May 7, 2023  Hasbro, in partnership with Ageless Innovation (a licensee of Hasbro brands) has unveiled new versions of Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit, and The Game of Life.  Each game has been reimagined to make the play experience more appealing and easier for seniors.  Tweaks to the board games feature several age-inclusive components, said Ted Fischer, co-founder and CEO of Ageless Innovation, which specializes in developing toys for elderly consumers.  Changes include bigger play pieces that are easier to grasp, larger wording on the boards and refreshed content that is more relatable to an older demographic.  The new Scrabble Bingo 3-in-1 edition (priced at $40) has three games—the classic word game of Scrabble, Scrabble Bingo, and Scrabble Pass.  All three games have bigger letter tiles to hold and larger lettering for players to see.  Scrabble Pass incorporates a 30-second sand timer to make it more challenging.  About 10,000 people turn 65 every day in the United States, according to the AARP, a nonprofit interest group for aging Americans.  “Today, there are over 50 million people in America over the age of 65 and it could double by 2050,” said Mr. Fischer.  The AARP estimates the number of older adults will more than double over the next several decades to top 88 million people and represent over 20 percent of the population by 2050.  As the population ages, it’s also presenting companies with a rapidly expanding market for all kinds of services and products, including toys.  https://www.toledoblade.com/business/retail/2023/05/07/scrabble-trivial-pursuit-game-life-board-games-seniors/stories/20230507043

Inside the Home and Studio of a 19th-Century Artist Power Couple  Thomas and Mary Nimmo Moran resided in this quirky, now-restored building in East Hampton, New York by the time Thomas Moran turned 40 in 1877, any American who followed visual art knew his work.  His majestic paintings of Western landscapes introduced many to the epic grandeur of places such as Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon; he even had a mountain named for him, Mount Moran, in the Teton Range of Wyoming.  His wife, Mary Nimmo Moran, had also established herself as a respected artist, and the couple had three children.  But they still hadn’t found a place to set down permanent roots, having moved from their adopted hometown of Philadelphia to Paris and later to Newark, New Jersey.  That changed in 1878, when they followed the suggestion of a friend to visit the East End of Long Island.  The quiet village of East Hampton, New York, made an impression on the Morans, its gently rolling fields evoking their native Scotland (Mary) and England (Thomas).  They rented space there for several summers before finally buying two-thirds of an acre on Main Street in 1883.  Thomas built a fanciful house known as The Studio on the property, cobbling together salvaged pieces of New York City buildings to create a structure later described by a United States Interior Department historian as “rather eccentric.”   See pictures at Preservation, the magazine of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Spring 2023  Within a 15-minute drive of The Studio, you can visit six artist’s havens.  See SavingPlaces.org/historic-sites for more information.    

Good writers avoid peppering their writing with qualifiers like ‘very’ and ‘really’.  They are known as padding or filler words and generally add little to your writing.  Adding modifiers, qualifiers, and unnecessary adverbs and adjectives, weakens your writing.  There may be times when you need them, and when you do, use them.  If you choose strong, appropriate nouns and verbs, you will need to use them less often.  https://www.writerswrite.co.za/45-ways-to-avoid-using-the-word-very/   

This flat bread is called shrak in Jordan, markook in Palestine and rkak in Iraq, the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf and North African countries.  The bread is usually rather large, almost 60 cm in diameter, and has a very thin thickness, practically translucent.  Shrak was first mentioned in a 10th-century cookbook written by Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, although here it was called “ruqaq”.  The author described it as bread thin as paper without the action of leavening agents.  Since food is a very important representation of Jordanian culture (as it symbolizes hospitality and generosity), every gathering at the table is considered a celebration.  During those, a portion of shrak is presented along almost all dishes.  Nita Ragoonanan  https://www.196flavors.com/shrak-markook/  Thank you, Muse reader!   

The Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar, Germany, houses a major collection of German literature and historical documents.  In 1991, the tricentennial of its opening to the public, the Ducal Library was renamed for Duchess Anna Amalia.  Today, the library is a public research library for literature and art history.  The main focus is German literature from the Classical and the late Romantic eras.  The library was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as part of the Classical Weimar site because of its testimony to the global cultural importance of Weimar during the late 18th and early 19th centuries during the Weimar Classicism movement.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchess_Anna_Amalia_Library   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2672  May 19, 2023