‘Phwooar--Ginsy Ginsy Ginsy, I love you so much!”  The “Ginsy” in question is beat poet Allen Ginsberg.  The literary critic is Frank Skinner, deconstructing Ginsberg’s Sunflower Sutra on his Absolute Radio poetry podcast.  Now embarking on its second series, the podcast is a terrific listen:  bursting with enthusiasm for its chosen poems and constantly amusing about Skinner’s relationship with them.  The standup is also quite brilliant at giving us footholds on the verses under review:  Parnassus never felt so approachable.  https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2020/oct/06/frank-skinner-poetry-podcast-absolute-radio 

In warm weather, the rolling hills of Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido burst with flowers.  In cold weather, they glisten with snow.  But come rain or shine, a sentinel stands guard in the island’s major city, Sapporo.  Loyal, friendly, and steadfast, this is Ken-kun, the proprietor of the Inu no Yakiimoyasan sweet potato stand.  This friendly salesman greets visitors and welcomes them to sample his signature roasted sweet potatoes.  But a sign outside the stand reminds visitors that he can’t give you change—because he’s a dog.  The Dog’s Roasted Sweet Potato stand has been around for several years, reliably offering locals in a Sapporo residential district the common street snack.  Ken-kun, a Shiba Inu, rocketed to global fame following a viral tweet early in 2019, and the internet was delighted at what a good boy he was.  While Ken-kun can’t actually roast the sweet potatoes or handle the money—that lack of opposable thumbs can really hold an entrepreneur back—he does man the stand solo for most of the day.  His owner roasts the potatoes and leaves them in a plastic container, then comes around several times a day to count the cash in an honor-system money box and walk Ken-kun.  See picures of Ken-kun at https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/inu-no-yakiimoyasan-dog-sweet-potato

We owe architect Louis Sullivan for one of the catchiest modern dicta on making things:  that form should follow function.  A pioneer of the steel-frame skyscraper—responsible for the Prudential (later Guaranty) Building in Buffalo, New York, and St. Louis’ Wainwright Building, both prototypes of the modern office building—and a forefather of American modernist architecture, he saw patterns in nature and felt that urban design ought to follow suit.  Acorns are made to grow into oaks.  Rivers are made to run.  A department store should be made to welcome city dwellers and entice them to buy something.  “Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight or the open apple blossom,” he wrote, “form ever follows function, and this is the law.”  People, generally speaking, gravitate toward pithy phrases and simple rules, even just to end up disagreeing with them.  So it’s no surprise that “form follows function” has become a mainstay of Sullivan’s legacy.  He debuted the idea in an 1896 piece for Lippincott’s Magazine, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” in which he outlined the most important considerations for designing the exemplary office (the entrance ought to catch the eye; rows of identical office cells are fine).  In 1901 he published a set of fifty-two essays, Kindergarten Chats, which further expounded on the tenets underpinning his idealistic architectural vision.  Addressed to young architects, the essays appeared over the course of a year in the Interstate Architect and Builder.  In 1918, with some encouragement from friends and colleagues, he recast the essays as a book aimed at curious laypeople in addition to practitioners.  It was first published in 1934, a decade after his death.  Eve Sneider  Read more and see graphics at https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/form-follows-function 

Hodgepodge has come to mean any mixture of things that are not really meant to go together, but it originally referred to a soup of all sorts of ill-suited ingredients jumbled together in a pot.  In other words, it is a soup that you just threw together with whatever you had on hand, whether the ingredients were harmonious or not.  Dating back to the 14th century, there is an earlier form of hodgepodge, hotchpotch, that is still used in Britain, and this is a form of the Middle English hotchpot, which before that was hochepot.  The origin of hodgepodge is ulimately French, however.  The Middle English Hochepot derived from the same word in French, and was formed from the verb hocher, meaning “to shake,” and pot which meant the same thing in French as it does in English:  a large, deep pan for cooking.  So, the word referred to a stew with a whole bunch of different ingredients all “shaken” together in a pot.  https://culinarylore.com/food-history:origin-of-hodgepodge/  See also:  Late Middle English alteration of hotchpotch by association with Hodge (a nickname for the given name Roger), an archaic British term used as a name for a typical agricultural worker at https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/hodgepodge 

Inside Katie Diez’s home in rural Oregon, life blossoms.  Diez is a pediatric occupational therapist and the cofounder of Comfort Seeds, an initiative that uses gardening to help kids who have lost loved ones heal.  She’s currently writing a Comfort Seeds children’s book, in collaboration with Oregon-based illustrator Manda Severin.  And she’s dreaming of the trip she’ll take once pandemic restrictions are lifted:  to Copenhagen, and Denmark’s new Happiness Museum, which recently added a packet of comfort seeds to its collection.  “My cup is completely full,” says Diez.  Reina Gattuso  Read more and see gorgeous pictures at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-in-happiness-museum 

The Dead Rabbits was the name of an Irish American criminal street gang active in Lower Manhattan in the 1830s to 1850s.  The Dead Rabbits were so named after a dead rabbit was thrown into the center of the room during a gang meeting, prompting some members to treat this as an omen, withdraw, and form an independent gang.  Their battle symbol was a dead rabbit on a pike.  They often clashed with Nativist political groups who viewed Irish Catholics as a threatening and criminal subculture.  The Dead Rabbits were given the nicknames the "Mulberry Boys" and the "Mulberry Street Boys" by the New York City Police Department because they were known to have operated along Mulberry Street in the Five Points.  See graphics and find lyrics detailing the Dead Rabbits' battle with the Bowery Boys on July 4, 1857, written by Henry Sherman Backus and Daniel Decatur Emmett at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Rabbits

Before cooking soybeans stovetop, you'll want to soak them well.  We recommend at least four hours but preferably overnight.  To soak soybeans, place them in a large bowl or pot and cover them with plenty of water.  When you're ready to cook them, drain the water and give the beans another quick rinse.  Cook soybeans in a 1:3 ratio with water.  That is for every one cup of soybeans, you want about three cups of water.  Bring water to a simmer in a large pot.  Add the soybeans, cover and simmer for about three hours or a little bit less if your soybeans are very fresh.  Up to four hours may be needed to make sure your soybeans are fully cooked.  Cooked soybeans will more than double in size.  For one cup of dried soybeans, you'll end up with a little more than two cups cooked.  Jolinda Hackett  Find instructions for slow cooker and pressure cooker at https://www.thespruceeats.com/how-to-cook-soy-beans-3376401

Painting is silent poetry, and poetry is painting that speaks. - Plutarch   Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words. -  Robert Frost   You campaign in poetry.  You govern in prose.  Mario Cuomo  https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/mario_cuomo_111605 

The 1870 New York gubernatorial election pitted the Democratic incumbent, John T. Hoffman, against the Republican, Stewart Lyndon Woodford, a decorated Civil War veteran and former lieutenant governor.  Previously the mayor of New York City (the last to become governor of the state), Hoffman was closely connected with Boss Tweed’s Tammany Hall political machine and won the election with over 52% of the vote.  Two years later, however, Hoffman would be drummed out of office after The New York Times ran a series of exposés on Tweed’s corrupting influence over regional politics and the embezzlement of tens of millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.  What’s not as well known about the 1870 election is Mark Twain’s brief entry into the race for governor—at least in an imaginative piece published shortly after the election. “Running for Governor” appeared as his monthly column for Galaxy magazine and in the local Buffalo Express newspaper, and it was thereafter widely reprinted.  (In some versions, the names of the major party candidates were changed to “John T. Smith” and “Blank J. Blank.”)  It would not be the only time Twain mocked Governor Hoffman in his writing.  The following year he published Mark Twain's (Burlesque) Autobiography and First Romance, which included illustrations that had nothing to do with the text:  caricatures of various robber barons and politicians (including Hoffman) captioned with lines from the nursery rhyme “The House that Jack Built.”  Two years later Twain had second thoughts about the book as a whole, considering it one of his lesser efforts, and had the plates destroyed.  http://storyoftheweek.loa.org/2012/11/running-for-governor.html 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2283  November 11, 2020