Is chocolate vegan?  If you are somewhat of a smart talker, one simple response to this is, "Sure! Chocolate comes from beans!"  Which is of course, true.  Chocolate comes from the pod of the cocoa tree, making it, of course, vegan.  Having got your sarcasm out of the way, you'll probably want to manage to come up with a serious response.  Chocolate itself comes from a plant, making it vegan, yes, but in the process of going from the tree to the grocery store, a variety of additives are added, including sugar and milk or milk fat.  A good quality chocolate, however, will have a higher chocolate content, pure ingredients, and no additives.  The ingredients will be simple:  cocoa, cocoa butter, sugar, and occasionally lecithin, and sometimes vanilla.  And that's it.  A high-quality chocolate actually has quite a few nutritional benefits, believe it or not.  A few producers have also started making "milk" chocolates from non-dairy milk substitutes such as almond milk or rice milk.  Whole Foods and other specialty grocers should carry a few of these.  Jolinda Hackett  https://www.thespruceeats.com/is-chocolate-vegan-3377738



The first country to be described as a "banana republic," albeit in a roundabout way, was Honduras, writes T.W. for The Economist, which traditionally does not publish full bylines.  In 1904, American writer O. Henry wrote “The Admiral,” a short story published in his book Cabbages and Kings.  It’s set in Anchuria,  a fictional ‘small, maritime banana republic,’ that T.W. writes was clearly based on Honduras, where Henry was at the time.  Huge companies like United Fruit moved in and built infrastructure in exchange for land.  With close ties to a country’s railways and ports came ties to government.  In Honduras, Zemurray was deeply involved in politics, as he had been since the Zemurray-Hubbard Steam Ship Company first started working in the country in 1903.  Zemurray's company Cuyamel even supplied weapons to the 1911 coup that brought in a more Cuyamel-friendly president, T.W. writes.  After fighting United Fruit for years, Cuyamel was bought by the rival for $32 million.  But it was just the start for Zemurray, who became the largest shareholder in the company.  In 1932, as the company struggled, Zemurray became its head.  “In the end, he would live in the grandest house in New Orleans, the mansion on St. Charles that is now the official residence of the Tulane president,” writes Rich Cohen in an excerpt from his book on Zemurray published by Slate.  “He continued to wield tremendous influence into the mid-’50s, a powerful old man who threatened, cajoled, explained, a mysterious Citizen Kane-like figure to the people in his city.”  When Zemurray died in 1961, he writes, The New York Times described him as “The Fish That Swallowed the Whale.”  Kat Eschner  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/where-we-got-term-banana-republic-180961813/



Deep in Honduras is La Mosquitia, an area about thirty-two thousand square miles, a land of rainforests, swamps, lagoons, rivers and mountains.  Early maps labeled it Portal del Infierno or Gates of Hell.  It gets over ten feet of rain a year, and 80% of cocaine from South America destined for the United States mostly comes through the region.  In 1980, UNESCO named the area the Rio Plátano Biosphere Reserve and, two years later, named the rainforest a World Heritage site.  The Lost City of the Monkey God:  A True Story by Douglas Preston



Prunus cerasifera is a species of plum known by the common names cherry plum and myrobalan plum.  It is native to Southeast Europe and Western Asia, and is naturalised in the British Islesand scattered locations in North America.  Cultivated cherry plums can have fruits, foliage, and flowers in any of several colours.  Some varieties have sweet fruits that can be eaten fresh, while others are sour and better for making jam.  Cherry plums are a key ingredient in Georgian cuisine where they are used to produce tkemali sauce, as well as a number of popular dishes, such as kharcho soup and chakapuli stew.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_plum   



Ross Collins was born in Glasgow, Scotland quite a while ago.  Glasgow School of Art gave him a first in Illustration when he graduated in 1994.  In the same year he won the MacMillan Children's Book Prize for his first book 'The Sea Hole'.  Ross spent a few years in London drawing things for publishers who were convinced that he knew what he was doing.  He then returned to Scotland where he has illustrated over 100 books and written a dozen or so.  http://www.rosscollins.net/whothisguy.php  Meet Ross Collins (extract from an interview)  Who has been the biggest influence on your work?  Lots of people--but I do keep coming back to Calvin & Hobbes.  Bill Watterston is a wee gem in a sea of boulders.  BookPage  August 2019 



Tracy Chevalier was born in 1962 and grew up in the US.  She studied English at Oberlin College, Ohio and moved to England in 1984, where she has since lived.  She worked as a Reference Book editor until 1993, after which she studied for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia.  While she was studying, she began her first novel, The Virgin Blue, which was published in 1997, and was later republished.  This was followed by further novels:  Girl With A Pearl Earring (1999); Falling Angels (2001); The Lady and the Unicorn (2003); Burning Bright (2007), a novel about William Blake; and Remarkable Creatures (2009).  Tracy Chevalier's most recent novel is The Last Runaway (2013), about an English Quaker who emigrates to Ohio in the 19th Century. 

https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/tracy-chevalier



rigmarole  In medieval times, there was a game called ragman, which seems to have been like consequences but with predefined statements.  It used a rolled-up scroll containing descriptions of characters, each with a string attached.  Players selected a string at random, the scroll was then unrolled and the associated passage read out, to the hilarity of all present.  There are also some suspicions that the same system was used for a gambling game.  The origin of the name for the game is obscure:  the oldest form was rageman, said as three syllables, and this suggests it may have been French in origin—a character called Rageman the Good appeared in some French verses of about 1290.  Others think it might have come from rag in the sense of tatters, used as a name for a devil (as in ragamuffin, originally a demon).  The name was transferred to various English statutes at the end of the thirteenth century, which were written on scrolls.  With the seals and ribbons of their signers sticking out, these reminded people of the scroll used in the game.  The most famous such document was the one in 1291 in which the Scottish nobility and gentry subscribed allegiance to Edward I before John Balliol took the Scots throne.  It seems the terms ragman and ragman roll passed into the language as a description of a long and rambling discourse, no doubt from the disconnected nature of documents like the rolls of allegiance.  It later seems to have fallen out of use; it reappeared in the eighteenth century in various spellings, such as riggmon-rowle, but it eventually settled down as rigmarole, in the process losing any clear connection with the older term.  http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-rig1.htm



Storyteller Paule Marshall, Brooklyn-born daughter of Barbadian immigrants, died August 12, 2019.  Illustrator Charles Santore, whose works are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Brandywine River Museum of Art, and the Free Library of Philadelphia died August 11, 2019. 



A THOUGHT FOR TODAY  The door of a bigoted mind opens outwards so that the only result of the pressure of facts upon it is to close it more snugly. - Ogden Nash, poet (19 Aug 1902-1971)



WORD OF THE DAY  Palladian adjective  (Greek mythology, rare)  Of or relating to Pallas, an epithet of Athena, the goddess of wisdom.

(by extension, rare)  Of or relating to knowledge, study, or wisdom. [...]

(architecture)  In the style of the Italian neoclassical architect Andrea Palladio.  Palladian noun 

(architecture)  An architect who designs buildings in the Palladian style.

(architecture)  A building or an architectural element (for example, a window) designed in the Palladian style.  The Italian architect Andrea Palladio, who is widely considered to be one of the most influential people in the history of architecture, died on August 19, 1580. 



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1240  August 19, 2019