Gray Area for Gray Matter:  On the Time Einstein’s Brain was Stolen  A Quest for the Biological Basis of Genius by Kathryn and Ross Petras  https://lithub.com/gray-area-for-gray-matter-on-the-time-einsteins-brain-was-stolen/    

The roots of “blithe” lie in early Germanic forms meaning “gentle, kind, happy, cheerful” and the like, and the ultimate source of “blithe” seems to be a root meaning “to shine.”  Can’t get much cheerier than that.  In English, where “blithe” first appeared in Old English, it meant simply “kind or friendly” to others or “happy and cheerful” in demeanor (“His spirit was blithe and its fire unquenchable,” 1872).  This “fun to be around” sense of “blithe” chugged along happy as a clam until the 1920s, when (perhaps reflecting the disillusionment born of World War I) it suddenly took a darker turn.  In “England, My England,” a collection of short stories, D.H. Lawrence employed “blithe” in a new, negative sense of “heedless, careless, or unthinking.”   This “who cares?” sense of “blithe” is now, unfortunately, by far the most common.  The relatively-new “heedless, careless, or unthinking” meaning of “blithe” certainly overlaps with the much older figurative uses of “blind,” but I doubt that confusion of the two words has played much part in their evolution (which is not to say that some people haven’t confused them at times).  The change of the meaning of “blithe” from “cheerful” to “witless” seems a natural evolution of the sense of the word.  Feedback:  My name is Blithe.  Blithe is an ancient Germanic and later an old English term meaning happy, cheerful, kind and carefree, but in recent times blithe has been hijacked to emphasise carefree in a negative way, usually in a political setting.  My father was a journalist and my mother a librarian, both wordsmiths, and they named me with intention of the true meaning of Blithe–happy, cheerful and carefree (in a positive sense).  In the Mother Goose rhyme about days of birth, “Sunday’s child is Bonny and Blithe”.  I was born on a Sunday.  http://www.word-detective.com/2013/01/blithe/  See also https://www.etymonline.com/word/blithe   

100 Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes—titles include A-Tiskit, A-Tasket, and Monday’s Child.  https://www.planesandballoons.com/2017/08/02/mother-goose-nursery-rhymes/   

Marietta is a city in, and the county seat of, Washington County, Ohio.  It is located in southeastern Ohio at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers, 11 miles (18 km) northeast of Parkersburg, West Virginia.  As of the 2020 census, Marietta has a population of 13,385 people and is the principal city of the Marietta Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of Washington County, and is the second-largest city in the Parkersburg–Marietta–Vienna, WV–OH Combined Statistical Area.  Founded in 1788 by pioneers to the Ohio Country, Marietta was the first permanent U.S. settlement in the newly established Northwest Territory, created in 1787, and what would later become the state of Ohio.  It is named for Marie Antoinette, then Queen of France, in honor of French aid in the American Revolution.  Prior to American settlement, the area was inhabited by various native tribes of the Hopewell tradition, who built the Marietta Earthworks, a complex more than 1,500 years old, whose Great Mound and other major monuments were preserved by the earliest settlers in parks such as Mound Cemetery.  Since 1835 the city has been home to Marietta College, a private, nonsectarian liberal arts school with approximately 1,200 students.  Leading up to the American Civil War, the city was a station on the Underground Railroad.  The settlers preserved the Great Mound, or Conus, by planning their own cemetery around it.  They also preserved the two largest platform mounds, which they called Capitolinus and Quadrophenus. The former was developed as the site for the city library.  As of 1900, the Mound Cemetery had the highest number of burials of Revolutionary War officers in the nation, indicating the nature of the generation that settled Marietta.  Marietta's location on two major navigable rivers made it ideal for industry and commerce.  Boat building was one of the early industries.  Artisans built oceangoing vessels and sailed them downriver to the Mississippi and south to New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico.  In less than two decades after settlement, the steamboat had been developed, and was also constructed here.  Brick factories and sawmills supplied materials for homes and public buildings. An iron mill, along with several foundries, provided rails for the growing railroad industry; the Marietta Chair Factory made furniture.  Interest in the prehistoric culture that built the Marietta Earthworks continued.  The complex was surveyed and drawn by Ephraim George Squier and Edwin Hamilton Davis, whose large project on numerous prehistoric mounds throughout the Ohio and Mississippi valleys was published by the Smithsonian Institution in 1848 as Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley.  It was the first book published by the Smithsonian.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marietta,_Ohio  Read about two museums in Marietta, Ohio at https://mariettamuseums.org/   

October 28, 2022  An artwork by the abstract Dutch painter Piet Mondrian has been hanging upside down in various galleries for 75 years, an art historian has said.  Despite the recent discovery, the work, entitled New York City I, will continue to be displayed the wrong way up to avoid it being damaged.  The 1941 picture was first put on display at New York's MoMA in 1945.  It has hung at the art collection of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia in Düsseldorf since 1980.  Curator Susanne Meyer-Büser noticed the longstanding error when researching the museum's new show on the artist earlier this year, but warned it could disintegrate if it was hung the right side up now.  New York City I is an adhesive-tape version of the similarly named New York City painting by the same artist.  Paul Glynn  See picture at https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-63423811   

Boo from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WimtFW8z4LY  0.38   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2585  October 31, 2022