432 Park Avenue is a residential skyscraper at 57th Street and Park Avenue in Midtown Manhattan overlooking Central Park. The 1,396-foot-tall tower was developed by CIM Group and Harry B. Macklowe and designed by Rafael Viñoly.  It features 125 condominiums as well as amenities such as a private restaurant for residents.  432 Park Avenue sits on Billionaires' Row and has some of the most expensive residences in the city, with the median unit selling for tens of millions of dollars.  432 Park Avenue is located on the site of the former Drake Hotel, which was sold to Macklowe in 2006.  The project faced delays for five years because of lack of financing as well as difficulties in acquiring the properties on the site.  Construction plans were approved for 432 Park Avenue in 2011 and excavations began the next year.  Sales within 432 Park Avenue were launched in 2013; the building topped-out in October 2014 and was officially completed in 2015.  The structure includes seven 12-story-tall segments with residential units.  Each segment is separated by a two-story-tall section without any windows or interior space, allowing wind gusts to pass through the building.  At the time of its completion, 432 Park Avenue was the third-tallest building in the United States and the tallest residential building in the world.  As of 2020, it is the thirty-first tallest building in the world, sixth-tallest building in the United States, the fifth-tallest building in New York City, and the third-tallest residential building in the world.  The design of the structure was conceived by architect Rafael Viñoly, who was inspired by a trash can designed in 1905 by Austrian designer Josef Hoffmann.  The metal trash can's grid-like pattern is replicated in the tower's facade.  Read more and see graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue

The Everyday Chicken Salad by Sarah Adler  This salad is perfect over mixed greens, spinach, or arugula or served in lettuce cups for a quick easy lunch.  It keeps well for five to seven days in the fridge.  I adore using Homemade Avocado Mayo or Primal Kitchen’s avocado mayo if you’re short on time, in this recipe.  Simply Real Eating by Copyright © 2019, 2020 by Sarah Adler    https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/the-everyday-chicken-salad  serves 4

Yellowstone National Park is in the western United States, with parts in Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.  It was established by the U.S. Congress and signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant on March 1, 1872.  Yellowstone was the first national park in the U.S. and is also widely held to be the first national park in the world.  The park is known for its wildlife and its many geothermal features, especially Old Faithful geyser.  Read much more and see many graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_National_Park

Tralfamadore is the name of several fictional planets in the novels of Kurt Vonnegut.  Details of the corresponding indigenous alien race, the Tralfamadorians, vary from novel to novel:  In Slaughterhouse-Five, Tralfamadore is the home to beings who exist in all times simultaneously, and are thus privy to knowledge of future events, including the destruction of the universe at the hands of a Tralfamadorian test pilot.  They kidnap Billy Pilgrim, the protagonist of the novel, and place him in a zoo on Tralfamadore with Montana Wildhack, a Hollywood starlet.  In The Sirens of Titan, Tralfamadore is a planet in the Small Magellanic Cloud and the home of a civilization of machines, which dispatches Salo to a distant galaxy with a message for its inhabitants.  After a part in his ship breaks, however, Salo is forced to land on Titan, a moon of Saturn, where he befriends Winston Niles Rumfoord.  Rumfoord exists in much the same way as the Tralfamadorians of Slaughterhouse-Five, while Salo appears to move in a linear fashion.  The translation of Tralfamadore is given by Salo as both all of us and the number 541.  The Tralfamadorians were originally developed by super-beings who built them to allow themselves to search for a meaning to their lives.  Unable to achieve this task, they eventually asked the machines to do it for them, and upon knowing that they could not be said to have any purpose at all, the precursor race decided to eradicate itself, just to realize that they were not even very good at this, so they used the Tralfamadorians instead to complete the annihilation of their race.  In God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Tralfamadore is a hypothetical foreign planet, used in a purely rhetorical sense as part of a thought exercise.  In Hocus Pocus, Tralfamadore is the planet nearest to a meeting place of ancient multi-dimensional beings who supposedly control all aspects of human life, including social affairs and politics.  Unlike humans, the Tralfamadorians have too much of a sense of humor to be affected by the beings.  The exploits of the multi-dimensional beings are chronicled in The Protocols of the Elders of Tralfamadore (a title which parodies The Protocols of the Elders of Zion), which is published serially in a pornographic magazine called Black Garterbelt.  Though the author is never specified, the media in which it is published suggests that it may be Kilgore Trout.  In Timequake, Tralfamadore is mentioned offhand as a fantastical meeting place of anthropomorphized chemical elements.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tralfamadore  See also https://vonnegut.fandom.com/wiki/Tralfamadorians

The old pond  A frog leaps in.  Splash!

Jumping over the brook  for water  not needed.

The poem about the old pond is by the Japanese Zen poet Matsuo Basho (Matsuo Munefusa) (1644-94).  Jumping over the brook, a Scandinavian proverb, is broken up and shortened to fill three lines, to compare with.  Many of Basho's haiku poems were actually the hokku (initial verse) of a renga (linked verse).  Basho abandoned for poetry the samurai (warrior) status he had earned, and gradually got a reputation as a skilled poet and able critic.  Read About Fifty Haiku by Basho at http://oaks.nvg.org/basho.html

James Dover Grant CBE (born 29 October 1954), primarily known by his pen name Lee Child, is a British author who writes thriller novels, and is best known for his Jack Reacher novel series.  The books follow the adventures of a former American military policeman, Jack Reacher, who wanders the United States.  His first novel, Killing Floor (1997), won both the Anthony Award, and the Barry Award for Best First Novel.  Grant was born in Coventry.  His father was a civil servant.  He is the second of four sons; his younger brother, Andrew Grant, is also a thriller novelist.  After being made redundant from his job due to corporate restructuring, Grant decided to start writing novels, stating they are "the purest form of entertainment."  In 1997, his first novel, Killing Floor, was published, and he moved to the United States in the summer of 1998.  Grant starts each new instalment of his book series on the anniversary day he began writing the first book in the wake of a job loss.  His pen name "Lee" comes from a family joke about a heard mispronunciation of the name of Renault's Le Car, as "Lee Car".  Calling anything "Lee" became a family gag.  His daughter, Ruth, was "lee child".  "Child" places his books alphabetically on bookstore and library shelves between crime fiction greats Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie.   Grant has said that he chose the name Reacher for the central character in his novels because he himself is tall and when they were grocery shopping his wife Jane remarked:  "'Hey, if this writing thing doesn't pan out, you could always be a reacher in a supermarket.' . . .  'I thought, Reacher—good name.'"  Some books in the Jack Reacher series are written in the first person, while others are written in the third person.  Grant has characterised the books as revenge stories--Somebody does a very bad thing, and Reacher takes revenge"--driven by his anger at the downsizing at Granada.  Although English, he deliberately chose to write American-style thrillers.  In 2007, Grant collaborated with 14 other writers to create the 17-part serial thriller The Chopin Manuscript, narrated by Alfred Molina.  This was broadcast weekly on Audible.com between 25 September 2007 and 13 November 2007.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Child

John McPhee quotes from Annals of the Former World, Book 4, Assembling California  “There are two earthquake-resistant structures—the pyramids and the redwoods.”  “A batholith, as defined in the science, has a surface of at least forty square miles and no known bottom.  For the latter reason, it is also called an abyssolith.”  “Between the grinding lithospheric plates, the rock of this terrain was so pervasively sheared that a roadcut in metabasalt looks like green hamburger.”  “The Coast Ranges were aglow with sulphurous volcanism, its products hardening upon the Franciscan.  The nutritive soils derived from these rocks prepared the geography of wine.”  “Napa and Sonoma are Patwin Indian names:  ‘Napa’ means house; ‘Sonoma’ means nose or the Land of Chief Nose.”  “Visiting California after the 1906 earthquake, Harry Fielding Reid, of Johns Hopkins University, conceived the theory of elastic rebound, which is also known as the Reid mechanism.”  “As Louis Agassiz discovered, if you set stakes in a straight line across a valley glacier and come back a year later, you will see the curving manner in which the stakes have moved.”

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2274  May 26, 2020