The War of the Pacific, also known as the Saltpeter War and by multiple other names, was a war between Chile and a Bolivian–Peruvian alliance from 1879 to 1884.  Fought over Chilean claims on coastal Bolivian territory in the Atacama Desert, the war ended with a Chilean victory, which gained for the country a significant amount of resource-rich territory from Peru and Bolivia.  The Chilean Army took Bolivia's nitrate-rich coastal region, and Peru was defeated by the Chilean Navy.  Battles were fought in the Pacific Ocean, the Atacama Desert, the Peruvian deserts, and the mountainous regions in the Andes.  For the first five months, the war played out in a naval campaign, as Chile struggled to establish a marine resupply corridor for its forces in the world's driest desert.  In February 1878, Bolivia imposed a new tax on a Chilean mining company ("Compañía de Salitres y Ferrocarril de Antofagasta", CSFA) despite Bolivia's express guarantee in the 1874 Boundary Treaty not to increase taxes on Chilean persons or industries for 25 years.  Chile protested and solicited to submit the issue to mediation, but Bolivia refused and considered it a subject of Bolivian courts.  Chile insisted and informed the Bolivian government that Chile would no longer consider itself bound by the 1874 Boundary Treaty unless Bolivia suspended the enforcement of the law.  On February 14, 1879, when Bolivian authorities attempted to auction the confiscated property of the CSFA, Chile's armed forces occupied the port city of Antofagasta.  Peru, bound to Bolivia by a secret 1873 treaty of alliance, tried to mediate the dispute but on March 1, 1879, Bolivia declared war on Chile and called on Peru to activate its alliance while Chile demanded that Peru declare its neutrality.  On April 5, after Peru refused the latter request, Chile declared war on both nations.  Even though the 1873 treaty and the imposition of the 10 centavos tax proved to be the casus belli, there were deeper, more fundamental reasons for the outbreak of hostilities in 1879.  On the one hand, there was the power, prestige, and relative stability of Chile compared to the economic deterioration and political discontinuity which characterised both Peru and Bolivia after independence.  On the other, there was the ongoing competition for economic and political hegemony in the region, complicated by a deep antipathy between Peru and Chile.  In this milieu, the vagueness of the boundaries between the three states, coupled with the discovery of valuable guano and nitrate deposits in the disputed territories, combined to produce a diplomatic conundrum of insurmountable proportions.  Afterwards, Chile's land campaign bested the Bolivian and Peruvian armies.  Bolivia withdrew after the Battle of Tacna, on May 26, 1880.  Chile's forces occupied Lima in January 1881.  Remnants and irregulars of the Peruvian army waged a guerrilla war but did not change the war's outcome.  Chile and Peru signed the Treaty of Ancón on October 20, 1883.  Bolivia signed a truce with Chile in 1884.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific 

What's the meaning of the phrase 'hanky-panky'?  Trickery--double dealing.  Also, more recently, sexual shenanigans.  This is one of those nonsense terms that was just made up as having an attractive alliteration or rhyme, like 'the bee's knees', 'the mutt's nuts' etc.  The words themselves have no inherent meaning, although it is possible that 'hanky-panky' derives as a variant of 'hoky-poky' or 'hocus-pocus'.  The term is first recorded, in relation to its original 'trickery' meaning, in the first edition of 'Punch, or the London Charivari', Vol 1, September 1841:  "Only a little hanky-panky, my lud.  The people likes it; they loves to be cheated before their faces.  One, two, three--presto--begone.  I'll show your ludship as pretty a trick of putting a piece of money in your eye and taking it out of your elbow, as you ever beheld."  https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/hanky-panky.html

At the age of 14, Ida Tarbell witnessed the Cleveland Massacre, in which dozens of small oil producers in Ohio and Western Pennsylvania, including her father, were faced with a daunting choice that seemed to come out of nowhere:  sell their businesses to the shrewd, confident 32 year-old John D. Rockefeller, Sr. and his newly incorporated Standard Oil Company, or attempt to compete and face ruin.  She didn’t understand it at the time, not all of it, anyway, but she would never forget the wretched effects of “the oil war” of 1872, which enabled Rockefeller to leave Cleveland owning 85 percent of the city’s oil refineries.  Almost 30 years later, Tarbell would redefine investigative journalism with a 19-part series in McClure’s magazine, a masterpiece of journalism and an unrelenting indictment that brought down one of history’s greatest tycoons and effectively broke up Standard Oil’s monopoly.  By dint of what she termed “steady, painstaking work,” Tarbell unearthed damaging internal documents, supported by interviews with employees, lawyers and—with the help of Mark Twain—candid conversations with Standard Oil’s most powerful senior executive at the time, Henry H. Rogers, which sealed the company’s fate.  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-woman-who-took-on-the-tycoon-651396/

Gefilte fish was, at first, a dish of convenience.  On the Sabbath, religious Jews are not permitted to separate bones from flesh, so it was convenient to grind the fish sans bones.  It was also a dish of faith.  The fact that these Jewish families could, in fact, eat fish allowed them to more legitimately sanctify special, holy days.  And it was a dish of resourcefulness.  Using the gefilte fish recipe, families who were unable to afford an entire fish to feed all of their children were able to stretch the limits of just one.  The poorer the family, the more breadcrumbs or matzo meal they might add to the mixture.  As was later canonized in Barbara Cohen’s memorable children’s book, “The Carp in the Bathtub,” gefilte fish was a dish of sacrifice, too.  In the late 19th and early 20th century, many Jews in New York City would keep a fish in their tiny tenement apartments in order to prepare the dish, giving up their one and only bathtub (or, in many cases, the bathtub they shared with neighbors) so it would be fresh for Passover or Shabbat.  And lastly, it was a dish of wisdom.  As with many traditions from many cultures, there's an element of practicality at play here:  Horseradish, which is typically served alongside gefilte fish, actually has an antimicrobial component.  Rebekah Lowin  https://www.foodandwine.com/news/gefilte-fish-haters-heres-why-you-should-reconsider-your-stance         

For Graham Greene he was "unquestionably our best thriller writer".  John le Carré once called him "the source on which we all draw".  With the six novels he wrote in the years leading up to the second world war--five of which have been reissued by Penguin Modern Classics--Eric Ambler revitalised the British thriller, rescuing the genre from the jingoistic clutches of third-rate imitators of John Buchan, and recasting it in a more realist, nuanced and leftishly intelligent--not to mention exciting--mould.  His novels were all out of print by the time he died in October 1998.  Thomas Jones  Read extensive article at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jun/06/eric-ambler-mask-dimitrios-journey-fear

“ . . . a trial-by-tabloid will sink a career.”  “I put ground nutmeg on my shrimp.  Some curry powder for heat.  And for sweetness, a splash of 7 Up.  You surprised?”  The Chef, a novel by James Patterson with Max DiLallo  Find six recipes, including one for Crab Gumbo, from the Killer Chef Food truck at the end of the book

Rigmarole means complicated, bothersome nonsense, so it might seem that, like gobbledygook, kerfuffle, to-do, and blabbityblab, the word’s origin is onomatopoeic or fanciful.  But there is a story behind rigmarole that goes back to a 13^th century list of names known as the Ragman Roll.  Edward I of England, also known as Hammer of the Scots, forced members of the Scottish nobility to swear fealty to him by signing oaths of allegiance that were collected on a number of parchments that together made up what came to be called the Ragman Roll (or Ragman Rolls, or Ragman’s Roll).  Why Ragman?  There’s some disagreement about that.  It may contain a Scandinavian root related to cowardice (in Icelandic ragmenni means coward).  Or it could go back to a medieval word for the devil.  Ragman was also the name of a game where a scroll of parchment had strings hanging from it that pointed to various (likely bawdy) verses in the scroll.  Players would choose a string to find their verse, and it would be read out to the entertainment of all.  Over time ragman roll, for a long roll of parchment full of “nonsense,” eventually became rigmarole, a long, unnecessarily time-consuming hassle.  Arika Okrent  https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/78351/where-does-rigmarole-come

Timothy Gager is the author of sixteen books of fiction and poetry.  His latest, Poems of 2020, is his ninth of poetry.  Timothy hosted the successful Dire Literary Series in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 2001 to 2018, and as a virtual series starting in 2020.  Timothy was the co-founder of The Somerville News Writers Festival.  He has had over one-thousand works of fiction and poetry published, of which seventeen have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.  His work also has been nominated for a Massachusetts Book Award, The Best of the Web, The Best Small Fictions Anthology and has been read on National Public Radio.  Timothy is the Fiction Editor of The Wilderness House Literary Review, and the founding co-editor of The Heat City Literary Review.  A graduate of the University of Delaware, Timothy lives in Dedham, Massachusetts with some fish and two rabbits, and he is employed as a social worker.  https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/timothy_gager

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2358  April 30, 2021