Wednesday, February 24, 2021

Voles are small brown rodents about the size and shape of a mouse.  They have small ears and a short tail.  Voles are common in yards.  They eat grasses and roots and leave trails.  We usually observe their small surface tunnels winding through lawns right after snow melt.  Moles are also small rodents; they have small eyes, concealed ears, and front feet designed for digging.  Unlike voles, moles are mostly predatory, eating earthworms, grubs, and other soil-dwelling arthropods.  Moles have deep below-ground tunnels as well as surface tunnels.  Entrances to mole tunnels may have mounds of excavated soil, often called molehills, near them.  https://blog-yard-garden-news.extension.umn.edu/2020/06/tunnels-and-holes-from-moles-and-voles.html 

Every year on April 14, the nori farmers of Japan travel to Uto City to celebrate the Mother of the Sea.  They assemble by a memorial that overlooks the Ariake Sea, an enormous, fertile bay speckled with the emerald-green grids of seaweed farms.  The mother they honor is no celestial figure spun from myth or memory, but rather an unpaid botanist from Manchester.  Though she lived halfway across the world, Kathleen Drew-Baker played a monumental role in saving Japan’s multi-billion dollar nori industry.  Nori, the Japanese name for the species of red seaweed known as Porphyra, is used ubiquitously in sushi.  Shimmering, crinkly sheets of processed Porphyra are what encircle sushi rolls and cradle onigiri.  Sabrina Imbler  Read much more and see pictures at https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-nori 

IMPLY:  to suggest indirectly what you really think about something (positive or negative opinion). 

INFER:  to form an opinion or decide that something is true based on the information you have. 

INSINUATE:  to suggest indirectly that something negative is true.  Anastasia Koltai  https://www.myenglishteacher.eu/blog/difference-between-infer-imply-and-insinuate/ 

Proudly sported every St. David’s Day on 1st March and at every international rugby match, the leek is now widely recognised as the national symbol of Wales.  The true origins are now perhaps lost in myth and legend; however the history can certainly be traced back at least seven hundred years.  During Elizabethan times, Shakespeare refers to the custom of wearing a leek as an “ancient tradition”, and his character Henry V tells Fluellen that he is wearing a leek “for I am Welsh, you know, good countryman.”  Earlier still in the fourteenth century, it is known that the feared Welsh archers adopted the green and white colours of the leek for their uniforms, perhaps at the Battle of Crecy.  Earlier than this however, myth and legend begin to intertwine.  According to one legend recorded by the English poet Michael Drayton in the early 1600’s, the leek was associated with St. David the Patron Saint of Wales who died in 589 AD.  It is possible that the poet made up the story; however it tells how St. David ordered his soldiers to wear the leek on their helmets in a battle against the hated pagan Saxon invaders of Britain.  The battle itself is also said to have taken place in a field full of leeks.  It is indeed likely that the Welsh association with the leek predates St. David by hundreds and possibly thousands of years, to an age when people worshipped trees, plants and other such aspects of Mother Nature.  The Druids were not only the Priests, Doctors, Poets and Minstrels of ancient Celtia, they were also the teachers who retained the sacred knowledge of ancient times.  It is in such times that the leek’s reputation as a medicine to cure a variety of illnesses would have been most appreciated and perhaps even revered.  It was highly regarded as a cure for the common cold, alleviating the pains of childbirth and was a tasty, healthy ingredient in cawl, the traditional Welsh broth.  It could seemingly offer protection against wounds in battle or against being struck by lightning, and was also a means of foretelling the future and for keeping away evil spirits.  Ben Johnson  https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofWales/The-Leek-National-emblem-of-the-Welsh/

 Traditional Welsh Cawl Stew  Cawl is a stew made from bacon, Welsh lamb or beef, cabbage, and leeks, although using cheaper cuts of meat is also traditional.  Welsh recipes for cawl vary from region to region, even season to season.  Time:  about 3 hours  Servings:  4  Elaine Lemm  https://www.thespruceeats.com/welsh-cawl-recipe-435581 

Renee Gladman (born 1971) is a poet, novelist, essayist, and artist.  She has published prose works including the Ravicka series of novels and the crime novel, Morelia; the poetry collection, Calamities; and a monograph of drawings, Prose Architectures.  Gladman is a graduate of Vassar College (BA, 1993), and studied poetics at the New College of California (MA, 2006).  She taught creative writing for many years at Brown University, served as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and was a 2016 Image Text fellow at Ithaca College.  Her writing is associated with the New Narrative movement, characterized by writing that "tests the potential of the sentence with map-making precision and curiosity."  In 2016 she was awarded a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists, which supported the publication of Prose Architectures.  As a publisher, Gladman has been responsible for the zine Clamour (1996-1999), the Leroy Chapbook series (1999-2003), and the Leon Works press, a perfect bound series of books for experimental prose (2005–present).  Gladman's Ravicka series, four interrelated fictional books taking place in the author's invented country of Ravicka, has been compared to the fiction of Samuel BeckettAnne Carson, and Julio Cortázar.  Zack Friedman of BOMB has characterized the Ravicka series as “social science fiction,” a label that Gladman herself prefers:  “I definitely would prefer social science fiction to science fiction, as I really didn’t intend these books to ask deep questions about technology or bioengineering or inter-galaxy relations.  Instead, they wonder about city living, architecture, language and communication, desire, and community—the same things I wonder about in my own life.  For me, it needs to stay on this side of reality . . . and it needs to be pushing for physical space in this world.”   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renee_Gladman 

February 22, 2021  A tiny message hidden in Edvard Munch's famous painting "The Scream" was written by the artist himself, a new investigation of the work has found, finally resolving one of modern art's most enduring mysteries.  The message "Can only have been painted by a madman," scrawled and barely visible in the top left-hand corner of the painting, has been the subject of debate for decades and was widely believed to have been an act of vandalism by a viewer of the piece.  But extensive research by the National Museum of Norway has revealed that Munch wrote the phrase himself.  The Expressionist masterpiece is one of the most celebrated works of modern times, heralded as a timeless depiction of human anxiety.  The subject's anguished face has become so familiar that it was recently given its own emoji.  Curators used infrared technology to analyze the message, which was added on top of the finished painting, comparing it with Munch's notes and letters and studying events around the time of the work's first public showing.  Rob Picheta  https://www.cnn.com/style/article/edvard-munch-the-scream-inscription-scli-intl/index.html 

Come, live in my heart and pay no rent. - Samuel Lover, songwriter, composer, novelist, and artist (24 Feb 1797-1868)  Samuel Lover (24 February 1797–1868), also known as "Ben Trovato" ("well invented"), was an Irish songwriter, composer, novelist, and a painter of portraits, chiefly miniatures.  He was the grandfather of Victor Herbert.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Lover 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2330  February 24, 2021 

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