Cecil Day-Lewis (or Day Lewis) CBE (1904–1972), often written as C. Day-Lewis, was an Anglo-Irish poet and Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972.  During World War II, Day-Lewis worked as a publications editor in the Ministry of Information for the UK government, and also served in the Musbury branch of the British Home Guard.  In his autobiography The Buried Day (1960), Day-Lewis wrote, "As a writer I do not use the hyphen in my surname--a piece of inverted snobbery which has produced rather mixed results".   Day-Lewis fathered four children.  His first two children, with Constance Mary King, were Sean Day-Lewis, a TV critic and writer, and Nicholas Day-Lewis, who became an engineer.  His children with Jill Balcon were Tamasin Day-Lewis, a television chef and food critic, and Daniel Day-Lewis, who became an award-winning actor.  Sean Day-Lewis published a biography of his father, C. Day-Lewis: An English Literary Life (1980).  Daniel Day-Lewis donated his father's archive to the Bodleian Library.  In 1935, Day-Lewis decided to increase his income from poetry by writing a detective novel, A Question of Proof under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake.  He created Nigel Strangeways, an amateur investigator and gentleman detective who, as the nephew of an Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, has the same access to, and good relations with, official crime investigation bodies as those enjoyed by other fictional sleuths such as Ellery Queen, Philo Vance and Lord Peter Wimsey.  He published nineteen more crime novels.  (In the first Nigel Strangeways novel, the detective is modelled on W. H. Auden, but Day-Lewis developed the character as a far less extravagant and more serious figure in later novels.)  From the mid-1930s Day-Lewis was able to earn his living by writing.  Four of the Blake novels--A Tangled Web, Penknife in My Heart, The Deadly Joker, The Private Wound--do not feature Strangeways.  Minute for Murder is set against the background of Day-Lewis's Second World War experiences in the Ministry of Information.  Head of a Traveller features as a principal character a well-known poet, frustrated and suffering writer's block, whose best poetic days are long behind him.  Readers and critics have speculated whether the author is describing himself or one of his colleagues, or has entirely invented the character.  See list of selected works at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecil_Day-Lewis 

Cecil Day-Lewis died in 1972 and was buried near the grave of Thomas Hardy.  On his grave are inscribed his own words:  Shall I be gone long?  Forever and a day.  To whom there belong?  Ask the stone to say,  Ask the song.  Link to poetry readings at https://poetryarchive.org/poet/c-day-lewis/ 

Asafetida (pronounced phonetically, found online or at Indian grocers) is the most simultaneously misunderstood and sublime ingredient in Indian cuisine.  It is essentially a gum extracted from a ferula, an herb in the celery family.  It is usually available as a coarse yellow powder and smells like boiled eggs.  But don’t be put off by the pungency.  When used properly, a pinch of asafetida supercharges every other spice in the pan, like salt but in a funkier way (and without any sodium).  I don’t know how else to put it except to say that to me, it makes Indian food taste more Indian.  Priya Krishna https://www.bonappetit.com/story/asafetida-indian-spice 

“An injured lion still wants to roar.”  “ . . . when there’s an elephant in the room, introduce it.”  “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand.”  “It’s easy to look smart when you’re parroting smart people.”  “Time must be explicitly managed, like money.”  “Let other people finish their sentences when they’re talking.”  The Last Lecture, a 2008 book co-authored by Randy Pausch and Jeffrey Zaslow  

A lot of professors give talks titled "The Last Lecture."  Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them.  And while they speak, audiences can't help but mull the same question:  What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance?  If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?  When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn't have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer.  But the lecture he gave—"Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams"—wasn't about dying.  It was about the importance of overcoming obstacles, of enabling the dreams of others, of seizing every moment (because "time is all you have . . . and you may find one day that you have less than you think").  It was a summation of everything Randy had come to believe.  It was about living.  https://www.cmu.edu/randyslecture/book/  

Gemelli, which means “twins” in Italian, is a short, corkscrew-shaped pasta made up of two thick strands twisted together.  Penne and fusilli are good substitutes.  Boil in abundant well-salted water until tender.  Link to recipes at https://www.finecooking.com/ingredient/gemelli-pasta   

Alice is an innovative block-based programming environment that makes it easy to create animations, build interactive narratives, or program simple games in 3D.  Unlike many of the puzzle-based coding applications Alice motivates learning through creative exploration.  Alice is designed to teach logical and computational thinking skills, fundamental principles of programming and to be a first exposure to object-oriented programming.  Link to resources at https://www.alice.org/ 

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? - George Eliot (pen name of Mary Ann Evans), novelist (22 Nov 1819-22 Dec 1880)

Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick, was born November 22 in 1428. Kingmaker was originally an epithet given to him for his role in deposing and appointing kings Henry VI and Edward IV.  Wiktionary 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2459  November 22, 2021