The sodium content of water-rinsed canned green beans, tuna, and cottage cheese was analyzed.  A 3-minute rinse of tuna and cottage cheese resulted in sodium reductions of 80% and 63%, respectively, with no significant effect on iron content.  Calcium was reduced by approximately 50%.  Although rinsing had a minimal effect on the sodium in canned beans, replacing the canning brine with water before heating lowered salt content by 33%.  This study shows that the simple and economical methods of water rinsing of tuna and cottage cheese and of heating green beans in tap water markedly lowered salt content.  R T Vermeulen, F A Sedor, S Y Kimm  Abstract   J Am Diet Assoc. 1983 Apr; 82(4):394-6.  https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/6833685/   

Back when I was motoring through London, very carefully, in a Mini Cooper, I wondered:  Why was I driving on the “wrong” side of the road?  I’m from the United States, which started as a bunch of former British colonies.  We speak the same language, more or less.  But we drive on opposite sides, sometimes with hazardous effects.  And the United Kingdom isn’t the only country, of course, to do it the other way.  It turns out that about 30% of the world’s countries mandate left-side driving and another 70% or so stay to the right.  How it got that way is a winding tale.  Not only does traffic on the right pre-date cars, it pre-dates the establishment of the United States.  That’s how I ended up in a former tobacco drying barn in Conestoga, Pennsylvania, looking at a wagon--only a few days after I test drove a Tesla Cybertruck, its modern electric descendant.  John Stehman, whose family has farmed land in the area since 1743, met me.  He’s president of the Conestoga Area Historical Society, and, as I had learned from research on the history of roads and driving, the Conestoga wagon was key to this whole story.  These big wagons, with their tall, arched cloth roofs, became icons of America’s westward expansion as they carried the belongings of pioneers from the east out to the frontier.  Back in the early 1700s, though, western Pennsylvania was the distant frontier.  Conestoga wagons were developed by local carpenters and blacksmiths to carry goods, including farm produce and items bartered from Native Americans, to markets in Philadelphia.  Philadelphia was, at the time, one of the biggest cities in the colonies.  The wagon driver could ride one of the horses or sit on a “lazy board” that slid out of the side of the wagon.  But when more active control was needed, he walked alongside the horses, pulling levers and ropes.  Peter Valdes-Dapena  https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/02/business/why-americans-drive-on-the-right-and-the-british-on-the-left?cid=ios_app  Thank you Muse reader!    

National Garlic Month is celebrated in April.  Garlic transcends cultures.  It can be found in Asian, American, African, and European cuisines.  Garlic was almost always used as more than just an herb or spice to add flavor to meals.  Some civilizations used it for medicinal purposes, while others elevated it to a higher spiritual status in their society.  https://nationaltoday.com/national-garlic-month/   

John Barth, a novelist who crafted labyrinthine, fantastical tales that were at once bawdy and philosophical, placing him on the cutting edge of the postmodern literary movement, died April 2, 2024.  He was 93.  Mr. Barth was the author of about 20 books, among them the short-story collection “Lost in the Funhouse” (1968), a landmark of experimental fiction, and the comic novels “The Sot-Weed Factor” (1960) and “Giles Goat-Boy” (1966).  The former was included on Time magazine’s 2010 list of the 100 greatest English-language novels, and in 1973 Mr. Barth won a National Book Award for “Chimera,” a collection of three interrelated novellas that retold the mythical stories of Perseus, Bellerophon and Scheherazade.  (Mr. Barth, not for the last time, appeared as a character in the work, making a cameo as a smiling genie who offers Scheherazade, or “Sherry,” fresh material for the stories she tells each night.)  https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/04/02/john-barth-author-dead-obituary/  

the organ grinder, not the monkey (plural the organ grinders, not the monkeys)  (idiomatic) Synonym of organ grinder (“the person who is in charge, rather than a lackey or representative; the person truly responsible for another's actions”)  noun  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/the_organ_grinder,_not_the_monkey#English

Jane Goodall, the English anthropologist and primatologist was born April 3, 1934.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2797  April 3, 2024