The John P. Parker House is a historic house museum at 300 North Front Street in Ripley, Ohio.  It was home to former slave and inventor John P. Parker (1827–1900) from 1853 to his death in 1900.  Parker was an abolitionist and a well-documented conductor on the Underground Railroad, helping hundreds of escaped slaves.  The house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1980, and it was further designated a National Historic Landmark in 1997.  It is now owned and managed by a local nonprofit organization as a museum about Parker's life and the abolitionist movement.  The John P. Parker House is located on the Ohio River waterfront, north of the center of Ripley.  The building is a two-story brick structure, with a side gable roof that has stepped gables.  A lower two-story wood frame ell extends to the rear.  The front facade is three bays wide, with the entrance in the rightmost bay, topped by a transom window.  Windows are plain sash, set in rectangular openings with stone lintels.  The house is all that is left of a larger manufacturing complex built about 1853 for the business of John Parker, which originally included a machine shop, blacksmithy, and foundry.  Most of these facilities were damaged or destroyed by a fire in 1889, and were not rebuilt by Parker.  Ripley was a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment in the antebellum period, and it was thus a well-known target for slaves escaping across the river from Kentucky, a slave state.  Although Parker's property was close to the river, he apparently rarely sheltered slaves in his home, its remote location equally attractive to fugitive slaves and slave catchers.  Parker was born into slavery, but was given an education by his physician owner, and was able to purchase his freedom.  He regularly crossed into Kentucky in search of escaping slaves, and brought them into the network of Underground Railroad supporters in Ripley.  The property was sold by Parker's wife not long after his death, and was used in support of a coal shipping operation for many years.  In the 1990s it was purchased by a local nonprofit and rehabilitated for use as a museum.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_P._Parker_House 

“I’ll buy you a beer when this is all over,” declares Christo Tofalli, the landlord of Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, which lays claim to the contentious title of Britain’s oldest pub and is no stranger to pandemics. While closed, Ye Olde Fighting Cocks, in the historic city of Saint Albans, has become a Community Supply Point, providing much-needed groceries and offering free delivery to the elderly.  They are even delivering Sunday Roast dinners to residents in lockdown.  Richard Collette  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-the-oldest-pub

 A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

A webster is, literally, a weaver.  And what is compiling a dictionary but assembling it one thread/word at a time?  Also, if you go by his first name, he did herd words in one place, in the style of Biblical Noah:  Noah Webster, Word herder.  Herded words from A to Z^* Into An American Dictionary.  He’s best known for his An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), but he published all sorts of stuff, including textbooks, his own version of the Bible (Common Version), newspaper articles, and more.  Besides writing, he served as a legislator in two states (Connecticut and Massachusetts), started an anti-slavery group (Connecticut Society for the Abolition of Slavery), co-founded a college (Amherst College), founded a newspaper (American Minerva, New York’s first daily), and served as a teacher, lawyer, soldier, and more.  The week of October 12 marks Webster’s 262nd birthday and in his honor we’ll feature words about words and language.  ^*Yes, Z rhymes with dictionary around here.

endonym  (EN-duh-nym)  noun  A name used internally to refer to a place, people, language, etc.  For example, Germany’s endonym is Deutschland, because that’s what Germans call their country.  From Greek endo- (inside, within) + -onym (word, name).  Some related words endogenous and endogamy 

metonymy  (muh-TAHN-uh-mee)  noun  A figure of speech in which someone or something is referred to by the name of something associated.  For example, the use of the word crown to refer to monarchy.  From Latin metonymia, from Greek metonymia (change of name), from meta- (after, beyond) + onama (name).  Ultimately from the Indo-European root no-men- (name) which also gave us name, anonymous, noun, synonym, eponym, renown, nominate, misnomer, moniker, and ignominy.  Earliest documented use: 1553.  When a part is used to refer to the whole, it is synecdoche.  For example, the use of the word eyeballs to refer to viewers or website visitors.  In metaphor, the substitution is based on analogy, in metonym on association.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day

From:  Michael Poxon  This reminds me of an incident in the USA, where I was giving a talk at an astrophysics meeting.  One of the stars I was discussing was RZ Piscium which, as a Brit, I pronounced “ah-zed”, and at which I could see some of the Americans briefly turning to one another.  Knowing why, I then said “If you want to know why we say zed and you say zee, see me afterwards.”  Several were interested enough to ask why.  Zed is a worn-down version of the Greek zeta.  It can also be seen in the cedilla (little zed) used to indicate that a c is to be sounded as an s, not a k.

From:  Tom Henderson  In Stephen Ambrose’s magnificent work Undaunted Courage, his account of the Lewis and Clark expedition, he noted the many critical commentaries over the years regarding, specifically, William Clark’s many “misspellings” in his journal of the expedition.  Professor Ambrose points out that Clark’s efforts pre-dated Webster’s publication of his dictionary by about 25 years, prior to which spelling (and diction) was a “hit or miss” proposition.

From:  Paul Varotsis  Endonym is a particularly interesting word for me as I have had various puzzled looks from custom officers and reception staff wondering which country I came from and some even pointing that I should not follow the European Union citizen queue as my passport states Hellenic Republic.  Lots of people do not know that it means Greece.
From:  Gregory Craner   I often say “I am the only person I know without an accent.”  AWADmail issue 955 

Claire the Scottish Deerhound beat out hundreds of canines to take home the top prize at the National Dog Show of 2020.  Claire was named Best in Show at the event, which this year was scaled down slightly--due to Covid-19.  The show featured just 600 dogs rather than the usual 2,000.   The National Dog Show, hosted by the Kennel Club of Philadelphia, was held over two days on November 14 and 15.  The show, which was first broadcast on NBC in 2002, has aired on Thanksgiving following the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade for almost 20 years.  Founded by The Kennel Club of Philadelphia in 1879, the show has been held annually since 1933.  Like other events in 2020, spectators were not allowed at the show this year because of the ongoing pandemic--cardboard cutouts replaced a live audience.  Masks and social distancing were also strictly enforced.  This year's show introduced three new dog breeds:  the Barbet, the Belgian Laekenois and the Dogo Argentino, according to NBC.  Leah Asmelash   https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/26/us/national-dog-show-2020-trnd/index.html

Fed up with the cold connection of virtual Netflix Parties and digital game nights, Americans are increasingly turning to old-fashioned letter writing to establish a more tactile and intimate rapport.  Paper Source, a national stationery chain, reports that sales of “just because” cards, those not associated with life events, are up nearly 2,000% year-over-year since March, 2020.  But these aren’t just letters, and the more ambitious missives, increasingly embellished and fun to look at, have started landing on social media, as an outlier form of expression called Mail Art.  Rachel Wolfe  https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-snail-mail-renaissance-is-soothing-americans-tired-of-zoom-11606401233 

Snail Mail is the American indie rock solo project of guitarist and singer-songwriter Lindsey Jordan.  In 2015, she started playing her songs live with her band, and released the EP Habit in 2016.  Snail Mail's debut studio album, Lush, was released on June 8, 2018, via Matador Records.  Snail Mail's Lush was nominated for Breakthrough Artist/Release and Best Rock Album at the 2019 Libera Awards.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snail_Mail_(musician) 

THOUGHT FOR NOVEMBER 30  Laws are like cobwebs which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through. - Jonathan Swift, satirist (30 Nov 1667-1745) 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2291  November 30, 2020 

Digitized selections from the holdings of the Newberry Library, which has one of the largest publicly-accessible postcard collections in the world.  Images in this digital collection are available for any lawful purpose, commercial or non-commercial, without licensing or permission fees to the library, subject to the following terms and conditions:  https://www.newberry.org/rights-and-reproductions   https://archive.org/details/newberrypostcards  Thank you, Muse reader! 

No one is pickier about rice than Guorui Chen.  The 33 year old only accepts rice grains longer than 7 millimeters (1/4 inch), and they have to be white, clear, straight, and undamaged.  Every day, he separates intact grains from broken ones with a winnowing basket and then spends hours examining their transparency under a light.  But Chen won’t cook this rice.  Instead, he turns it into art.  He picks out three grains, glues them end to end into a triangle, and connects hundreds of these basic units to form shapes:  a horse, a lotus flower, a temple.  In his hands, rice turns into aesthetic hollow sculptures. They appear so delicate that every joint looks liable to break, but in fact, they are sturdy enough to be lifted up and moved.  In a country with over a billion people who eat rice almost every day, Guorui Chen is the only one using rice to make Gaolou Rice Strings, a traditional art that had been lost for decades.  “Nowhere else in the world can you find it,” says Chen.  Zeyi Yang  Read much more and see pictures at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/making-art-with-rice-china

landish  adjective  From Middle English londish, londiss, from Old English *lendisċ (attested in inlendisċ, ūtlendisċ, uplendisċ, etc.) equivalent to land +‎ -ish.  landish (comparative more landish, superlative most landish)  Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of the land quotations ▼ Related terms:  inlandish, outlandish, uplandish  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/landish

“The years rolled by, one by one, like peaceful uniform wheels.” * “the paradise of simple faith” * “Without cap or helmet, his head is orphaned.” * “They plunged the plow into the rich flesh of the fields.” *  The Radetsky March, a novel by Joseph Roth, translated by Joachim Neugroschel 

For his dark comedy, Joseph Roth might be compared to his contemporary Franz Kafka.  With the writings of Kafka and Robert Musil, Roth’s novels constitute Austria-Hungary’s finest contribution to early-twentieth-century fiction, yet his career was such as to make you wonder that he managed to produce novels at all, let alone sixteen of them in sixteen years.  For most of his adult life, Roth was a hardworking journalist, travelling back and forth between Berlin and Paris, his two home bases, but also reporting from Russia, Poland, Albania, Italy, and southern France.  He didn’t have a home; he lived in hotels.  His novel-writing was done at café tables, between newspaper deadlines, amid the bloody events—strikes, riots, assassinations—that marked Europe’s passage from the First World War to the Second, and which seemed more remarkable than anything a novelist could imagine.  When Roth was born, in 1894, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, presided over by the aging Franz Joseph, consisted of all or part of what we now call Austria, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, Croatia, Poland, Ukraine, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Italy.  Ethnically, this was a huge ragbag, and separatist movements were already under way, but to many citizens of the empire its heterogeneity was its glory.  He was the first person to inscribe the name of Adolf Hitler in European fiction, and that was in 1923, ten years before Hitler took over Germany.  https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2004/01/19/european-dreams

In Medieval Europe, sawing the top off a well-executed coffin revealed something delicious, rather than disgusting.  A coffin, spelled coffyn in 12th-century English, referred to self-standing pastry made from flour, water, and sometimes fat.  Like a sort of medieval Tupperware, coffins preserved the foods they contained and were rarely eaten.  During the Tudor period, the English loved pastry cases so much that they developed a saying:  “If it’s good, tis better in a Coffyn.”  The barely edible container was the progenitor of pie.  Leigh Chavez-Bush  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/who-made-first-pie

Henry Dunant was a co-founder of the Red Cross (ICRC).  His book, “Un souvenir de Solférino” (A Memory of Solferino), about the decisive battle in the Austro-Sardinian War lay the foundations for more humane conduct in times of war.  The man from Geneva was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this in 1901.  But anyone who now regards Dunant as an absolute humanitarian would be mistaken.  This businessman was spending time in northern Italy due to commercial interests, and it was actually more by chance that he bore witness to the ruthlessness of war there.  Andrej Abplanalp  https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2018/05/henry-dunant-a-tragic-hero/  

A curtsy (also spelled curtsey or incorrectly as courtsey) is a traditional gesture of greeting, in which a girl or woman bends her knees while bowing her head.  It is the female equivalent of male bowing or genuflecting in Western cultures.  Miss Manners characterizes its knee bend as deriving from a "traditional gesture of an inferior to a superior."  The word "curtsy" is a phonological change from "courtesy" known in linguistics as syncope.  According to Desmond Morris, the motions involved in the curtsy and the bow were similar until the 17th century, and the gender differentiation between the actions developed afterwards.  The earlier, combined version is still performed by Restoration comedy actors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtsy   

GRATITUDE QUOTES

“I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new.”   Ralph Waldo Emerson

“When you arise in the morning give thanks for the food and for the joy of living.  If you see no reason for giving thanks, the fault lies only in yourself.”  Tecumseh 

“When eating fruit, remember the one who planted the tree.”  Vietnamese proverb 

"'Enough' is a feast."  Buddhist proverb 

“Wear gratitude like a cloak, and it will feed every corner of your life.”  Rumi

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”  Marcel Proust 

“We must find time to stop and thank the people who make a difference in our lives.”  John F. Kennedy 

“Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.”  Marcus Tullius Cicero

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2290  November 27, 2020 

Cornell University’s McGraw Tower is 137 feet tall.  It’s visible for miles, and most days, its 21 chimes ring out morning, afternoon, and evening.  It’s a campus touchstone, one that community members use to meet up with friends, give people directions, and generally anchor themselves.  So on October 8, 1997, as students walked to their Wednesday morning classes, it’s fair to say they were surprised to discover that their beloved landmark had grown an appendage.  “One day, there was this thing at the top of the tower,” remembers Oliver Habicht, at the time a recent graduate working for the university IT department.  It was way up at the top, impaled on the spire.  After two weeks of analysis via “microscopic slides, videotapes and photographs,” a special panel of plant biology professors announced that it was, indeed, a pumpkin.  Other students joined in the fun.  “One group parked a whole bunch of pumpkins at the bottom of the tower, sort of cheering on the one at the top,” says Habicht.  One student wrote a pumpkin version of the Cornell song (sample lyric:  “Who can tell from whence it came there, silent and alone? / See the guardian of the harvest, nobly thus enthroned”).   Cara Giaimo  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/cornell-pumpkin-prank-20th-anniversary-mystery  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornell_Chimes and https://chimes.cornell.edu/about 

Banyans are strangler figs.  They grow from seeds that land on other trees.  The roots they send down smother their hosts and grow into stout, branch-supporting pillars that resemble new tree trunks.  Banyans are the world’s biggest trees in terms of the area they cover.  The biggest one alive today is in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh.  It covers 1.9 hectares (4.7 acres) and can shelter 20,000 people.  For thousands of years, people have used banyans as sources of medicines.  Today in Nepal, people use banyan leaves, bark and roots to treat more than twenty disorders.  Hindu texts written more than 2500 years ago describe a cosmic ‘world tree’, a banyan growing upside-down with its roots in the heavens.  Its trunk and branches extend to Earth to bring blessings to humanity.  Mike Shanahan  https://underthebanyan.blog/2016/09/04/10-things-you-need-to-know-about-banyan-trees/ 

Since ancient Greece, when Aristophanes debuted The Birds in 414 B.C, the phrase “the milk of the birds” has denoted items of exceptional rarity.  Someone with everything on Earth could only long for bird’s milk, because—as far as anyone knew—it didn’t exist.  Jan Wedel, owner of the E. Wedel candy company in Poland, capitalized on this concept in 1936.  Ptasie Mleczko (“bird milk”) is a chocolate candy that encloses a creamy marshmallow-meets-meringue filling.  There’s nothing highly unusual about the decadent morsel, but the name bestowed the treat with the aura of a rare delicacy.  As it turns out, bird’s milk does exist.  While it’s not technically “milk” in the sense of mammary glands, some birds (male and female) can produce hearty secretions for their young.  Pigeons feed their squabs a highly nutritious secretion called “crop milk,” which contains more protein than cow or human milk.  Both Greater Flamingos and Emperor Penguins can secrete “milk” from their upper digestive tracts to feed chicks, as well.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/birds-milk-chocolate 

The Brownies is a series of publications by Canadian illustrator and author Palmer Cox, based on names and elements from English traditional mythology and Scottish stories told to Cox by his grandmother.  Illustrations with verse aimed at children, The Brownies was published in magazines and books during the late 19th century and early 20th century.  The Brownie characters became famous in their day, and at the peak of their popularity were a pioneering name brand within merchandising.  Brownies are little fairy- or goblin-like creatures who appear at night and make mischief and do helpful tasks.  As published by Palmer Cox, they were based on Scottish folktales.   The first appearances of Brownie characters in a print publication took place in 1879, but not until the February 1881 issue of Wide Awake magazine were the creatures printed in their final form.  The first proper story, The Brownies' Ride, appeared in the February 1883 issue of the children's periodical St. Nicholas Magazine.  Published in 1899, The Brownies Abroad is considered the first Brownie comic strip, though it was mostly a text comic.  It didn't utilise speech balloons until the publication The Brownie Clown of Brownie Town of 1908.  From 1903, The Brownies appeared as a newspaper Sunday strip for several years.  The first compilation, The Brownies, Their Book, was published in 1887, followed by 16 books in the series until the last in 1918.  Palmer Cox died in 1924.  Beyond print publication, The Brownies was at least twice adapted to stage plays.  With the rise in popularity of the Brownie characters, these were used in many venues of merchandising, such as games, blocks, cards, dolls, calendars, advertisements, package labels, mugs, plates, flags, soda pop, a slot machine, a bagatelle game and so forth.  George Eastman applied the brand name in promotion of Kodak's "Brownie Camera", but Palmer Cox reportedly never received any money for the commercial use of his work.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Brownies 

Winston Churchill gave his legendary “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946.  That fateful evening, he and President Harry Truman had dinner together, and Bess Truman served Ozark pudding.  This mashup between an apple crisp and a pecan pie isn’t much to look at, but its sticky, buttery-crisp bottom and airy crust overcompensate for its lack of style.  South Carolinians call the same dessert Huguenot torte, all thanks to a chef named Evelyn Anderson Florance.  Florance made desserts at the Huguenot Tavern in Charleston, South Carolina, during the 1940s.  There, she recreated the Ozark pudding she’d first tried at a church dinner a decade earlier.  She renamed the sweet in honor of the restaurant, then had the recipe printed in a Charleston community cookbook in 1950.  Thus, Ozark Pudding became known as Huguenot torte.  The dessert has very little to do with the Huguenots, a group of Protestants who fled violent persecution in France.  After religious freedom was abolished in 1685 (a result of revoking the Edict of Nantes), thousands of French Protestants fled to the United States.  A large portion of them settled in South Carolina.  And yet, while many of their descendants love Huguenot torte, they were not responsible for its creation (despite the misconception bred by Florance’s recipe).  Another hint that Ozark pudding was never French?  It calls for baking powder, a 19th-century British invention.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/ozark-pudding-huguenot-torte  This is the Muser’s favorite Thanksgiving dessert.  

Rockefeller, the Saw-whet owl that stowed away and traveled on the Rockefeller Christmas tree, was released in a conifer forest in upstate New York November 24, 2020.  “Rocky” traveled about 170 miles on the tree and was discovered during transport, the Ravensbeard Wildlife Center said.  Christina Maxouris  https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/25/us/rockefeller-tree-owl-released-trnd/index.html 

130 children in need will receive books in 2020 through the Book Angel Project run by independent bookstore Oblong Books & Music in Rhinebeck, New York.  Begun in 2002 by Piper Woods, co-owner of Montgomery Row—and Oblong Books’ landlord—the program has provided books to over 1,500 children attending kindergarten through twelfth grade.  Woods began the program after seeing a similar one at Vermont bookstore and being “blown away by how many books they were able to supply to children in need.”  She grew up loving books like Steven Kellogg's The Mysterious Tadpole, Tomie DePaola's illustrated Simple Pictures are Best, Daniel Pinkwater's The Big Orange Splot, and wanted other kids to experience the same joy in reading as she had.  “Now that I'm a mother I find that reading is such an important building block for young people,” said Woods in an interview.  “Reading helps with accomplishing school work, it can be an escape or a resource for coping.  Developing and maintaining a love of books in young people is so crucial.”  Woods works with local schools to identify kids who are unlikely to receive a book at the holidays, said Suzanna Hermans, co-owner of Oblong Books & Music, which also has a second location in Millerton, New York (though the Rhinebeck store is the one operating the Book Angel program).  Piper then gives the bookstore a list of the children’s names (changed to protect their privacy), their reading levels and interests, and creates tags to hang on a tree in the store’s children’s section through November 25, 2020.  Customers can choose a tag from the tree and pick out a book for that child, which most opt to do, or get assistance from Oblong’s booksellers in making a selection.  Customers can also donate online to ensure all 130 kids receive a book; most children receive one book, though younger kids may receive two paperbacks.  Rachel Kramer Bussel  https://www.forbes.com/sites/rachelkramerbussel/2020/11/04/bookstores-book-angel-program-ensures-kids-in-need-receive-books-for-the-holidays/?sh=589982433de1 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2289  November 25, 2020 

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

unicorn  (YOO-nih-korn)  noun  1.  A mythical horse-like creature with a horn on the forehead.  2.  Something or someone rare or unusual:  highly desirable but hard or impossible to find.  3. A startup valued at one billion dollars or more.  From Latin unicornis, from uni- (single) + cornu (horn), ultimately from the Indo-European root ker- (horn, head), which also gave us cornucopia, carrot, cranium, cornea, cervix, and cancer.  Earliest documented use:  1225.

bunyip  (BUHN-yip)  noun  An impostor.  adjective  Counterfeit; phony.  After bunyip, a large mythical creature of Australian Aboriginal legend, who lives in swamps, riverbeds, etc.  The word is from Wemba-Wemba or Wergaia language of the Aboriginal people in Victoria.  Earliest documented use:  1848.

gremlin  (GREM-lin)  noun  A source of trouble, especially problems of technical nature.  Of uncertain origin.  Perhaps from an alteration of the word goblin or from Irish gruaimin (a gloomy person).  Earliest documented use:  1929.   Originally, the word gremlin was Royal Air Force slang for a low-level employee.  From there it evolved to refer to a mythical creature responsible for problems in aircraft.  The word was popularized by the novelist Roald Dahl, a former fighter pilot with the RAF, when he published his children’s book The Gremlins in 1943.  It’s not certain how the term was coined.

Bigfoot  (BIG-foot)   noun:  A prominent person in a commanding position, especially a journalist.  verb tr.:  To dominate or to take control of a situation from someone.  verb intr.:  To behave in an authoritative, domineering manner.  Bigfoot is a nickname for a Sasquatch, a large, ape-like mythical creature who lives in a remote wilderness, especially the Pacific Northwest region of the US and Canada.  Earliest documented use:  1833.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day

From:  Helen Ross  The unicorn is an emblem on the Royal Arms of Scotland, while the lion is an emblem for England. I am reminded of the nursery rhyme, The Lion and the Unicorn.  “The lion and the unicorn were fighting for the crown/The lion beat the unicorn all around the town.”  The lion still does exactly that, being stronger in voting power.

From:  Judith Judson  An obsolete usage of unicorn is to describe a three-horse team (video, 2 min.), two wheelers and one leader in front--thus making a triangle.  It was a difficult feat to control such a rig, and therefore (as we know from Georgette Heyer’s Regency novel The Unknown Ajax), it could also be called “Sudden Death”.  We commonly think of a three-horse team as the Russian troika, but that is driven with three horses abreast.

From:  Eric Kisch  Numerous tales of the bunyip in written literature appeared in the 19th and early 20th centuries.  These included a story in Andrew Lang’s The Brown Fairy Book (1904).  The Bunyip of Berkeley’s Creek is a contemporary Australian children’s picture book about a bunyip.  Alexander Bunyip, created by children’s author and illustrator Michael Salmon, first appeared in print in The Monster That Ate Canberra in 1972.  Alexander Bunyip went on to appear in many other books and a live-action television series, Alexander Bunyip’s Billabong.  A statue of Alexander is planned for the Gungahlin Library.  The word bunyip has been used in other Australian contexts, including The Bunyip newspaper as the banner of a local weekly newspaper published in the town of Gawler, South Australia.  First published as a pamphlet by the Gawler Humbug Society in 1863, the name was chosen because “the Bunyip is the true type of Australian Humbug!”  The word is also used in numerous other Australian contexts, including the House of the Gentle Bunyip in Clifton Hill, Victoria.  There is also a coin-operated bunyip at Murray Bridge, South Australia, at Sturt Reserve on the town’s riverfront.  Bunyips appear in Naomi Novik’s fantasy novel Tongues of Serpents.  It also makes an appearance as the primary threat to the treasure seekers in the Bengali novel called Chander Pahar by Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay.

From:  Roberta M. Eisenberg  There used to be a car model called a Gremlin.  My uncle had one--orange.  We all called it The Shoe.  Perhaps the name of the car foretold its demise.
From:  Jim Tang   The 1963 Twilight Zone episode, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet (video, 9 min.), made great use of William Shatner’s acting chops to place the gremlin on an airliner.  Specifically, on the port wing as he tore up the engine.  Rod Serling, like Roald Dahl, had ties to aviation, although his were jumping out of them as a decorated WWII US Army paratrooper.  His brother Robert is renowned for aviation writing that centers more on the airline builders, airplane manufacturers, and pilots.  Gremlins still inhabit airplanes, even more so as we move further into the computer age.  When they finally replace human beings in the cockpit, only the gremlins will remain.
From:  M.M. Serpento   Here’s a real estate definition (a variation on McMansion):  To bigfoot is to replace a house similar to others in the neighborhood with a much larger house.  Often done by buying two side-by-side lots and demolishing the existing houses.  Bigfoot houses: The new trend in metro Detroit’s compact communities  AWADmailissue 954

A 118-year-old ham, which is reportedly the oldest in the world, was originally cured in 1902 by the Gwaltney Foods meat company before it was lost in storage.  On its rediscovery two decades later, the elated Pembroke D. Gwaltney Jr. made the piece of pork his “pet ham.”  He put a brass collar on it and paraded it around various expositions to prove to customers his meat could be kept without being refrigerated.  The dry curing process used to create the ham involved salting the meat and draining the blood, which allows for a longer shelf life and a richer flavor.  Supposedly, microbiologists say the ham is technically still edible.  However, it isn’t a delicacy anyone would enjoy pigging out on, as the taste and sensory experience of the cured ham may not appeal to modern palates.  The ham is housed in the Isle of Wight County Museum, which is also home to the world’s oldest peanut.  It occupies a climate-controlled display case with two other hams, one of which is purportedly the largest ham in the world.  See picture at https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/worlds-oldest-edible-ham 

“When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.”  “It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible.  The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.”  “The species greatest harvest ― words.”  David Brin  https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/14078.David_Brin  Glen David Brin (born October 6, 1950) is an American scientist and author of science fiction.  He has received the Hugo, Locus, Campbell and Nebula Awards.  His novel The Postman was adapted as a feature film and starred Kevin Costner in 1997.  Brin's nonfiction book The Transparent Society won the Freedom of Speech Award of the American Library Association and the McGannon Communication Award.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brin 

Eighteen five-ingredient Thanksgiving recipes  Margaux Laskey  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/18/dining/five-ingredient-thanksgiving-recipes.html 

Sir Christopher Frank Carandini Lee, CBE, CStJ (1922–2015) was an English actor, singer and author.  With a career spanning nearly seven decades, Lee was well known for portraying villains and became best known for his role as Count Dracula in a sequence of Hammer Horror films.  His other film roles include Francisco Scaramanga in the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Count Dooku in the Star Wars prequel trilogy (2002–2005), and Saruman in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy (2001–2003) and the Hobbit film trilogy (2012–2014).  Lee was knighted for services to drama and charity in 2009, received the BAFTA Fellowship in 2011, and received the BFI Fellowship in 2013.  Lee credited three films “for bringing me to the fore” as an actor, A Tale of Two Cities (1958), in which he played the villainous marquis, and two horror films, The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958).  He considered his best performance to be that of Pakistan's founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah in the biopic Jinnah (1998), and his best film to be the British cult film The Wicker Man (1973).  He frequently appeared opposite his friend Peter Cushing in many horror films, and late in his career had roles in five Tim Burton films.  Always noted as an actor for his deep, strong voice, Lee was also known for his singing ability, recording various opera and musical pieces between 1986 and 1998, and the symphonic metal album Charlemagne: By the Sword and the Cross in 2010, after having worked with several metal bands since 2005.  The heavy metal follow-up Charlemagne: The Omens of Death was released on 27 May 2013, Lee's 91st birthday.  He was honoured with the "Spirit of Metal" award at the 2010 Metal Hammer Golden Gods Awards ceremony.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lee 

HERE ARE THE WINNERS OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARDS  Liberty Hardy  https://bookriot.com/2020-national-book-awards/  Read speech by Walter Mosley (winner of "The Medal for Distinguished Contribution  to American Letters")  from National Book Awards  https://lithub.com/read-walter-mosleys-incredible-speech-from-last-nights-national-book-awards/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2288  November 23, 2020