In 1942, Irish songwriter and publisher Jimmy Kennedy, best known for "The Teddy Bear's Picnic," created a dance, and an instructional song to go with it, called "The Hokey Cokey."  Written to entertain Canadian troops stationed in London, the song was similar to the "Hokey Pokey" we all know today.  Composer Al Tabor was also entertaining Canadian troops in wartime London, and in 1942 he wrote a participation dance song called "The Hokey Pokey."  He claims the name came from the London ice cream vendors of his youth, called "Hokey Pokey Men."  The accompanying dance was very similar to Kennedy's.  In 1946, totally unaware of the British "Hokey Cokey" and "Hokey Pokey," two Scranton, Pennsylvania musicians—Robert Degan and Joe Brier—recorded "The Hokey-Pokey Dance" to entertain summer vacationers at Poconos Mountains resorts.  The song was a regional favorite at dances and resorts for the rest of the 1940s, but that still isn't the song we know today.  To confuse matters even more, British bandleader Gerry Hoey also claimed to have authored a similar tune, "The Hoey Oka," in 1940.  The general belief is that Charles Mack, Taft Baker, and Larry Laprise wrote the American version of the song "The Hokey Pokey" in 1949 to entertain skiers at the Sun Valley Resort in Idaho.  The song was a hit at the resorts, so Laprise recorded it.  The recording flopped, but Degan and Brier found out about it and sued Laprise for ripping off their "Hokey-Pokey Dance."  Despite the fact that his version came out after theirs, Laprise won the rights to anything having to do with "The Hokey Pokey."  Some argue that "The Hokey Pokey" (or "Cokey") is a corruption of "hocus pocus," the familiar term used by magicians.  "Hocus pocus" derives, in turn, from a Latin line in the Catholic Mass, "Hoc corpus meum" ("This is my body"), indicating the transformation of the communion "bread" into the body of Jesus Christ.  The dance that goes along with the song—in which the participants all dance in a ring, putting the relevant arm or foot in or out, and then shaking it around—goes back a fair way, too.  Similar dances and songs were recorded in Robert Chambers's Popular Rhymes of Scotland (1826); other versions have been traced to 17th-century minstrels.  But the earliest accurate record, so far, of the song we all know and love is from an account, dated 1857, of two sisters from Canterbury, England, on a trip to Bridgewater, New Hampshire.  During their visit, they taught the locals a song that went something like this:  "I put my right hand in, I put my right hand out, I give my hand a shake, shake, shake, And I turn myself about."  Apparently, the performance of the song—called "Right Elbow In" and several verses long—was accompanied by "appropriate gestures" and was danced with a slow, rhythmic motion.  Eddie Deezen  https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/31063/ambiguous-origins-hokey-pokey

Nearly everything the ceramist and designer Eny Lee Parker makes is meant to offset what she sees as the tedium of domestic architecture.  “We have a floor, a neat vertical wall and then a horizontal,” she says.  “We live in boxes.”  Since receiving her M.F.A. from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017, she’s developed an array of distinctive hand-built ceramic furniture and objects, from bouclé- and mohair-upholstered stools to interlocking earrings, with pleasing, curvilinear shapes that look like naturally occurring phenomena.  Parker was born to Korean parents in Brazil, where she roamed the craft stalls of the beach town of Fortaleza.  Parker found a collection of vintage medical drawings in a secondhand bookstore in her neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn.  Inside the book were hundreds of pages of delicate pen-and-ink renderings of brain cells by the 20th-century Spanish scientist Santiago Ramón y Cajal, who discovered the noncontinuous nature of neurons, which communicate across a minuscule gap.  Parker began experimenting with translating the drawings to clay.  Parker fires pieces into her kiln in Maspeth, Queens.  Lizzie Feidelson  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/10/t-magazine/eny-lee-parker.html

Just below the end of Wall Street, at the tip of Lower Manhattan where the island meets the furthest estuaries of the green-grey Atlantic, there are no bananas.  In the early 20th century, so many boats bearing bushels of bananas arrived at this spot that the Old Slip piers became known as the Banana Docks.  I am here for the Gros Michel—the banana that was the standard across the United States from 1870, when it sold for $2 a bunch in Jersey City, until the late 1950s, when the ruinous fungus Panama disease all but wiped it out.  It wasn’t always the case:  The Gros Michel was once everywhere. When America fell in love with the banana, this is the fruit that captured its heart.  The alchemist who first produced the banana split used a Gros Michel; the chemist who produced artificial banana flavor allegedly had it in mind as well.  When Eddie Cantor sings “Yes, We Have No Bananas,” it is Big Mike he’s singing about.  Natasha Frost  Read much more and see pictures at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/gros-michel-bananas

Ruthenia is an exonym, originally used in Medieval Latin as one of several designations for East Slavic regions.  During the early modern period, the term also acquired several specific meanings.  The ancient land of Rus was ruled by the Rurikid dynasty.  The last of the Rurikids ruled as Tsars of all Rus/Russia until the 16th century.  The word Ruthenia originated as a Latin designation of the region whose people originally called themselves the Rus'.  During the Middle Ages, writers in English and other Western European languages applied the term to lands inhabited by Eastern Slavs.  Russia itself was called Great Ruthenia or White Ruthenia until the end of the 17th century.  It is a source of beeswax, its forests harbor many animals with valuable fur, and the capital city Moscow (Moscovia), named after the Moskva River (Moscum amnem), is 14 miles in circumference.  Danish diplomat Jacob Ulfeldt, who traveled to Russia in 1578 to meet with Tsar Ivan IV, titled his posthumously (1608) published memoir Hodoeporicon Ruthenicum ("Voyage to Ruthenia").   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruthenia  See also The Lost Nation of Ruthenia:  a journey through no man's land at https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/europe/lost-nation-ruthenia-journey-through-no-man-s-land-10331209.html

peccable  adjective  From Medieval Latin peccābilis, from Latin peccō (“I sin”).  Liable to sin; subject to transgress the divine law.  quotations ▼ Related terms:  impeccable  peccant  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/peccable 

Julia Morgan (1872–1957) was an American architect and engineer.  She designed more than 700 buildings in California during a long and prolific career.  She is best known for her work on Hearst Castle in San Simeon, California.  Morgan was the first woman to be admitted to the architecture program at l'École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the first woman architect licensed in California.  She designed many edifices for institutions serving women and girls, including a number of YWCAs and buildings for Mills College.  In many of her structures, Morgan pioneered the aesthetic use of reinforced concrete, a material that proved to have superior seismic performance in the 1906 and 1989 earthquakes.  She embraced the Arts and Crafts Movement and used various producers of California pottery to adorn her buildings.  She sought to reconcile classical and Craftsman, scholarship and innovation, formalism and whimsy.  In 2006, a children's picture book titled Julia Morgan Built a Castle was published and is available in many public libraries.  On May 28, 2008, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and First Lady Maria Shriver announced that Julia Morgan would be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, located at The California Museum for History, Women and the Arts.  The induction ceremony took place on December 15 and her great-niece accepted the honor in her place.  Julia Morgan was the 2014 recipient (posthumous) of the AIA Gold Medal, the highest award of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).  She is the first female architect to receive this honor.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julia_Morgan

When Clementine Thomas walked into Montreal’s Appetite for Books, a bookstore that sells cookbooks and offers cooking classes, “everything kind of clicked.”  She had always loved cookbooks.  “It all started percolating then,” she says, “‘What if D.C. had its own space to bring together home cooks, professional cooks, and the authors that are exciting?’  It was like the retirement plan was, ‘Oh, maybe I’ll open this little cookbook store.’”  Some half decade later, her dream has become a reality in the form of Bold Fork Books, a culinary bookshop in Mount Pleasant.  Prior to opening Bold Fork Books, Thomas, a D.C. native, worked in D.C. restaurants as a server, floor manager, general manager, and co-owner.   The timing couldn’t be better.  Thousands of Washingtonians have hunkered in their homes and, willingly or not, become home cooks.  Read interview published December 2, 2020 with Clementine Thomas by Will Warren at https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/503294/everyone-is-suddenly-a-home-cook-bold-fork-books-is-here-to-help/

In 1987 Matt Nader of the San Francisco-based Blue Chip Cookie Company created Cookie Day.  This holiday on December 4 was also championed by The Cookie Monster from Sesame Street.  Link to recipe for peanut butter cookies at https://www.daysoftheyear.com/days/cookie-day/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2293  December 4, 2020