Friday, May 22, 2020




The library I grew up using is a Carnegie-funded library:  Blanche A. Nixon/Cobbs Creek Library.  Serving the Cobbs Creek community since 1925, the branch was renamed in 1990 to honor a local activist.  Situated on a triangular lot where Cobbs Creek Parkway, Baltimore Avenue, and 58th Street converge in Philadelphia, the branch has a tree-lined walkway in front.  Cobbs Creek was known as Karakung by the Lenni Lenape Indians and Mill Creek by Swedes in the late 1600's.  It later became known as Cobbs Creek after an English settler.  The neighborhood surrounding the Cobbs Creek Branch was part of land belonging to the Hoffman family since colonial days.  The area became part of Blockley Township in the 1800's.  A village called Angora centered around several mills on Cobbs Creek located at the current intersection of 60th Street and Baltimore Avenue.  The woods surrounding the village were known as Sherwood Forest.  In the 1910's, the mills and woods were torn down to make way for houses.  Baltimore Avenue was used to transport food and supplies from the Schuylkill River wharfs to places west of the city.  Around 1905, the Philadelphia Rapid Transit Company started subway surface routes using the electric streetcar on Baltimore Avenue.  Trolleys still travel this route today.  Subway surface routes, as well as the completion of the Market Elevated in 1907, spurred residential construction in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood.  Funded by a grant from Andrew Carnegie, the Cobbs Creek Branch opened on December 30, 1925.  The community contributed $10,000 toward a book fund.  The building was renovated and refurbished in 1957.  In 1990, the branch library was renamed the Blanche A. Nixon/Cobbs Creek Branch in honor of Blanche Nixon, a local resident, community activist and library volunteer.  Mrs. Nixon spearheaded beautification projects at the branch, including its garden and exterior mural.  https://libwww.freelibrary.org/locations/blanche-a-nixoncobbs-creek-library

Milford is a borough in Pike County, Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat.  Its population was 1,021 at the 2010 census.  Located on the upper Delaware River, Milford is part of the New York metropolitan area.  The area along the Delaware River had long been settled by the Lenape, an Algonquian-speaking indigenous tribe that lived in the mid-Atlantic coastal areas, including western Long Island, and along this river at the time of European colonization.  The English also called the people the Delaware, after the river they named after one of their colonial leaders.  Milford was founded in 1796 after the American Revolutionary War as a United States settlement on the Delaware River by Judge John Biddis, one of Pennsylvania's first four circuit judges.  He named the settlement after his ancestral home in Wales.  Milford has a large number of buildings of historical significance, many constructed in the nineteenth century and early twentieth centuries.  Some are listed on the National Register of Historic Places, while numerous others are included in the Milford Historic District, also listed on the NRHP.  Of the 655 buildings in the district, 400 of them have been deemed to be historically significant.  The district is characterized by a variety of Late Victorian architecture.  Grey Towers National Historic Site, the ancestral home of Gifford Pinchot, the noted conservationist, two-time Governor of Pennsylvania and first head of the U.S. Forest Service, is located in Milford.  It was designed by architect Richard Morris Hunt has been designated a National Historic Site.  According to the United States Census Bureau, the borough has a total area of 0.5 square miles (1.3 km2), all land.  Milford is located on the Upper Delaware River, which divides Pennsylvania's Poconos region from the Catskill Mountains in New York, in what was historically a heavily forested area.  When Judge Biddis bought up the land of what was then known as Wells Ferry and laid out the lots for the new town, he generally followed the urban plan of Philadelphia:  he laid out High Street--the equivalent of what is now Market Street in Philadelphia--running to the Delaware River, while Broad Street runs perpendicular to High, creating a grid.  At the intersection of Broad and High is a public square--just as there is at Broad and Market in Philadelphia-- and most of Milford's official buildings are located there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milford,_Pennsylvania  Milford Haven in Wales is an Anglicization of an old Scandinavian name Melrfjordr that was first applied to the waterway--the Old Norse Melr, meaning sandbank, and fjordr, meaning inlet, developing into "Milford"; then later the term "Haven" was added.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Milford_Haven

Fireball Whisky Barbecue Sauce Recipe

Ananym is a special form of the pseudonym, in which the letters of a name are rearranged.  The ananym is a special form of the anagram and can be formed by (1) arbitrarily rearranging all the letters of a name, thus forming a new name or (2) sorting in exactly the reverse order.  If the ananym is read backwards, it returns the original name.  The term is derived from the Greek words ana, which coincides with according, as well as onyma, which means name.  Examples:  (1) The poet Paul Celan was originally called Paul Ancel.  (2) In Castlevania is one of the protagonists Alucard.  Castlevania is a video game series from Konami, whose first offshoot appeared in 1987.  In the game, the player controls a vampire hunter who approaches the dark forces and usually tries to find a way through Dracula’s castle.  The son of Count Dracula is called Alucard, which is a simple reversal of the name of the legendary vampire.  The Ananym Alucard is not an invention of Konami.  For the first time in the American film Son of Dracula (1943) by Robert Siodmak, the noble blood-sucker Anthony Alucard leads the wordplay as a surname.  In addition, this ananym is found in the Manga/Anime series Hellsing.  Alucard is a vampire who works for the organization Hellsing.  (2) Theodor Seuss Geisel sometimes used the name Theo LeSieg.  For his works, he used various pseudonyms, such as Dr. Seuss, Rosetta Stone and the ananym of his surname LeSieg.  posted by Edward  https://monsterliterature.com/ananym/

John McPhee quotes from Annals of the Former World, Book 3, Rising From the Plains  “There was a saying among homesteaders in Wyoming:  ‘If summer falls on a weekend, let’s have a picnic.’”   “Bentonite is mined in Wyoming and sold to the rest of the world.  Blessed is the land that can sell its mud.  Bentonite is used in adhesives, automobile polish, detergent and paint.”  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bentonite

The Black HoursMS M.493 (or the Morgan Black Hours) is an illuminated book of hours completed in Bruges between 1460 and 1475.  It consists of 121 leaves, with Latin text written in Gothic minuscule script.  The words are arranged in rows of fourteen lines, and follow the Roman version of the texts.  The lettering is inscribed in silver and gold, and placed within borders ornamented with flowers, foliage and grotesques, on pages dyed a deep blueish black.  It contains fourteen full-page miniatures and opens with the months of the liturgical calendar (folios 3 verso--14 recto), followed by the Hours of the Virgin, and ends with the Office of the Dead (folio 121v).  MS M.493 is one of seven surviving black books of hours, all originating from Bruges and dated to the mid-to-late 15th century.  They are so named for their unusual dark blueish appearance, a colourisation achieved through the expensive process of dyeing the vellum with iron gall ink.  This dye is very corrosive and the surviving examples are mostly badly decomposed; MS M.493 is in relatively good condition due to its very thick parchment.  The book is a masterpiece of Late Gothic manuscript illumination.  No records survive of its commission, but its uniquely dark tone, expense of production, quality and rarity suggest ownership by privileged and sophisticated members of the Burgundian court.  The book is often attributed, on stylistic grounds, to a follower of Willem Vrelant, a leading and influential Flemish illuminator.  It has been in the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, New York, since 1912.  See illustrations at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hours,_Morgan_MS_493

How to Make Mason Jar Ice Cream  No machine or special equipment required.  Katherine Sacks  https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/how-to-make-mason-jar-ice-cream-article

Driving Down This Haunted Pennsylvania Road Will Give You Nightmares  If you’ve ever seen M. Night Shymalan’s film “The Village,” then you’re already familiar with the area around Cossart Road.  It is so infused with legend that he chose to film the movie in a nearby field.  Even if you were unaware of the road’s ghostly history, you would suspect an ominous presence due to the trees, which dramatically lean away from the road.  Legend states that the trees lean away from Cossart Road in a desperate attempt to be further away from the evil road, which is colloquially known as Devil's Road.  The source of bad spirits in the area is said to come from the DuPont family, who lived in a large stone mansion off of Devil's Road.  Posted by Cristi  https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/pennsylvania/pa-cossart-road/  The Muser’s father was born in Cossart, Pennsylvania.  The town no longer exists.  The house he was born in is no longer there. 

THOUGHT FOR MAY 22  It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data.  Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts. - Arthur Conan Doyle, physician and writer (22 May 1859-1930)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2272  May 22, 2020

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