Like mushrooms, to which they are closely related, truffles are the fruiting bodies of a fungus that forms a partnership with trees, sheathing the tree roots in a net of cells known as mycorrhiza and feeding the trees water and micronutrients in exchange for sugars, which the trees make through photosynthesis.  But unlike mushrooms, which rise above the surface, open their parasols, and let wind and water spread their spores, truffles stay underground—an adaptation to dry environments.  Nestled in the earth, they have less of a risk of desiccating in a drought, but they do have a spore-dissemination challenge.  They’ve solved it brilliantly by producing some of the most extraordinary scents in biology, complex cocktails of aroma that many animals, including humans, find irresistible.  The animals dig up the truffles, eat them and spread the spores.  Rowan Jacobsen  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/american-grown-truffle-breakthrough-180977702/ 

Rowan Jacobsen is an American author and journalist.  He is known for his writings on nature, science, sustainability, and the organoleptic experience.  His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Newsweek, Harper's Magazine, Outside, Orion, Eating Well, Forbes, Popular Science, Mother Jones, Vice, Lucky Peach, Food & Wine, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Audubon, Yankee, and elsewhere.  His work is regularly anthologized in The Best American Science & Nature Writing and Best Food Writing collections.  He has been an Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow, writing about endangered diversity on the borderlands between India, Myanmar, and China; a McGraw Center for Business Journalism Fellow, writing about the disruptive potential of plant-based proteins; and a Knight Science Journalism fellow at MIT, focusing on the environmental and evolutionary impact of synthetic biology.  He has performed with Pop-Up Magazine, lectured at Harvard and Yale, and appeared on CBS, NBC, and NPR.  He has received James Beard Awards for his book A Geography of Oysters and his Eating Well piece, "Or Not to Bee."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowan_Jacobsen 

The smallest in the group of Greater Sunda Islands, but with a population of 140 million people, Java is one of most populated places on the globe.  The island is located in the Malay Archipelago and is a major economic region of Indonesia.  The length from west to east is about 1,000 kilometers, with a maximum width of 192 kilometers.  The island's area is 126.5 thousand square kilometers.  In the north the island is washed by the Java Sea, in the east Bali Strait is found separating Java from the island of Bali, in the south by the Indian Ocean, and to the west is the Sunda strait separating Java from Sumatra.  Approximately half of the Java territory is covered by mountains.  The mountain belt of different eras stretches in the south, mostly composed of limestone.  More than 100 volcanoes, about 30 of which are active, rising above the low mountains.  https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-country-is-the-island-of-java-in.html 

Coffee has many names.  Some, such as “espresso,” and “drip” refer to how coffee is made.  Others, such as “mocha” and “cappuccino,” refer to a specific beverage made with coffee.  Still others refer to coffee’s origins and history.  “Java” falls into this third category.  During the 1600s, the Dutch introduced coffee to Southeast Asia.  They brought coffee trees to places like Bali and Sumatra, where it’s still grown today.  Another island they began planting coffee on was Java, and it’s from this island that the name “java” arose.  It’s not known specifically known how the term was first used.  The Dutch were likely the first to use the name, and they may have used it to refer to single-origin coffee from Java.  As the coffee trade grew, though, the term was adopted by more and more people throughout the world, and any specificity was lost.  Today, “java” has become a generic term for coffee and no longer refers only to coffee from the Island of Java.  Coffee continues to be grown on Java today, and much of the island’s arabica production comes from estates that were originally built by the Dutch.  In the 1880s, coffee leaf rust decimated many of the trees on the island, and producers responded by substituting arabica lots with liberica and then robusta ones.  Liberica and robusta coffees are both more resistant to leaf rust, but their traits aren’t nearly as desirable as arabica’s.  Thus, the coffees produced by these trees are usually used in lower-quality, commercial-grade coffees, not in specialty-grade coffees.  Five plantations, however, still grow coffea arabica and have decent processing facilities.  Some plantations age their coffees for up to three years, which is known as “monsooning” it.  This creates a less acidic and mellow coffee.  It mimics the flavor profile of coffees that Europeans would have enjoyed in the 1600 and 1700s, when transporting coffee by ship from Java to Europe could take years.  In 1995, a programming language called Java was released and featured a steaming cup of coffee as its icon.  Javascript was also released in 1995, and it continues to be used some today.  posted by Scott  https://driftaway.coffee/coffee-called-java/

A “cup of joe,” is one of coffee’s most common nickname—and one of its most puzzling.  The term first started appearing in print in the 1930s, with the first occurrence of it in a book coming in 1936.  Martinson Coffee has trademarked the term “cup of joe,” suggesting that the slang term comes from the company’s early years. Founded in New York in 1898 by Joe Martinson, who reportedly had a “bigger-than-life personality,” coffee may have locally been called “Joe’s coffee” or a “cup of joe.”  As the company grew, “cup of joe” could have expanded from a local nickname to a more widely used term by the 1930s.   Warhol liked to paint their cans, and, more recently, Martinson Coffee made an appearance on Mad Men in Season 2 Episode 7.  In 1914, Secretary of the Navy Josephus “Joe” Daniels banned alcohol from all U.S. Navy ships.  As this was close to the start of World War I, many young men would soon find themselves aboard a ship where the strongest drink available was coffee, or a “cup of joe.”  Those who argue against this theory often point out that this ban would have had little practical impact, because alcohol wasn’t widely available on U.S. Navy ships at the time.  When boarding dry ships, though, men who were used to going to the local bar or having a drink at home would have felt the ban’s effects.  Referring to coffee as a “cup of joe” would be one way to voice dissent and disapprovement without directly criticizing the Secretary of the Navy.  This theory doesn’t account for the twenty-year gap between Daniels’ ban and the rise of “cup of joe” in the 1930s.  The term, however, may have fallen out of favor in the 1920s when sailors returned home, only to reappear during Prohibition in the 1930s.  Linguists sometimes argue that Joe could be a shortened version of Jamoke.  Jamoke, which was a common nickname for coffee in the 1930s, was a combination of mocha and java.  Since joe refers to an average man, “the average joe,” “cup of joe” could simply be a reference to an ordinary person’s drink.  Regardless of whether this is the true origin of “cup of joe,” the term may have been kept alive by “joes,” or average guys, following World War II.  As diners popped up in the 1940s and 50s, working men who ate their daily breakfast at these restaurants might have been served “cups of joe.”  All we know for sure is that the first recorded occurrences of “cup of joe” come from the 1930s, and the nickname is here to stay.  In fact, it’s become much more popular since the 1980s.  posted by Scott  https://driftaway.coffee/why-is-coffee-called-a-cup-of-joe/

As the athletes finished marching into the stadium for the closing ceremony of the 32nd Summer Olympics on Sunday night, August 8, 2021, the announcer asked for a big round of applause.  But there simply weren’t enough people in the stands to make much noise.  And the flashiest component of the ceremony, a formation of the five Olympic rings by tiny points of light, was invisible live in the stadium.  The magic of its special effects played only on large screens and to television audiences.  There were upsets:  The U.S. women’s soccer team fell to Canada in a semifinal; Jun Mizutani and Mima Ito won Japan’s first gold medal in table tennis over the Chinese world champions.  Naomi Osaka, after lighting the Olympic cauldron for Japan, was eliminated in the third round of her tennis tournament, denying the host country a potential gold medal moment it had dearly hoped for.  There were history-making triumphs:  Allyson Felix surpassed Carl Lewis as the most decorated American Olympian in track and field, and Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya successfully defended his gold medal in the men’s marathon.  And who could resist the British diver Tom Daley, who was often spotted knitting in the stands?  Outside the stadium before the ceremony on Sunday, Ryogo Saita, 45, who was walking with his 7-year-old son, said they had enjoyed watching on television as Yuto Horigome captured skateboarding’s first gold medal for Japan.  Motoko Rich https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/08/sports/olympics/tokyo-olympics-closing-ceremony.html 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2401  August 9, 2021 

A “humblebrag” connects the words “humbly” + “brag,” which implies the act of indirectly or demurely boasting.  The definition of a humblebrag by Merriam Webster is:  “To make a seemingly modest, self-critical, or casual statement or reference that is meant to draw attention to one’s admirable or impressive qualities or achievements.”  Interestingly, the humblebrag has only recently entered our social lexicon, thanks to the rise of social media—some credit the term to the late Parks and Recreation producer Harris Wittels.  From celebrities to athletes, it’s common for people to engage in humblebragging without even realizing it.  This is because talking about ourselves triggers the same pleasure response in our brains as sex or food, two Harvard neuroscientists found.  For instance, you may have come across a novelist saying something like, “I can’t believe my new book is on the New York Times bestseller list!”  This statement, while true and maybe even well-intentioned, still comes off as braggadocious.  In this case, the novelist’s attempt at humility was unfortunately expressed as a humblebrag.  Another typical way that humblebragging is expressed is alongside a complaint.  Saying “I have to miss happy hour to pick up my Mercedes from the detailer after work” may seem like an annoyance to the speaker, but to anyone listening, this is nothing but a classic humblebrag.  Kelly Konya  https://www.grammarly.com/blog/what-is-humblebrag/ 

The Smurfs is a Belgian comic franchise centered on a fictional colony of small, blue, humanoid creatures who live in mushroom-shaped houses in the forest.  The Smurfs was first created and introduced as a series of comic characters by the Belgian comics artist Peyo (the pen name of Pierre Culliford) in 1958, wherein they were known as Les Schtroumpfs.  There are more than 100 Smurf characters, and their names are based on adjectives that emphasise their characteristics, such as "Jokey Smurf", who likes to play practical jokes on his fellow smurfs.  "Smurfette" was the first female Smurf to be introduced in the series.  The Smurfs wear Phrygian caps, which came to represent freedom during the modern era.  The word “smurf” is the original Dutch translation of the French "schtroumpf", which, according to Peyo, is a word he invented during a meal with fellow cartoonist André Franquin when he could not remember the word salt.  The Smurfs franchise began as a comic and expanded into advertising, films, TV series, ice capades, video games, theme parks, and dolls. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Smurfs

The Kaiser Library is a government-run public library in Kathmandu, Nepal.  It is located in the Keshar Mahal palace complex.  The library was established by Chandra Shumsher Jang Bahadur Rana for his son, Kaiser (Keshar) Shumsher Rana, in 1907.  The library hosts some rare and ancient books on Buddhism, Tantrism and astrology.  Some are written on palm-leaf manuscript.  The book includes a 1,100-year-old copy of the Sushruta Samhita, an ancient Sanskrit text on medicine listed in UNESCO's international Memory of the World Register.  Beside books, the library also has paintings and other antique artifacts.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_library 

In North America, Belgian waffles are a variety of waffle with a lighter batter, larger squares, and deeper pockets than American waffles.  Belgian waffles were originally leavened with yeast, but baking powder is now often used.  They are often eaten as a breakfast food; toppings vary from whipped cream, confectioners sugar, soft fruit, and chocolate spread, to syrup and butter or margarine.  They may also be served with vanilla ice cream and fresh fruit (such as strawberries) as a dessert.  In Belgium itself, there are several kinds of waffle, including the Brussels waffle and the Liège waffle.  Originally showcased in 1958 at Expo 58 in Brussels, Belgian waffles were introduced to North America by a Belgian named Walter Cleyman at the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle in 1962, and served with whipped cream and strawberries.  The waffles were further popularized in the United States during the 1964 New York World's Fair at Flushing Meadows Park in Queens, New York City.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_waffle  The runaway best-seller at the 1964 World’s Fair was the Belgian—or “Bel-Gem,” as it was called—waffle.  See also https://www.food.com/recipe/the-best-belgian-waffles-63071 and https://www.beaumontenterprise.com/news/article/She-sold-Belgian-waffles-at-the-1964-World-s-Fair-5418625.php 

Amethyst is a violet variety of quartz.  The ancient Greeks wore amethyst and carved drinking vessels from it in the belief that it would prevent intoxication.  Amethyst is a semiprecious stone that is often used in jewelry and is the traditional birthstone for February.  Amethyst occurs at many localities in the United States.  The most important production is at Four Peaks, Gila and Maricopa Counties, Arizona, and Jackson's Crossroads, Wilkes County, Georgia.  Smaller occurrences have been reported in the Red Feather Lakes, near Fort Collins, Colorado; Amethyst Mountain, Texas; Yellowstone National Park; Delaware County, Pennsylvania; Haywood County, North Carolina; Deer Hill and Stow, Maine and in the Lake Superior region of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.  Amethyst is relatively common in the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Nova Scotia.  The largest amethyst mine in North America is located in Thunder Bay, Ontario.  Amethyst is the official state gemstone of South Carolina.  Several South Carolina amethysts are on display at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amethyst

July 28, 2021  When researcher Sarah Coyne released a 2016 study asserting that Disney princess culture was harmful to girls because it cemented sexist stereotypes and led to self-critical body image, the loyalists came for her.  “I got so much hate mail,” the Brigham Young University professor and associate director of the School for Family Life tells Yahoo Life.  “People called me a ‘princess hater!’”  But now Coyne has announced new findings on the subject, surprising even herself with what she learned:  that the long-term effect of the bejeweled, tiara-wearing heroines on kids can actually be a positive one, leading to more progressive views about women and a less favorable view of behavior known as toxic masculinity.  The study, published in the journal Child Development, is quite small and limited—following just 307 Utah children (and their parents), 87 percent white, half boys, half girls, for a five-year period, picking up where Coyne’s older research left off, with many of the same subjects.  And there were very likely other factors, which Coyne did not investigate, influencing the kids’ attitudes as they grew.  Still, the positive nature of the findings is striking.  Beth Greenfield  https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/can-disney-princess-culture-positive-kids-study-174236653.html

On a visit to Boston, Benjamin Franklin noted that the inhabitants of his native city were far better prepared to fight fires than the natives of his adopted city, Philadelphia.  Upon returning home, he consulted the Junto, a benevolent group dedicated to civic and self-improvement, and asked for their suggestions on better ways to combat fires.  For the February 4, 1735 issue of The Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin sent an anonymous letter to his own newspaper entitled Protection of Towns from Fire.  Writing as an "old citizen" he admonished:  In the first Place, as an Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure, I would advise 'em to take care how they suffer living Coals in a full Shovel, to be carried out of one Room into another, or up or down Stairs, unless in a Warmingpan shut; for Scraps of Fire may fall into Chinks and make no Appearance until Midnight; when your Stairs being in Flames, you may be forced, (as I once was) to leap out of your Windows, and hazard your Necks to avoid being oven-roasted.  He further urged that chimney sweeps should be licensed by the city and be held responsible for their work.  Under Franklin's goading, a group of thirty men came together to form the Union Fire Company on December 7, 1736.   https://www.ushistory.org/franklin/philadelphia/fire.htm

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2400  August 6, 2021

More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.  First attributed to Saint Teresa of Avila (Teresa de Jesús) (1515–1582), born Teresa de Cepeda y Ahumada by Truman Capote in "Go Ahead and Ask Me Anything.' (And So She Did):  An Interview with Truman Capote" by Gloria Steinem, in McCall's magazine (November 1967), as the source of the title of a novel he was working on called Answered Prayers.  Likely a variant of “I remember having read somewhere, in some strange book, that when the gods wish to punish us they answer our prayers,” a quip found in act 2 of Oscar Wilde's play An Ideal Husband.  https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Teresa_of_%C3%81vila

The first three groups of sounds in English—plosives, fricatives, and affricates are collectively referred to as obstruents (because they obstruct the airway).  Each of these sounds involve some type of halting or obstructing the flow of air.  Obstruents always occur as voiced and voiceless pairs, with two sounds being produced identically from a mechanical standpoint (which articulators do what), but with the only difference between them being the use of the vocal cords.  In contrast, the final three types of sounds involve redirection of the air exiting the body without halting or obstructing its flow.  These sounds are called sonorants.  The word sonorant is a combination of sonorous (having strong resonant sound) and consonant.  The name sonorant refers to the fact that these sounds reverberate or echo off the vocal organs with the breath exiting freely through either the nose or mouth (versus obstruents where the air is constricted or obstructed so that it cannot flow freely).  In English, sonorants are always voiced, but often occur in more than one form depending on how they are combined with other sounds.  There are three categories of sonorants—nasals, liquids, and glides.  Read more at https://calleteach.wordpress.com/2010/01/10/sounds-of-english-nasals-liquids-glides/

Lope de Vega, one of the most prolific Spanish authors, spent most of his long life in Madrid.  He wrote approximately 3000 sonnets, 3 novels, 4 novellas, 9 epics, 3 didactic poems, and several hundred comedies.  Lope is only second to Cervantes regarding his importance during the Golden Age of Spanish literature, and he's most famous for modernizing the theatre of the 17th century and ridding it from the strict Aristotelian structure.  This new theatre genre was called "new comedy" or "Spanish comedy".  https://www.classicspanishbooks.com/16th-cent-baroque-lope-works.html  See also https://www.europeana.eu/en/blog/lope-de-vega-never-short-of-a-drama

The proverbial phrase 'To err is human' is often heard in its fuller form 'To err is human; to forgive, divine.'  This makes sense of the notion that the originator, the English poet Alexander Pope, was trying to convey.  In the poem An Essay on Criticism, Part II, 1711, Pope explains that, while anyone can make a mistake, we should aspire to do as God does, that is, show mercy and forgive sinners:  Ah ne'er so dire a Thirst of Glory boast, Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!  Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join; To err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.  Note that Pope's original wording uses the word 'humane' rather than, as it is now usually spelled, 'human'.  This wasn't a spelling mistake, nor have we misunderstood the poet's meaning, just that 'humane' was the accepted spelling of 'human' in the early 18th century.  https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/to-err-is-human.html 

George Rhoads (January 27, 1926–July 9, 2021) was a contemporary American painter, sculptor, and origami master.  He was best known for his whimsical audiokinetic sculptures in airports, science museums, shopping malls, children’s hospitals, and other public places throughout the world.  Rhoads attended the University of Chicago with the goal of studying physics and mathematics.  After earning enough credits to complete his associate degree, Rhoads began taking design and drawing classes at Chicago’s Art Institute.  Two years later he left Chicago and moved to New York City to become a painter.  His work focused on portraits and impressionistic cityscapes, but he was not critically or financially successful.  In 1952, Rhoads moved to Paris to continue painting.  It was there that he met American origami expert Gershon Legman who introduced him to the art of origami and the work of Akira Yoshizawa.  This meeting sparked Rhoads’ interest and he began practicing origami and inventing new folds.  His most notable contribution to the field became known as the Blintzed Bird Base, now a standard origami fold used for creating an animal with four legs, two ears, and a tail from a single sheet of paper.  See graphics and list of selected public works at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Rhoads 

On May 1, 1931, President Herbert Hoover officially dedicated New York City’s Empire State Building, pressing a button from the White House that turned on the building’s lights.  Hoover’s gesture, of course, was symbolic; while the president remained in Washington, D.C., someone else flicked the switches in New York.  The idea for the Empire State Building is said to have been born of a competition between Walter Chrysler of the Chrysler Corporation and John Jakob Raskob of General Motors, to see who could erect the taller building.  Chrysler had already begun work on the famous Chrysler Building, the gleaming 1,046-foot skyscraper in midtown Manhattan.  Not to be bested, Raskob assembled a group of well-known investors, including former New York Governor Alfred E. Smith.  The group chose the architecture firm Shreve, Lamb and Harmon Associates to design the building.  The Art-Deco plans, said to have been based in large part on the look of a pencil, were also builder-friendly:  The entire building went up in just over a year, under budget (at $40 million) and well ahead of schedule.  During certain periods of building, the frame grew an astonishing four-and-a-half stories a week.  Link to Ten Surprising Facts about the Empire State Building at https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/empire-state-building-dedicated 

A filibuster is a parliamentary procedure where one or more members of a legislature debate over a proposed piece of legislation to delay or entirely prevent a decision being made on the proposal.  It is sometimes referred to as "talking a bill to death" or "talking out a bill" and is characterized as a form of obstruction in a legislature or other decision-making body.  This form of political obstruction reaches as far back as Ancient Roman times and could also be referred to synonymously with political stonewalling.  Due to the often extreme length of time required for a successful filibuster, many speakers stray off-topic after exhausting the original subject matter.  US Senators have, for example, read through laws from different states and recited past speeches and recipes.  The ultimate source for filibuster is certainly 16th century Dutch vribuyter (now vrijbuiter) 'robber', 'pirate', 'plunderer', from vribuyt 'plunder' (16th c.), from vrij 'free' + buyt 'booty', 'loot'.  However, the intermediate history is complicated, because several languages have influenced each other reciprocally.  Intermediate links may be English freebooter (1598), a loan translation of the Dutch equivalent, and flibutor (1587):  with an -r- altered in an -l- that may have been the result of dissimilation, typical for liquid consonants.  This alteration may have occurred in English, or first in a foreign language before it entered English.  Find a list of the 14 state legislatures that have a filibuster at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster 

“ . . .  No longer, dog-in-manger-like can you retain possession . . . ”   See notation of the song Filibustering at http://sniff.numachi.com/pages/tiFILBUSTR;ttFILBUSTR.html 

Roberto Calasso, a towering figure in European publishing as the driving force behind an esteemed Milan-based publisher, as well as an inquisitive and prolific author himself, has died at 80.  Italian news media, quoting his publishing house Adelphi, said Calasso died July 29, 2021 in Milan.  Directing Adelphi since 1971 and being its chairman since 1999, Calasso adhered to the philosophy choosing books to publish not on how they might sell but on whether they had something important to say. Frances D’Emilio  https://www.miamiherald.com/entertainment/celebrities/article253147168.html 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2399  August 4, 2021

 At 9:51 on the morning of June 10, 1964, Senator Robert C. Byrd completed an address that he had begun 14 hours and 13 minutes earlier.  The subject was the pending Civil Rights Act of 1964, a measure that occupied the Senate for 60 working days, including seven Saturdays.  A day earlier, Senate whips Hubert Humphrey (D-MN) and Thomas Kuchel (R-CA), the bill's floor managers, concluded they had the 67 votes required at that time to end the debate.  The Civil Rights Act provided protection of voting rights; banned discrimination in public facilities—including private businesses offering public services—such as lunch counters, hotels, and theaters; and established equal employment opportunity as the law of the land.  As Senator Byrd took his seat, House members, former senators, and others—150 of them—vied for limited standing space at the back of the chamber.  With all gallery seats taken, hundreds waited outside in hopelessly extended lines.  Georgia Democrat Richard Russell offered the final arguments in opposition.  Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, who had enlisted the Republican votes that made cloture a realistic option, spoke for the proponents with his customary eloquence.  Noting that the day marked the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's nomination to a second term, the Illinois Republican proclaimed, in the words of Victor Hugo, "Stronger than all the armies is an idea whose time has come."  He continued, "The time has come for equality of opportunity in sharing in government, in education, and in employment.  It will not be stayed or denied.  It is here!"  Never in history had the Senate been able to muster enough votes to cut off a filibuster on a civil rights bill.  And only five times in the 47 years since the cloture rule was established had the Senate agreed to cloture for any measure.  https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/filibusters-cloture/civil-rights-filibuster-ended.htm  

The record-long filibuster is the 1957 talkfest by then-Democratic Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.  He lasted for 24 hours, 18 minutes.  There is an argument to be made, Constitution Daily says, that Thurmond isn't the true record holder.  Later, Thurmond would switch to the Republican Party.  In 1953, Oregon Sen. Wayne Morse (then a Republican) lasted 22 hours, 26 minutes.  https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/03/07/173736882/how-did-strom-thurmond-last-through-his-24-hour-filibuster 

All beers, no matter how great or small, are made from a basic combination of water, malts, hops, and yeast.  So then what really distinguishes an ale from a lager?  The difference is yeast.  Not whether or not it’s used, but the specific type.  Here’s what you can expect when it comes to drinking these two classic brews.  Ales are brewed with a top-fermenting yeast that thrives at mid-range room temperatures.  For this reason, ales are typically stored between 60° and 75° Fahrenheit during the fermentation stage.  This type of yeast and the fermentation temperature tend to give ales a fruitier and spicier flavor than lagers.  In general, ales are more robust and complex.  Common styles of ale include pale ale, India pale ale, amber ale, porters, and stouts.  By contrast, lagers are made with bottom-fermenting yeast that work best at cooler temperatures, between 35° and 55° Fahrenheit.  Fermentation happens more slowly and the beer is more stable, so it can be stored (or “lagered”) for longer than ales.  This yeast tends to have less presence in the finished beer.  As compared to ales, lagers have a cleaner and crisper quality with emphasis on the hops and malt flavors.  The lager family includes pilsners, bocks, and dunkels.  Emma Christensen  https://www.thekitchn.com/whats-the-difference-ale-vs-la-131805  

Googie architecture is a type of futurist architecture influenced by car culture, jets, the Space Age, and the Atomic Age.  It originated in Southern California with the Streamline Moderne architecture of the 1930s, and was popular nationwide from roughly 1945 to the early 1970s.  Googie-themed architecture was popular among motels, coffee houses and gas stations.  The term Googie comes from the now-defunct Googies Coffee Shop in Hollywood designed by John Lautner.  Similar architectural styles are also referred to as Populuxe or Doo Wop.   Features of Googie include upswept roofs, curvaceous, geometric shapes, and bold use of glass, steel and neon.  Googie was also characterized by Space Age designs symbolic of motion, such as boomerangs, flying saucers, diagrammatic atoms and parabolas, and free-form designs such as "soft" parallelograms and an artist's palette motif.  These stylistic conventions represented American society's fascination with Space Age themes and marketing emphasis on futuristic designs.  As with the Art Deco style of the 1910s–1930s, Googie became less valued as time passed, and many buildings in this style have been destroyed.  Some examples have been preserved, though, such as the oldest McDonald's stand (located in Downey, California).  The origin of the name Googie dates to 1949, when architect John Lautner designed the Googies Coffee Shop in Hollywood, which had distinct architectural characteristics.  The name "Googie" had been a family nickname of Lillian K. Burton, the wife of the restaurant's original owner, Mortimer C. Burton.  Googies was located at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Crescent Heights in Los Angeles but was demolished in 1989.  The name Googie became a rubric for the architectural style when editor Douglas Haskell of House and Home magazine and architectural photographer Julius Shulman were driving through Los Angeles one day.  Haskell insisted on stopping the car upon seeing Googies and proclaimed "This is Googie architecture.”  He popularized the name after an article he wrote appeared in a 1952 edition of House and Home magazine.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googie_architecture

HOW ELIZABETH’S BIG HOUSES LAID THE GROUNDWORK FOR IRISH DOMESTIC NOIR by Sarah Stewart Taylor   “After the Bentley murder, Rose Hill stood empty two years.”  I read the first line of the great Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen’s 1934 short story The Cat Jumps late one January night almost exactly sixty years after it was written, lying on my stomach on the floor of the University College Dublin library.  I was working as a live-in au pair for a family who lived nearby—an American raised on Long Island, I had moved to Dublin somewhat impulsively the previous summer—and many evenings, after I was off duty, I’d walk to the library and pull books at random off the shelves, flopping in a corner to inhale as many words as I could before I had to walk home.  I’d just graduated from college at home in the States and after four years of curriculum reading for my English Literature major, I reveled in reading exactly what I wanted, finishing or not finishing a book as my whim took me:  Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale, Cormac McCarthy, Roddy Doyle, Frank O’Connor, Steinbeck, John Irving, Toni Morrison, Jane Austen.  I obsessively re-read Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers.  And I discovered Elizabeth Bowen.  Rose Hill, the English countryside house at the center of The Cat Jumps, was, we learn, the site of a terrible murder, the details kept tantalizingly vague.   Bowen was a lifelong fan of detective fiction.  As a child, she loved H. Rider Haggard’s She, Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel, and E. Nesbit’s books for children, which contain both mystery and supernatural elements.  In the 1946 essay Out of a Book, she writes that “books introduced me to, and magnified, desire and danger.  They represented life, with a conclusiveness I had no reason to challenge, as an affair of mysteries and attractions, in which each object or place or face was in itself a volume of promises and deceptions, and in which nothing was impossible.”   https://crimereads.com/elizabeth-bowen-irish-domestic-noir/

Find the criteria for being listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a list of 34 new locations at https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/unesco-world-heritage-list-2021/index.html  Francesca Street  See also https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2398  August 2, 2021