tog  from Old French togue, from Latin toga (“cloak, mantle”).  It started being used by thieves and vagabonds with the noun togman, which was an old slang word for "cloak".  By the 1700s the noun "tog" was used as a short form for "togman", and it was being used for "coat", and before 1800 the word started to mean "clothing".  The verb "tog" came out after a short period of time and became a popular word which meant to dress up.  The unit of thermal resistance was coined in the 1940s after the clo, a unit of thermal insulation of clothing, which was itself derived from clothes.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tog

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

bokeh  (BOH-kay/kuh) noun  The blurred effect in a photograph, typically as a soft out-of-focus background, that results in a pleasing effect and helps to draw attention to the subject of the photograph.  From Japanese boke (blur, haze) or boke-aji (blur quality).  Earliest documented use:  1997.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day  From:  Walter Levy  In the world of photography, the term bokeh has been in general use since around 1997.  A more recent neologism is bokehlicious, a portmanteau of bokeh and delicious, indicating a highly desirable quality of bokeh.  The term can be applied to a photograph with smooth, “creamy” out-of-focus areas, or to a lens that tends to produce such images.

If you're not already making labneh, now's the time to start!  This creamy, tangy yogurt cheese comes together with just 2 simple ingredients.  The hardest part of making labneh cheese is waiting.  Everything else is simple.  Mix together 2 ingredients--Greek yogurt and salt--wrap them in a cheesecloth, and hang it over a bowl to strain.  Then, things get tough:  you’ll have to wait 24 hours to open the cheesecloth and enjoy the thick, creamy yogurt cheese inside.  But if you try this labneh recipe, I think you’ll agree that the wait is totally worth it.  https://www.loveandlemons.com/labneh-recipe/  Thank you, Muse reader! 

DNA origami is the nanoscale folding of DNA to create non-arbitrary two- and three-dimensional shapes at the nanoscale.  The specificity of the interactions between complementary base pairs make DNA a useful construction material, through design of its base sequences.  DNA is a well-understood material that is suitable for creating scaffolds that hold other molecules in place or to create structures all on its own.  DNA origami was the cover story of Nature on March 16, 2006.  Since then, DNA origami has progressed past an art form and has found a number of applications from drug delivery systems to uses as circuitry in plasmonic devices; however, most applications remain in a concept or testing phase.  The idea of using DNA as a construction material was first introduced in the early 1980s by Nadrian Seeman.  The current method of DNA origami was developed by Paul Rothemund at the California Institute of Technology.  Examples include a smiley face and a coarse map of China and the Americas, along with many three-dimensional structures such as cubes.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_origami

“There is a land in the northern fringes of the state of Vermont known to locals simply as the Northeast Kingdom.  It takes in most of Essex County, with pieces of Orleans and Caledonia, a wild, mountainous place of lakes and rivers, hills and gorges, with here and there a bumpy track and a small village.”  “Wits from the South say there are only two seasons in the Kingdom—August and winter.  Those who know the place say this is nonsense; it is August 15th and winter.”  The Negotiator, a novel by Fredercik Forsyth  *  In 1990 Australian broadcaster Alan Jones had been a regular writer for The Sun-Herald when the newspaper announced that Jones' column would no longer appear following a petition by staff calling for his removal as a contributor.  This followed Jones' publication of a column predicting an oil crisis, in which a large amount of the material had been taken directly from Forsyth's novel The Negotiator without any attribution or indication that the source was a work of fiction.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negotiator_(novel)

Six hundred miles from the North Pole, on an island the size of West Virginia, at the end of a tunnel bored into a mountain, lies a vault filled with more than 1 million samples of seeds harvested from 6,374 species of plants grown in 249 locations around the world.  The Wall Street Journal  May 30, 2020

February 24, 2020  The so-called “doomsday” vault in Norway is taking in its biggest deposit of seeds since vital upgrades in 2019.  The deposit will feature over 60,000 seed samples from 36 different groups—the most to send their seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault at one time.  That includes the Cherokee Nation, the first tribe based in the US to make a deposit.  Departments of agriculture from Thailand, the US, and Ireland and universities and research centers from Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Lebanon, and elsewhere will make contributions as well.  The international nonprofit organization Crop Trust manages the vault in partnership with the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre.  Justine Calma@justcalma 
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21151298/doomsday-svalbard-vault-seed-deposit-cherokee-nation

FROM THE YEAR 2000  “This Friday is the first National Work at Home Day, an occasion when there won't be any need to feel guilty about negotiating a multimillion-dollar deal in your boxers and bunny slippers, or interviewing a chief executive while wearing just a towel.”  https://www.wired.com/2000/07/this-friday-make-it-real-casual/  The tradition continues (day after day after day) in 2020.

At the Bird Library in Virginia, birds (and the occasional squirrel) come and go, leaving with seeds and fruits instead of books.  It’s not actually a library, but a bird feeder that anyone can watch on a 24/7 livestream.  According to librarian Rebecca Flowers, she and woodworker Kevin Cwalina built the bird feeder five years ago after seeing The Piip Show, a popular-but-now-defunct livestream in Norway with the same concept, but set in a cafe.  It was their love of nature (and literature) that made them decide to do a similar project.  Over the years, the library has received diverse visitors, including goldfinches, cardinals, nuthatches, and more recently, a rose-breasted grosbeak.  Flowers says that one can learn a lot about birds and their unique personalities by simply watching them.  You can watch the Bird Library’s livestream on YouTube, and you can also see their archive of photos on their website.  Inigo Del Castillo https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/bird-library-livestream-36766357  Thank you, Muse reader! 

“I’m a librarian, I can handle anything.”  “It’s snack o’clock!”  “Why did the bird go to the library?  He was looking for bookworms.”  Quotes from https://www.birdlibrary.org/

                                                                                                  

David A. Taylor on Art as Social Intervention  When the economy collapsed in 1929, American jobs disappeared at the rate of 20,000 a day.  In the Great Depression, the publishing and arts sectors shrank by about a third.  Creatives were desperate.  There was private desperation and there was public desperation.  Harry Hopkins, the New Deal’s jobs program coordinator, focused on the public aspect and short-term solutions.  When Congress questioned the idea of supporting artists and writers with jobs in the Works Progress Administration, Hopkins replied that artists had to eat like everyone else.  In response to protests in New York by unemployed publishing workers who felt abandoned, the WPA began a small Federal Writers’ Project and others for art, music, and theater. The notion behind “work relief” was that paying work could sustain morale better than direct unemployment payments.  In visual art, a first federal art program in 1933 cranked out 15,000 works in six months.  It reached one-third of the country’s estimated 10,000 unemployed artists and the Federal Art Project reached still further.  Jacob Lawrence, who studied at the Harlem Community Art Center with Romare Bearden, was a WPA artist. Lawrence first considered becoming a writer.  He knew he “wanted to tell a story,” he said later, but was daunted by the competitive genius in Harlem’s literary scene.  So he chose to tell it in paint.  He created most of his Migration Series as a 23-year-old living in a Harlem loft.  Some WPA guidebooks were censored and denounced by citizens’ committees in their time, and some of the writers’ later works were banned.  They reflect art’s power in shaping and triggering American identities and norms.  Even in 2020,  Invisible Man appeared on an Alaska school board’s list of banned books (along with work by Maya Angelou and others) for mentions of incest, racial slurs, and profanity.  Maybe the WPA let new passions into the public space.  “Writing is an act of salvation,” Ellison wrote in a letter to Wright after seeing the Great Migration unspool in Wright’s photo essay, 12 Million Black Voices.  “God! It makes you want to write and write and write, or murder.”  https://lithub.com/how-did-artists-survive-the-first-great-depression/

A THOUGHT FOR JUNE 30  Not that I want to be a god or a hero.  Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone. - Czeslaw Milosz, poet and novelist (30 Jun 1911-2004)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2292  June 30, 2020