New Year's Eve (plural New Year's Eves)

The holiday occurring on the last day of the year, celebrated on December 31st in cultures following the Gregorian calendar

Related terms

New Year's Day

watchnight (not identical to New Year's Eve – New Year's Eve is the entire day before New Year's Day, whereas watch night is the night that begins at sundown on New Year's Eve and ends with sunrise on New Year's Day)

 https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve    

Revelers began celebrating New Year’s Eve in Times Square as early as 1904, but it was in 1907 that the New Year’s Eve Ball made its maiden descent from the flagpole atop One Times Square.  Seven versions of the Ball have been designed to signal the New Year.  The first New Year’s Eve Ball, made of iron and wood and adorned with one hundred 25-watt light bulbs, was 5 feet in diameter and weighed 700 pounds.  It was built by a young immigrant metalworker named Jacob Starr, and for most of the twentieth century the company he founded, sign maker Artkraft Strauss, was responsible for lowering the Ball.  As part of the 1907-1908 festivities, waiters in the fabled “lobster palaces” and other deluxe eateries in hotels surrounding Times Square were supplied with battery-powered top hats emblazoned with the numbers “1908” fashioned of tiny light bulbs.  At the stroke of midnight, they all “flipped their lids” and the year on their foreheads lit up in conjunction with the numbers “1908” on the parapet of the Times Tower lighting up to signal the arrival of the New Year.  The Ball has been lowered every year since 1907, with the exceptions of 1942 and 1943, when the ceremony was suspended due to the wartime “dimout” of lights in New York City.  Nevertheless, the crowds still gathered in Times Square in those years and greeted the New Year with a minute of silence followed by the ringing of chimes from sound trucks parked at the base of the tower—a harkening-back to the earlier celebrations at Trinity Church, where crowds would gather to “ring out the old, ring in the new.”  In 1920, a 400 pound Ball made entirely of wrought iron replaced the original.  In 1955, the iron Ball was replaced with an aluminum Ball weighing a mere 150 pounds.  This aluminum Ball remained unchanged until the 1980s, when red light bulbs and the addition of a green stem converted the Ball into an apple for the “I Love New York” marketing campaign from 1981 until 1988.  After seven years, the traditional glowing white Ball with white light bulbs and without the green stem returned to brightly light the sky above Times Square.  In 1995, the Ball was upgraded with aluminum skin, rhinestones, strobes, and computer controls, but the aluminum Ball was lowered for the last time in 1998.  The actual notion of a ball “dropping” to signal the passage of time dates back long before New Year’s Eve was ever celebrated in Times Square.  The first “time-ball” was installed atop England’s Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1833.  This ball would drop at one o’clock every afternoon, allowing the captains of nearby ships to precisely set their chronometers (a vital navigational instrument).  Around 150 public time-balls are believed to have been installed around the world after the success at Greenwich, though few survive and still work.  The tradition is carried on today in places like the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, DC, where a time-ball descends from a flagpole at noon each day--and of course, once a year in Times Square, where it marks the stroke of midnight not for a few ships’ captains, but for over one billion people watching worldwide.  See pictures at https://timessquareball.net/ball-history/   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2892  December 31, 2024

Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett was born above his grandfather's bookshop in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  His father moved the family to Chicago in 1889 where Starrett attended John Marshall High School.  Starrett landed a job as a cub reporter with the Chicago Inter-Ocean in 1905.  When that paper folded two years later he began working for the Chicago Daily News as a crime reporter, a feature writer, and finally a war correspondent in Mexico from 1914 to 1915.  Starrett turned to writing mystery and supernatural fiction for pulp magazines during the 1920s and 1930s.  In 1920, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche entitled The Adventure of the Unique "Hamlet".   Starrett on at least one occasion said that the press-run was 100 copies, but on others claimed 200; a study of surviving copies by Randall Stock documents 110.  This story involved the detective investigating a missing 1602 inscribed edition of Shakespeare's play Hamlet.   Starrett's most famous work, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, was published in 1933. Starrett was one of the founders of The Hounds of the Baskerville (sic), a Chicago chapter of The Baker Street Irregulars.  Starrett's horror/fantasy stories were written primarily for the pulp magazine Weird Tales, and are collected in The Quick and the Dead, (Arkham House, 1965).   His story "Penelope," published in the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales, was also featured in the anthology The Moon Terror (1927) anonymously edited by Farnsworth Wright, and published by the magazine.  Starrett's other writing included poetry, collected in Autolycus in Limbo, (Dutton, 1943), detective novels, such as Murder on 'B' Deck, (Doubleday, 1929, and others).   He had also created his own detective character, Chicago sleuth Jimmie Lavender, whose adventures usually first appeared in the pulp magazine Short Stories.  The name Jimmy Lavender (sic) was that of an actual pitcher for the Chicago Cubs; Starrett wrote to ask the ball player for permission to use his name for a gentleman detective, which the pitcher granted.  The stories are collected in The Case Book of Jimmie Lavender (Gold Label, 1944).  Starrett was a major enthusiast of Welsh writer Arthur Machen and was instrumental in bringing Machen's work to an American audience for the first time.   His influential weekly column "Books Alive" ran in the Chicago Tribune for 25 years.  He also wrote Best Loved Books of the 20th Century, a collection of 52 essays discussing popular works, published in 1955.   Among his film adaptions his 1934 story "Recipe for Murder", first published in Redbook magazine in one installment, was filmed as The Great Hotel Murder by Fox in 1935.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Starrett 

Starrett quote:  “When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” 

Wiktionary Word of the Day for December 29:
overmorrow advective
(archaic) On the day after tomorrow. overmorrow noun  (archaic or obsolete)  The day after tomorrow. (obsolete, rare)  Of or relating to the day after tomorrow.    just-so story noun  A story which supposedly explains the beginning or early development of a current state of affairs; a myth, a pourquoi story. (literature)  A story, especially one for children, featuring animals as characters. (social sciences, especially anthropology, philosophy, chiefly derogatory)  An untestable explanation for something, such as a form of behaviour, a biological trait, or a cultural practice.  The English writer Rudyard Kipling, whose series of short stories called Just So Stories (published in book form in 1902) gave rise to the term, was born on December 30, 1865.  https://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2891  December 30, 2024

Penny Dreadfuls  The stories were reprints, or sometimes rewrites, of the earliest Gothic thrillers such as The Castle of Otranto or The Monk, as well as new stories about famous criminals.  The first ever penny blood, published in 1836, was called Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c.  The story continued over 60 issues, each eight pages of tightly-packed text with one half-page illustration.  Some of the most famous of these penny part-stories were The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance (introducing Sweeney Todd, "the Demon Barber of Fleet Street"), The Mysteries of London (inspired by the French serial The Mysteries of Paris), and Varney the Vampire (1845–47).  Varney is the tale of the vampire Sir Francis Varney and introduced many of the tropes present in vampire fiction recognizable to modern audiences—it was the first story to refer to sharpened teeth for a vampire.  The popularity of penny dreadfuls among British children was challenged in the 1890s by the rise of competing literature.  Leading the challenge were popular periodicals published by Alfred Harmsworth.  Priced at one half-penny, Harmsworth's story papers were cheaper and, at least initially, were more respectable than the competition.  Harmsworth claimed to be motivated by a wish to challenge the pernicious influence of penny dreadfuls.  According to an editorial in the first number of The Half-penny Marvel in 1893:  It is almost a daily occurrence with magistrates to have before them boys who, having read a number of 'dreadfuls', followed the examples set forth in such publications, robbed their employers, bought revolvers with the proceeds, and finished by running away from home, and installing themselves in the back streets as 'highwaymen'.  This and many other evils the 'penny dreadful' is responsible for.  It makes thieves of the coming generation, and so helps fill our gaols. 

The Half-penny Marvel was soon followed by other Harmsworth half-penny periodicals, such as The Union Jack.  At first the stories were high-minded moral tales, reportedly based on true experiences, but it was not long before these papers started using the same kind of material as the publications they competed against.  From 1896, the cover of Illustrated Chips featured the long-running comic strip of the tramps Weary Willie and Tired Tim, with a young Charlie Chaplin among its readers.  A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, once said, "Harmsworth killed the penny dreadful by the simple process of producing the 'ha'penny dreadfuller'"  The quality of the Harmsworth/Amalgamated Press papers began to improve throughout the early 20th century, however.  By the time of the First World War, papers such as Union Jack dominated the market in the UK.  The penny dreadfuls were also challenged by book series such as The Penny Library of Famous Books launched in 1896 by George Newnes which he characterized as "penny delightfuls" intended to counter the pernicious effects of the penny dreadfuls, and such as the Penny Popular Novels launched in 1896 by W. T. Stead.  Two popular characters to come out of the penny dreadfuls were Jack Harkaway, introduced in the Boys of England in 1871, and Sexton Blake, who began in the Half-penny Marvel in 1893.  In 1904, the Union Jack became "Sexton Blake's own paper", and he appeared in every issue thereafter, up until the paper's demise in 1933.  In total, Blake appeared in roughly 4,000 adventures, right up into the 1970s.  Harkaway was also popular in America and had many imitators.  The fictional Sweeney Todd, the subject of both a successful musical by Stephen Sondheim and a feature film by Tim Burton, first appeared in an 1846/1847 penny dreadful titled The String of Pearls: A Romance by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest.  The penny dreadfuls inspired the British comics that began to emerge in the 1870s.  Describing penny dreadfuls as "a 19th-century British publishing phenomenon", the BBC adds, their "very disposability (the booklets' bargain cover price meant they were printed on exceptionally flimsy paper) has made surviving examples a rarity, despite their immense popularity at the time."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_dreadful   

This week's theme:  No el  

equative (EK-wuh-tiv) 

adjective:  Expressing identity or a degree of comparison. 

noun:  A case in some languages indicating equivalence or similarity between two things. 

[From Latin aequare (to make equal).  Earliest documented use:  1913.]

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg   

http://librarianmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2890  December 24, 2024

Penny Dreadfuls  The stories were reprints, or sometimes rewrites, of the earliest Gothic thrillers such as The Castle of Otranto or The Monk, as well as new stories about famous criminals.  The first ever penny blood, published in 1836, was called Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen, Footpads, &c.  The story continued over 60 issues, each eight pages of tightly-packed text with one half-page illustration.  Some of the most famous of these penny part-stories were The String of Pearls: A Domestic Romance (introducing Sweeney Todd, "the Demon Barber of Fleet Street"), The Mysteries of London (inspired by the French serial The Mysteries of Paris), and Varney the Vampire (1845–47).  Varney is the tale of the vampire Sir Francis Varney and introduced many of the tropes present in vampire fiction recognizable to modern audiences—it was the first story to refer to sharpened teeth for a vampire.  The popularity of penny dreadfuls among British children was challenged in the 1890s by the rise of competing literature.  Leading the challenge were popular periodicals published by Alfred Harmsworth.  Priced at one half-penny, Harmsworth's story papers were cheaper and, at least initially, were more respectable than the competition.  Harmsworth claimed to be motivated by a wish to challenge the pernicious influence of penny dreadfuls.  According to an editorial in the first number of The Half-penny Marvel in 1893:  It is almost a daily occurrence with magistrates to have before them boys who, having read a number of 'dreadfuls', followed the examples set forth in such publications, robbed their employers, bought revolvers with the proceeds, and finished by running away from home, and installing themselves in the back streets as 'highwaymen'.  This and many other evils the 'penny dreadful' is responsible for.  It makes thieves of the coming generation, and so helps fill our gaols. 

The Half-penny Marvel was soon followed by other Harmsworth half-penny periodicals, such as The Union Jack.  At first the stories were high-minded moral tales, reportedly based on true experiences, but it was not long before these papers started using the same kind of material as the publications they competed against.  From 1896, the cover of Illustrated Chips featured the long-running comic strip of the tramps Weary Willie and Tired Tim, with a young Charlie Chaplin among its readers.  A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, once said, "Harmsworth killed the penny dreadful by the simple process of producing the 'ha'penny dreadfuller'"  The quality of the Harmsworth/Amalgamated Press papers began to improve throughout the early 20th century, however.  By the time of the First World War, papers such as Union Jack dominated the market in the UK.  The penny dreadfuls were also challenged by book series such as The Penny Library of Famous Books launched in 1896 by George Newnes which he characterized as "penny delightfuls" intended to counter the pernicious effects of the penny dreadfuls, and such as the Penny Popular Novels launched in 1896 by W. T. Stead.  Two popular characters to come out of the penny dreadfuls were Jack Harkaway, introduced in the Boys of England in 1871, and Sexton Blake, who began in the Half-penny Marvel in 1893.  In 1904, the Union Jack became "Sexton Blake's own paper", and he appeared in every issue thereafter, up until the paper's demise in 1933.  In total, Blake appeared in roughly 4,000 adventures, right up into the 1970s.  Harkaway was also popular in America and had many imitators.  The fictional Sweeney Todd, the subject of both a successful musical by Stephen Sondheim and a feature film by Tim Burton, first appeared in an 1846/1847 penny dreadful titled The String of Pearls: A Romance by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest.  The penny dreadfuls inspired the British comics that began to emerge in the 1870s.  Describing penny dreadfuls as "a 19th-century British publishing phenomenon", the BBC adds, their "very disposability (the booklets' bargain cover price meant they were printed on exceptionally flimsy paper) has made surviving examples a rarity, despite their immense popularity at the time."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penny_dreadful   

This week's theme:  No el  

equative (EK-wuh-tiv) 

adjective:  Expressing identity or a degree of comparison. 

noun:  A case in some languages indicating equivalence or similarity between two things. 

[From Latin aequare (to make equal).  Earliest documented use:  1913.]

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg   

http://librarianmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2890  December 24, 2024

 velvet glove (VEL-vet gluhv) noun 

   An outward appearance of gentleness concealing an underlying firmness

   or resolve. 

[From velvet, from Old French veluotte, from velu (velvety), from Latin

villus (tuft) + glove, from Old English glof.  Earliest documented use:  1850.] 

NOTES:  Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte is credited with the expression an iron fist in a velvet glove, meaning a bold approach presented in a gentle and courteous manner.  A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg   

52 things I learned in 2024 by Tom Whitwell   Shared by a Muse reader for your amusement.  The list includes: 

After 100 years of work, Egypt is now officially free of malaria, the disease that killed Tutankhamen.  [Jaroslav Lukiv]

Avatar Robot Cafe Dawn in Tokyo is staffed by robot waiters that are remotely controlled by workers with disabilities working from home.  [Yuji Semba]

Millions of free bikes have been given to children in rural India, doubling the number of girls cycling to school, increasing attendance and reducing dropouts. [Rachita Vora] 

People whose surnames start with U, V, W, X, Y or Z tend to get grades 0.6% lower than people with A-to-E surnames.  Modern learning management systems sort papers alphabetically before they’re marked, so those at the bottom are always seen last, by tired, grumpy markers.  A few teachers flip the default setting and mark Z to A, and their results are reversed.  [Jill Barshay] 

https://medium.com/@tomwhitwell/52-things-i-learned-in-2024-75efffe44f15   

On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924.  They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.  This year’s literary highlights include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf.  In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films.  From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain. Find  just a handful of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2025.  To find more material from 1929, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.  The title of Faulkner’s novel was itself taken from a public domain work, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, and its lament over the seeming meaningless of life.  “Life…is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing.”  The Sound and the Fury was published on October 7, 1929, on the eve of the Great Depression.  Faulkner won the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature.  https://web.law.duke.edu/cspd/publicdomainday/2025/     

Watch 47^th Kennedy Honors Episode 1:  2024  https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/lQ_IH3lEyLL5tAg4Ht__Q_fXwzFp54_4/   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2889  December 23, 2024 

Tweeting by Caroline555  https://www.jigidi.com/solve/80qry0f7/tweeting/   

Possibly originally from post to pillar, perhaps a reference to the rapid movement of the ball in real tennis; The Wordsworth Dictionary of Proverbs (1993) notes that from post to pillar dates to at least the 15th century.   Hyphenation:  from pil‧lar to post  adverb

from pillar to post  (not comparable) 

(idiomatic)  From one place (or person, or task) to another; from post to pillar, hither and thither. quotations ▼  The term normally implies a harassing situation.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/from_pillar_to_post#Adverb   

Shoofly pie is a type of American pie made with molasses associated with Pennsylvania Dutch cuisine.  While shoo-fly pie has been a staple of Moravian, Mennonite, and Amish foodways, there is scant evidence concerning its origins, and most of the folktales concerning the pie are apocryphal, including the persistent legend that the name comes from flies being attracted to the sweet filling.  The name shoo-fly was borrowed from a brand of molasses that was popular in parts of the U.S. during the late 19th century.  Possibly related to the Jenny Lind pie (a soft gingerbread pie), it may have originated among the Pennsylvania Dutch in the 1880s as molasses crumb cake, and is sometimes called molasses crumb pie. Traditionally it was not served as a dessert pie, but instead as a breakfast food with hot coffee.  Shoo-fly pie has been described as a crumb cake baked in a pie crust.  The primary ingredients of the filling are molasses, brown sugar, and water.  Serving the cake in pie crust made it easier for people to eat it with their hands in the 19th century.  It comes in two different versions:  wet-bottom and dry-bottom.  The dry-bottom version is baked until fully set and results in a more cake-like consistency throughout.  The wet-bottom version is set like cake at the top where it was mixed in with the crumbs, but the very bottom is a stickier, gooier custard-like consistency.  Different recipes for the wet and dry versions appeared in the early 20th century--the dry version was suitable for dunking in a cup of coffee.  Shoo-fly pie began as a crust-less molasses cake called centennial cake in 1876, to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia.  There is no evidence of it being made before the American Civil War.  Precursors include Jenny Lind pie, a type of gingerbread cake that was named for the famed Swedish opera star, Jenny Lind, after her tour of America in the 1850s.  Because shoo-fly pie traditionally contains molasses but no eggs, historians conclude that it was typically baked during the winter, when chickens laid fewer eggs and molasses could be stored in the cold weather without fear of it fermenting.  

A Montgomery pie is similar to a shoo-fly pie, except lemon juice is used in the bottom layer.  Treacle tart is a pie with a filling made from light treacle.  Shoo-fly pie has been described as a crumb cake baked in a pie crust.  The primary ingredients of the filling are molasses, brown sugar, and water.  Serving the cake in pie crust made it easier for people to eat it with their hands in the 19th century.   It comes in two different versions:  wet-bottom and dry-bottom.  The dry-bottom version is baked until fully set and results in a more cake-like consistency throughout.  The wet-bottom version is set like cake at the top where it was mixed in with the crumbs, but the very bottom is a stickier, gooier custard-like consistency.  Different recipes for the wet and dry versions appeared in the early 20th century--the dry version was suitable for dunking in a cup of coffee.  The modern name comes from a particular brand of molasses from Philadelphia, Shoo-fly Molasses.  The name "shoo-fly pie" was used in the 1880s, but its first appearance in print was after World War I.  The "Shoo-fly Molasses" brand was named after a popular circus animal that toured in Pennsylvania in the 19th century, "Shoo-fly the Boxing Mule".  The mule, in turn, may have been named after a song that became popular half a century before:  "Shoo Fly, Don't Bother Me". The pie is mentioned in the song "Shoo-Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy", popularized by Dinah Shore in the 1940s.  In the Pennsylvania Dutch language, shoo-fly pie is called Melassich Riwwelboi or Melassichriwwelkuche (molasses crumb cake).  Before its modern name became popular during the 20th century, it was molasses crumb pie or soda rivvel cake (rivels are lumps of food).   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoofly_pie   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2888  December 20, 2024