Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters, is a collection of short free verse poems that collectively narrates the epitaphs of the residents of Spoon River, a fictional small town named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town of Lewistown, Illinois.  The collection includes 212 separate characters, in all providing 244 accounts of their lives, losses, and manner of death.  Many of the poems contain cross-references that create an unabashed tapestry of the community.  The poems were originally published in 1914 in the St. Louis, Missouri literary journal Reedy's Mirror, under the pseudonym Webster Ford.  Find a list of twenty adaptations of Spoon River Anthology including songs, a play, photographs, a documentary and "Return to Spoon River," a musical at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_River_Anthology

A spoonerism is an error in speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched (see Metathesis) between two words in a phrase.  These are named after the Oxford don and ordained minister William Archibald Spooner, who reputedly did this.  An example is saying "The Lord is a shoving leopard" instead of "The Lord is a loving shepherd."  While spoonerisms are commonly heard as slips of the tongue, and getting one's words in a tangle, they can also be used intentionally as a play on words.  See examples and use in popular culture at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoonerism

The floor of the Colosseum in Rome, where you might expect to see a smooth ellipse of sand, is instead a bewildering array of masonry walls shaped in concentric rings, whorls and chambers, like a huge thumbprint.  The confusion is compounded as you descend a long stairway at the eastern end of the stadium and enter ruins that were hidden beneath a wooden floor during the nearly five centuries the arena was in use, beginning with its inauguration in A.D. 80.  Weeds grow waist-high between flagstones; caper and fig trees sprout from dank walls, which are a patchwork of travertine slabs, tufa blocks and brickwork.  Heinz-Jürgen Beste of the German Archaeological Institute in Rome, the leading authority on the hypogeum, has spent much of the past 14 years deciphering the hypogeum—from the Greek word for “underground.”  The hypogeum itself had a lot in common with a huge sailing ship.  The underground staging area had “countless ropes, pulleys and other wood and metal mechanisms housed in very limited space, all requiring endless training and drilling to run smoothly during a show.  Like a ship, too, everything could be disassembled and stored neatly away when it was not being used.”  All that ingenuity served a single purpose: to delight spectators and ensure the success of shows that both celebrated and embodied the grandeur of Rome.  Beyond the thin wooden floor that separated the dark, stifling hypogeum from the airy stadium above, the crowd of 50,000 Roman citizens sat according to their place in the social hierarchy, ranging from slaves and women in the upper bleachers to senators and vestal virgins—priestesses of Vesta, goddess of the hearth—around the arena floor.  A place of honor was reserved for the editor, the person who organized and paid for the games.  Often the editor was the emperor himself, who sat in the imperial box at the center of the long northern curve of the stadium, where his every reaction was scrutinized by the audience.  The hypogeum played a vital role in these staged hunts, allowing animals and hunters to enter the arena in countless ways.  Eyewitnesses describe how animals appeared suddenly from below, as if by magic, sometimes apparently launched high into the air.  “The hypogeum allowed the organizers of the games to create surprises and build suspense,” Beste says.  “A hunter in the arena wouldn’t know where the next lion would appear, or whether two or three lions might emerge instead of just one.”  This uncertainty could be exploited for comic effect.  Emperor Gallienus punished a merchant who had swindled the empress, selling her glass jewels instead of authentic ones, by setting him in the arena to face a ferocious lion.  When the cage opened, however, a chicken walked out, to the delight of the crowd.  Gallienus then told the herald to proclaim:  “He practiced deceit and then had it practiced on him.”  The emperor let the jeweler go home.  At the ludi meridiani, or midday games, criminals, barbarians, prisoners of war and other unfortunates, called damnati, or “condemned,” were executed.  (Despite numerous accounts of saints’ lives written in the Renaissance and later, there is no reliable evidence that Christians were killed in the Colosseum for their faith.)  Tom Mueller  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/secrets-of-the-colosseum-75827047/

“A public library is the most enduring of memorials, the trustiest monument for the preservation of an event or a name or an affection; for it, and it only, is respected by wars and revolutions, and survives them."  Mark Twain  [Letter to the Millicent (Rogers) Library, February 22, 1894] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1019165-a-public-library-is-the-most-enduring-of-memorials-the

The first written case of steganography is found in Histories by Herodotus.  He writes that it happened during the Ionian Revolt, an uprising of some Greek cities against Persian rule at around 500 BC.  Histiaeus, the ruler of Miletus was away from his city, acting as an adviser to the Persian king.  He wanted to go back to Miletus, which was under the control of his son-in-law, Aristagoras, so he planned to stage a revolt in Ionia as a pretext for his return.  This is where the steganography comes in:  He shaved the head of one of his slaves and tattooed a message on his scalp.  Histiaeus then waited for the slave’s hair to grow back and hide the message, then sent him to Aristagoras with instructions to shave the slave’s head once more and read the message.  The concealed text told him to rise up against the Persian rule, which kicked-off the uprising against their conquerors.  Herodotus tells another story about steganography that occurred several years later, when the Spartan king Demaratus sent a seemingly blank wax tablet back to Sparta.  Hidden beneath the wax was a message that warned the Spartans of Xerxes’ planned invasion.  Herodotus is known for his tall tales, so we can’t be sure of how truthful these stories are, but they’re the earliest records of steganography we have.  It wasn’t long before more sophisticated forms of steganography were recorded.  In the 4th century BC, Aeneas Tacticus made mention of a hole punching technique.  Philo of Byzantium was the first to discuss invisible inks, writing about them in the third century BC.  His recipe used gall nuts to write text and a copper sulfate solution to reveal it.  The term steganography was first used in a book called Steganographia by Johannes Trithemius.  The word combined the Greek steganos, which means concealed, with graphein, which means writing.  Steganographia was a clever book that was purportedly about magic and the occult, but used cryptography and steganography to hide its real subject matter, which centered around cryptography and steganography.  Steganographia was followed up by Polygraphia, which was first published after Trithemius’ death in 1518.  This was a more straightforward book about steganography and its practice.  Another key development in steganography came in 1605, when Francis Bacon devised Bacon’s cipher.  This technique used two different typefaces to code a secret message into a seemingly innocent text.  Microdots were first developed in the latter half of the 19th century, but they weren’t used heavily for steganography until World War I.  They involve shrinking a message or image down to the size of a dot, which allows people to communicate and pass on information without their adversaries knowing.  Josh Lake   http://www.crime-research.org/articles/Stegano26/

The British bookseller Waterstones, the chemist Boots, and the media organisation Reuters are among the many brands that have dropped their apostrophe over the years.  When Waterstones ditched it in 2012, its then managing director James Daunt said it was doing so to make its name more 'versatile' for online use.  By contrast, the US clothing company Lands’ End is an example of a company that has maintained the use of an incorrect apostrophe and built it into its heritage.  The apostrophe probably originated in the early 16th Century–either in 1509, in an Italian edition of Petrarch, or in 1529, courtesy of French printer Geoffroy Tory, who seemingly had a fondness for creating linguistic marks, as he is also credited with inventing the accent and the cedilla.  It came from the Greek apostrophē, meaning 'the act of turning away', and before it was used in a grammatical context, it was a rhetorical term used to describe the moment when a speaker would turn from the audience to address, typically, an absent person.  Grammatical apostrophes originally denoted absence of a different kind, signalling that something had been removed from a word, usually a vowel that was not pronounced.  They were also used to show that several letters were missing, not just one.  And sometimes they were added in for no obvious reason, for example in this line, by 17th Century poet Robert Herrick:  “What fate decreed, time now ha's made us see."  Hélène Schumacher  Read more and see pictures at http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20200217-have-we-murdered-the-apostrophe

Hatch green chillies come from a town called Hatch in New Mexico.  You can add them to soups, stews, salsas or use as toppings for burgers or pizzas for a great depth of flavour.  They range in heat level (and also offer a subtle sweetness to them), so buy whichever are better for your palate.  You can add white beans and use the back of a wooden spoon to mash the beans against the side of the pan to thicken this 30-Minute Green Chili by Yasmin Fahr.  https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/30-minute-green-chicken-chili  serves 2 or 4 for sharing

The Hatch chile is the holy grail of chile peppers.  The little village of Hatch, New Mexico is the self-proclaimed Chile Capital of the World.  See pictures at https://www.roadunraveled.com/blog/hatch-chile-new-mexico/  See also http://www.hatchchilefest.com/

Coronavirus Means Everyone Wants Jigsaw Puzzles.  Good Luck Buying One.  The Wall Street Journal  March 30, 2020 p.A1  The Muser is working puzzles, then will take them to Goodwill.

A THOUGHT FOR March 26  The more I think it over, the more I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people. - Vincent van Gogh, painter (30 Mar 1853-1890)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2248  March 30, 2020