COMIC STRIP HUMOR  multi-basking:  three animals stretched out side by side in a sunny spot (Non Sequitur)  business card:  For All Your Demolition Needs Call Godzilla (Rhymes With Orange)   

BIRTHSTONES  https://www.gemsociety.org/article/birthstone-chart/

One of the birthstones for August is the spinel.  For centuries, spinel, the great imposter, masqueraded as ruby in Europe’s crown jewels.  https://www.gia.edu/spinel 

BIRTH FLOWERS  https://www.bloomandwild.com/birth-month-flowers-guide-whats-my-birth-flower

I sing the praise of Hollandaise . . . I would shudder to depict a world without Eggs Benedict.  Ogden Nash

Hollandaise sauce is a classic creamy sauce that’s perfect for breakfast or brunch!  This recipe by Lisa Bryan is easy and no-fail.  It takes just 5 minutes in a blender.  https://downshiftology.com/recipes/hollandaise-sauce/ 

Mustard—especially spicy Dijon—is classic, necessary, a required condiment in every refrigerator.  But mustard alone is not a sauce.  It's too intense for that.  It needs balance.  Enter the mayonnaise.  Mayo tempers the sinus-clearing power of Dijon mustard.  And what's even cooler is that when you combine these two classic condiments, what you get is not just a super-condiment, but a bona fide sauce that you can use on almost anything.  Tommy Werner  https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/how-to-make-dijonnaise-article 

The American expression 'Six ways to Sunday' is used with more than one meaning.  Most people use it to mean 'in every possible way, with every alternative examined', as in "we checked him out six ways to Sunday before offering him that big loan".  We can find the same idiom expressed as '2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 or even a thousand ways to Sunday'.  As well as the numbers of ways we can also find 'different', 'both' and 'many'.  Not content with that the 'to' is also often listed as 'from' or 'for'.  That's 39 variants, all found in print in US newspapers, and there are others.  That's quite appropriate given the 'many alternatives' meaning of the phrase.  Google's Ngrams viewer lists the number of times expressions have appeared in print and ranks the different forms of the phrase in this order:  Six ways to Sunday, Seven, Ten, Three, Eight, and Nine.  https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/six-ways-to-sunday.html 

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899–1977), Russian and American novelist, short-story writer, poet, translator, and lepidopterist was born into a wealthy St. Petersburg family.  He grew up trilingual from childhood.  https://sites.bu.edu/russian-poetry/biography-vladimir-nabokov/

 “A given landscape lives twice:  as a delightful wilderness in its own right, and as the haunt of a certain butterfly or moth.”  Vladimir Nabokov 

Vladimir Nabokov took many road trips over his lifetime and drove thousands of miles across the United States, but his first cross-country adventure was in the summer of 1941.  The writer donated many of the butterflies and moths collected on that trip to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.  Curatorial Assistant Suzanne Rab Green geo-referenced and curated Nabokov’s 1941 collection, re-tracing his three-week cross-country road trip, providing a vivid record of a formative period for the great novelist.  Read more and see graphics at https://www.amnh.org/shelf-life/nabakov-butterflies-360 

“Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.”  Vladimir Nabokov  His scientific drawings and watercolors of butterflies have now been collected into one volume, Fine Lines.  https://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2016/may/26/vladimir-nabokov-butterfly-art-illustrations 

Patricia Smith has won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement, a $100,000 honor presented by the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation.  Previous winners include W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan and the current poet laureate, Joy Harjo.  Smith is known for such collections as “Blood Dazzler” and “Incendiary Art,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.  On September 14, 2021, the foundation also announced that Susan Briante won the $7,500 Pegasus Award for poetry criticism for her essay collection “Defacing the Monument,” and that five emerging poets were named Poetry Fellows:  Bryan Byrdlong, Steven Espada Dawson, Noor Hindi, Natasha Rao and Simon Shieh.  The fellows will each receive $25,800.   https://apnews.com/article/entertainment-arts-and-entertainment-poetry-joy-harjo-ws-merwin-452a2be8702d1ad895140bae74e7ce68 

ROASTED CORN  Bake corn cobs in their husks in a pan or on a rack in a preheated 400 degree oven.  After 15 minutes turn then, and then roast them another 10 minutes.  Thank you, Muse reader!  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2423  September 17, 2021