“Nama means bow; as means I; and te means you,” says yoga teacher Aadil Palkhivala.  “Therefore, namaste literally means ‘bow me you’ or ‘I bow to you.’”  The gesture associated with namaste is called Anjali Mudra—pronounced UHN-jah-lee MOO-dra.  Anjali evolved from the Sanskrit word “anj,” which means to honor or celebrate.  To perform the Anjali Mudra—a physical expression of namaste—press the hands together, fingers touching and pointed up, with the thumbs at the breastbone.  Close your eyes and bow your head or bend at the waist.  Alternately, Palkhivala says, “It can also be done by placing the hands together in front of the third eye, bowing the head, and then bringing the hands down to the heart.”  The gesture doesn’t have to be directed toward another being.  You can express namaste to yourself and use the gesture as a form of personal meditation.  American English speakers tend to attribute a shorter “a” sound to the vowels and put the emphasis on the last syllable: nah-mah-STAY.  But the term is more correctly pronounced nuh-MUH-stheh, according to Rina Deshpande.  When you see those two a’s, train your brain to pronounce them with a short “u” sound.  See pictures at https://www.yogajournal.com/practice/beginners/the-meaning-of-namaste/ 

Everybody loves progress but nobody likes change.  Found in my fortune cookie April 9, 2024   

On its own jackfruit doesn’t at all taste like meat.  Canned unripe jackfruit tastes a lot like artichokes, though its texture is more stringy.  Much like tofu, canned jackfruit actually takes on the flavor of whatever you season it with.  This makes it incredibly versatile and a great vegan meat alternative.  What about fresh, ripe jackfruit?  It’s much sweeter and tastes more like a mild mango.  It’s great in desserts, ice cream, and smoothies.  As the largest tree-born fruit in the world, mature jackfruit are estimated to weigh up to 90 pounds.  Some of the jackfruit pieces will have the firm core attached and that won’t shred; feel free to just leave it as is or give it a quick chop with your kitchen knife.  The core is perfectly edible, and you won’t even notice it once it’s cooked with your other ingredients.  As for how to tell when it’s done cooking, you can actually just eat jackfruit raw out of the can if you’d like, so you won't need to "cook" it.  You can cook up jackfruit with Asian spices or sauces and add them as part of a stir-fry.  Jackfruit also makes a nice addition to a quick weeknight curry.  We’ve added it to fried rice at home, and also folded it into slow cooker chili and stew.  In the spring and summer, it’s great cooked with your favorite sauce or seasoning, and works well when added to salads, grain bowls or used as a filling for simple wraps.  Megan Gordon  https://www.simplyrecipes.com/what_is_jackfruit/ 

 

Artist Faith Ringgold, whose seven-decade career encompassed bestselling children’s books, incisive activism, and work in an astonishing array of mediums, and culminated with the kind of mass international acclaim that was long denied to Black visual artists and women artists like her, died on April 13, 2024 at her home in Englewood, New Jersey.  She was 93.  Just one aspect of Ringgold’s remarkable life would have been enough to secure her place in history, but it was her action-packed, richly detailed painted quilts for which she was best known.  Her most famous was Tar Beach (1988), which tells the story of an 8-year-old girl, Cassie Louise Lightfoot, who flies from the roof of her Manhattan apartment building into the night sky.  In 1991, it was adapted into a children’s book that has become a staple of elementary school classrooms in the United States.  https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/faith-ringgold-artist-dead-1234702902/    

If it wasn’t a primarily literary event at the time, it surely has become one in retrospect; hundreds of books, both fiction and non-, have now been written about the disaster.  But there were also some literal literary casualties among the 1,500 odd victims.  One of them was 37-year-old mystery writer Jacques Futrelle, who created Professor Augustus S.F.X. Van Dusen, “one of the great rivals of Sherlock Holmes,” a character that possibly inspired both G.K. Chesterton and Agatha Christie. Futrelle drowned, along with William Thomas Stead, one of the fathers of investigative journalism (and, ahem, tabloids), who was once considered “the most famous journalist in the British Empire.”  Also lost in the disaster was high-octane bibliophile and collector Harry Elkins Widener, who had been in London on a “buying spree.”  He sent most of his books back home to the US separately (on the RMS Carpathia, the ship that would finally arrive to rescue the Titanic survivors) but boarded the doomed ship with a miniature first edition of Francis Bacon’s Essaies (1598) in his pocket—along, somewhat ironically, with a last minute purchase of a 1542 pamphlet entitled Heavy News of a Horrible Earthquake which was in the city of Scarbaria in this present year.  Another tragic casualty was a jewel-encrusted copy of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, which had just been auctioned off at Sotheby’s to an American buyer for £405 (the equivalent of about £58,000 today)—who would, alas, never receive it.  Like the bibliophiles and writers aboard, it was lost to the Atlantic, and never found.  Literary Hub  April 14. 2024    

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. - Leonardo da Vinci, painter, engineer, musician, and scientist (15 Apr 1452-1519)   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2802  April 15, 2024