The common periwinkle or winkle (Littorina littorea) is a species of small edible whelk or sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusc that has gills and an operculum, and is classified within the family Littorinidae, the periwinkles.  This is a robust intertidal species with a dark and sometimes banded shell.  It is native to the rocky shores of the northeastern, and introduced to the northwestern, Atlantic Ocean.  There is another snail known as the small periwinkle or Melarhaphe neritoides that looks similar, but is smaller.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_periwinkle 

Common periwinkle (Vinca minor) is an ideal plant for tough spots.  It is also called lesser periwinkle or creeping myrtle.  Although it prefers rich, slightly moist soil, it tolerates a wide range of conditions, including clay, alkaline soils and drought.  Periwinkle has shallow, spreading, fibrous roots that hold soil in place.  Use it on slopes or to prevent soil erosion.  Native to Asia and Europe, periwinkle is hardy in U.S. Department of Agriculture plant hardiness zones 4 through 9.  It blooms best in full sun, but it also grows in shade and is often planted under trees.  Its dense roots tend to crowd out other plants, so use it alone or plant it with bulbs.  Periwinkle produces tiny purple, blue or white blooms in spring to summer and has deep green, glossy evergreen foliage.  Julie Christensen  https://www.gardeningchannel.com/how-to-grow-periwinkle-vinca/ 

In December 1853, a 27-year-old archaeologist named Hormuzd Rassam was leading excavations near Mosul, now in Iraq.  Over the past few years, European adventurers digging in these mounds (and at Nimrud, twenty miles south) had revealed a spectacular ancient world.  The largest mound, called Kouyunjik, was a mile long.  In 1847, the British explorer Austen Henry Layard, with Rassam as his assistant, tunneled into its southwest corner and unearthed the ruins of a great palace, built in the seventh century BC.  The luxurious riverside residence had at least 80 rooms and passages, with stone doorways guarded by huge winged bulls and lions, and walls decorated with around two miles of carved alabaster friezes, showing victorious military campaigns across the Near East.  It belonged to the Assyrian king Sennacherib:  Layard and Rassam had discovered the great city of Nineveh, capital of the largest empire that the world had ever known.  The chamber they had discovered turned out to be a long, narrow salon, 50 feet long by 15 feet wide.  Its walls were covered with scenes of a lion hunt: the king chasing in his chariot, bow held high; spearing a lion with his attendants; thrusting his dagger through the animal’s neck.  The reliefs are some of the most exquisite, lifelike art ever discovered from the Assyrian civilization.  Rassam was moved by the portrayal of one lioness in particular, “resting on her forepaws, with outstretched head she vainly endeavours to gather together her wounded limbs.”  But the biggest discovery was beneath his feet.  The floor of this chamber was covered with thousands of broken clay tablets:  some completely smashed; others almost whole, up to around 9 inches long.  Their surfaces were crowded with tiny, wedge-shaped indentations—a script known as cuneiform, made by pressing the end of a reed into the clay while it was still wet.  Rassam really had discovered another palace—built by Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal, the Assyrian empire’s most powerful king.  And this was his library.  It was a crucial find.  The origin of farming, around 8000 BC, was a key turning point in human history:  people were no longer part of nature, they were beginning to shape and control it.  A few millennia later, these same fertile plains between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers—an area known as Mesopotamia—witnessed another great human revolution:  the invention of writing.  The earliest written tablets known were produced by the Sumerian civilization of southern Mesopotamia, at the end of the fourth millennium BC.  Their cuneiform script was later adopted by the Babylonians and Assyrians and spread farther north.  By allowing everything from debts and taxes to the will of the king to be permanently recorded, the written word supported the machinery and bureaucracy of ever more complex cities, states and even empires.  And, of course, with written records, history can begin.  Archaeological remains can hint at what past cultures thought and believed, but words tell us directly.  Jo Marchant  https://lithub.com/obsession-and-desire-in-an-ancient-assyrian-library/ 

“You see things; you say, 'Why?'  But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?”   “You use a glass mirror to see your face; you use works of art to see your soul.”  George Bernard Shaw, Back to Methuselah  https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/3089881-back-to-methuselah 

George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), known at his insistence simply as Bernard Shaw, was an Irish playwright, critic, polemicist and political activist.  His influence on Western theatre, culture and politics extended from the 1880s to his death and beyond.  He wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman (1902), Pygmalion (1912) and Saint Joan (1923).  With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Born in Dublin, Shaw moved to London in 1876, where he struggled to establish himself as a writer and novelist, and embarked on a rigorous process of self-education.  By the mid-1880s he had become a respected theatre and music critic.  Following a political awakening, he joined the gradualist Fabian Society and became its most prominent pamphleteer.  Shaw had been writing plays for years before his first public success, Arms and the Man in 1894.  Influenced by Henrik Ibsen, he sought to introduce a new realism into English-language drama, using his plays as vehicles to disseminate his political, social and religious ideas.  By the early twentieth century his reputation as a dramatist was secured with a series of critical and popular successes that included Major Barbara, The Doctor's Dilemma and Caesar and Cleopatra.  Shaw's expressed views were often contentious; he promoted eugenics and alphabet reform, and opposed vaccination and organised religion.  He courted unpopularity by denouncing both sides in the First World War as equally culpable, and although not a republican, castigated British policy on Ireland in the postwar period.  These stances had no lasting effect on his standing or productivity as a dramatist; the inter-war years saw a series of often ambitious plays, which achieved varying degrees of popular success.  In 1938 he provided the screenplay for a filmed version of Pygmalion for which he received an Academy Award.  His appetite for politics and controversy remained undiminished; by the late 1920s he had largely renounced Fabian Society gradualism and often wrote and spoke favourably of dictatorships of the right and left—he expressed admiration for both Mussolini and Stalin.  In the final decade of his life he made fewer public statements, but continued to write prolifically until shortly before his death, aged ninety-four, having refused all state honours, including the Order of Merit in 1946.  Since Shaw's death scholarly and critical opinion about his works has varied, but he has regularly been rated among British dramatists as second only to Shakespeare; analysts recognise his extensive influence on generations of English-language playwrights.  The word Shavian has entered the language as encapsulating Shaw's ideas and his means of expressing them.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Bernard_Shaw 

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  wheel horse  (HWEEL hors) noun  1.  Someone responsible and diligent, especially one who bears the biggest share of burden in a group.  2.  A horse harnessed closest to the front wheel(s) of a carriage.  From wheel, from Old English hweol + horse, from Old English hors.  Earliest documented use:  1708.  cock-horse  (KAHK-hors)  adverb:  Mounted with a leg on each side.  noun:  A hobby horse.  From cock (rooster) + horse, perhaps from the strutting of a rooster.  Earliest documented use:  1566.  Feedback to A.Word.A.Day  From:  Francis Carr  You wrote:  “What do you call a horse who says no to riding?  A neigh-sayer.”  Or, coming from the horse’s mouth:  “You want to ride today?  Saddle-y no.”   From:  Richard Turner  When I was a child (1940s), my Dad used a “wheel horse” to cultivate his small vegetable garden.  This was a push-from-behind device with a three-foot diameter metal wheel in front that would fit between the rows. I haven’t seen one for many years.  From:  Kenneth Kirste  I believe Joyce Cary titled his 1944 novel The Horse’s Mouth to suggest that an artist (such as his central character) is in touch with the truth in a way most are not and, therefore, can provides an honest perspective on the culture and society.  AWADmailissue949 

WORDPLAY  Malice in Blunderland, coils of curls 

‘Mushrooms Have Kidnapped You’: Pandemic Feeds Russia’s Obsession With Forest Fungi  Wall Street Journal  October 1, 2020 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2266  October 2, 2020