At the Valley of the Temples, which has occupied a ridge outside the city of Agrigento, Italy, for 2,500 years, visitors come to admire the Doric columns and see the stunning Greek structures that have stood through weather and war.  What they see is the skeleton of a long-gone society.  Tour guides and didactic panels describe what life was once like, and recreated wood machines sprinkled throughout the site help one imagine how the temples were built.  But the structures themselves are lifeless.  If you follow a path from the Temple of Concordia towards the Hellenistic-Roman urban quarter, though, you will find an orchard of almond and pistachio trees bursting white with flowers.  This “Living Museum of the Almond Tree,” which stands out among the arid landscape of scrub, contains more than 300 rare Sicilian varieties.

The almond orchard is not the park’s only agricultural project:  It is home to bees and goats and citrus trees.  For a long time, conservation management prioritized ruins rather than their surrounding context.  The Venice Charter, an influential 1964 document that established a framework for conservation, omitted historic landscapes and gardens, focusing on maintaining ruins as unchanged artifacts.  For decades, this narrow vision of culture dominated the field.  But “culture” stems from the Latin word cultura, which means to grow or cultivate.  So the professionals in these two silos--archaeology and landscape—got to talking.  And according to Mauro Agnoletti, a professor at the University of Florence who teaches landscape history and rural-landscape planning, conservation slowly began to take into account not just the ruins but the surrounding environment.  Shaun Pett  July 30, 2020  Read much more and see pictures at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-to-see-agrigento-valley-of-temples 

What do namby-pamby, nemesis, nebuchadnezzar, nestor, nicotine and nosey parker have in common?  All are eponyms.  Read about them at https://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/eponyms/eponym_list_n.html

When life hands you desperation, make desperation pie.  Before sugar cream pie became Indiana’s unofficial state pie, it was a palatable answer to hard times.  The earliest known recipe dates back to 1816, the same year Indiana became a state.  Thanks to the pie’s lack of seasonal ingredients, anyone could combine sugar, cream, vanilla, nutmeg, salt, and flour throughout the year.  A true sugar cream filling didn’t even call for eggs.  The dish, which fed a sizable group and could sit out without spoiling, became common at church gatherings and farm plowings—akin to Amish funeral pie.  Though it was already beloved in select communities, sugar cream truly began its rise to the top in 1944.  That’s when Duane Wickersham opened a restaurant in Randolph County, Indiana, and started baking around 20 pies per day.  Over the next decade, demand quadrupled.  In 1962, Wickersham patented the recipe and opened a factory.  Today, “Wick’s” makes 10,000 pies per eight-hour shift, and 75 percent of them are sugar creams.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/hoosier-desperation-sugar-cream-pie-indiana 

English poet and playwright Ambrose Philips (1674-1749) was educated at the University of Cambridge.  His first and best-known poems were collected in Pastorals and were probably written while he was a fellow at Cambridge, although they were not published until 1710.  For Pastorals, published in one of Jacob Tonson’s several volumes entitled Miscellany, Philips won immediate praise from several leading men of letters, including Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, but he was strongly attacked by Alexander Pope, whose own Pastorals had been published in the same volume as Philips’s.  His adulatory verses (“Dimpley damsel, sweetly smiling”) won Philips the nickname “Namby-Pamby.”  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ambrose-Philips 

The tonka bean, which gives off notes of vanilla, cherry, and almond, infuses desserts, drinks, and even perfumes around the world.  British chefs mix it into cocktail syrups and grate its shavings over pastries, while pâtissiers in France whip up tonka bean–infused ice creams and custards.  In fact, the French love the bean so much, they’ve dubbed their obsession fièvre tonka, or “tonka fever” (a play on fève, the French word for “bean.”)  And yet, if you’re in the United States, stocking these wrinkled, raisin-looking beans in your spice cabinet could get you raided by the Food and Drug Administration. Tonka beans, a product of the South American cumaru tree, contain a naturally occurring chemical known as coumarin.  Since coumarin can cause health problems such as liver damage, the FDA has enforced a ban on tonka beans since 1954.  However, it would take eating 30 whole tonka beans to experience any negative effects from this toxicity. And no one eats the beans whole.  Due to tonka’s potent flavor profile, a sprinkle of its shavings is enough to create a rich and heady aroma.  By some reports, a single bean can flavor as many as 80 dishes.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/tonka-beans 

In the pink is an English idiom that means to be at the peak of health, to be in perfect condition.  The expression in the pink to mean to be at the peak of health goes back to the 1500s when the word pink did not refer to a color.  At that time, the word pink referred to a certain type of flower called dianthus, still referred to as pinks in the English vernacular, today.  Pinks, the flowers, were considered the pinnacle of floral design and so the word pink came to mean anything that was the pinnacle of excellence.  The word pink is derived from the Danish term pinck oogen, which translates as half-closed eyes or small eyes, a clear reference to the appearance of the dianthus flower.  Unbelievably, the word pink to mean a color was not used until the end of the 1700s, and not in general use until the 1800s.  https://grammarist.com/idiom/in-the-pink/ 

NPR Books Summer Poll 2020:  Kids’ Books  We decided that this year's summer reader poll should be all about keeping kids occupied.  We asked you to tell us about your favorite kids' books, from board books for babies to great read-alouds to early chapter books and even a few books for older readers.  And thousands of you answered.  It's a curated list built from your recommendations and picks from our expert panel of judges--a fantastic group of authors, librarians, publishers and all-around book nerds.   Instead of a ranked list, it's grouped into categories that we hope will help you find just the right books for the kids in your life.  Petra Mayer  https://www.npr.org/2020/08/31/905804301/welcome-to-story-hour-100-favorite-books-for-young-readers 

Cilantro Lime Sweet Corn  Servings:  4  Total Time:  35 Minutes  This dish can be made up to a day ahead of time but wait to add the cilantro until right before serving.  https://www.onceuponachef.com/recipes/cilantro-lime-sweet-corn.html 

Difference Between Cilantro and Coriander by Amy Jeanroy   Coriander is a double duty herb.  Its seeds are known as coriander and its leaves are known as cilantro.  This herb has a very distinct taste that is best described as a fresh-green spice, and it is a perfect addition for indoor and kitchen gardens.  Cilantro resembles flat parsley in its appearance and is sometimes called Chinese parsley.  https://www.thespruce.com/what-is-cilantro-1761776 

I like to play an old vinyl copy of Willie Nelson’s Red Headed Stranger for my child.  She’s six, and she perks up with the song “Hands on the Wheel,” which I have forever sung as her lullaby.  She doesn’t understand that the full weight of the concept album’s cycle—in which a protagonist emerges from consuming violence and despair—comes to bear on this hopeful melody.  Nor does she realize the many shapes that “Hands on the Wheel” has taken for her father over the better part of five decades.  She does not and should not understand that even now, homebound, her teary gripes of “When is this coronavirus going to go home, so I can play with friends?,” the lyric conforms:  At a time when the world seems to be spinning / hopelessly out of control . . . Lost to the gentle melody, she won’t even try to sing along.  This is okay.  Though I had memorized every word, note, and nuance to the Red Headed Stranger before I knew the Pledge of Allegiance, it took me half a life to understand the lessons it provided in narrative, craft, and culture.  I first heard the album when I was 5 years old, in 1976, in San Antonio.  This was a dozen years before someone assigned me Winesburg, Ohio, and two decades or more before I found Toni Morrison or Jennifer Egan, Markson or Calvino, or anyone else whose story structure might reconsider time, place, and presentation.  Odie Lindsey  https://lithub.com/learning-to-write-from-willie-nelson-and-one-of-the-greatest-albums-of-the-1970s/  Odie Lindsey is writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University’s Center for Medicine, Health, and Society. 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2253  September 4, 2020