The Penrose stairs or Penrose steps, also dubbed the impossible staircase, is an impossible object created by Oscar Reutersvärd in 1937 and later independently made popular by Lionel Penrose and his son Roger Penrose.  A variation on the Penrose triangle, it is a two-dimensional depiction of a staircase in which the stairs make four 90-degree turns as they ascend or descend yet form a continuous loop, so that a person could climb them forever and never get any higher.  This is clearly impossible in three-dimensional Euclidean geometry.  The "continuous staircase" was first presented in an article that the Penroses wrote in 1959, based on the so-called "triangle of Penrose" published by Roger Penrose in the British Journal of Psychology in 1958.  M.C. Escher then discovered the Penrose stairs in the following year and made his now famous lithograph Klimmen en dalen (Ascending and Descending) in March 1960.  Penrose and Escher were informed of each other's work that same year.  Escher developed the theme further in his print Waterval (Waterfall), which appeared in 1961.  The staircase design had been discovered previously by the Swedish artist Oscar Reutersvärd, but neither Penrose nor Escher was aware of his designs.  Inspired by a radio programme on Mozart's method of composition—described as "creative automatism", that is, each creative idea written down inspired a new idea—Reutersvärd started to draw a series of impossible objects on a journey from Stockholm to Paris in 1950 in the same "unconscious, automatic" way.  He did not realize that his figure was a continuous flight of stairs while drawing, but the process enabled him to trace his increasingly complex designs step by step.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penrose_stairs 

The artist who created some of the most memorable images of the 20th century was never fully embraced by the art world.  There is just one work by Maurits Cornelis Escher in all of Britain’s galleries and museums, and it was not until his 70th birthday that the first full retrospective exhibition took place in his native Netherlands.  Escher was admired mainly by mathematicians and scientists, and found global fame only when he came to be considered a pioneer of psychedelic art by the hippy counterculture of the 1960s.  His prints adorn albums by Mott the Hoople and the Scaffold, and he was courted unsuccessfully by Mick Jagger for an album cover and by Stanley Kubrick for help transforming what became 2001:  A Space Odyssey into a “fourth-dimensional film”.  Since Escher’s death in 1972, his most famous images have become ubiquitous.  New fuel for his popular cult was provided by Douglas Hofstadter’s interdisciplinary fantasia of a book, Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979), which seduced generations of curious students in the following decades.  (Escher adored Bach.)  Fittingly, given the artist’s mathematical playfulness, some of the richest tributes to his work in modern times have come in the world of video games.  In the beautiful Echochrome (2008), players set out to free an eternally walking human from a succession of Escherian landscapes by rotating the point of view until the “trick” of perspective locks into place.  Steven Poole  See graphics at https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/20/the-impossible-world-of-mc-escher  

On October 7, 1993, Toni Morrison, née Chloe Ardelia Wofford, became the first—and as of now, the only—Black American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.  (She is the country’s third most recent winner, after Louise Glück, who won last year, and . . . Bob Dylan.)  In 2016, Beloved, first published in 1987, was an international sensation and voted the best work of American fiction of the previous 25 years; it is not controversial to suggest that nothing has been published in the last five years to challenge its crown.  Her work has influenced, changed, and inspired both readers—like Kamala Harris and Barack Obama—and writers—from Ocean Vuong to Keah Brown to Rich Benjamin.  Literary Hub  October 3, 2021 

June 2, 2020  Feral swine are not native to the Americas.  They were first brought to the United States in the 1500s by early explorers and settlers as a source of food.  Free-range livestock management practices and escapes from enclosures led to the first establishment of feral swine populations within the United States.  In the 1900s, the Eurasian or Russian wild boar was introduced into parts of the United States for the purpose of sport hunting.  Today, feral swine are a combination of escaped domestic pigs, Eurasian wild boars, and hybrids of the two.  Feral swine have been reported in at least 35 states. Their population is estimated at over 6 million and is rapidly expanding.   https://www.aphis.usda.gov/aphis/ourfocus/wildlifedamage/operational-activities/feral-swine/sa-fs-history 

The wild boar (Sus scrofa), also known as the wild swine, common wild pig, Eurasian wild pig, or simply wild pig, is a suid native to much of Eurasia and North Africa, and has been introduced to the Americas and Oceania.  The species is now one of the widest-ranging mammals in the world, as well as the most widespread suiform.  It has become an invasive species in part of its introduced range.  Wild boars probably originated in Southeast Asia during the Early Pleistocene and outcompeted other suid species as they spread throughout the Old World.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_boar

Animal glue has existed since ancient times, although its usage was not widespread.  Glue deriving from horse tooth can be dated back nearly 6000 years, but no written records from these times can prove that they were fully or extensively used.  The first known written procedures of making animal glue were written about 2000 BC.  Between 1500 and 1000 BC, it was used for wood furnishings and mural paintings, found even on the caskets of Egyptian Pharaohs.  Evidence is in the form of stone carvings depicting glue preparation and use, primarily used for the pharaoh's tomb furniture.  Egyptian records tell that animal glue would be made by melting it over a fire and then applied with a brush.  Ancient Greeks and Romans later used animal and fish glue to develop veneering and marquetry, the bonding of thin sections or layers of wood.  About 906–618 BC, fish, ox horns and stag horns were used to produce adhesives and binders for pigments in China.  Animal glues were employed as binders in paint media during the Tang Dynasty.  They were similarly used on the Terracotta Army figures.  Records indicate that one of the essential components of lampblack ink was proteinaceous glue.  Ox glue and stag-horn glues bound particles of pigments together, acting as a preservative by forming a film over the surface as the ink dried.  Today, animal glues are sparsely industrialized, but still used for making and restoring violin family instruments, paintings, illuminated parchment manuscripts, and other artifacts.  Gelatin, a form of animal glue, is found in many contemporary products, such as gelatin desserts, marshmallows, pharmaceutical capsules, and photographic film and is used to reinforce sinew wrappings, wood, leather, bark, and paper.  Hide glue is also preferred by many luthiers over synthetic glues for its reversibility, creep-resistance and tendency to pull joints closed as it cures.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_glue 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2433  October 5, 2021