A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg  rostrum  (ROS-truhm, RO-struhm)  noun  1.  A platform, stage, dais, etc., for public speaking.  2.  A beaklike projection on a warship, used for ramming another ship.  3.  A snout, beak, or bill of an animal.  In ancient Rome, a speaking platform was decorated with the beaks of captured ships.  Hence the use of the term for a speaking platform.  From Latin rostrum (snout, bill, beak), from rodere (to gnaw).  Earliest documented use:  1542. 

Today from the endless vault that is the internet:  your favorite pop songs, rewritten as sonnets.  These sonnets were written by software engineer Erik Didriksen, who has also published a book of his work, entitled Pop Sonnets:  Shakespearean Spins on Your Favorite Songs.  (‘Twould make an excellent gifte.)   Emily Temple  Find a few of the best sonnets in the bunch at https://lithub.com/all-your-favorite-pop-songs-reimagined-as-sonnets/  

“Let the kettle boil slowly . . .  for stew boiled in haste is of no use to anyone.”― Marsha Mehran, Rosewater and Soda Bread  “Sometimes you can save time by waiting and finding out all there is to learn about a situation.” ― Abhijit Naskar  “Time is the best teacher; patience is the best lesson” ―Ernest Agyemang Yeboah  https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/patience-and-timing  See also https://wisdomquotes.com/patience-quotes/ 

How Amy Tan “inspired me and so many others who followed to write the stories that only we could tell” by Vanessa Hua  April 28, 2021  As I began middle school, I paged through the latest issue of Seventeen Magazine, the arbiter of taste for American teens and tweens.  To my shock, in between the usual glossy fashion and makeup spreads, I discovered Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks.”  In her 1987 story, the narrator’s crush—a white minister’s son—comes over for Christmas dinner with his family.  She’s mortified when her parents reach across the table to dip into platters, instead of passing them.  Then her father burps to signify his approval of the meal.  Only later does she realize that her parents served all her favorites, squid with the look of bicycle tires and a whole rock cod whose head disgusts the squeamish guests.  It was the first time I’d read a short story about a Chinese American teenager.  Later, I would learn that Tan is roughly a generation older than me.  Even though the details of our lives differed in significant ways, certain contours were familiar, those of shame and pride and love.  “Fish Cheeks” is now widely taught in classrooms.  Within two years of its publication, Tan would debut “The Joy Luck Club,” landmark, interlinked stories about four mothers and four daughters struggling to bridge cultural, language and generational gaps.  With the premier of Amy Tan: Unintended Memoir, I’ve been reflecting upon the impact of her work on my life and many others in the decades since.  Tan inspired me and so many others who followed to write the stories that only we could tell.  Eventually, I became a writer, publishing “Deceit and Other Possibilities,” a short story collection, and a novel, “A River of Stars.”  My next book, “Forbidden City,” is forthcoming.  A couple years ago, I met Tan at the Community of Writers, a conference where we both got our start as aspiring novelists, decades apart.  I still had that battered copy of “The Joy Luck Club,” that I’d carried with me on several cross country and career moves.  Heart pounding, I approached her one night, not wanting to bother her, but she graciously signed it, as she has signed countless copies of her novels, children’s books, and memoirs for fans who felt made visible, made whole by her work, whether or not they shared a similar background.  https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/how-amy-tan-inspired-me-and-so-many-others-who-followed-to-write-the-stories-that-only-we-could-tell/17842/ 

In 1849, after retiring from medicine and science, 70-year-old Peter Mark Roget turned to words, a passion that harked back to his childhood, when he had filled a notebook with English translations of Latin vocabulary and then classified them into subject areas.  Roget’s early passion never dissipated:  In his mid-20s, during off hours, the young doctor compiled a list of some 15,000 words—a “little collection,” he later called it, that, although “scanty and imperfect,” had helped him in his writing over the years.  Now a man of leisure, Roget unearthed his earlier compilation.  One of Roget’s greatest gifts, his biographer D.L. Emblen writes, was a determination “to bring about order in that which lacked it.”  Over the next three years in his Bloomsbury home, just steps from leafy Russell Square, Roget assembled his words into six overarching categories, including “matter,” “intellect” and “volition.”  Roget’s work echoed the organizational principles of Carl Linnaeus, the pioneering 18th-century taxonomist.  Neither a dictionary nor simply a collection of similar words, Roget had sorted and classified “all human knowledge,” Emblen notes emphatically.  Although prior books of synonyms existed, none offered the depth or scope of the thesaurus that Roget published in 1853, and for which he would become a household word—a synonym for the source of all synonyms.  Over the next 16 years, Roget oversaw more than two dozen additional editions and printings—so many that the stereotype plates created for the third volume in 1855 eventually wore out.  After his death on September 12, 1869, at the age of 90, Roget’s son John took up editorship of the thesaurus.  In an introduction to the 1879 edition, John reported that his father had been working on an expanded edition in the last years of his life, scribbling words and phrases in the margins of an earlier version.  Claudia Kalb  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/roget-gets-last-word-180977459/  

May 1, 2021   After years of legal wrangling and failed attempts to seal a deal, Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Seminole Tribe of Florida have nailed down a gambling agreement to bring sports betting to the state and rake at least $2.5 billion into state coffers within five years.  But the complicated 30-year pact faces significant hurdles before Florida residents and visitors legally could whip out their phones and place bets on their favorite sports teams.  State lawmakers would have to sign off on the agreement, which is known as a “compact.”  The U.S. Department of the Interior also has to authorize the deal.  In addition, experts are divided about whether the Florida Constitution requires statewide voter approval to legalize sports betting.  Other lawyers believe that the proposed compact with the Seminoles could run afoul of federal law.  “Florida is a legal landmine,” Hallandale Beach lawyer Daniel Wallach, who specializes in sports betting, said in an interview.  Wallach warned that the compact could result in a legal quagmire because of the federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act which governs what activities tribes can engage in.  Dara Kam  https://www.clickorlando.com/news/2021/05/01/florida-gambling-deal-with-seminole-tribe-faces-legal-questions/

To some, they resemble “Peanuts” characters—if Charlie Brown and the gang had ever grown up.  They are the seven black-and-white works of comic art from the mid-’50s collectively called the “Hagemeyer” strips.  Four of them have appeared in books. The three other “lost” strips were found and purchased at auction in May 2020—but have never been widely published, according to the Charles M. Schulz Museum and Research Center.  The seven “Hagemeyer” originals will go on public display for the first time June 17, 2021 at the museum’s gallery space in Santa Rosa, Calif., as the centerpiece of an exhibition titled “Adults by Schulz.”  The seven samples were created several years after the 1950 debut of “Peanuts”; the museum believes Schulz pitched “Hagemeyer” as a potential feature to his distributor, United Feature Syndicate, which apparently passed on launching it.  Schulz started several comic features during that decade, including the sports-and-games panel “It’s Only a Game” and the religiously themed gag panel “Young Pillars,” which centered on adolescence.  After the museum acquired the three rediscovered “Hagemeyer” originals last year—the seller remained anonymous—Schulz officials were able to glean a bit more about the strip’s concept, including who the title character was.  (The museum now owns all seven pen-and-ink works, each about 29 by 7 inches, which still show the cartoonist’s underlying pencil lines.)  Michael Cavna   See the seven strips at https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2021/05/31/charles-schulz-hagemeyer/  See also https://schulzmuseum.org/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2373  June 4, 2021