Oeuf mayonnaise, sometimes shortened to oeuf mayo, is a simple French egg dish.  It is an hors d'oeuvre and is considered a classic bistro dish.  A serving consists of a large chicken egg, which is almost hard boiled, although it is removed from the heat while the yolk retains a little creaminess.  The egg is then chilled, peeled and halved lengthwise.  The halves are presented face down on a plate, resembling white domes.  Then, the egg halves are entirely covered with a sauce consisting of mayonnaise and Dijon mustard, thinned with enough water or lemon juice that it can be poured with a spoon.  The dish is served either on a leaf of lettuce, or with crudités on the side.  It can be garnished with snipped chives, parsley, chervil, fried capers, thin-sliced, roasted red bell pepper or an anchovy fillet.  In the late 1980s, the dish was going out of fashion in Paris, perhaps in part due to concern about eggs being a high cholesterol food.  In 1990, Claude Lebey, author of several restaurant guides, founded a group that he called the Association de sauvegarde de l’oeuf mayonnaise to promote the dish and its proper preparation.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oeuf_mayonnaise

He was so famous that fan letters addressed to "Mark Twain, God knows where" and "Mark Twain.  Somewhere (Try Satan)" found their way to him; the White House accommodatingly forwarded something addressed to "Mark Twain, c/o President Roosevelt".  Like Charles Dickens, Twain achieved immense success with his first book, became his nation's most famous and best-loved author, and has remained a national treasure ever since–America's most archetypal writer, an instantly recognisable, white-haired, white-suited, folksy, cantankerous icon.  Since his death on 21 April 1910, Twain's writings have reportedly inspired more commentary than those of any other American author and have been translated into at least 72 languages.  Mark Twain understood publicity so well that he was merely amused when Huck Finn was banned by libraries across the US; when it was banned in Omaha, Nebraska, for example, he sent a telegram to the local newspaper, observing facetiously:  "I am tearfully afraid this noise is doing much harm.  It has started a number of hitherto spotless people to reading Huck Finn [. . .]  The publishers are glad, but it makes me want to borrow a handkerchief and cry."  Twain's cult of personality--as lecturer and novelist, commentator and social critic, travel and humour writer, gadfly and avuncular curmudgeon--as carefully judged, his folksy humour natural, but strategically deployed.  He wrote out of a tradition of tall tales; this is why he was particularly suited to travel writing, which allowed him to be anecdotal and digressive, without much regard to structure or plot.  Huck Finn itself is travel writing, in which the raft-trip down the Mississippi provides the picaresque structure for an episodic tale, an Edenic journey away from civilisation, as well as an occasionally frightening glimpse of the (all-too-human) wilderness.  Sarah Churchwell  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/30/mark-twain-american-sarah-churchwell 

Bergamot is a plant that produces a type of citrus fruit.  Oil from the peel of the fruit, and extract from the fruit juice, are used to make medicine.  Bergamot is used for high levels of cholesterol or other fats (lipids) in the blood (hyperlipidemia).  It is also used for other conditions, often as aromatherapy, but there is no good scientific evidence to support these other uses.  In foods, bergamot oil is widely used as a citrus flavoring agent, especially in gelatins and puddings.  In manufacturing, bergamot oil is used in perfumes, creams, lotions, soaps, and suntan oils.  https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-142/bergamot  Bergamot is pronounced bur-guh-mot. 

 

The Google Ngram Viewer or Google Books Ngram Viewer is an online search engine that charts the frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in sources printed between 1500 and 2019 in Google's text corpora in English, Chinese (simplified), French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Russian, or Spanish.  There are also some specialized English corpora, such as American English, British English, and English Fiction.  The program can search for a word or a phrase, including misspellings or gibberish.  The n-grams are matched with the text within the selected corpus, optionally using case-sensitive spelling (which compares the exact use of uppercase letters), and, if found in 40 or more books, are then displayed as a graph.  The Google Ngram Viewer supports searches for parts of speech and wildcards.  It is routinely used in research.   The program was developed by Jon Orwant and Will Brockman and released in mid-December 2010.  It was inspired by a prototype called "Bookworm" created by Jean-Baptiste Michel and Erez Aiden from Harvard's Cultural Observatory and Yuan Shen from MIT and Steven Pinker.  The Ngram Viewer was initially based on the 2009 edition of the Google Books Ngram Corpus. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Ngram_Viewer  Thank you, Muse reader!  

Find an Ngram viewer search for filibuster at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=filibuster&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cfilibuster%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cfilibuster%3B%2Cc0  and over-psychologize at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=over-psychologize&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cover%20-%20psychologize%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2Cover%20-%20psychologize%3B%2Cc0 

"America (My Country, 'Tis of Thee)" is an American patriotic song, the lyrics of which were written by Samuel Francis Smith.  The melody used is the same as that of the national anthem of the United Kingdom, "God Save the Queen".  The song served as one of the de facto national anthems of the United States (along with songs like "Hail, Columbia") before the adoption of "The Star-Spangled Banner" as the official U.S. national anthem in 1931.   Samuel Francis Smith wrote the lyrics to "America" in 1831 while a student at the Andover Theological Seminary in Andover, Massachusetts.  The use of the same melody as the British royal anthem can be described as a contrafactum which reworks this symbol of British monarchy to make a statement about American democracy.  Smith gave Mason the lyrics he had written, and the song was first performed in public on July 4, 1831, at a children's Independence Day celebration at Park Street Church in Boston.  The first publication of "America" was in 1832.  Verse 2:  My native country, thee,  Land of the noble free,  Thy name I love;  I love thy rocks and rills,  Thy woods and templed hills;  My heart with rapture thrills,  Like that above.   Find music and lyrics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America_(My_Country,_%27Tis_of_Thee) 

rill  from or akin to West Frisian ril (“rill; a narrow channel”), Dutch ril (“rill; gully; trench; watercourse”), German Low German Rille, Rill (“a small channel; brook; furrow”), German Rille (“a groove; furrow”).  noun  a very small brook; a streamlet. quotations ▼ verb  rill   (third-person singular simple present rills, present participle rilling, simple past and past participle rilled)  To trickle, pour, or run like a small stream.  trickle, pour, or run like a small stream.  quotations ▼ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rill 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2410  August 25, 2021