Once upon a time, a long time ago, Pan, the god of shepherds, challenged Apollo to a musical duel. Pan insisted his flute of reeds could produce a more beautiful melody than Apollo's silly harp.  The two agreed on a contest with judges.  One of the judges was King Midas.  After hearing the two melodies, all but one of the judges chose Apollo as the winner.  But one judge, King Midas, preferred Pan's tune.  Furious that anyone could prefer a reedy pipe to his musical lyre, Apollo cooed, "I see the problem.  It's your ears.  They are too small to hear properly.  Let me fix that for you."  King Midas felt his ears quiver.  His ears sprang out, and out, and turned into the large furry ears of an ass.  Find out how the story ends at https://greece.mrdonn.org/greekgods/kingmidas2.html 



From:  Louise Dawson  Legend has it that Midas was hiding his donkey’s ears under a bonnet, and only his barber knew the secret.  However, it became too hard for him not to tell, so one day he went into a deserted marsh and whispered to the reeds:  King Midas has donkey’s ears.  But, whenever it was windy, the rushes were heard murmuring for all to hear:  King Midas has donkey’s ears!  I read this charming story long ago in a childhood encyclopedia.  A rural myth?  Also gives sense to the business called Midas Muffler, doesn’t it.



FROZEN CUCUMBER SLICES 

2 c. sugar

2 c. water

1 c. vinegar

1  tbsp. salt

Mix ingredients.  Boil until clear.  Cool.  Pour syrup over unpeeled sliced cucumbers to cover.  Leave head space.  Freeze.



undertime  verb  (third-person singular simple present undertimes, present participle undertiming, simple past and past participle undertimed)  (transitive)  To measure wrongly, so that it seems to take less time than actually required.  (transitive, photography)  To underexpose.

undertime  noun   (uncountable) (informal)  The time spent at a workplace doing non-work activities.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/undertime 



'Round Robin' is now used to refer to things that operate in a rotational manner, like tournaments where each player plays every other, circular letters etc.  The earliest use was as a disparaging nickname, along the lines of 'sly dog' or 'dark horse'.  This dates back to the 16th century and was cited in a work by Miles Coverdale, in 1546.  A variey of uses:  a reference to Roundheads, that is, the supporters of Parliament during the English Civil War, as in Rump, 1662, which was a collection of scurrilous poems and songs - the name of a high-spirited game; for example, in The Works of Mr. Thomas Brown, 1707 - "The noble and ancient recreation of Robin-Robin, Hey-Jnks, [sic] and Whipping the Snake." - the name of virtually anything that was round in shape, for instance, Angler fish, pancakes.  The currently used ' rotational' meaning is independent of all of the earlier uses.  This began in the 18th century as the name of a form of petition, in which the complainants signed their names in a circle, so as to disguise who had signed first.  This was especially favoured by sailors--not surprisingly, as mutiny was then a hanging offence.  The term is recorded in the January 1730 edition of The Weekly Journal:  "A Round Robin is a Name given by Seamen, to an Instrument on which they sign their Names round a Circle, to prevent the Ring-leader being discover'd by it, if found."  It may be that this derives from the French 'rond rouban', which was a similar form of petition, in which the names were written on a circle of ribbon.  That's an attractive and plausible notion, but I can't find any actual documentary evidence to substantiate it.  Another idea, again attractive at first sight, is that the term 'ringleader' derives from the person who was first to sign the circle of names on a round robin.  That's not likely, as the first use of ringleader is from well before 1730.  https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/round-robin.html



Murse may refer to:  Moers, city in Germany, archaically spelled Murse; man's handbag (portmanteau word from "male purse"); Mirza, Persian title, a prince or educated man, variant spelling; or male nurse  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murse



Tsunamis are giant waves caused by earthquakes or volcanic eruptions under the sea.  Out in the depths of the ocean, tsunami waves do not dramatically increase in height.  But as the waves travel inland, they build up to higher and higher heights as the depth of the ocean decreases.  The speed of tsunami waves depends on ocean depth rather than the distance from the source of the wave. Tsunami waves may travel as fast as jet planes over deep waters, only slowing down when reaching shallow waters.  https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/tsunami.html



Ice tsunamis—also known as “ice shoves” and “ivu,” among other names—are rare, but well-documented events.  According to National Geographic’s Michael Greshko, ice tsunamis were being studied as far back as 1822, when an American naturalist commented on “rocks, on level ground, taking up a gradual line of march [along a lakebed] and overcoming every obstacle in . . . escaping the dominion of Neptune.”  Ice tsunamis tend to occur when three conditions are in place.  The event is most common in springtime, when ice that covers large bodies of water starts to thaw, but has not yet melted.  If strong winds then blow through the area, they can push the ice towards the water’s edge—and winds in the Lake Erie region were indeed quite powerful, reaching hurricane-like speeds of up to 74 miles per hour, reports Fox News; Travis Fedschun  The third condition is a gently sloping shoreline; the gentler the slope, the less resistance the ice meets as it piles up and pushes inland.  Brigit Katz  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/furious-winds-lead-ice-tsunamis-along-lake-erie-180971569/



July 31, 2014  Once upon a time, geologists tell us, a massive chunk of Lake Tahoe's western shore collapsed into the water in a tremendous landslide.  The water responded by sloshing high onto the surrounding shores in a series of landslide tsunamis.  A major new study in the journal Geosphere  https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/geosphere/article-lookup/10/4/757 adds much new detail to that story, tracing massive features around and beneath the lake.  Forty years ago the first sonar survey of Lake Tahoe showed evidence that bite-shaped McKinney Bay, in the middle of the lake's western shore, is a scar left by a very large landslide and that huge pieces of that slide, as much as a kilometer long, are strewn across the lake bottom.  The landslide involved a body of rock made unstable by movement on a large-scale fault along the western shore.  The slide, presumably triggered by an earthquake on that fault, sent some 12.5 cubic kilometers of rock and sediment into the lake, where it pushed a corresponding amount of water out of the way as huge tsunamis, perhaps 100 meters high.  Much of this water burst over the lake's outlet at Tahoe City and rushed down the Truckee River, where house-sized boulders litter the riverbed today as far downstream as Verdi at the Nevada border.  Andrew Alden  See graphics at https://www.kqed.org/science/20134/the-tahoe-tsunami-new-study-envisions-early-geologic-event



Word of the Day  kombu  noun  Edible kelp (“a type of brown seaweed”) (from the class Phaeophyceae) used in East Asian cuisine.  Today, the third Monday in July in 2019, is 海の日 (Umi no Hi) or Marine Day in Japan, a public holiday for giving thanks for the ocean’s bounty and for recognizing its importance to Japan as an island nation.  Wiktionary



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2124  July 15, 2019