken thighs (or a combo of thighs and legs) are marinated in vinegar and soy sauce with lots of black pepper, ginger and garlic, then grilled until crispy and tender.  If you’ve never tasted adobo, get ready for one of the most ingenious flavor combinations of the world.  Find recipe by Jamie Purviance serving 4-8 at https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/barbecued-chicken-adobo

The griot tradition has proved remarkably resilient in West Africa, seven centuries after its beginnings during the Malinke Empire which stretched from modern day Senegal to Timbuktu and Gao in Mali and even included parts of Côte d’Ivoire.  The griots were advisors to court, story-tellers, musicians and praise-singers drawn from five leading griot families.  Griots frequently compare their work to an ancient baobab tree or a library--a living, speaking testimony to a society’s history.  http://www.goethe.de/ins/za/prj/wom/osm/en9606618.htm

Yankee  noun  1683, a name applied disparagingly by Dutch settlers in New Amsterdam (New York) to English colonists in neighboring Connecticut.  It may be from Dutch Janke, literally "Little John," diminutive of common personal name Jan; or it may be from Jan Kes familiar form of "John Cornelius," or perhaps an alteration of Jan Kees, dialectal variant of Jan Kaas, literally "John Cheese," the generic nickname the Flemings used for Dutchmen.  [I]t is to be noted that it is common to name a droll fellow, regarded as typical of his country, after some favorite article of food, as E[nglish] Jack-pudding, G[erman] Hanswurst ("Jack Sausage"), F[rench] Jean Farine ("Jack Flour").  [Century Dictionary, 1902, entry for "macaroni"]  Originally it seems to have been applied insultingly to the Dutch, especially freebooters, before they turned around and slapped it on the English.  A less-likely theory (attested by 1832) is that it represents some southern New England Algonquian language mangling of English. In English a term of contempt (1750s) before its use as a general term for "native of New England" (1765); during the American Revolution it became a disparaging British word for all American natives or inhabitants.  Contrasted with southerner by 1828.  Shortened form Yank in reference to "an American" first recorded 1778.  Latin-American form Yanqui attested in English by 1914 (in Mexican Spanish by 1835).  https://www.etymonline.com/word/yankee

Before The Star Spangled Banner, by Francis Scott Key, was made the official U.S. national anthem in 1931, Yankee Doodle was often used as an unofficial national anthem.  The official version of Yankee Doodle has 16 verses, giving a pretty good history of the American Revolution.  The American author E. B. White came up with a funny summary of how to keep the term straight.  It shows how, in the end, who is and isn't a Yankee is all about the geographic perspective:  
To foreigners, a Yankee is an American.
To Americans, a Yankee is a Northerner.
To Northerners, a Yankee is an Easterner.
To Easterners, a Yankee is a New Englander.
To New Englanders, a Yankee is a Vermonter.
And in Vermont, a Yankee is somebody who eats pie for breakfast.

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/yankee/  Yankee Doodle is the state song of Connecticut  https://statesymbolsusa.org/categories/song

The Greek prefix epi– means something like "on, over" and occurs in several English words.  An epigram is a short, pithy saying, what moderns might call a “sound bite.”  The word originally meant an inscription, which by its nature would have been brief.  An epigraph had the original meaning of “inscription,” something brief written over something.  An epigraph is a quotation that begins a book or a chapter in a book.  An episode  is a unit of action in a literary work, or one performance of a radio or television series.  Maeve Maddox  Read more at https://www.dailywritingtips.com/epi-words-for-writers/

Dogs, more so than almost any other domesticated species, are desperate for human eye contact.  When raised around people, they begin fighting for our attention when they’re as young as four weeks old.  It’s hard for most people to resist a petulant flash of puppy-dog eyes—and according to a study, that pull on the heartstrings might be exactly why dogs can give us those looks at all.  A paper published June 17, 2019 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that dogs’ faces are structured for complex expression in a way that wolves’ aren’t, thanks to a special pair of muscles framing their eyes.  These muscles are responsible for that “adopt me” look that dogs can pull by raising their inner eyebrows.  It’s the first biological evidence scientists have found that domesticated dogs might have evolved a specialized ability used expressly to communicate better with humans.  Haley Weiss  Read much more at https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/06/domestication-gave-dogs-two-new-eye-muscles/591868/

WORD OF THE DAY  Meet one's Waterloo  verb  A reference to Napoleon Bonaparte’s defeat by armies of Britain and Prussia at the Battle of Waterloo on 18 June 1815, which marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars.  Waterloo is a municipality south of Brussels in what is now the province of Walloon Brabant, Belgium.  To be decisively defeated by an encounter with a powerful opponent or a problem that is too difficult. quotations ▼ See also meet one's doom  meet one's end  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meet_one%27s_Waterloo#English

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2112  June 18, 2019