Chef Massimo Bottura: the Pavarotti of Pasta In his kitchen at Osteria Francescana in
Modena, Italy where tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, was born, Bottura oversees a
staff of 35 as they build his beautiful, avant-garde masterpieces that he says
are inspired by contemporary art. His
creations are like canvasses. Read more and see graphics at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chef-massimo-bottura-the-pavarotti-of-pasta-60-minutes-interview-2019-12-22/
Ignorance and its related forms come from the Latin
verb ignorare, “not to know.” ignore Initially the English
verb ignore meant “to be ignorant of.” Like “J’ignore” in modern French, “I ignore”
meant simply, “I don’t know.” In modern
English ignore means “to refuse to take notice
(of).” ignorance and ignorant Both these words relate to
the fact or condition of not knowing something.
As everyone is born ignorant, no shame should attach to the mere fact of
being ignorant. However, the words have
acquired negative connotations and both are often used to insult, hurt, or
condemn. The word noble goes back to Latin nōscere, “to know.”
The best-known people were members of the ruling classes. Their families had the wealth to buy the
horses, weapons, and armor that enabled them to make a name for
themselves. Being “known” conferred
status. The word for being known became
a class marker. Noble began as a word that
referred to a social and economic class, but gradually acquired additional
meanings. Initially, ignoble meant “not noble,” that is, not born to
the noble social class. Because the
privileged class saw itself as superior in every way, noble came to mean “characterized by moral
superiority,” and ignoble came
to mean “morally flawed.” https://www.dailywritingtips.com/ignorance-ignominy-and-other-ig-words/
Fine
words butter no parsnips (or sometimes soft words ... or fair words ...), meaning that words alone are useless, especially
flattering phrases or fine promises, and you should judge people by what they
do rather than by what they say is a
proverb, which is at least 400 years old:
the first example given in the big Oxford
English Dictionary is dated 1639: “Faire words butter noe parsnips”. The link between butter and flattery is easy
to understand. We have had the verb to butter up, to flatter someone lavishly, in the
language at least since the early eighteenth century. It and the proverb share the image of fine
words being liberally applied to smooth their subject and oil the process of
persuasion. Parsnips were featured in
the proverb early on because they were common in the English diet and were
usually buttered before being put on the table.
(Nothing particularly special about that, however: foreign visitors often commented in disgust
at the English habit of using butter to cook almost everything.) Nigel Rees, in Oops, Pardon Mrs Arden!, quotes a stanza from Epigrammes of 1651 by a Thames waterman known as
the Water Poet, John Taylor: Words are
but wind that do from men proceed; None but Chamelions on bare Air can feed; Great
men large hopeful promises may utter; But words did never Fish or Parsnips
butter. This shows that other foodstuffs
were involved in the saying at that time—indeed there’s an example in the OED
from 1645: “Fair words butter no
fish”—and that it’s the act of buttering that’s the key part of the saying. http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-but2.htm
Herbed Butter Parsnips RECIPE
COURTESY OF TYLER FLORENCE 4-6 servings
A holy site where any casual viewer of Jeopardy! can
appreciate the profound weight of the program’s 36-year history. A dissertation-level study on how the show’s
nightly trivia affected the ambient knowledge of the American mind. An exacting catalog of the countless number
of times that Alex Trebek has shepherded us through categories of potpourri, of
arcane word games, of 19th-century novelists whose names begin with the letter
E. Right
you are. On the fan-run J! Archive,
a would-be scholar can click on any season, from any year, and bear witness to
thousands and thousands of tabulated episodes.
Jeopardy!, now in its 36th season, celebrates the brain’s
limitless capacity to carry inessential insight. The archive is of the same breed. Those breezy interviews that Trebek conducts
with the contestants after the first commercial break? The site’s moderators transcribe them like
they’re court records. There is an incisive mathematical breakdown of
the scoring over the course of a given episode.
There are running tallies of the money totals after every
question. Just as Trekkies
can dictate vows in Klingon, and Tolkien adherents can parse Quenya script, a
small niche of Jeopardy! obsessives have articulated their
exclusive fandom in an extremely on-brand way, ensuring that no Daily Double
goes forgotten, and guaranteeing that every Trebekism is accounted for. Luke Winkie
https://www.polygon.com/tv/2020/1/6/21048003/jeopardy-champions-questions-j-archive
The Creator of The Good Place Introduces The Life You Can Save by Michael Schur I first came across Peter Singer in 2006, via an article he
wrote in the New York Times Magazine. He was discussing the “Golden Age of
Philanthropy.” Warren Buffett had just
pledged $37 billion to the Gates Foundation and other charities, which on an
inflation-adjusted basis, Singer noted, was “more than double the lifetime
total given away by two of the philanthropic giants of the past, Andrew
Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, put together.” Singer posed some simple questions: What should a billionaire give to charity? What should we (non-billionaires, ostensibly)
give? And how do we calculate these
numbers? What struck me about Singer’s
arguments was that the amount in question, for him, wasn’t theoretical. It was
calculable. There is an amount of money
one needs to live a decent life—to pay for a reasonable amount of rent,
clothes, food, and leisure. And if you
have more than that amount, he posited, you should give it away—because you
don’t need it, and someone else does. Ten years later, I was researching various topics in
moral philosophy for a TV show I was developing, called The Good Place.
As I drifted into utilitarianism—a philosophy arguing that the moral
worth of an action is based on its consequences—Singer popped up again and
again. With each of his articles or
books that I read, I found myself reacting with the same mix of fascination,
dismay, excitement, and disbelief. His
writing was clear, unambiguous, uncompromising, and, at times, shocking. Arguments I at first found to be absurd would
wind up seeming eminently reasonable . . . and vice versa. Read more at https://lithub.com/michael-schur-on-peter-singers-moral-challenge-to-the-rest-of-us/
Arthur Wynne,
the English-born New York journalist who invented the crossword puzzle in 1913,
would be astonished to see how computers are being used to generate today's
cryptic crosswords, and amazed at the latest development, in which addicts are
challenged to solve crosswords on the Internet.
His invention has become the world's most popular word game, attracting
millions of devotees, and has boosted the sales of newspapers, magazines,
dictionaries, notepads, pencils, and erasers for nearly 90 years. Wynne had the job of creating puzzles for the New
York World's eight-page Fun section when the editor
asked him to invent a new word game. He
recalled a puzzle from his childhood called Magic Squares, in which a given group of words had to be arranged so their letters
would read the same way across and down.
He designed a larger and more complex grid, and provided a clue for each
word. The World published
Wynne's first Word-cross puzzle on
December 21, 1913 as one of the Fun section's "mental
exercises." It was diamond-shaped,
with easy clues. It was an instant
winner, soon adopted by other newspapers.
Wynne experimented with different shapes, including a circle, before
settling on the rectangle. The word-cross became known as
a cross-word, and as with many hyphenated words, the hyphen was
eventually dropped. Eric Shackle http://www.fun-with-words.com/first_crossword.html
Brooklyn Borough President
Eric Adams has sparked outrage over a speech in which he urged newer residents
of NYC to "go back" where they come from at a Dr. Martin Luther King,
Jr. Day event on January 20, 2020. "Go
back to Iowa, you go back to Ohio. New
York City belongs to the people that were here and made New York City what it
is," he said in remarks at the National Action Network's MLK Day celebration, to cheers and
claps from the audience and, at times, politicians sitting behind him. His comments on gentrification and newcomers
to the city, though they received cheers at the event and are all-too familiar
to readers of Gothamist's comment section, were derided on social media
as exclusionary and divisive. Sydney
Pereira https://gothamist.com/news/brooklyn-borough-president-eric-adams-tells-nyc-newcomers-go-back-ohio
On October 9, 1876,
Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson talked by telephone to each other
over a two-mile wire stretched between Cambridge and Boston. It was the first wire conversation ever held. Yesterday afternoon (January 25) the same two
men talked by telephone to each other over a 3,400-mile wire between New York
and San Francisco. Dr. Bell, the veteran
inventor of the telephone, was in New York, and Mr. Watson, his former
associate, was on the other side of the continent. They heard each other much more distinctly
than they did in their first talk thirty-eight years ago. Alexis C. Madrigal https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/01/the-first-transcontinental-call-was-made-today-in-1915/70140/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2216
January 27, 2020
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