A bight is a long, gradual bend or recess in the shoreline that forms a large, open bay.  Bights are shallow and may pose hazards to navigation, so their depths, in addition to any submerged features like sand bars and rock formations, are clearly marked on nautical charts.  A number of bights can be found on both the U.S. West and East Coasts.  The Southern California Bight, for example, is the curved coastline between Point Conception and San Diego, and encompasses the Channel Islands.  The New York Bight refers to the coastal area between Long Island and the New Jersey coast.  It is part of a larger geographical area called the Middle Atlantic (or Mid-Atlantic) Bight, which extends from Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, north to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.  One of the world's largest bights is the Great Australian Bight on the continent's southern coast.  https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/bight.html 

Denis (1261-1325), called the Farmer King (Rei Lavrador) and the Poet King (Rei Poeta), was King of Portugal.  The eldest son of Afonso III of Portugal by his second wife, Beatrice of Castile, and grandson of Alfonso X of Castile (known as the Wise), Denis succeeded his father in 1279.  His marriage to Elizabeth of Aragon, who was later canonised as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church, was arranged in 1281 when she was 10 years old.  Denis ruled Portugal for over 46 years.  He worked to reorganise his country's economy and gave an impetus to Portuguese agriculture.  He ordered the planting of a large pine forest (that still exists today) near Leiria to prevent the soil degradation that threatened the region and to serve as a source of raw materials for the construction of the royal ships.  He was also known for his poetry, which constitutes an important contribution to the development of Portuguese as a literary language.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denis_of_Portugal 

In 1962 at the age of 71, Joseph E. Yoakum (1891–1972) reported having a dream that inspired him to draw.  Thereafter the retired veteran began a daily practice and over the next 10 years produced some 2,000 works.  Yoakum was born into poverty, had very little schooling, and at an early age left home to join a circus.  He wound up working with several circuses, traveling across the United States as well as abroad and becoming intimately familiar with the world’s various landscapes. These experiences would provide the foundational memories that fueled his deeply spiritual vision decades later.  After Yoakum’s first exhibition in 1968, word spread through the local artist community. School of the Art Institute (SAIC) professor Whitney Halsted took a serious interest in his work, an interest that would lead to Halsted writing a foundational text about Yoakum’s drawings, and artists such as Karl Wirsum, Ray Yoshida, Jim Nutt, and Roger Brown—all SAIC graduates—began to collect Yoakum’s work, marveling at his instincts and creativity despite having no formal art training.  His designs, forms, lines, and colors defied landscape traditions, yet they each possessed a power derived from the artist’s uncanny use of his distinctive graphic style.  See graphics at https://www.artic.edu/exhibitions/9499/joseph-e-yoakum-what-i-saw 

Bacon wrapped appetizers:  Wrap cooked bacon around figs, peppers, olives, pineapple chunks or ingredients of your choosing.  If desired, add cream cheese to keep things together.   

When I bestirred myself to research be-, I became bewitched and bedazzled with the bewildering number of ways this busy little prefix shapes our language and communicates our thoughts.  “Be-” as a prefix goes back to Old English, apparent in such ancient-sounding words as betwixt, betroth, and bereft.  e see it in so many common verbs we use every day:  begin, behave, become, believe, befriend, belong.  And in common prepositions and adjectives:  beneath, beside, below, between, beyond, beloved, bereaved.  The prefix be- can act as an intensifier, indicating something is thoroughly or excessively done, as in bewitch, bewilder, bedazzle.  It can show a verb is affecting or causing something:  bedevil, bedim, befoul.  Steve of Upland  https://sblazak.wordpress.com/2010/05/28/be-ing-the-bemusing-prefix-be/ 

Susan Eloise Hinton (born July 22, 1948) is an American writer best known for her young-adult novels (YA) set in Oklahoma, especially The Outsiders (1967), which she wrote during high school.  Hinton is credited with introducing the YA genre.  Hinton received the inaugural 1988 Margaret A. Edwards Award from the American YA librarians, citing her first four YA novels, which had been published from 1967 to 1979 and adapted as films from 1982 to 1985.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S._E._Hinton 

One story above all is returned to again and again by filmmakers across countries and eras, suggesting that it may be the most visually alarming of all English language eerie tales.  That story is Henry James’s 1898 novella, The Turn of the Screw.  The novella follows the haunted and disturbing events at a manor in Bly, Essex.  A group of men are being read a manuscript authored by a governess who was charged with the care of the children of the manor, Miles and Flora.  Miles has been mysteriously expelled from school and returns home.  James’s heady novella is arguably the most successful ghost story ever written, at least in terms of creative responses to it.  A cursory glance over IMDb entries reveals over two dozen screen adaptations, and that’s before including filmed versions of the chamber opera of the story by composer Benjamin Britten.  In particular, the last two decades have seen a slew of television adaptations, 2020 itself boasting no less than six screen versions of various kinds.  Adam Scovell  Read much more at https://lithub.com/on-the-most-adapted-ghost-story-of-all-time/ 

The Food and Drug Administration on January 12, 2022 said it is deregulating French dressing for the first time in seven decades.  The federal agency said it revoked the so-called standard of identity for the dressing in response to a petition from the Association for Dressings and Sauces.  The FDA said that by revoking the standard of identity, it "will allow for greater innovation and more flexibility of products on the market."  Danielle Haynes  https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2022/01/12/FDA-French-dressing/5131642019231/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2482  January 14, 2022