Prior to 1864, commercial coffee roasting didn’t really exist in the United States. Households would buy raw beans and roast them at home, most often in a cast-iron skillet on a stovetop or over a fire.  It was a difficult process, and inexperienced roasters would often be left with bitter and scorched coffee to drink.  C.C. Warren of Toledo, Ohio began roasting in a friend’s barn (which at one point caught fire during his experimentation process), and in 1864, he trademarked Lion Coffee, leading him to be one of the first to roast coffee at a commercial level and hold one of the oldest trademarks in the U.S.  Alvin Woolson of the Woolson Spice Company, another local aromatic venture, purchased Lion Coffee in 1872. Originally located on the corner of Jackson and Huron streets, by 1911, the factory had expanded and moved by the river on North Summit Street.  The Woolson Spice Company sold spices and other dried goods, but Lion Coffee quickly became their signature brand.  Woolson was determined to turn Lion Coffee into a household name, and ultimately revolutionized the coffee industry in two ways. First, he introduced the idea of selling roasted coffee in one-pound packages.  This streamlined the purchasing process, as selling already roasted and weighed coffee standardized the quality of coffee that customers would receive.  He also introduced the idea of premiums as an incentive to purchase the coffee.  Each bag of Lion coffee included a picture card, and customers could cut images of the iconic lion’s head from packages and send them back to the company for prizes. Woolson vice president N.L. Schmid remembered, “when the incoming mail was so heavy that we had to send our own truck to the post office to pick it up.” Eventually, the company had to weigh the mail they received, rather than counting each individual lion head, a method that the USPS soon adopted for dealing with bulk mail.”  Lion Coffee was sold all over the country.  For several decades in the early 20th century, Woolson supplied almost all of the coffee consumed in the United States, with its only true competitor being the Arbuckle Company of Pittsburgh.  When Woolson retired in 1897, the building housed 48 roasters and produced almost 454,000 bags annually.  JULIA CONTI and TIFFANY WANG  See pictures at https://www.midstory.org/how-toledo-ohio-revolutionized-the-coffee-industry/   

Lumpia are fried spring rolls that are found in Filipino and Indonesian cuisines. The rolls traditionally feature a thin pastry skin (a.k.a. a lumpia wrapper) and are often stuffed with a savory mixture of ground pork and vegetables.  Make it a meal by pairing your lumpia with Garlic Fried Rice or serving it as an appetizer for a traditional Filipino main dish, such as Caldereta.  Allow the rolls to cool, then transfer the leftovers to an airtight container or wrap them tightly in foil.  Store the lumpia in the refrigerator for up to four days.  It's best to freeze the lumpia before you fry it.  total time:  1 hrs 10 mins  servings:  15  Serve lumpia as a side dish or appetizer with a sweet chili dipping sauce.  LILQTPINAY23  https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/35151/traditional-filipino-lumpia/   

Tiger's eye (also called tiger eye) is a chatoyant gemstone that is usually a metamorphic rock with a golden to red-brown colour and a silky lustre.  As members of the quartz group, tiger's eye and the related blue-coloured mineral hawk's eye gain their silky, lustrous appearance from the parallel intergrowth of quartz crystals and altered amphibole fibres that have mostly turned into limonite.  Tiger iron is mined primarily in South Africa and Western Australia. Serpentine deposits in the US states of Arizona and California can have chatoyant bands of chrysotile, a form of asbestos, fibres.  These have been cut and sold as "Arizona tiger-eye" and "California tiger's eye" gemstones.  Roman soldiers wore engraved tigers eye to protect them in battle.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger%27s_eye   

The Tiger's Eye: A Jungle Fairy Tale is a short story by L. Frank Baum, famous as the creator of the Land of Oz.  The story was unpublished in its own era, but has attracted significant attention since its belated publication in 1962.  Baum wrote the story most likely in 1905, to conclude his series of Animal Fairy Tales.  The nine stories in that collection first appeared in nine consecutive issues of The Delineator, a popular women's magazine of the day, in 1905.  "The Tiger's Eye," however, was not printed in the magazine, "probably because it was considered too frightening for small children."  "Baum indicated in a letter" that the story "was intended to be the tenth of the Animal Fairy Tales in a planned book edition," but such an edition was not published until 1969, five decades after Baum's death.  "The Tiger's Eye" was "Perhaps . . . too strong meat for the taste of its day . . . "  It did not appear in print until it was included in a special L. Frank Baum issue of The American Book Collector.  The story was printed again in The Baum Bugle in 1979.  As one of Baum's "most powerful" short works, "a genuine horror story," the "unrelieved morbid terror" of "The Tiger's Eye" makes it unlike anything else in Baum's literary canon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tiger%27s_Eye

An atmospheric river is a plume of moisture that helps carry saturated air from the tropics to higher latitudes, delivering unrelenting rain or snow.  Think of it as a fire hose that aims at--then drenches--a particular region.  Typically 250 to 375 miles wide, atmospheric rivers can stretch more than a thousand miles long, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says.  In the western US, they account for 30% to 50% of annual precipitation.  While atmospheric rivers are an incredibly important source of rainfall, they can also bring flash flooding, mudslides and landslides, sometimes killing people and destroying property.  Ten or more atmospheric rivers can be happening at once across the globe.  A well-known and strong one is the Pineapple Express, with moisture transported from the tropical Pacific around Hawaii to the US and Canadian West Coasts.  The eastern half of the US also experiences atmospheric rivers, with moisture pulled from the Gulf of Mexico.  “Atmospheric rivers are more frequent on the East Coast than they are on the West Coast,” said Jason Cordeira, associate professor of meteorology at Plymouth State University.  “They’re just not as impactful and don’t usually produce as much rainfall.”  Jennifer Gray  https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/09/weather/what-is-an-atmospheric-river-xpn/index.html    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2651  March 31, 2023