Pekin Noodle Parlor (built 1909) is one of the oldest known continuously operating Chinese restaurants in the United States, located in Butte, Montana.  The restaurant was founded in its current location in 1911 by Hum Yow and Tam Kwong Yee. Along with the Wah Chong Tai Company mercantile building (1891) and the Mai Wah Noodle Parlor (1909), the Pekin Noodle Parlor represents one of the last surviving properties from the original Chinatown neighborhood in the Butte–Anaconda Historic District.  Patrons enter the second floor restaurant from the ground floor on South Main Street, walking up a flight of stairs to a door on the left.  The door opens into a hallway with salmon-orange colored beadboard partitions separating 17 eating rooms and booths on either side with privacy curtains for each room.  The dining tables and chairs in each room date back to 1916.  The central hallway is lined with Chinese lanterns hanging from the ceiling.  The original design, for the first 50 years, was based on a light lime green color scheme with dark green velveteen curtains.  It was repainted to its current orange color after the owner read an article in Bon Appetit magazine that said "salmon color whets people's appetites".  The first level was at one point an herbal shop and the sub-level hosted illegal gaming.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pekin_Noodle_Parlor   

July 18, 2022  The Library of Congress will install an oculus--a circular glass window that will allow all visitors to see the dome from a new orientation center below the Main Reading Room.  For the researcher seeking insight, information and inspiration in the Main Reading Room, the experience will change very little.  Librarians will be available to assist researchers.  Staff will still deliver and distribute books and other research materials for use there.  Access to digital resources will continue.  The circular desk at the center of the room will remain.  Only the cabinet enclosing a central staircase and book elevator at the center of the room, which has been modified and updated several times since 1897, will be removed to make way for the oculus.  Meanwhile, the new orientation center will occupy the space previously used as the control room.  The historic functions of the control room, where books arrived for delivery to the Main Reading Room via the book elevator (which replaced the original dumbwaiter), have evolved many times since 1897 when the Library opened.  All of these new experiences are possible thanks to generous investments from Congress and from generous private sector donations.  David Rubenstein, the chairman of the Library’s James Madison Council and co-executive chairman of The Carlyle Group, has pledged $10 million to support the visitor experience project, and other private sector donors will also support it.  Congress has expressed enthusiastic support and has appropriated $40 million to fund it.  The planning, design and construction of a project of this scope is significant.  If current efforts remain on track, we look forward to welcoming our first visitors to experience some of the new elements included in the Visitor Engagement Master Plan in 2023 when the Treasures Gallery opens.  April Slayton  https://blogs.loc.gov/loc/2022/07/a-new-vision-for-an-inspiring-location/   

5 Words That People Say Aren’t Real—But Are  Irregardless has been used (mistakenly) in place of regardless since the early 1900s and has now been admitted into dictionaries.  Believe it or not, conversate is an actual word–and it’s been around for over 200 years. Brittany Gibson  Find more examples at https://www.rd.com/article/words-that-arent-words/   

In 1924, during Hollywood’s first golden age, 14 American bison arrived on Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles off the coast of Los Angeles.  The animals were to appear in two movies being filmed on the island, The Vanishing American and The Thundering Herd, both adapted from Zane Grey novels.  Alas, the animals didn’t make it into the former, and we don’t know if they played a part in the latter—the footage vanished long ago.  But the bison remained, and some of their progeny finally made it to the big screen, in Stanley Kramer’s 1971 Bless the Beasts & Children.  Descendants of the founding beasts still have star power­, helping attract hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, but perhaps their most salient role over the decades is to bedevil conservationists.  ­Today, the herd presents benefits and challenges for local ecology.  Visitors take bison tours, enjoy bison burgers (made from mainland meat) and quaff “buffalo milk” cocktails (featuring Kahlúa, vodka, half-and-half, crème de cacao and crème de banana—and no bison milk).  Such tourism helps fund the nonprofit Catalina Island Conservancy (CIC), which controls 88 percent of the island and works to restore and protect native flora.  At its peak, in the 1980s, the herd numbered 550, but concerns about the animals’ health and ecological impact led the CIC to ship bison off the island regularly.  A 2003 study found the bison were still disturbing native flora:  Their shaggy coats carry plants that were imported, such as fennel, to places they wouldn’t otherwise reach, disrupting endemic species like St. Catherine’s lace.  The study also found the bison were smaller and less fertile than their mainland counterparts, partly from persistent drought.  Katya Cengel  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/uneasy-future-catalina-island-wild-bison-180980559/   

equinox (plural equinoxes or (rare) equinoctes)  noun  One of the two occasions in the year when the length of the day and night are equal, which occurs when the apparent path of the Sun (the ecliptic) intersects with the equatorial plane of the Earth; this happens on a day between March 19 and 21 (spring in the Northern Hemisphere, and autumn in the Southern Hemisphere), and on another day between September 21 and 24 (autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, and spring in the Southern Hemisphere); hence, the exact time when the intersection occurs.  quotations ▼synonym ▲ Synonym:  (rare) evennight  (also figuratively)  The circumstance of a twenty-four hour time period having the day and night of equal length. quotations ▼ (astronomy) One of the two points in space where the apparent path of the Sun intersects with the equatorial plane of the Earth.  (obsolete)  (rare) A gale (“very strong wind”) once thought to occur more frequently around the time of an equinox (sense 1), now known to be a misconception; an equinoctial gale. quotations ▼ (astronomy)  A celestial equator (“great circle on the celestial sphere, coincident with the plane of the Earth's equator (the equatorial plane)”); also, the Earth's equator. Quotations  ▼synonym ▲  Synonym:  (obsolete) equinoctial line  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/equinox#English   The September equinox takes place on September 23,  2022 according to UTC. 

http://librarianmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2568  September 23, 2022