The difference between reality and fiction?  Fiction has to make sense.  Attributed to an interview on Larry King Live; also quoted in Quotable Quotes (1997) edited by Deborah Deford  Attributed variant:  The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense.  Clancy here expresses an idea evoked in similar statements made by others, all derived from the original made by Lord Byron:  Lord Byron:  Truth is always strange; stranger than fiction.  Mark Twain:  Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities, truth isn't.  G. K. Chesterton:  Truth must necessarily be stranger than fiction, for fiction is the creation of the human mind and therefore congenial to it.  Leo Rosten:  Truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense. (attributed)  American author Thomas Leo "Tom" Clancy, Jr. (1947–2013) https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tom_Clancy

The first natural cleaner for brass is ketchup.  Yes, ketchup.  The mild acid in tomatoes removes tarnish and dirt from brass.  Rub ketchup onto item with a soft cloth, rinse with warm water and dry thoroughly.  You can also soak small brass items in a bowl of tomato juice to clean them.  Put them in the juice and let them sit for five minutes (longer, if they’re really dirty.)  Pull them out, rinse with warm water and dry thoroughly.  Lemon juice also contains a mild acid that will clean brass.  There are two lemon-based cleaners you can make that will leave your brass shiny and bright.  For light tarnish, cut a lemon in half and sprinkle it with table salt.  Rub the salted lemon over the surface of the brass.  Once you’ve covered the surface with the lemon juice and salt mixture, wipe with a soft cloth and buff till the piece shines.  For heavy tarnish, make a paste using two parts cream of tartar to one part lemon juice.  Apply the paste to the item and let sit for a minimum of 30 minutes.  Rinse the item thoroughly with warm water, then buff with a dry cloth.   https://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/maintenance-and-repair/cleaning/how-to-clean-brass 

There are numerous ways to clean solid brass.  Your approach should depending on the level of dust, dirt, or tarnish that has built up.  Start with hot, soapy water and a microfiber cleaning cloth.  Go over all of the surfaces thoroughly with the cleaning cloth, using a clean toothbrush to get into any crevices.  Rinse with warm water and dry thoroughly.  For tougher cleaning jobs, pull out the ketchup, tomato sauce, or tomato paste.  Simply rub a thin coat onto the brass, let sit for an hour or so, and then clean the piece with hot, soapy water.  Another option is to make a paste of equal parts salt, flour, and white vinegar.  Apply the paste to the brass and let sit for up to an hour.  Rinse with warm water and buff dry.  An alternative natural cleaning combination is salt and lemon.  Cut a lemon in half and remove the seeds.  Coat the cut half of the lemon with table salt and rub it over the surface of the brass, re-coating the lemon with salt as needed.  Once you’ve covered the entire surface, buff to a shine with a clean, dry cloth.  You can also make a paste using two parts cream of tartar powder to one part lemon juice—rub the paste on the brass, let sit for 30 minutes, rinse with warm water and buff.

Commercial metal cleaners and polishes can also be effective for cleaning brass and are commonly available at most home centers and supermarkets.  Donna Boyle Schwartz and Bob Vila  https://www.bobvila.com/articles/how-to-clean-brass/ 

The finger lime is a small, sausage-shaped citrus that comes in an assortment of colors, including red, yellow, brown, green, and black.  The best way to open one of these fruits is to slice at its center and then squeeze one of the halves.  When you apply pressure, little balls of pulp will spill out.  These tiny juice bubbles easily separate from one another and pop when chewed, releasing a pleasant splash of flavor with each bite.  This unusual texture has earned the fruit the nickname “citrus caviar.”  Finger limes taste very similar to regular limes, but with less sourness.  There is quite a bit of flavor variation depending on a tree’s growing conditions, and inferior varieties may carry a slight taste of dish detergent.  Thankfully, any soapy flavor is typically lost when combined with other ingredients.  The fruit is native to the subtropical Australian states of Queensland and New South Wales, where indigenous people have foraged the citrus as both food and medicine for thousands of years.  Over the past few decades, however, finger limes have become popular in kitchens around the world.  They can serve as a colorful and tasty topping on pancakes, sushi, oysters, desserts, and cocktails.  Cooking the pulp can diminish their texture, so it’s best to use them to garnish food after it’s already made.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/finger-caviar-lime-australia 

hurst  noun  archaic  A hillock.  A sandbank in the sea or a river.  A wood or wooded rise.  Old English hyrst, of Germanic origin; related to German horst. 

Portuguese traders are likely responsible for introducing Thais to the confection that became luk chup.  They arrived in the region, then known as Siam, as early as 1511, drawn by international trade opportunities in the wealthy city of Ayutthaya.  The Dutch, English, Spanish, and French all followed, but the Portuguese were among the first arrivals.  With them came a taste for marzipan (massapão), a sugary almond paste that remains ubiquitous in much of Europe today.  In the absence of almonds, European traders satisfied their cravings by subbing in peanuts or mung beans to re-create the soft, decadent sweet.  Like Italy’s frutta martorana, which feature marzipan replicas of petite, ornate fruits, pieces of luk chup often took the form of produce.  Southeast Asia’s wealth of natural dyes, such as pandan leaf extract and butterfly pea flower, gave the dainty creations an extra pop of vibrancy.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/luk-chup

Moniker has had so many spellings that it’s difficult to keep track of them all.  Jonathon Green gives 14 in The Cassell Dictionary of Slang, for example.  This variability is a sure sign the word was for long passed from person to person in speech rather than in writing.  The first known written example is from 1851, in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, in which Mayhew gives it as monekeer.  It was recorded in the Sydney Slang Dictionary in Australia in 1881, spelled monniker, and seems to have reached the USA not long after.  Expert opinion, for which you may read “guesswork” if you like, is leaning towards a blend of monogram with signature, largely because moniker can mean someone’s John Hancock.  Read much more at https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-mon4.htm 

A pioneering book of science theory published by Sir Isaac Newton in 1687 was long considered to be exceptionally rare; by the 20th century, only 189 first edition copies were known worldwide.  But after years of sleuthing, a pair of historians tracked down nearly 200 additional copies of the book—and they suspect that hundreds more are yet to be found.  The book is Newton's "Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica," also known as the "Principia."  Written in Latin, the book outlines Newton's three laws of motion, which are still a cornerstone of modern physics, and explain how gravitational forces shape planetary orbits.  First edition copies are so prized that in 2016 one sold at auction for $3.7 million, the highest price ever paid for a printed scientific book, Live Science previously reported.  A census of Principia copies conducted in 1953 revealed 189 books in 16 countries.  In the new survey, the researchers tracked down hundreds of long-lost books, eventually tallying a total of 386 in 27 countries.  They concluded that this scientific masterpiece, though famously hard to understand, likely had a wider audience upon publication than once thought.  The findings were published online Sept. 2, 2020 in the journal Annals of Science.  Mindy Weisberger  https://www.livescience.com/200-more-copies-newton-principia.html 

In 1976, the 19 tribes that make up New Mexico’s Pueblo population gathered to open Albuquerque’s Indian Pueblo Cultural Center on a patch of Native American land in the center of the city.  This serene complex of stucco buildings is an important arena for the preservation of Native American crafts, music, and ceremonies.  It’s also a place where all-too-rare pre-Columbian cuisine is sustained and celebrated, on the menu at Pueblo Harvest.  The year 1492—when Christopher Columbus arrived in the Americas—divides the dinner menu.  “Post-Contact” options feature all the burgers, salads, and mixed-Mexican options you’d expect from a New Mexican restaurant.  The “Pre-Contact” menu, on the other hand, eschews the staple beef, chicken, wheat, butter, sugar, and rice that anchor “American” cuisine altogether; it’s a love letter to New Mexico’s original inhabitants, a smattering of indigenous ingredients upheld and shaped by modern culinary techniques.  Diners eating off the Pre-Contact menu can open with a carpaccio, comprised of sumac-seared bison, pickled squash, and pumpkin oil, before moving on to a pot roast of elk shoulder, acorn squash, and wilted wild greens.  Another entrée option, the “Tribal Trout,” is pan-seared and served with yam puree, prickly pear syrup, and fried sweet potato strings.  Visitors can finish with their wojapi, slow-stewed berries baked under a maple pepita-and-pecan-crumble crust.  With its commitment to authenticity, the menu revels in what most modern kitchens might see as a limitation.  Indigenous ingredients even spill over into the Post-Contact menu, with dishes such as blue cornmeal–crusted onion rings or salad with fried chicken (also coated in blue cornmeal) and shaved jícama.  The menu enacts a collision of the two periods with curios such as fry-bread—reminiscent of the Pueblo Indians’ fat-fried solution to government rations in the 1800s—or fried Kool-Aid pickles, a creative comfort food among the Pueblo.  What ingredients the restaurant doesn’t source from local tribes are pulled from the IPCC’s Resilience Garden, a fertile lot where elders teach younger Pueblo generations how to grow endangered crops using traditional farming techniques.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/pueblo-harvest-cafe 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2286  November 18, 2020