Believe Me is partly based on a true story, the murder of Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common in 1992, and the subsequent undercover operation to try to lure the main suspect, Colin Stagg, into a confession.  The decoy in that operation was a policewoman, but I started to wonder:  what if she’d been a professional actress?  And what if she’d realized, even while she was doing her job, that the man she was being paid to entrap was actually innocent?  I ended up moving my location to New York, and the story I eventually wrote has very little resemblance to the Nickell case.  https://christina-mcdonald.com/jp-delaney/   See also https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/j-p-delaney/  J.P. Delaney is the pseudonym of Ugandan born British author, Tony Strong, who has also written novels under the pseudonym Anthony Capella.   

"An ounce of behavior is worth a pound of words” is an acting adage that has been printed on many images.  The saying is credited to acting teacher Sanford Meisner (1905-1997).  “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” is the famous saying that this is based on.  https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/an_ounce_of_behavior_is_worth/  The quote is used in the novel Believe Me by J.P. Delaney. 

CHORBA was imported to Algeria by Turkish invaders in the sixteenth century.  In the Ottoman army, soup was particularly important in the Janissary Corps where the çorbaci (literally “soup man”) was a military rank equivalent to colonel.  Chorba is traditionally prepared with mutton or lamb which can also be substituted with beef or poultry depending on the recipes and regions.  In the capital, Algiers, people talk more about chorba hamra fdaouech (red chorba with vermicelli), which, by itself, has several variants:  with squash, eggplant, fresh beans, potatoes, peas or a mix of vegetables.  Recipe serves 4  Vera Abitbol   https://www.196flavors.com/algeria-chorba-frik/   

HEAD SOUTH FOR 80 miles from Lisbon to the village of Melides, on the Alentejo coast, take the dirt road that borders the lagoon and leads to the Atlantic and, after a few minutes of bumpy driving, a 28-foot-tall tower emerges from a thicket of parasol pines.  At first glance, it resembles a spaceship:  a wide concrete cylinder with a round hole in its roof.  But to its owner, the structure represents something much more whimsical.  “I call it La Folie,” says the 58-year-old French shoe designer Christian Louboutin, “because it’s just for fun.”  The single-room La Folie, which was completed in 2021, after seven years of design and construction, is a natural gathering point.  The 1,400-square-foot round building was inspired by the Jantar Mantar observatory in Jaipur, India—a collection of large-scale stone and marble structures built in the 18th century as astronomical instruments—as well as by Rajasthani stepwells, ancient subterranean cisterns known for their sharply angular staircases.  Made of reinforced concrete, it has eight-inch-thick walls pierced by keyhole windows and coated in lime wash.  Ellie Pithers  photographs by Clément Vayssieres  https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/t-magazine/louboutin-portugal-vacation-home.html 

The phrase 'the bee's knees' was originally an 18th century fanciful phrase which referred to something that didn't exist.  It was used as the kind of spoof item apprentices would be sent to the stores to fetch--like tartan paint or a left-handed hammer.  This meaning is no longer used.  In the Roaring Twenties in America, bright young things invented nonsense language to refer to things that were 'the tops'--like 'the cat's pajamas', 'the snake's hips' and so on.  They utilized the existing 'bee's knees' phrase to add to that list.  The expression has since spread and is now used worldwide to mean 'excellent/the very best'.  https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/the-bees-knees.html    

Bees communicate flower location using special dances inside the hive.  One bee dances, while other bees watch to learn the directions to a specific flower patch. The dancing bee smells like the flower patch, and also gives the watching bees a taste of the nectar she gathered.  Smell and taste helps other bees find the correct flower patch.  Read about the waggle dance and the circle dance at https://askabiologist.asu.edu/bee-dance-game/introduction.html   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2642  March 10, 2023