The Historic House Trust of New York City was formed in 1989 as a public-private partnership with the New
York City Department of Parks and Recreation to preserve the historic
houses located
within New York City parks, although most of the houses were not
originally city-owned. The Trust works with the individual houses to
restore and promote the houses as a means of educating residents and visitors about the social, economic and
political history of New York City and cast urban
history in a new
light. The Trust includes 23 historic sites, with 18 operating as
museums. Find pictures, locations and
descriptions of houses at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_House_Trust
00:22
PINK CITY IN INDIA If a member of the royal family were coming
to your home, you’d probably spruce it up a bit—maybe rearrange the furniture
and plop some peonies into a vase. The
king of Jaipur, however, went above and beyond what's expected of a host. In an effort to impress the Prince of Wales
ahead of his state visit in 1876, it is widely believed that the king had
the entire city painted pink.
Prior to a state visit from Prince Albert Edward—the eldest son of
Queen Victoria and her consort, Prince Albert—Jaipur’s buildings were either white
or a “sallow yellow,” according to The Rough Guide to India. At the urging of his favorite wife, the
maharaja took it one step further and passed a law in 1877 making it illegal for buildings in the old
city to be painted any color other than "Jaipur pink." This law still remains in effect today. Emily Petsko
See pictures at https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/542269/why-jaipurs-king-painted-his-city-pink-impress-prince-wales
PINK
CITY IN FRANCE Toulouse is the capital of the French department of Haute-Garonne and of the region of Occitanie.
The city is on the banks of the River Garonne, 150 kilometres (93 miles) from
the Mediterranean Sea,
230 km (143 mi) from the Atlantic Ocean and 680 km
(420 mi) from Paris. It is the fourth-largest city in France, with 479,553 inhabitants within its
municipal boundaries (as of January 2017), and 1,360,829 inhabitants within its
wider metropolitan area (also
as of January 2017), after Paris, Lyon and Marseille. The University of
Toulouse is one of the oldest in Europe (founded in 1229) and,
with more than 103,000 students, it is the fourth-largest university campus in
France, after the universities of Paris, Lyon and Lille. Founded by the Romans, the city was the
capital of the Visigothic Kingdom in
the 5th century and the capital of the province of Languedoc in the Late Middle Ages and early modern period (provinces
were abolished during the French Revolution), making it the unofficial
capital of the cultural region of Occitania (Southern France). Toulouse counts two UNESCO World Heritage Sites:
the Canal du Midi (designated
in 1996 and shared with other cities), and the Basilica
of St. Sernin, the largest remaining Romanesque building in Europe, designated
in 1998 because of its significance to the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage route. The city's unique architecture made of
pinkish terracotta bricks
has earned Toulouse the nickname La Ville Rose (The Pink City).
Cacao
beans are encased in an outer husk that must be removed and separated from the
seed through a process called winnowing.
Winnowing cracks the cacao bean and separates the husk from the
"nib". We use the nib to make
chocolate. Our winnower is custom built:
a piece from a juicer cracks the cacao, while a vacuum sucks up the lighter
husk. We donate our husks to Brooklyn Grange,
Red Hook Community Farm, and Edible Schoolyard NYC, where they are used as
compost. Because the husk is
indigestible and not tasty, it's much better for the soil and plants than for
people. https://www.raakachocolate.com/pages/unroasted
A knot garden is a formal
garden designed to resemble a Celtic or Medieval knot. Different types or colors of plants are used
to differentiate the threads of the knot.
Small shrubs, herbs or perennials can be used in the beds created
between or around the paths. Knot
gardens are almost always square. Daily
maintenance is required to keep the knot garden looking good. Lynn Doxon
https://homeguides.sfgate.com/build-knot-garden-45720.html
In one of the twentieth
century’s most memorable scenes from literature, a man is standing on a beach,
pulling on a long rope that stretches out to sea. The rope is covered in thick seaweed. He yanks and tugs, and out of the foaming
waves comes a horse’s head. It’s black
and shiny and lies there at the water’s edge, its dead eyes staring while
greenish eels slither from every orifice.
The eels crawl out, shiny and entrails-like, more than two dozen of
them; when the man has shoved them all into a potato sack, he pries open the
horse’s grinning mouth, sticks his hands into its throat, and pulls out two
more eels, as thick as his own arms.
This macabre fishing method is described in Günter Grass’s 1959
novel, The Tin Drum. Rarely has the eel been more detestable. The eel does not appear frequently in
literature or art, but when it does, it’s often an unsettling, slightly
revolting creature. And yet the eel
continued to be associated with the irrational psyche of humankind, with the
alien and unfathomable, in both literature and art. It remained a slimy, frightening creature of
the dark, slithering out of the depths.
A creature unlike others. In
Fritiof Nilsson Piraten’s Swedish classic Bombi Bitt and Me, from
1932, the eel is a devil, a horned monster that has grown to more than ten feet
long over the course of countless years in the depths. In a remote and possibly bottomless Scanian
pond, it has hidden away from humanity, until the book’s main characters, Eli
and Bombi Bitt, along with old man Vricklund set out to catch it one night. Vricklund manages to pull it out of the pond;
it’s a “dark, monstrous creature, that whipped the water to foam”—and then a
wild wrestling match ensues The eel
rises up like a “living telephone pole”; the moonlight outlines its large
horns; the struggle ends only when Vricklund sinks his teeth into its enormous
body. from The Book of Eels, by Patrik Svensson. Copyright ©
2019 by Patrik Svensson. English
translation copyright © 2020 by Agnes Broomé. Read more at https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/07/01/ashes-to-ashes-eel-to-eel/
July 13, 2020 The United States, China and the United Arab
Emirates are sending unmanned spacecraft to Mars in quick succession beginning
this week, in the most sweeping effort yet to seek signs of ancient microscopic
life while scouting out the place for future astronauts. The U.S., for its part, is dispatching a
six-wheeled rover the size of a car, named Perseverance, to collect rock
samples that will be brought back to Earth for analysis in about a decade. Each spacecraft will travel more than 300
million miles (483 million kilometers) before reaching Mars next February. It takes six to seven months, at the minimum,
for a spacecraft to loop out beyond Earth’s orbit and sync up with Mars’ more
distant orbit around the sun. Scientists
want to know what Mars was like billions of years ago when it had rivers, lakes
and oceans that may have allowed simple, tiny organisms to flourish before the
planet morphed into the barren, wintry desert world it is today. Marcia Dunn
https://apnews.com/4302ec5c515d37f53636b8ef60869991
July 12,
2020 The newly-discovered Comet Neowise--a
big-tailed beauty which has become the brightest comet visible in the U.S. in a
quarter-century--is now visible in Michigan in the evenings as well as just
before sunrise. It’s best seen with a good pair
of binoculars or even a telescope, but its tail recently got brighter and it
can be seen with your eyes. Its approach
will get closer until about July 23, scientists have said. The comet was discovered in March, 2020 via
NASA’s Neowise infrared space telescope, according to the Associated Press. It has an official name--Comet C/2020 F3--but
the telescope’s name has become the comet’s moniker. Researchers say the comet is about 3 mile
across. Its origins are ancient. “Its nucleus is covered with sooty material
dating back to the origin of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago,” the AP
said. Neowise is expected to head back out toward our outer
solar system in mid-August, but should be visible until then. Tanda Gmiter
https://www.mlive.com/news/2020/07/how-to-see-comet-neowise-streaking-past-earth-before-it-disappears-for-6800-years.html
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2298
July 13, 2020
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