The vitelotte or black vitelotte or China truffle loves growing in light, well drained and deep soil.  It rots in case of excess moisture and needs sun to develop well.  Planting the black vitelotte potato is easy, especially since it doesn’t depend on the climate zone you live in.  https://www.nature-and-garden.com/gardening/vitelotte.html 

Fight for the things that you care about, but do it in a way that will lead others to join you. - Ruth Bader Ginsburg, US Supreme Court justice 

Developed in Canada, Yukon Golds are a cross between a North American white potato and a wild South American yellow-fleshed one.  Their golden flesh is richly flavored and fairly firm and moist, with medium starch content.  A perfect compromise between dry, fluffy russet potatoes and moist, waxy varieties, Yukon Golds are incredibly versatile.  They’re superb for mashing and in soups and chowders, and they’re great for roasting and sautéing.  Link to recipes at https://www.finecooking.com/ingredient/yukon-gold-potatoes 

venge  verb  (third-person singular simple present venges, present participle venging, simple past and past participle venged)  (obsolete, transitive)  To avenge; to punish; to revenge. quotations ▼ From Middle English vengen, from Old French venger, from Latin vindicare (“to avenge, vindicate”).  Related terms:  avenge, revenge, vengeance, vengeful, vengesome  Derived term:  venger  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/venge 

One has to practically sing along with Auld Lang Syne as if by law  *  Whisk eggs with grated cheese and herbs—pour them in a heated pan and cover them with a lid  *  In honeymoon bridge you place the shuffled deck on the table.  Your opponent draws the top card.  He can keep the card, look at second card and discard it facedown, or discard the first card and keep the second one.  Go back and forth until the deck is exhausted at which point you each hold thirteen cards having discarded thirteen.  *  When some incident shed a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that’s about as good a gift as chance intends to offer.  *  George Washington wrote Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour in Company and Conversation as a teenager—the 110 rules are in the appendix and also available in libraries and for sale  *  Rules of Civility by Amor Towles 

Charles Dickens was by far the most commercially successful of the major Victorian writers.  He sold all his novels twice.  First, they were issued in nineteen monthly “parts”—thirty-two-page installments, with advertising, bound in paper and priced at a shilling.  (The final installment was a “double part,” and cost two shillings.)  Then the novels were published as books, in editions priced for different markets.  The exceptions were novels he serialized weekly in magazines he edited and owned a piece of.  Demand was huge.  The parts of Dickens’s last, unfinished novel, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” were selling at a rate of fifty thousand copies a month when he died.  By contrast, the parts of George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” and William Makepeace Thackeray’s “Vanity Fair”—not exactly minor works by not exactly unknown authors, both of them adopting the method of publication Dickens had pioneered—sold an average of five thousand copies a month.  Dickens gave his full energy and attention to everything he did.  People who saw him perform conjuring tricks, or act onstage, or read from his books, were amazed by his preparation and his panache.  He loved the theatre, and many people thought that he could have been a professional actor.  At his public readings to packed houses, audiences wept, they fainted, and they cheered.   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/03/07/the-crisis-that-nearly-cost-charles-dickens-his-career-robert-douglas-fairhursts-the-turning-point

Walter de la Mare, born on April 25, 1873 in London, is considered one of modern literature’s chief exemplars of the romantic imagination.  His complete works form a sustained treatment of romantic themes:  dreams, death, rare states of mind and emotion, fantasy worlds of childhood, and the pursuit of the transcendent.  As a youth he attended St. Paul’s Cathedral School, and his formal education did not extend beyond this point.  Upon graduation he went to work for the Anglo-American (Standard) Oil Company, remaining with the firm for 18 years.  De la Mare began writing short stories and poetry while working as a bookkeeper in the company’s London office during the 1890s.  His first published short story, “Kismet,” appeared in the journal Sketch in 1895.  In 1902 he published his first major work, the poetry collection Songs of Childhood, which was recognized as a significant example of children’s literature for its creative imagery and variety of meters.  In 1908, following the publication of his novel Henry Brocken and the poetry collection titled Poems, de la Mare was granted a Civil List pension, enabling him to terminate his corporate employment and focus exclusively on writing.  Conrad Aiken, writing in his Scepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry in 1919 found that de la Mare’s Peacock Pie “contains some of the most delightful work he has done.”  The world of childhood, however, is only a facet of de la Mare’s work.  Closely linked with his poetry in theme and mood are de la Mare’s short stories.  Collections like The Riddle are imbued with the same indefiniteness and aura of fantasy as his poetry.  In a review of The Connoisseur, and Other Stories, a critic for the Times Literary Supplement asserted in 1926 that “de la Mare has the poet’s imagination, and it is a poetic emotion that delights us in his stories.”  Another favorable appraisal of de la Mare’s short fiction came from John H. Wills, who wrote in the North Dakota Quarterly that “de la Mare is the most underrated short story writer in the English language.”  https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/walter-de-la-mare 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2515  April 1, 2022