Where's Wally? (called Where's Waldo? in North America) is a British series of children's puzzle books created by English illustrator Martin Handford.  The books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations depicting dozens or more people doing a variety of amusing things at a given location. Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally hidden in the group.  Wally is identified by his red-and-white-striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses, but many illustrations contain red herrings involving deceptive use of red-and-white striped objects.  Later entries in the long-running book series added other targets for readers to find in each illustration.  The books have also inspired two television programmes (Where's Wally? the 1991 animated series and Where's Wally? the 2019 animated series), a comic strip and a series of video games.  On Thursday 2 April 2009, 1,052 students, alumni, and members of the community at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, America, captured the Guinness World Record for the largest gathering of people dressed as Wally.  The event raised money for local public schools.  On Sunday 19 June 2011, the previous record was broken when 3,872 people dressed as Wally gathered in Merrion Square, Dublin, Ireland.  On Saturday 12 September 2009 a re-creation took place in downtown Chicago.  The re-creation featured all of the characters, Wally, Wenda, Wizard Whitebeard, Odlaw, and Woof, hiding throughout downtown Chicago and invited others to come and find them.    The Waldo Waldo 5K has tried to break the record in a 5-kilometre fun run to raise money for the Waldo Canyon Fire burn area in Colorado Springs, Colorado, US, every year since the fire in July, 2012.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Where%27s_Wally%3F

In visual art, horror vacui (from Latin "fear of empty space"), also kenophobia (from Greek "fear of the empty"), is the filling of the entire surface of a space or an artwork with detail.  Italian art critic and scholar Mario Praz used this term to describe the excessive use of ornament in design during the Victorian age.  Other examples of horror vacui can be seen in the densely decorated carpet pages of Insular illuminated manuscripts, where intricate patterns and interwoven symbols may have served "apotropaic as well as decorative functions."  The interest in meticulously filling empty spaces is also reflected in Arabesque decoration in Islamic art from ancient times to present.  Art historian Ernst Gombrich theorized that such highly ornamented patterns can function like a picture frame for sacred images and spaces.  "The richer the elements of the frame," Gombrich wrote,"the more the centre will gain in dignity.”  Another example comes from ancient Greece during the Geometric Age (1100 - 900 BCE), when horror vacui was considered a stylistic element of all art.  See beautiful illustrations at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horror_vacui

Years of horse riding has given us words that now we don’t even realize have connections with horses.  A constable is, literally, a count of the stable.  Someone named Philip is, literally, a horse lover, from Greek philo- (love) + hippos (horse).  There are idioms, such as beating a dead horse (to try to revive interest in something that has lost its relevance) and trojan horse (something or someone placed in order to subvert from within).  Hippocrene  (HIP-uh-kreen, -kree-nee)  noun   Poetic or literary inspiration.   In Greek mythology, Hippocrene was a spring on Mt. Helicon and was created by a stroke of Pegasus’s hoof.  From Greek hippos (horse) + krene (fountain, spring).  Ultimately from the Indo-European root ekwo- (horse), which also gave us equestrian, equitant, hippodrome, and hippology.  Earliest documented use:  1598.  Anu Garg  wsmith@wordsmith.org

In 1905 the Hippodrome on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th street was built, only one block away from the newly named Times Square.  The Hippodrome opened on April 12, 1905 with a production titled "A Yankee Circus on Mars."  For over two decades the Hippodrome was the largest and most successful theater in New York; its scale wouldn’t be replicated until the construction of the Roxy Theatre in 1927.  Until the end of World War I, the Hippodrome housed all sorts of spectacles—complete with circus animals, diving horses, opulent sets, and 500-member choruses—then switched to musical extravaganzas produced by Charles Dillingham, including "Better Times," which ran for more than 400 performances.  Competition from the newer and more sumptuous movie palaces in the Broadway-Times Square area forced Keith-Albee-Orpheum, which was merged into RKO by May 1928, to sell the theatre.  Several attempts to use the Hippodrome for plays and operas failed, and it remained dark until 1935, when producer Billy Rose leased it for his spectacular Rodgers & Hart circus musical, "Jumbo," which received favorable reviews but lasted only five months due to the Great Depression.  After that, the Hippodrome sputtered through bookings of late-run movies, boxing, wrestling, and Jai Lai games before closing on August 16, 1939.  It was demolished that same year.  http://www.nycago.org/Organs/NYC/html/HippodromeTheatre.html

If you cook for others on a regular cadence, you’ll discover that not all the meals will be beautifully planned.  Sometimes one thing leads to another and you forget to shop, or you forget that you need wood or propane or time to brine the meat.  Sometimes you run out of time.  Sometimes you run out of energy.  Sometimes you just want to cook something simple and eat, toast one another, wash everything up, and take a long walk with the dog.  Pasta with peas and mint can answer that call, provide a bright summer evening on a plate.  It’s a pantry meal for those who grow mint and always have dried pasta in a cabinet and a few bags of organic peas in the freezer.  (It’s an easy shop for those who don’t.)  You can use fettuccine or tagliatelle, though I like how medium shells hold the peas.  Could you add some chopped bacon to the pan?  Why, yes, you could, and that would be fine.  Pasta with Peas and Mint is from the new book See You on Sunday by Sam Sifton. https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/pasta-with-peas-and-mint

Founded in 1745, the Moravian Book Shop in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, is said to be the oldest continuously-running bookstore in America, yet it’s largely under the radar.  It’s not a grande dame to whom homage must be paid; it’s never been the epicenter for new literary movements; nor was it a champion for free speech under British rule.  Instead, the Moravian Book Shop, established by the Moravian Church and today managed by Barnes and Noble, exists in a nexus of past and present, public and private, communal and corporate.  In this way, it defies definition—a nebulosity that speaks volumes about bookstores themselves.  Andrew Belonsky  Read of the store’s struggles at

https://lithub.com/how-americas-oldest-bookstore-has-survived-across-the-centuries/

Another 5.2 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits last week, bringing the total seeking aid in a month of coronavirus-related shutdowns to 22 million and showing a broad shock for the U.S. labor market.  Amazon is retooling its website to do the opposite of what made it one of the world’s most dominant companies:  Sell fewer items.  The Wall Street Journal  April 17, 2020

What's the meaning of the phrase 'Necessity is the mother of invention'?  Difficult situations inspire ingenious solutions.  What's the origin of the phrase 'Necessity is the mother of invention'?  The author of this proverbial saying isn't known.  It is sometimes ascribed to Plato and it does appear in translations of Plato's Republic.  Those translations weren't made until much later than the phrase was in common use in English and are more likely to be the work of the translator than being a literal version of Plato's words.  The proverb was known in England by the 16th century, although at that point it must have been known to very few as it was then documented in its Latin form rather than in English.  Many well-known proverbs appeared first in Latin and were transcribed into English by Erasmus and others, often as training texts for latin scholars.  William Horman, the headmaster of Winchester and Eton, included the Latin form 'Mater artium necessitas' in Vulgaria, a book of aphorisms for the boys of the schools to learn by heart, which he published in 1519.  Roger Ascham came close to an English version of the phrase in his manual on how to use a longbow, which is by the way the first book ever written about archery, Toxophilus, 1545:

"Necessitie, the inuentour of all goodnesse."

https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention.html

The word corona means crown.  The scientists who in 1968 came up with the term coronavirus thought that, under a microscope, the virus they were looking at resembled a solar corona:  the bright crown-like ring of gasses surrounding the sun that is visible during a solar eclipse.  (The beer brand Corona, incidentally, based its logo on the crown atop the Cathedral of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Puerto Vallarta.)  Though the disease currently spreading around the globe—COVID-19—is often called coronavirus, it’s really a disease caused by one type of coronavirus:  SARS-CoV-2.  Katy Steinmetz  https://time.com/5798684/coronavirus-glossary-definitions/

A novel coronavirus is a new coronavirus that has not been previously identified.  The virus causing coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), is not the same as the coronaviruses that commonly circulate among humans and cause mild illness, like the common cold.  https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/faq.html#Coronavirus-Disease-2019-Basics

Because I’m in isolation like most of you during these trying times, I have tied belts together, raising and lowering gifts for visitors from my second floor balcony.  Necessity made me do it and I’m sticking to it.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2256  April 17, 2020

August 19, 2019  A UCLA study revealed that a gene on the X chromosome may help explain why more women than men develop multiple sclerosis and other autoimmune diseases.  Researchers found that a gene known as Kdm6a was expressed more in women's immune cells than in men's, and expressed more in female mice than in males.  When the Kdm6a gene was eliminated in mice that were bred to mimic a disease like MS, they had improved symptoms, reduced inflammation and less damage to their spinal cords.  Women's risk of developing MS is about three times greater than men's, and women have stronger immune responses in general.  Previous research has suggested that these differences may be due to differences in sex hormones and/or chromosomes between men and women.  Since women have two X chromosomes, they have a "double dose" of genes on the X chromosome, and although there is a natural mechanism to silence the extra genes, some genes elude that mechanism.  https://www.uclahealth.org/x-chromosome-gene-may-explain-why-women-are-more-prone-to-autoimmune-diseases

Sex hormones like testosterone and estrogen seem to be important in modulating the immune response, says Veena Taneja of the Mayo Clinic, who studies differences in male and female immune systems.  What's more, she says, women also have two copies of the X chromosome, while men have only one.  "The X chromosome has lots of immune-response genes," Taneja says.  While women's extra X chromosome is generally silenced, she says, "almost around 10% of those genes, they can be activated.   Many of those genes are actually immune-response genes."  That makes it possible, she says, that women get a "double-dose" of protection—although it's still too soon to know exactly how all this might play out in the context of COVID-19.  Nell Greenfieldboyce  https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/10/831883664/the-new-coronavirus-appears-to-take-a-greater-toll-on-men-than-on-women?utm_medium=RSS&utm_campaign=nprtopicsscience

April 11, 2020  As British politicians invoke memories of World War II’s “Blitz Spirit” during the coronavirus lockdown, and many are quietly channeling the stoic resolve their elders showed in the face of enormous hardship, some in the nation’s baking community are taking a more direct cue from history.  Britain's National Loaf—a nutrient-dense whole wheat bread first produced in 1942—has been re-emerging in recent weeks.  Alasdair Lane  https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/british-bakers-reintroduce-world-war-ii-bread-coronavirus-fight-n1180536

Brett Battles is an American author from Los Angeles, California.  Brett Battles' first novel, The Cleaner (2007), introduced recurring character Jonathan Quinn, freelance intelligence operative.  "The Cleaner" was nominated for the Barry Award for Best Thriller.  His second novel, The Deceived (2008), won the Barry Award for Best Thriller.  His third novel, Shadow of Betrayal, continues the adventures of freelance operative and "cleaner" Jonathan Quinn.  Shadow of Betrayal was published in the United Kingdom under the title The Unwanted (Preface Publishing, 2009).  This fourth novel, The Silenced, was released by Dell in 2011. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brett_Battles

Robert Gregory Browne is an AMPAS Nicholl Award-winning screenwriter and International Thriller Writers (ITW) Thriller Award nominated novelist, publisher, playwright, composer, lyricist, designer, and rabid sample library enthusiast.  His novels Trial Junkies and Trial Junkies:  Negligence were Amazon bestsellers and his first novel, Kiss Her Goodbye, was produced by CBS Television.  https://robertgregorybrowne.com/

Green beans get their color from chlorophyll, and yellow wax beans are simply green beans that have been bred to have none of this pigment.  So the questions are, does chlorophyll contribute to the flavor of green beans and will you miss it if it’s not there?  We tasted green and wax beans steamed until crisp-tender and braised in our Mediterranean Braised Green Beans recipe.  In both applications, tasters found very little difference in the flavors of the two beans, calling both sweet and “grassy.”  But wax beans did have one advantage over green:  Because they have little color to lose during prolonged braising, their appearance changes less than that of green beans, which tend to turn a drab olive.  So if you’re making a long-cooked bean dish and are picky about aesthetics, go for the gold.  Link to recipes at https://www.cooksillustrated.com/how_tos/6529-green-versus-wax-beans

Poetry has captivated physicians for centuries.  In the early 19th century, John Keats abandoned a career in medicine to concentrate on writing.  Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (“Old Ironsides,” “The Chambered Nautilus”) wrote poems throughout his medical career and continued to do so long after he retired from Harvard Medical School in 1882.  William Carlos Williams, who practiced pediatrics and general medicine for more than 40 years, won the first National Book Award for poetry in 1950 and was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1963.  As doctors established modern-day medical journals in the 19th and 20th centuries, editors and publishers started to include poetry alongside discussions of surgical techniques and treatises on new treatments.  Stephanie DeMarco   Read poems at https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2020-03-11/column-one-doctor-poets

April 7, 2020  By the time Michel de Montaigne wrote “Of Experience,” the last entry in his third and final book of essays, the French statesman and author had weathered numerous outbreaks of plague (in 1585, while he was mayor of Bordeaux, a third of the population perished), political uprisings, the death of five daughters, and an onslaught of physical ailments, from rotting teeth to debilitating kidney stones.  All the while, Montaigne was writing.  From a tower on his family’s estate in southwestern France, he’d innovated a leisurely yet commodious literary mode that mirrored—while also helping to manufacture—the unpredictable movements of his racing mind.  Part evolving treatise, part prismatic self-portrait, the essai, in Montaigne’s conception, was the antidote to self-isolation, a recurring conference in the midst of quarantine, perhaps even a kind of textual necromancy—his best friend and intellectual sparring partner, the poet Étienne de La Boétie, had died of plague in 1563.  “Of Experience” is about how to live when life itself comes under attack.  Because life as we’ve known it is on hold at the moment, because sickness and confusion are everywhere, and because one of the things books are good for is reminding us that we aren’t alone in history or consciousness, reading “Of Experience” right now feels like an analogue to experience; not a cold study of a distant artist’s late style so much as wisdom lit for wary souls unresigned, as of yet, to world-weariness.  “Of Experience” is one of Montaigne’s gravest works—“We must learn to endure,” he writes, “what we cannot avoid”—but the writing is so vigorous, so uninterested in despair.  In the end, we get the sense from the writing that the writing was Montaigne’s method of magnifying enjoyment. Reading him might be as good a way as any to suspend life’s flight.  Drew Bratcher  https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/04/07/sheltering-in-place-with-montaigne/   Drew Bratcher was born in Nashville.  He received his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa.  He lives in Chicagoland.

June 28 is "Two Pi Day", also known as "Tau Day".  2π, also known by the Greek letter tau (τ) is a common multiple in mathematical formulae.  Some have argued that τ is the more fundamental constant, and that Tau Day should be celebrated instead.  Celebrations of this date jokingly suggest eating "twice the pie".  Pi Approximation Day is observed on July 22 (22/7 in the day/month format), since the fraction ​²²⁄₇ is a common approximation of π, which is accurate to two decimal places and dates from Archimedes.  Link to information on Mole Day and Square Root Day at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi_Day

April 13, 2020  Fairy tales and facts:  Siri Hustvedt on how we read in a pandemic. | Lit Hub    Escape your self-isolation by exploring these maps of fictional, fantastical places. | Atlas Obscura    “The Lemons.” A poem by Eugenio Montale, translated by Jonathan Galassi. | Lit Hub    Sound artist Alan Nakagawa’s “Social Distancing, Haiku and You” project is inviting people to write and record haikus for a collaborative project with one California art museum. | Smithsonian Magazine    Why are some readers turning to Mrs Dalloway as a quarantine read? | The New Yorker    Silent Book Club gatherings have taken on an entirely new meaning during quarantine. | Los Angeles Times   Eight novelists on what books are reassuring them right now. | Vogue  https://lithub.com 

WORD OF THE DAY gilder noun  One who gilds; especially one whose occupation is to overlay things with gold.  April 15 is the anniversary of the day Italian Renaissance polymath Leonardo da Vinci was born in 1452, and is declared by the International Association of Art to be World Art Day to celebrate the fine arts

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gilder#English

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2255  April 15, 2020

A wet market (also called a public market) is a marketplace selling fresh meat, fish, produce, and other perishable goods as distinguished from "dry markets" that sell durable goods such as fabric and electronics.  The term wet market is often used to signify a live animal market in which vendors slaughter animals upon customer purchase.  Wet markets are common in many parts of the world, notably in China and Southeast Asia, and include a wide variety of markets, such as farmers' markets, fish markets, and wildlife markets.  They often play critical roles in urban food security due to factors of pricing, freshness of food, social interaction, and local cultures.  Not all wet markets carry living animals or wildlife products, but those that do have been linked to outbreaks of zoonotic diseases, with one such market believed to have played a role in the 2019 coronavirus pandemic.  Wet markets were banned from holding wildlife in China in 2003, after the 2002–2004 SARS outbreak which was directly tied to those practices.  Such regulations were lifted before being put into place again in 2020, with other countries proposing similar bans.  Media reports that fail to distinguish between all wet markets from those with live animals or wildlife, as well as insinuations of fostering wildlife smuggling, have been blamed for fueling xenophobia related to the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet_market

The International Thriller Writers is an honorary society of authors, both fiction and nonfiction, who write books broadly classified as “thrillers.”  This would include (but isn’t limited to) such subjects as murder mystery, detective, suspense, horror, supernatural, action, espionage, true crime, war, adventure, and myriad similar subject areas.  ITW’s mission is “To bestow recognition and promote the thriller genre at an innovative and superior level for and through our Active members; to provide opportunities for mentoring, education and collegiality among thriller authors and industry professionals; and to grant awards for excellence in the thriller genre.”  ITW By-laws: Article II, Purposes, Section 2.  One of the main purposes of the organization is to provide a way for successful, bestselling authors to help debut and midlist authors advance their careers.  To that end, ITW has designed numerous, effective programs and events which promote debut and midlist writers and their work, sometimes in partnership with bestselling authors.  In addition, ITW promotes literacy, gives money to worthy organizations, supports libraries, and advances the genre.  Finally, it brings together almost a thousand writers, readers, publishers, editors and agents at its annual conference, ThrillerFest, as well as at CraftFest, a writing workshop program, and AgentFest, where aspiring authors can meet and pitch top literary agents.  http://thrillerwriters.org/about-itw/

Killer Year is a 2007 book with short stories of seventeen authors.  Each entry in this one-of-a-kind collection is introduced by the author’s Killer Year mentor, including bestselling authors James Rollins, Tess Gerritsen, and Jeffery Deaver.  Includes Killing Justice by Allison Brennan, Perfect Gentleman by Brett Battles, Bottom Deal by Robert Gregory Browne, One Serving of Bad Luck by Sean Chercover, The Class of Co-opetition by M. J. Rose, Gravity and Need by Marcus Sakey and additonal stories by Ken Bruen, Bill Cameron, Dave White, Patry Francis, Marc Lecard, Derek Nitikas, Gregg Olson, Jason Pinter, Duane Swierczynski, and Toni McGee Causey.  Killer Year:  Stories to Die For… was originally published January 2008 in hardcover.  https://www.allisonbrennan.com/book/killer-year-stories-to-die-for/  “Ours has become a risk-averse industry that more and more puts all its eggs in the same basket year in, year out:  a few brand-name authors, yet there are more than one thousand novels traditionally published every month.”  The Muser was lucky enough to get a free copy of Killer Year that was published before it was proofread. 

The New York Public Library is partnering with public radio station WNYC to give New Yorkers a shared community to connect with one another over thought-provoking books while cooped up inside their homes.  If you tend to look to literature in stressful times, this virtual book club could be your escapist pleasure and provide a sense of togetherness with other bookish New Yorkers.  “During this unsettling time, we believe reading can be both the escape and the connection that New Yorkers need,” said Brian Bannon, the Merryl and James Tisch Director and chief librarian of the New York Public Library.  “The Library brings New Yorkers together, offering welcoming spaces for people of varying backgrounds and perspectives to learn, grow, and explore the world.  During this unimaginable moment in our history, when we all must stay apart but long for that kind of togetherness, we are proud to team up with another venerable New York institution to offer our city an opportunity to connect.”  The first book on the book club's agenda is James McBride’s award-winning novel Deacon King Kong, a New York Times bestseller that takes place in the Brooklyn projects of the late 1960s.  Book clubbers can join the live-streamed discussion of the novel on April 30, 2020 at 7pm, led by WNYC journalist Alison Stewart, on social media outlets of both Stewart's channel All of It NYC and the NYPL.  McBride himself will also be on the livestream to join the conversation and carry out an audience Q&A.  New Yorkers can download the library’s e-reading app SimplyE to connect their library cards to and borrow the novel for free (as well as download from a selection of 300,000 other free e-books available on the app).  If you don't have a library card, you can apply for one within the app, and if you're in New York State you'll be able to immediately start borrowing.  Collier Sutter  https://www.timeout.com/newyork/news/the-new-york-public-library-has-launched-a-virtual-book-club-040620

Mort Drucker, the cartoonist and caricaturist who helped satirize decades of pop culture in the pages of Mad magazine, died April 8, 2020, The New York Times reports.  He was 91.  Drucker was a self-taught illustrator and freelance cartoonist who joined Mad in 1956 and soon took a regularly recurring bit—film and TV show parodies—and turned it into a defining staple of the humor magazine.  His first was a spoof of the Fifties court drama, Perry Mason, and over the next 50-plus years he illustrated a total of 238 of them, riffing on everything from Star Wars and Saturday Night Fever to Yentl and Forrest Gump.  His last film parody was published in 2008, a send-up of The Chronicles of Narnia:  Prince Caspian titled The Chronic-Ills of Yawnia: Prince Thespian.  Jon Blistein  https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/mort-drucker-mad-magazine-cartoonist-dead-obituary-981159/

Quarantine Cuisine:  Mediterranean-Style Chicken and Couscous Salad

https://www.toledoblade.com/a-e/food/2020/04/10/Quarantine-Cuisine-Mediterranean-Style-Chicken-and-Couscous-Salad/stories/20200406003  yield four servings

A walkie-talkie (more formally known as a handheld transceiver, or HT) is a hand-held, portable, two-way radio transceiver.  Its development during the Second World War has been variously credited to Donald L. Hings, radio engineer Alfred J. Gross, and engineering teams at Motorola.  First used for infantry, similar designs were created for field artillery and tank units, and after the war, walkie-talkies spread to public safety and eventually commercial and jobsite work.  Typical walkie-talkies resemble a telephone handset, with a speaker built into one end and a microphone in the other (in some devices the speaker also is used as the microphone) and an antenna mounted on the top of the unit.  They are held up to the face to talk.  A walkie-talkie is a half-duplex communication device.  Multiple walkie-talkies use a single radio channel, and only one radio on the channel can transmit at a time, although any number can listen.  The transceiver is normally in receive mode; when the user wants to talk they must press a "push-to-talk" (PTT) button that turns off the receiver and turns on the transmitter.  Read more and see many pictures at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkie-talkie  See also Walkie-Talkies Make Comeback With Folks Stuck at Home.  Coronavirus lockdowns give the World War II-era device new life by Sarah Krouse  While attorney Eric Monzo took part in a bankruptcy-court videoconference last month, he kept an eye on his new link to the world outside the guest bedroom of his Delaware home:  a Pokemon-themed yellow walkie-talkie.  The Wall Street Journal  April 12, 2020

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Kate McKinnon) invites people to join her workout at home.  April 11, 2020  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99MI90bKWtE  3:49 

Twyla Tharp quotes  “Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.”  “I read for growth, firmly believing that what you are today and what you will be in five years depends on two things:  the people you meet and the books you read.”  “Life is about moving, it’s about change.  And when things stop doing that they’re dead.”  “Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box.”  https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/148884.Twyla_Tharp

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2254  April 13, 2020

The professional pseudonym of Theodor Seuss Geisel is Dr. Seuss, and all the English-speaking world pronounced it “Doctor Soose.”  If you pronounce it “Doctor Zoice,” you’ll sound like a fool.  It is true that the middle name of Theodor Geisel—“Seuss,” which was also his mother’s maiden name—was pronounced “Zoice” by the family, and by Theodor Geisel himself.   So, if you are pronouncing his full given name, saying “Zoice” instead of “Soose” would not be wrong.  You’d have to explain the pronunciation to your listener, but you would be pronouncing it as the family did.  However, if you’re referring to the author of books for children, you pronounce it “Doctor Soose.”  For his pseudonym, Dr. Seuss accepted this pronunciation of his middle name.  I’m the author of Dr. Seuss:  American Icon (2004) and The Annotated Cat:  Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats (2007).  I also wrote the bio and timeline for Random House’s Seussville website.  The beginning of that bio includes the pronunciation information (“Zoice”), which I learned from Judith and Neil Morgan’s excellent Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel (1995).  If you read one secondary source about Seuss, their book is the one to read.  "Geisel” is pronounced “Guy-zell”.  Philip Nel  http://www.philnel.com/2013/02/06/seusswrong/  See also 11 words you're probably mispronouncing by Amanda Green at https://theweek.com/articles/468052/11-words-youre-probably-mispronouncing

Gooseberry Patch Recipes  https://www.myrecipes.com/gooseberry-patch-recipes  Gooseberry Patch philosophy:  Keep it simple.  Make it special.  See recipe for Buckeyes, a chocolate–dipped confection:    http://www.gooseberrypatch.com/gooseberry/recipe.nsf/55e548eeef8c89b9852568d4004c5ffe/324EBD673127E342852579B20050D839  Recipe for no-cook Rah-Rah Buckeye Bars:  https://gooseberrypatch.typepad.com/blog/2011/02/cotw-ffm-special-feature.html#.Xmjcd6hKiUk  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gooseberry_Patch

In a short story in the January 2016 issue of the London Review of Books, Hilary Mantel attributes to an adolescent student the peculiar phrase “She is in high dudgeon.”  Readers like me stopped dead at that point.  So did Hilary Mantel.  She paused to explain what might have been going on in the mind of that fictional student, a process as complicated as the English Reformation under Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell that Mantel has narrated in her masterpieces, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.  Mantel points out that phrases like the one about dudgeon seem to emerge from nowhere, perhaps “from schoolbooks their grandparents had.”  Dudgeon means a feeling of offense or deep resentment.  It may have originated as an Italian word for overshadowing, which would make it a sister word to umbrage, a favourite of mine.  Most people, I believe, have read “take umbrage” many times without wondering how this word came to mean what it does.  We guess from the content that it’s a way of saying “feel resentful” or “be angered.”  Well-read horticulturalists and arborists have always known.  It comes from the term for shade trees.  That’s how Charlotte Brontë used it 1849 in Shirley, her second published novel after Jane Eyre:  “She would spend a sunny afternoon in lying stirless on the turf, at the foot of some tree of friendly umbrage.”  Two centuries earlier, John Milton, in Paradise Lost, referred to “highest woods” that “spread their umbrage broad.”  Gradually, usage (in its ponderous, anonymous and mostly unknowable ways) gave the word another meaning, so that the shadow cast by friendly trees turned into an unfriendly shadow cast over individuals or phrases that might darken someone’s otherwise good name.  Short shrift is a rare case of an ancient companion term that retains its strength although few readers understand its origin.  Originally, it referred to the sacrament of confession, often called shrift.  It was said by some that prisoners who were soon to be executed received only rapid and unsympathetic treatment by priests administering confession:  short shrift.  It passed into general language as curt dismissal.  The Nobel-winning poet, Joseph Brodsky, warned one audience of certain social and cultural evils and then added, “Once you have steered clear of them, give them the shortest shrift possible.”  Robert Fulford  https://nationalpost.com/entertainment/books/taking-umbrage-with-the-short-shrift-where-do-our-obscure-turns-of-phrase-come-from

To better understand the title of Robert Boswell's gripping and unsettling play, The Long Shrift, you have to consider how reversing the dictionary meaning of the phrase, "getting the short shrift," as it is has been traditionally understood:  "The brief interlude given a condemned prisoner to confess and receive absolution before execution."  Although Boswell, is more renowned for his seven published novels, The Long Shrift is his second play, and it's a humdinger.  In defense of his oft-explored theme—you unwittingly hurt the one you love—it explores aspects of rape and repentance with uncanny insight and a clear-minded compassion for both the victim and the perpetrator.  Simon Saltzman  http://www.curtainup.com/longshrift14.html

Why MacDowell NOW? Whitman, Melville, the Virus by Vijay Seshadri  April 2, 2020  Decades ago, someone said in a literature seminar I attended that while America’s founders built the edifice of American democracy it was Walt Whitman who gave America its inner meaning and created the American social bond.  As expansive and Whitmanesque as this claim seems, I thought it was true the moment I heard it, and true not just as a statement of historical fact (one that some people might dispute) but also because of what it revealed about the relationship between American identity and imagination.  Imagination can survive in terrible political systems—in autocracies and tyrannies, under totalitarianism.  (I once heard Jorge Luis Borges say, jokingly, in an on-stage interview, that censorship is good for writers because it forces them to be ingenious.)  But the political system we call democracy can’t survive without imagination, which makes it possible to see ourselves in others and others in ourselves; and a particularly strong and vital current of imaginativeness needs to be generated to jump the wide gaps between people in a society that is, and has been since its beginnings, as diverse as America.  https://www.macdowellcolony.org/news/whitman-melville-the-virus?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Why%20MacDowell%20NOW%3F%20Whitman%2C%20Melville%2C%20the%20Virus&utm_campaign=2020Mar_eNews  Vijay Seshadri is a MacDowell Fellow (1998, 2004), board member and is a Brooklyn, New York-based Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, essayist, and literary critic.

An international team of specialists, led by the University of Bristol, is closer to cracking a 5,000-year-old mystery surrounding the ancient trade and production of decorated ostrich eggs.  Long before Fabergé, ornate ostrich eggs were highly prized by the elites of Mediterranean civilisations during the Bronze and Iron Ages, but to date little has been known about the complex supply chain behind these luxury goods.  Examining ostrich eggs from the British Museum's collection, the team, led by Bristol's Dr. Tamar Hodos, were able to reveal secrets about their origin and how and where they were made. Using state-of-the-art scanning electron microscopy, Dr. Caroline Cartwright, Senior Scientist at the British Museum was able to investigate the eggs' chemical makeup to pinpoint their origins and study minute marks that reveal how they were made.  In the study, published April 9, 2020 in the journal Antiquity, the researchers describe for the first time the surprisingly complex system behind ostrich egg production.  This includes evidence about where the ostrich eggs were sourced, if the ostriches were captive or wild, and how the manufacture methods can be related to techniques and materials used by artisans in specific areas.  Read more and see graphics at https://phys.org/news/2020-04-year-old-egg-reveals-complexity-ancient.html

Seismologists have discovered that there is less seismic noise around the world, which means there are less vibrations from trains, cars and buses throughout the world because so many people are staying home and social distancing, CNN reports.  The lack of noise means “Earth’s upper crust is moving just a little less,” according to CNN.  Thomas Lecocq, a geologist and seismologist at the Royal Observatory in Belgium, was one of the first to discover the change in sound in Belgium, where vibrations have decreased about one-third because of new social distancing and quarantine restrictions, according to CBS News.  Lecocq and other researchers told CNN they’ve picked up on smaller earthquakes and shakes because there’s less general seismic noise from transportation.  Herb Scribner  https://www.deseret.com/u-s-world/2020/4/7/21209641/coronavirus-covid-19-earthquake-shake-seismic

One of the world’s oldest films, “Sneeze,” is a gift that keeps on giving.  Shot in 1894 and about as long as an achoo, it shows a mustachioed gent emitting a single sneeze, a kerchief clutched in one hand.  The film was made by W.K.L. Dickson and the sneeze delivered by Fred Ott.  Sneeze is one of more than 7000 videos you can stream courtesy of the Library of Congress at https://loc.gov/collections/national-screening-room  Manohla Dargis  The New York Times  April 4, 2020

Phone calls have made a comeback in the pandemic.  While the nation’s biggest telecommunications providers prepared for a huge shift toward more internet use from home, what they didn’t expect was an even greater surge in plain old voice calls, a medium that had been going out of fashion for years.  Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year.  Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak.  AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times.  In contrast, internet traffic is up around 20 percent to 25 percent from typical daily patterns, AT&T and Verizon said.  The rise is stunning given how voice calls have long been on the decline.  Some 90 million households in the United States have ceased using landline phones since 2000, according to USTelecom.  Cecilia Kang  https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/09/technology/phone-calls-voice-virus.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

With restaurants, hotels and cafeterias closed by the coronavirus, American farmers stuck with vast quantities of food they cannot sell are dumping milk, throwing out chicken-hatching eggs and rendering pork bellies into lard instead of bacon.  The Wall Street Journal  April 10, 2020

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2253  April 10, 2020

Paper cutting or Scherenschnitte (literally, scissor cuts) started in Switzerland around the 16th century.  Unlike Chinese paper cutting, which goes back to the 6th century and usually depicts Chinese characters and zodiac animals, in Switzerland it’s more often about symmetry in design--whether the artwork depicts a geometrical design or Swiss pastoral scenes.  Chinese paper cutting is traditionally done on red paper, while in Switzerland black is the preferred choice.  Scherenschnitte really took off in Switzerland in the 19th century, under the two masters of the art--Johann Jakob Hauswirth (1809-1871) and Louis Saugy (1871-1953).  Most houses, restaurants, shops and hotels in Gstaad-Saanenland area display paper cut designs.  The Heritage Museum in Saanen (which traces the history of the area through costumes, tools, arts and crafts) has some elaborate, almost lace-like scherenschnitte works on display.  Modern day artists are going beyond the alpine village theme and exploring new designs--everything from the abstract and asymmetrical to fairy tales, current affairs and feminist themes.  https://deliciouslydirectionless.com/the-beautiful-art-of-paper-cutting-in/  This feature was commissioned by Mint Lounge and was published in their print issue January 9, 2016.  Read it here. 

Romansh is a Romance language spoken by 50-70,000 people in the Swiss canton of Grisons (Graubünden).  It is one of the four national languages of Switzerland and has semi-official status.  Romansh, which is also known as Rumantsch, Romansch or Romanche or Rhaeto-Romansch, is not in fact a single language but rather a cluster of closely-related dialects.  A standardised written form, known as Rumantsch Grischun (Graubünden Romansh) was created in 1982 by Heinrich Schmid, a linguist from Zurich, though it isn't particularly popular with speakers, who prefer to use their own dialects and often use German to communicate with speakers of different dialects.  Romansh first appeared in print in 1552 in a catechism by Jacob Bifrun called Christiauna fuorma, which he wrote in the Engadine dialect.  A Romansh translation of the New Testament was published in 1560.  See Romansh alphabet at https://www.omniglot.com/writing/romansh.htm

Peak Walk is a pedestrian suspension bridge linking two mountain peaks in the Swiss Alps.  It is situated in the Diablerets massif of the Bernese Alps in the canton of Vaud, and connects the peak of Scex Rouge with another peak.  On the other peak is the viewpoint of the Glacier 3000 company.  Scex Rouge is about 5 m (16 ft) higher than Glacier 3000's viewpoint.  Peak Walk is the world's first suspension bridge which connects two mountain peaks.  The bridge, which has been built by the firm Seiler AG (Steel and metal constructions) in Bönigen, is 107 m (351 ft) long, 0.8 m (2.6 ft) wide and 1.2 m (3.9 ft) high with a 15% slope.  It has four pieces of key supporting steel cables with a 120 tonne loading capacity.  Peak Walk is anchored by 20 pieces in the rock.  It was built as a tourist attraction in Europe, and it costs 1.8 million franc (about 1.2 million GBP).  Three hundred people could be accommodated at a time, although the number would be reduced to 150 to ensure greater comfort.  The designers took the extreme conditions into account, with winds of about 200 km/h (120 mph).  Mountains that can be seen from the bridge include Mont Blanc (the Alps' highest point), the Matterhorn, Mönch, Jungfrau and Eiger, and the bridge has a partial glass floor that afford views down through it.  In addition, the bridge became the world's second highest suspension bridge after the Titlis Cliff Walk, which is 3,000 m (9,800 ft) above sea level.  The thin air at high altitudes and poor weather hampered construction work, and summer storms delayed the transportation of construction materials.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_Walk

Farro-Lentil Soup  serves 8  Heidi Swanson, “Super Natural Every Day” https://www.mercurynews.com/2011/09/27/recipe-farro-lentil-soup/

Q.  What is the tallest building in the entire world?  A.  The library, because it has so many stories.

On the morning of September 1, 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington ascended into the private observatory attached to his country estate outside of London.  After cranking open the dome’s shutter to reveal the clear blue sky, he pointed his brass telescope toward the sun and began to sketch a cluster of enormous dark spots that freckled its surface.  Suddenly, Carrington spotted what he described as “two patches of intensely bright and white light” erupting from the sunspots.  Five minutes later the fireballs vanished, but within hours their impact would be felt across the globe.  That night, telegraph communications around the world began to fail; there were reports of sparks showering from telegraph machines, shocking operators and setting papers ablaze.  All over the planet, colorful auroras illuminated the nighttime skies, glowing so brightly that birds began to chirp and laborers started their daily chores,  believing the sun had begun rising.  Some thought the end of the world was at hand.  The flare spewed electrified gas and subatomic particles toward Earth, and the resulting geomagnetic storm—dubbed the “Carrington Event”—was the largest on record to have struck the planet.  Christopher Klein  https://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-solar-superstorm-the-1859-carrington-event

The CARES Act that is now law is HR 748.  It was originally introduced under the name "Middle Class Health Benefits Tax Repeal Act of 2019.”  What the Senate did was take that piece of legislation and turn it into an 800+ page behemoth that is affecting all our lives.  The Senate also has another bill called the CARES Act, S. 3548.   You likely know where this is heading.   Folks understandably go to S. 3548 and then are quite confused.  Should you visit congress.gov, you will note S. 3548 is the third most popular bill as determined by views.  (There is a moral here about popularity.)  A search for the CARES Act has S. 3548 as the 17^th result and HR 748 as the 44^th.  Hence I contacted the Library of Congress asking that it put a reference somewhere obvious to direct folks to the proper bill.  Thought this seemed like a no-brainer request, but then I forgot I was talking with a government agency.  The initial response to my request was directions as to how to narrow my search so that only enacted laws come up.  My reply pointed out it was much easier to put a reference on the homepage than explain to 300+ million people how to use the site.  The library’s answer to this was to fill out the survey on congress.gov with how to fix the system.  So I did.  Here was the result:  Your answer is too long.  Please shorten it before submitting your comments.  So, I dashed off another e-mail to the library with a copy of the above and my full answer below along with a request it be forwarded to the proper party.  Also gave a very abbreviated answer to the survey.  If you feel so inclined, please contact the Library of Congress with a request to fix the system.  My solution was a spot for the library to highlight popular bills--not based on searches/views but on news.  Thank you, Muse reader!

Super Pink Moon is an astronomical event that occurs when the moon is closest to the Earth in its orbit, making it appear much larger and brighter than usual.  The Pink Moon gets its name from the emergence of the first wildflowers of spring.  The first of 33 slides depicts pink supermoon above the Salgo Castle in Somoskoujfalu, Hungary on April 7, 2020 at https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/in-photos-super-pink-moon/ss-BB12i4E5

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2252  April 8, 2020