15 of the World’s Scariest-Looking Structures  Nick Mafi  https://www.architecturaldigest.com/gallery/worlds-scariest-looking-structures           

Masonite is a type of hardboard, a kind of engineered wood, which is made of steam-cooked and pressure-molded wood fibers in a process patented by William H. Mason.  It is also called Quartrboard, Isorel, hernit, karlit, torex, treetex, and pressboard.  A product resembling masonite (hardboard) was first made in England in 1898 by hot-pressing waste paper.  Masonite was patented in 1924 in Laurel, Mississippi, by William H. Mason, who was a friend and protégé of Thomas Edison.  Mass production started in 1929.  In the 1930s and 1940s, Masonite was used for applications including doors, roofing, walls, desktops, and canoes.  It was sometimes used for house siding.  Masonite is formed using the Mason method, in which wood chips are disintegrated by saturating them with 100-pound-per-square-inch (690 kPa) steam, then increasing the steam or air pressure to 400 pounds per square inch (2,800 kPa) and suddenly releasing them through an orifice to atmospheric pressure.  Forming the fibers into boards on a screen, the boards are then pressed and heated to form the finished product with a smooth burnished finish.  (Later a dry process with two burnished surfaces was also used.)  The original lignin in the wood serves to bond the fibers without any added adhesive.  The long fibers give Masonite a high bending strength, tensile strength, density, and stability.  Unlike other composite wood panels, no formaldehyde-based resins are used to bind the fibers in Masonite.  Artists have often used it as a support for painting, and in artistic media such as linocut printing.  Masonite's smooth surface makes it a suitable material for table tennis tables and skateboard ramps.  Masonite is used by moving companies.  Among other things, they use it to protect the walls of buildings where they work, and lay on floors to enable smooth rolling of dollies loaded with goods.  Masonite is used extensively in the construction of sets for theater, film and television.  It is especially common in theaters as the stage floor, painted matte black.  It is considered one of the best materials for making a musical wobble board.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masonite 

Traverse City, Michigan, often calls itself “The Cherry Capital of the World.”  On July 25, 1987, Chef Pierre Bakeries celebrated that status with a cherry pie weighing 28,350 pounds and stretching 17 feet, 6 inches in diameter.  While the pie was devoured decades ago, the tin still stands to the side of Cass Road in Traverse City.  The pie tin for the record-setting pie was 18 feet wide and 26 inches deep.  It was built by the Jacklin Steel Supply Company of Traverse City.  Hundreds of volunteers helped the bakery employees assemble, cook, and serve the pie.  When the big day to make the pie arrived, people lined up to help pass down 510 buckets of cherry pie filling to the waiting tin.  The pie then received a top crust.  When it was finished, a tube sucked out the filling from the pan’s bottom and squirted it into small cups.  Pastry crumbs adorned the top of each serving, and the pie fed an estimated 35,000 spectators.  At the time, the Guinness Book of World Records certified Traverse City’s cherry pie as the largest ever, thereby eclipsing the record set by Charlevoix, a neighboring town, 11 years earlier.  But the victory was not without controversy:  Charlevoix residents argued that the Traverse City pie lacked a bottom crust and therefore did not count as a full cherry pie.  But Traverse City’s record was short-lived:  On July 14, 1990, the city of Oliver, British Columbia, baked a 37,721-pound cherry pie, and officially unseated Traverse City as the home of the “World’s Largest Cherry Pie.”  https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/worlds-largest-cherry-pie-tin           

California native Jack London had traveled around the United States as a hobo, returned to California to finish high school (he dropped out at age 14), and spent a year in college at Berkeley, when in 1897 he went to the Klondike by way of Alaska during the height of the Klondike Gold Rush.  Later, he said of the experience:  "It was in the Klondike I found myself."  He left California in July and traveled by boat to Dyea, Alaska, where he landed and went inland.  To reach the gold fields, he and his party transported their gear over the Chilkoot Pass, often carrying loads as heavy as 100 pounds (45 kg) on their backs. They were successful in staking claims to eight gold mines along the Stewart River.  London stayed in the Klondike for almost a year, living temporarily in the frontier town of Dawson City, before moving to a nearby winter camp, where he spent the winter in a temporary shelter reading books he had brought:  Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species and John Milton's Paradise Lost.  In the spring, as the annual gold stampeders began to stream in, London left.  He had contracted scurvy, common in the Arctic winters where fresh produce was unavailable.  When his gums began to swell he decided to return to California.  With his companions, he rafted 2,000 miles (3,200 km) down the Yukon River, through portions of the wildest territory in the region, until they reached St. Michael.  There, he hired himself out on a boat to earn return passage to San Francisco.  In Alaska, London found the material that inspired him to write The Call of the Wild.  Dyea Beach was the primary point of arrival for miners when London traveled through there, but because its access was treacherous Skagway soon became the new arrival point for prospectors.  To reach the Klondike, miners had to navigate White Pass, known as "Dead Horse Pass", where horse carcasses littered the route because they could not survive the harsh and steep ascent.  Horses were replaced with dogs as pack animals to transport material over the pass; particularly strong dogs with thick fur were "much desired, scarce and high in price".  London would have seen many dogs, especially prized husky sled dogs, in Dawson City and in the winter camps situated close to the main sled route.  He was friends with Marshall Latham Bond and his brother Louis Whitford Bond, the owners of a mixed St. Bernard-Scotch Collie dog about which London later wrote:  "Yes, Buck is based on your dog at Dawson."  Beinecke Library at Yale University holds a photograph of Bond's dog, taken during London's stay in the Klondike in 1897.  The depiction of the California ranch at the beginning of the story was based on the Bond family ranch.  On his return to California, London was unable to find work and relied on odd jobs such as cutting grass.  He submitted a query letter to the San Francisco Bulletin proposing a story about his Alaskan adventure, but the idea was rejected because, as the editor told him, "Interest in Alaska has subsided in an amazing degree."  A few years later, London wrote a short story about a dog named Bâtard who, at the end of the story, kills his master.  London sold the piece to Cosmopolitan Magazine, which published it in the June 1902 issue under the title "Diablo--A Dog".  London's biographer, Earle Labor, says that London then began work on The Call of the Wild to "redeem the species" from his dark characterization of dogs in "Bâtard".  Expecting to write a short story, London explains:  "I meant it to be a companion to my other dog story 'Bâtard' . . . but it got away from me, and instead of 4,000 words it ran 32,000 before I could call a halt."  Written as a frontier story about the gold rush, The Call of the Wild was meant for the pulp market.  It was first published in four installments in The Saturday Evening Post, which bought it for $750 in 1903.  In the same year, London sold all rights to the story for $2,500 to Macmillan, which published it in book format.  The book has never been out of print since that time.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Call_of_the_Wild 

Most popular sports in the world:  #1--Football (Soccer); #2—Cricket; #3—Basketball; #4—Tennis.  Read about the top sports in the world at https://mostpopularsports.net/in-the-world

Like Swedish lovers canoodling in a hot tub overlooking the frozen lakes of northern Scandinavia, kaffeost, or “coffee cheese,” bobs luxuriously in its hot coffee bath.  The dried cheese, called juustoleipä (sometimes leipäjuusto or just juusto), absorbs the steaming brew, softening without melting, like a rich, moist cheese sponge.  Though it may be an unlikely pairing to some palates, among the Sami people of Lapland and other regions around northern Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Russia, sharing a mug of kaffeost is a welcome and welcoming ritual.  Juustoleipä translates to “cheese bread,” which not only refers to its dry and sturdy texture, but also its culinary use as a sort of bread-like vehicle for jam, syrup, and, of course, coffee.  To make the cheese, milk—once reindeer milk, now often goat or cow milk—gets curdled, baked, and dried into thin rounds.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/kaffeost

There is no such thing as not voting:  you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some diehard's vote. - David Foster Wallace, novelist, essayist, and short story writer (21 Feb 1962-2008) 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2280  November 4, 2020