A sock puppet is defined as a person whose actions are controlled by another.  It is a reference to the manipulation of a simple hand puppet made from a sock, and is often used to refer to alternative online identities or user accounts used for purposes of deception.  Online, it came to be used to refer to a false identity assumed by a member of an internet community who spoke to, or about, themselves while pretending to be another person.  The use of the term has expanded to now include other misleading uses of online identities, such as those created to praise, defend, or support a person or organization, to manipulate public opinion, or to circumvent restrictions, such as viewing a social media account that they are blocked from, suspension, or an outright ban from a website.  A significant difference between a pseudonym and a sock puppet is that the latter poses as a third party independent of the main account operator.  Sock puppets are unwelcome in many online communities and forums.  The practice of writing pseudonymous self-reviews began before the Internet.  Writers Walt Whitman and Anthony Burgess wrote pseudonymous reviews of their own books, as did Benjamin Franklin.  The Oxford English Dictionary defines the term without reference to the internet, as "a person whose actions are controlled by another; a minion" with a 2000 citation from U.S. News & World Report.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sock_puppet_account    

Believed to be pregnant with twins at the age of forty-five, Jane Todd Crawford is famous as the first woman to survive surgery to remove an ovarian cyst.  Crawford and her local doctors discovered something was amiss as her purported due date came and went without any sign of birth.  Dr. Ephraim McDowell  diagnosed Crawford with an ovarian tumor, a virtual death sentence in the early 19th century. He warned her that no similar tumor had ever been successfully removed and any attempt to do so would likely result in her death.  Yet, Crawford elected to risk the procedure rather than suffer a painful and lingering death from the tumor. McDowell would only perform the operation at his office in Danville.  Crawford rode the 60 miles from her Green County home to Danville and arrived on Christmas Day 1809.  Operating without anesthesia (not yet in use), McDowell worked for nearly half an hour to remove the growth, while Crawford reportedly sang hymns.  The surgery resulted in a 22.5 pound cyst being removed from Crawford.  She remained with McDowell for almost a month while recuperating and was able to ride home in January 1810.  She and her family soon moved from the state and they ultimately settled in Indiana, where Crawford is buried.  She lived another 32 years after the procedure and the successful surgery paved the way for future advances.  While McDowell is well-known as the “father of abdominal surgery,” Crawford’s role as its “mother” can be overshadowed.  Yet the courage to ride 60 miles across the Kentucky frontier to undergo an untried procedure, with your life as the stakes for the gamble, deserves its own commemoration.  Andrew Patrick  https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/807   See also https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/85548/johnson-cemetery#view-photo=151976067  Thank you, Muse reader! 

On June 14, 1777, the Continental Congress approved the design of a national flag.  Since 1916, when President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation establishing a national Flag Day on June 14, Americans have commemorated the adoption of the Stars and Stripes in many ways–displaying the flag in the front of their homes, parades, and other patriotic observances. P rior to 1916, many localities and a few states had been celebrating the day for years.  Congressional legislation designating that date as the national Flag Day was signed into law by President Harry Truman in 1949; the legislation also called upon the president to issue a flag day proclamation every year.  According to legend, in 1776, George Washington commissioned Philadelphia seamstress Betsy Ross to create a flag for the new nation.  Scholars, however, credit the flag’s design to Francis Hopkinson, who also designed the Great Seal and first coin of the United States.  Even so, Ross most likely met Washington and certainly sewed early American flags in her family’s Philadelphia upholstery shop.  To date, there have been twenty-seven official versions of the flag, but the arrangement of the stars varied according to the flag-makers’ preferences until 1912 when President Taft standardized the then-new flag’s forty-eight stars into six rows of eight.  The forty-nine-star flag (1959-60), as well as the fifty-star flag, also have standardized star patterns.  The current version of the flag dates to July 4, 1960, after Hawaii became the fiftieth state on August 21, 1959.  https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/june-14/   

50 U.S. state flags, plus the District of Columbia  Olivia Munson  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2023/03/18/complete-us-state-flags-list/11025139002/   

List of national flags by design  Nepal has the only national flag that is not rectangular, being made with 5 sides.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_national_flags_by_design   

June 13, 2023  Literary Concertos:  A Reading List of Novels Inspired by Other Art Forms  Julia Fine Recommends Alexander Chee, Sara Sligar, Kazuo Ishiguro, and More  https://lithub.com/literary-concertos-a-reading-list-of-novels-inspired-by-other-art-forms/   

Cormac McCarthy, one of the great novelists of American literature, died June 13, 2023 at his home in Santa Fe, N.M.  He was 89.  McCarthy won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his stunning, post-apocalyptic, father-son love story called The Road.  He wrote most compellingly about men, often young men, with prose both stark and lyrical.  There was a strong Southwestern sensibility to his work.  "McCarthy was, if not our greatest novelist, certainly our greatest stylist," says J.T. Barbarese, a professor of English and writing at Rutgers University.  "The obsession not only with the origins of evil, but also history.  And those two themes intersect again and again and again in McCarthy's writing."  Wade Goodwyn  https://www.npr.org/2023/06/13/598425063/cormac-mccarthy-dies-obituary    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com   Issue 2683  June 14, 2023