Cheryl Y. Hayashi is a Hawaii-born biologist who is curator, professor, and Director of Comparative Biology Research at the American Museum of Natural History.  Hayashi specializes in the genetic structure of spider silk.  A Yale alumnus, she was previously a professor at University California Riverside, and was a 2007 MacArthur Fellow.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheryl_Hayashi



The Magnificence of Spider Silk  TED talk February 2010 by Cheryl Hayashi  Each species of spider can make up to 7 very different kinds of silk.  https://www.ted.com/talks/cheryl_hayashi_the_magnificence_of_spider_silk?language=en  14:22



Although baseball is played in several countries around the world today, it is typically known as an American sport and is even called “America’s Passtime.”  While the origins of the sport come from two English games, rounders and cricket, the basis for modern baseball was formed in America during the mid-19th century.  Due to this, the oldest baseball teams in the world were established in the United States in the late 1800s to the early 1900s.  All of them still exist today as either a part of the National League (NL) or the American League (AL), which form Major League Baseball (MLB).  Read about and find a list of the ten oldest baseball teams in America at http://www.oldest.org/sports/baseball-teams-america/



From:  Fred Glienna  The LA Dodgers had an outfielder named Wally Moon in the late 1950s-early 1960s.  The Dodgers also had a short left-field (252 feet) with a ridiculous, 40-foot high screen to prevent easy home runs.  Moon’s specialty was a high, lofty slice that would clear the screen.  Fans called them Moon shots.  Feedback to A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg



What’s in a Name?  Nearly every single language’s word for wine derives from the latin word vinum.  There are only three languages whose word for wine does not:  Greek (oinos), Turkish (sarap), and Hungarian (bor).  Some historians believe this might indicate an early Hungarian connection to winemaking unrelated to the Romans, feeding the strong suspicion that Hungarian wine culture predates most of the other wine cultures of Europe.  Hungary is located between the 46th and 49th parallel which is actually the same latitude range as many of France’s top wine regions from Northern Rhône to Champagne.  Hungary’s rolling hills are rich in volcanic soils and limestone--idyllic soil types for fine winemaking.  Tokaj  Top Wines:  Tokaji (sweet white wines), Furmint (dry white wines)  Soils:  A range of clay-dominant soils of red, yellow, brown, and white clay, along with loess, strewn atop volcanic rock subsoil that’s rich in iron and lime.  Villány  Top Wines:  Cabernet Franc, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Kékfrankos  Soils:  Volcanic soils  Nagy Somló  Top Wines:  Juhfark  Soils:  Volcanic soils with loess, clay and sand   Eger  Top Wines:  Egri Bikavér red blend, Egri Csillag white blend  Soils:  Brown forest topsoils cover volcanic rhyolite tuff with limestone and broken rock.  https://winefolly.com/review/hungarian-wines-for-the-win/



Cookbooks confirm that the American practice of stuffing celery began in the early 20th century as an appetizer for parties and adult gatherings.  It didn’t become a vital part of lunchboxes and playdates until decades later.  The most famous (at least for the coloring-book crowd) is, of course, ants on a log.  Andrew Ruis, author of Eating to Learn, Learning to Eat: The Origins of School Lunch in the United States, could only place the origin around sometime in the mid-20th century.  A hypothesis tracing the recipe origins to a product cookbook proved null.  Sun-Maid (which represents about 40 percent of the raisin industry), Dole, the California Raisin Marketing Board, and even the Girl Scouts had no knowledge of the ants on a log inventor.  (Sun Valley and the Raisin Bargaining Association did not respond to requests for comment.)  A recipe for "Stuffed Celery Stalks” appeared in the Good Housekeeping Cook Book (1944) with seven iterations, the second of which instructs log builders to “lay seedless raisins end to end in celery stalks” before filling them with a mixture of cream cheese, top milk (the upper layer of milk in a container enriched by whatever cream has risen), spec pepper, and paprika.  (There’s no mention of any “ants” or “logs” of any kind.)  The first print sighting took place on February 15, 1959, when the Star Tribune published a story about encouraging children to help out in the kitchen:  “Anne Marie is working on snacks.  Popcorn, cheese dips, and the other night, ants on a log have been some of the foods the family has shared.”  Mara Weinraub  https://food52.com/blog/24538-what-is-ants-on-a-log  Thank you, Muse reader!



The Midwich Cuckoos is a 1957 science fiction novel written by the English author John Wyndham.  It tells the tale of an English village in which the women become pregnant by brood parasitic aliens.  It has been filmed twice as Village of the Damned, with releases in 1960 and 1995.  The book has been adapted for radio in 1982, 2003, and 2017.  Wyndham began work on a sequel novel, Midwich Main, which he abandoned after only a few chapters.  The novel was filmed as Village of the Damned in 1960, with a script that was fairly faithful to the book.  A sequel, Children of the Damned, followed soon afterwards.  A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer remake to have begun filming during 1981 was canceled.  Christopher Wood was writing the script for producer Lawrence P. Bachmann when the Writers Guild of America went on strike early that year for three months.  The 1994 Thai movie Kawao Thi Bang Phleng (Blackbirds at Bangpleng) is a localised version of the story.  It was based on a 1989 novel by the Thai writer and politician, Kukrit Pramoj, that was clearly based on unattributed major borrowings from Wyndham's book.  The Thai version has differences due to the confrontation between the alien intelligences and Buddhist philosophy.  A remake of the 1960 movie was made in 1995 by John Carpenter and set in Midwich, California; it featured Christopher Reeve in his last movie role before he was paralysed, and included Kirstie Alley as a government official, a character not present in the original novel.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Midwich_Cuckoos



John Wyndham is probably the most successful British science fiction writer after HG Wells, and his books have never been out of print.  He continues to haunt the public imagination--either through adaptations of his own work (2009 gave us a new Day of the Triffids on the BBC)--or through thinly disguised homages (witness the opening of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, which almost exactly resembles the first chapters of The Day of the Triffids, and is in its turn parodied in the opening of Shaun of the Dead).  I read a lot of Wyndham when I was a teenager.  Then, a few years ago, when I was looking around for books to adapt as a Radio 4 "classic serial", I thought of The Midwich Cuckoos.  Rereading it, I was startled to find a searching novel of moral ambiguities where once I'd seen only an inventive but simple SF thriller.  Wyndham's novels were famously dismissed by Brian Aldiss, championing the New Wave's harder-edged science fiction, as "cosy catastrophes".  It's true that Wyndham's preference is for no-nonsense, brisk, wry narrators, and the horrors that visit the books can seem like opportunities to show off good old British pluck.  But the books are surprisingly unheroic, and often (notably in the cases of Kraken and Triffids) peculiarly open-ended.  Dan Rebellato  https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/dec/20/john-wyndham-unread-bestseller



National Welcoming Week is Sept 13-22, 2019 and the Toledo Lucas County Public Library will host and facilitate Who We Are.  Who We Are is a program lead by Library staff to encourage community members to share the people, places and thing that shape their roots.  Tuesday,  Sept 17, 6 - 8:30 p.m. at the West Toledo Branch.  The program will begin with a meet and greet and light refreshments followed by story sharing, and concluding with attendees able to mingle afterwards.  Other local organizations like Welcome Toledo-Lucas County, Local Initiatives Support Initiative, and US Together will also conduct events during the program.  https://www.toledo.com/news/2019/09/13/daily-dose/toledo-library-celebrates-national-welcoming-week/



http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2154  September 16, 2019