Killer rabbit may refer to:  Rabbit of Caerbannog, a fictional beast from the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail; Jimmy Carter rabbit incident, a 1979 incident involving a swamp rabbit trying to board President Jimmy Carter's fishing boat; creatures from the 1972 horror film Night of the Lepus; The Killer Rabbits, a 20th-century comedy rock band; and White Rabbit (comics), a fictional character who sometimes employs killer rabbits.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killer_rabbit 

Thomas Lipton took to the grocery business like a duck to water and one store soon became a chain of stores across Glasgow.  One of the products he would sell to his customers was tea and it wasn’t long before he spotted a huge potential in this refreshing brew and bought his first tea farms in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).  He then reorganized it and introduced an innovative cable car system to make transporting leaves more efficient.  But what set Sir Thomas apart was that, in an age when tea was a rare and expensive luxury, he believed that anyone, of any class, should be able to enjoy tea at its best.  He established the Thomas J Lipton Co.® tea packaging company in Hoboken, New Jersey and began to look for ways to make packaging and shipping less expensive.  Instead of arriving in crates, loose tea was packed in multiple weight options.  He also cut out the middleman and was the first to sell loose tea direct to the masses.  At last, you didn’t have to be an aristocrat to enjoy a great cup of tea.  Soon after, tea bags were accidentally discovered by American merchant, Thomas Sullivan (he sent tea samples to customers in silk bags which they then presumed should be placed in water).  Thomas Lipton saw the future, and was the first to start selling tea bags.  He was also the first to print brewing instructions on tea bag tags.  https://www.lipton.com/us/en/our-purpose/the-history-of-lipton-tea.html  Inside Glasgow’s Southern Necropolis Cemetery, you might notice one grave with tea bags beside it.  These tributes are in honor of Sir Thomas Lipton, one of the tea industry’s most important figures.  Lipton was born in Glasgow on May 10, 1850.  At age 16, he emigrated to the United States and worked in various jobs, but soon returned to Scotland to help run his parents’ grocery store.  

Many aspects of Egyptian culture impressed the ancient Greeks, including their mathematics, papyrus-making, art, and egg-hatching.  Aristotle was the first to mention that last innovation, writing that in Egypt, eggs “are hatched spontaneously in the ground, by being buried in dung heaps.”  But 200 years later, the historian Diodorus Siculus cast Egyptian egg-hatching as wondrous. In his forty-book-long historical compendium Library of History, he wrote:  The most astonishing fact is that, by reason of their unusual application to such matters, the men [in Egypt] who have charge of poultry and geese, in addition to producing them in the natural way known to all mankind, raise them by their own hands, by virtue of a skill peculiar to them, in numbers beyond telling.  Aristotle and Diodorus were referring to Egyptian egg incubators, an ingenious system of mud ovens designed to replicate the conditions under a broody hen.  With lots of heat, moisture, and periodical egg-turning, an egg oven could hatch as many as 4,500 fertilized eggs in two to three weeks, a volume that impressed foreigners for centuries.  Western travelers mentioned the wondrous structures constantly in their writings about Egypt.  In 1750, French entomologist René Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur visited an egg incubator and declared that “Egypt ought to be prouder of them than her pyramids.”  Vittoria Traverso  See many graphics at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/egypt-egg-ovens

Drought-resistant.  Tolerant of pollution.  Adaptable to a variety of soils.  With its reputation as a tough species, the Kentucky coffeetree is an excellent choice for parks, golf courses, and other large areas.  It is also widely used as an ornamental or street tree.  The Kentucky coffeetree is native to the central states of America from Pennsylvania to Nebraska and from Minnesota to Oklahoma.  This tree gets its name because early Kentucky settlers noticed the resemblance of its seeds to coffee beans.  In earlier times, its wood was used in the construction of railway sleeper cars.  Sources disagree on which parts of the seed pods are edible.  The seed pulp is reportedly toxic to cattle.  Link to a tree guide at https://www.arborday.org/trees/treeguide/TreeDetail.cfm?ItemID=819 

Soft cream is the Japanese answer to soft serve.  Creamier and thicker than its American counterpart, it is popular throughout Hokkaido and Japan, and many towns showcase local identity through unique flavors.    Ishii Miso Brewery in Matsumoto makes soft cream with their miso.  In Kyoto, you can find yuba, ice cream flavored like the skin over boiled soy milk.  And Hakodate, Hokkaido’s southern tentacle, slaps visitors with black squid ink.  “Food especially stands in a rather emotional domain compared to other products like pottery or clothes,” says Ng.  “And since tourism draws on a tourist’s emotions and imaginations, a tourist might more easily remember some soft cream they ate on a trip than the displays in a castle.”  Touting local specialties has deep roots in Japanese culture.  Anyone who has done a jikoshokai—or a self-introduction—will be familiar with boasting hometown pride.  Every town, no matter how small, is famous for something.  For some, those famed products will be extracted and swirled into soft serve.  The concept of omiyage—when people travel, they’re expected to bring back a gift, typically a single-serving, individually wrapped edible novelty that represents the place they visited—also taps into this.  Michael Colbert  See pictures at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-soft-cream-japan

Thomas Michael Maschler, publisher and managing director of Jonathan Cape and the architect of the Booker prize for fiction, died October 15, 2020 at the age of 87.  He joined the fusty but esteemed publishing house in 1960 as editorial director, his first buy Catch-22, for which he paid £250.  “Authors felt they’d been touched,” suggested Philippa Harrison, who started her career in publishing as a Cape reader.  Her report on First Love, Last Rites (1975) ensured that Maschler read the manuscript for the short story collection that marked Ian McEwan’s debut.  His authors included Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Doris Lessing, Martin Amis and Bruce Chatwin, plus Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, who put Latin American fiction on the English-speaking map.  Conversely, Maschler’s rejection of An Unsuitable Attachment condemned Barbara Pym to 14 years in the wilderness, following six novels with Cape.  Maschler presided over Cape like a colossus, the list a roll-call of some of the 20th century’s great names in fiction, prize-winning heavyweights whose British and Commonwealth contenders would routinely carry off the Booker prize he had created in 1969 to rival the Prix Goncourt.  But, in addition to literary fiction and nonfiction, Maschler was a dab hand at commerce--for example Desmond Morris’s The Naked Ape (1967), Kit Williams’s Masquerade treasure hunt (1979) and Jonathan Miller’s pop-up The Human Body (1983).  From John Lennon’s “doodles”, brought to him by the journalist Michael Braun, he created two books, In His Own Write (1964) and A Spaniard in the Works (1965).  Liz Thomson   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/16/tom-maschler-obituary 

For a book lover, stepping into a bookstore is always exciting, but a new bookstore in China makes the experience absolutely spellbinding.  Dujiangyan Zhongshuge, located in Chengdu, was designed by Shanghai-based architecture firm X+Living, which has created several locations for Zhongshuge. The two-story space appears cathedral-like, thanks to the mirrored ceilings and gleaming black tile floors which reflect the bookcases, creating a visual effect that feels akin to an M.C. Escher drawing.  “The mirror ceiling in the space is the signature of Zhongshuge bookstore,” says Li Xiang, founder of X+Living.  “It effectively extends the space by reflection.”  Upon entering, shoppers encounter C-shaped bookcases, which create a series of intimate spaces.  In the center of the store, towering arches and columns take advantage of the full height of the space.  These bookcases were inspired by the history and topography of the region.  “We moved the local landscape into the indoor space,” says Li.  “The project is located in Dujiangyan, which is a city with a long history of water conservancy development, so in the main area, you could see the construction of the dam integrated into the bookshelves.”  The firm used film printed with books on the upper shelves so it would appear that books stretched from floor to ceiling.  “If we placed real books on the upper shelves, it’s not only hard for readers to reach them but also difficult for operators to take care of,” says Li.  “The store already has a collection of over 80,000 books, so there’s actually no waste of space.”  Another key part of the design was lighting.  “We designed light belts on each shelf to create a good light effect, which also draws the outline of each layer, making the shelf more stereoscopic and clear to give readers a visual impact and also make it convenient for readers to find books on the shelves,” says Li.  The store’s first floor is home to a café and a playful children’s area, which features bamboo bookcases decorated with pandas.  Stacks of colorful cushions provide comfy reading spots for little readers. The second level’s balcony is filled with seating, where customers can browse through their selections, work, or meet.  Elizabeth Stamp  See pictures at https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/surreal-new-bookstore-opened-china  Thank you, Muse reader! 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2274  October 21, 2020