Labyrinth is a 1986 British-American fantasy film, directed by Jim Henson, produced by George Lucas and starring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly.  The screenplay was collaboratively produced between Henson, George Lucas, poet Dennis Lee, Laura Phillips, Terry Jones and Elaine May, although Jones received the film's sole screen-writing credit.  Labyrinth was mostly filmed at Elstree Studios in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire, England, with a few scenes being filmed in New York and West Wycombe Park in England.  In the Labyrinth series, this was preceded by Untitled Archaia Comics Project and followed by Return to Labyrinth.  This was the last feature film directed by Henson before his death in 1990.  https://labyrinth.fandom.com/wiki/Labyrinth_(film) 

The city of Detroit, Michigan, is the only major US city that sits directly on the Canada-USA border.  And it’s the 14th largest metro area in the US too.  And Detroit actually sits north of the city of Windsor, Ontario.  https://www.sidmartinbio.org/is-windsor-north-of-detroit/ 

Gerald Clery Murphy (1888-1964) and Sara Sherman Wiborg (1883-1975) were wealthy, expatriate Americans who moved to the French Riviera in the early 20th century and who, with their generous hospitality and flair for parties, created a vibrant social circle, particularly in the 1920s, that included a great number of artists and writers of the Lost Generation.  Gerald had a brief but significant career as a painter.  Nicole and Dick Diver of Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald are widely recognized as having been based on the Murphys, mainly from the marked physical similarities, although many of their friends, as well as the Murphys themselves, saw as much or more of Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald's relationship and personalities in the couple than those of the Murphys.  Ernest Hemingway's couple in The Garden of Eden is not explicitly based on this pair, but given the similarities of the setting (Nice) and of the type of social group portrayed, there is clearly some basis for such an assumption.  Guests of the Murphys often swam at Eden Roc, an event emulated in Hemingway's narrative.  Calvin Tomkins's biography of Gerald and Sara Murphy Living Well Is the Best Revenge was published in The New Yorker in 1962, and Amanda Vaill documented their lives in the 1995 book Everybody Was So Young.  Both accounts are balanced, unlike some of the portrayals in the memoirs and fictitious works by their friends, including Fitzgerald and Hemingway.  In 1982, Honoria Murphy Donnelly, the Murphys' daughter, with Richard N. Billings, wrote Sara & Gerald:  Villa America and After.  On July 12, 2007, a play by Crispin Whittell titled Villa America, based entirely on the relationships between Sara and Gerald Murphy and their friends, had its world premiere at the Williamstown Theatre Festival with Jennifer Mudge playing Sara Murphy.  Gerald only painted from 1921 until 1929; he is known for his hard-edged still life paintings in a Precisionist, Cubist style.  Pablo Picasso, a friend of Sara, painted her in several of his 1923 works.  The Sara and Gerald Murphy Papers are held at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_and_Sara_Murphy 

Good health and a healthy appetite go hand in hand in Jane Austen’s novels.  Her heroines—when flourishing—eat in moderation and without worrying too much about what they are eating and what they are not.  Austen was well aware that a garden was about much more than sensual splendor; it also had to play its part in the household economy.  She writes:  We are likely to have a great crop of Orleans plumbs—but not many greengages—on the standard scarcely any—three or four dozen perhaps against the wall.  In Chawton Cottage’s thriving plum trees was the promise, she saw, of jellies and desserts in the coming months, and bottled fruits through the winter.  Austen’s message in her novels—of having a good appetite spurred on by exercise but all the while disentangling appetite from emotion—is a challenging one, but remains relevant to our human flourishing today.  Excerpted from Jane Austen’s Table:  Recipes Inspired by the Works of Jane Austen by Robert Tuesday Anderson.  Copyright © Octopus Publishing Group, 2021.  Find a recipe that will capture all the freshness of those “Orleans plumbs” but sturdy enough to keep away any fall chill at https://lithub.com/in-moderation-and-without-worry-on-jane-austens-use-of-food-as-character 

A traditional yurt (from the Turkic languages) or ger (Mongolian) is a portable, round tent covered with skins or felt and used as a dwelling by several distinct nomadic groups in the steppes of Central Asia.  The structure consists of an angled assembly or latticework of wood or bamboo for walls, a door frame, ribs (poles, rafters), and a wheel (crown, compression ring) possibly steam-bent.  The roof structure is often self-supporting, but large yurts may have interior posts supporting the crown.  The top of the wall of self-supporting yurts is prevented from spreading by means of a tension band which opposes the force of the roof ribs.  Modern yurts may be permanently built on a wooden platform; they may use modern materials such as steam-bent wooden framing or metal framing, canvas or tarpaulin, plexiglass dome, wire rope, or radiant insulation.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yurt 

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows is, essentially, a love story.  It is the story of a small island community composed of very disparate people who came together during the German occupation of World War II to protect, comfort, and in some cases, save one another.  The novel is told through a series of letters sent between January and September 1946.  In these letters and nine short months, a whole world of tragedy, deprivation, evil, camaraderie, humor, and love is revealed.  In his lust for land acquisition, Hitler sends troops onto the Guernsey Channel Islands in 1940 to hold them for the homeland until the war is over.  It is during this, a five-year occupation, that we learn the story of Elizabeth, who, though missing from the island, is nevertheless central to the story.  It is Elizabeth who saves a group of her friends from serious punishment for a curfew violation by lying to the guards and telling them they are just leaving from a book club discussion.  A true book club is then born, becoming the center of community for the people living in Guernsey and who are suffering the starvation and humiliation of the occupation.  It is this society that keeps sanity and hope alive.  https://www.ala.org/united/friends/bookclubchoices/guernsey 

We shall overcome.  My blood is not shed in vain.  *  Those who live in stone houses shouldn’t throw stones for fear of ricochet.  *  The world looks better when your belly is full, brighter and more hopeful.  *  Fear makes anger.  *  There’s nothing worse than warm beer—except no beer.  *  Malawi’s highlands are speckled with rivers and lakes that were stocked with Scottish trout before the Second World War and whose waters are still rich with the trouts’ descendants.  Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, an African Childhood by Alexandra Fuller 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2522  April 18, 2022

Beatrix Potter drew compulsively, rapturously, from a young age, in a sketchbook that she made from drawer-lining paper and stationery.  “It is all the same, drawing, painting, modelling, the irresistible desire to copy any beautiful object which strikes the eye,” she wrote.  Potter’s sketchbook and coded journal, and many of her other belongings, are on display at the V. & A. through early 2023, in an exhibition titled “Beatrix Potter:  Drawn to Nature.”  (Rizzoli has published an accompanying book by the same name.)  Some two hundred and forty eclectic objects, including manuscripts, sketches, tchotchkes and collectibles—even the alleged pelt of Benjamin Bunny–—tell the story of a remarkable transformation.  Potter gave up the trappings of her privileged life in London and bought a cottage in a remote part of the English countryside.  She became a farmer and conservationist, with muddy shoes and prize-winning sheep.  She walked the fells and lakeside paths around her new home, sketching them, and ultimately saving them from destruction.  In 1901, Potter self-published the first edition of “The Tale of Peter Rabbit,” which appeared almost exactly as she had written it to Noel Moore, down to Peter’s “blue jacket with brass buttons, quite new.”  A series of established publishers had turned her down, partly because of her insistence on keeping the book’s price low.  “Little rabbits cannot afford to spend 6 shillings on one book, and would never buy it,” she wrote to a friend.  She was also particular about the size of the book; it had to be small, for small hands.  The following year, Frederick Warne & Co. agreed to put out an abridged version.  “Peter Rabbit” was an instant hit, selling out multiple editions.  (“The public must be fond of rabbits! what an appalling quantity of Peter,” Potter wrote.)  Her publisher asked for more books, and she began pumping them out one after another, beginning with “The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin” and “The Tailor of Gloucester.”  She also patented her characters.  Anna Russell  The New Yorker  March 12, 2022 

flummox  verb  Of uncertain origin, probably risen out of a British dialect (OED finds candidate words in Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, southern Cheshire, and Sheffield). "The formation seems to be onomatopœic, expressive of the notion of throwing down roughly and untidily" [OED].  To confuse; to fluster; to flabbergast.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flummox 

flabbergast  The origin of the verb is uncertain; possibly dialectal (Suffolk), from flabby or flap (“to strike”) + aghast.  The word may be related to Scottish flabrigast (“to boast”) or flabrigastit (“worn out with exertion”).  The noun is derived from the verb.  Verb  flabbergast  (transitive)  To overwhelm with bewilderment; to amaze, confound, or stun, especially in a ludicrous manner. [from late 18th c.] quotations ▼ Noun   flabbergast (countable and uncountable, plural flabbergasts)  (countable)  An awkward person.  (uncountable)  Overwhelming confusion, shock, or surprise. quotations ▼ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flabbergast 

The Colossus of Rhodes is a 1954 oil painting by the Spanish surrealist Salvador Dalí.  It is one of a series of seven paintings he created for the 1956 film Seven Wonders of the World, each depicting one of the wonders.  The work shows the Colossus of Rhodes, the ancient statue of the Greek titan-god of the sun, Helios.  The painting was not used for the film and, in 1981, was donated to the Kunstmuseum Bern, where it remains.  Painted two decades after Dalí's heyday with the surrealist movement, the painting epitomises his shift from the avant-garde to the mainstream.  Pressured by financial concerns after his move to the United States in 1940, and influenced by his fascination with Hollywood, Dalí shifted focus away from his earlier exploration of the subconscious and perception, and towards historical and scientific themes.  Dalí's rendering is influenced by a 1953 paper by Herbert Maryon, a sculptor and conservator at the British Museum.  Maryon proposed a hollow Colossus formed from hammered bronze plates, located alongside the harbour rather than astride it.  He further suggested that it used a hanging drapery to give the statue a stable tripod base.  These elements were all incorporated by Dalí.  See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Colossus_of_Rhodes_(Dal%C3%AD) 

Ptolemy I Soter  "Ptolemy the Savior" (c. 367 BC-282 BC) was an Ancient Macedonian general, historian and companion of Alexander the Great of the Kingdom of Macedon in northern Greece who became ruler of Egypt, part of Alexander's former empire.  Ptolemy was pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt from 305/304 BC to his death.  He was the founder of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which ruled Egypt until the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC, turning the country into a Hellenistic kingdom and Alexandria into a center of Greek culture.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy_I_Soter 

Claudius Ptolemy (c. 100–c. 170 AD) was a mathematician, astronomer, astrologer, geographer, and music theorist,  who wrote about a dozen scientific treatises, three of which were of importance to later Byzantine, Islamic, and Western European science.  The first is the astronomical treatise now known as the Almagest, although it was originally entitled the Mathēmatikē Syntaxis or Mathematical Treatise, and later known as The Greatest Treatise.  The second is the Geography, which is a thorough discussion on maps and the geographic knowledge of the Greco-Roman world.  The third is the astrological treatise in which he attempted to adapt horoscopic astrology to the Aristotelian natural philosophy of his day.  This is sometimes known as the Apotelesmatika (lit. "On the Effects") but more commonly known as the Tetrábiblos, from the Koine Greek meaning "Four Books", or by its Latin equivalent Quadripartite.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptolemy 

Michael Joseph Winkelmann (born 20 June 1981), known professionally as Beeple, is an American digital artist, graphic designer, and animator.  He is known for using various mediums in creating comical, phantasmagoric works that make political and social commentary while using pop culture figures as references.  British auction house Christie's has called him "A visionary digital artist at the forefront of NFTs".  Beeple was first introduced to NFTs in October 2020 and credits Pak for providing his first "primer" on selling NFTs.  The NFT associated with Everydays: the First 5000 Days, a collage of images from his "Everydays" series, sold for $69,400,000 on March 12, 2021.  It is the first purely non-fungible token to be sold by Christie's.  The auction house had previously sold Block 21, an NFT with accompanying physical painting for approximately $130,000 in October 2020.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Winkelmann  On April 24, 2022, the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, Italy, will include the artist’s first sculpture, “HUMAN ONE,” in Expressions with Fractures.  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2521  April 15, 2022

His personal email silted up with nothing more than spam.  *  I like information.  Learning is a virtue.  *  Romeo, Juliet is R.J. in the NATO phonetic alphabet.  My initials, military style.  Reacher, Jack.  *  Reduce.  Reuse.  Recycle.  *  The Sentinel, 25^th novel in the Jack Reacher series by Lee Child and Andrew Child  

The Greek alphabet has been used to write the Greek language since the late ninth or early eighth century BC.  It is derived from the earlier Phoenician alphabet, and was the earliest known alphabetic script to have distinct letters for vowels as well as consonants.  In Archaic and early Classical times, the Greek alphabet existed in many local variants, but, by the end of the fourth century BC, the Euclidean alphabet, with twenty-four letters, ordered from alpha to omega, had become standard and it is this version that is still used for Greek writing today.  The uppercase and lowercase forms of the twenty-four letters are:  Α α, Β β, Γ γ, Δ δ, Ε ε, Ζ ζ, Η η, Θ θ, Ι ι, Κ κ, Λ λ, Μ μ, Ν ν, Ξ ξ, Ο ο, Π π, Ρ ρ, Σ σ/ς, Τ τ, Υ υ, Φ φ, Χ χ, Ψ ψ, and Ω ω.  The Greek alphabet is the ancestor of the Latin and Cyrillic scripts.  Find table with names and modern pronunciation of Greek letters at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_alphabet  See also https://www.thoughtco.com/letters-of-greek-alphabet-118638 

·        John Alcock and Arthur Whitten-Brown co-piloted a plane from Newfoundland to Ireland eight years before Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic alone.

·        Karate began in Okinawa.

·        Lincoln borrowed the phrase of the people, by the people and for the people from

abolitionist and minister Theodore Parker.

·        Baby Ruth candy bar was named for Grover Cleveland’s daughter.

Fabulous Fallacies by Tad Tuleja

Tad Tuleja (b. 1944) is a graduate of Yale, Cornell, and the University of Sussex.  He has been a journalist, editor, and researcher, and has authored numerous short-entry reference books.  See list of Tad Tuleja’s books at https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19747.Tad_Tuleja 

In its short lifespan, Wordle has already made the tricky transition from cult phenomenon to established part of our daily lives.  Created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner in October 2021, the online word puzzle game gives you six tries to correctly guess a five-letter word each day.  Its no-frills design, once-daily refresh, and spoiler-free way to share results on social media has turned it into an overnight success.  But the game’s swift pop culture ascendancy, which led to it getting acquired by the New York Times for upward of $1 million in January, isn’t unprecedented.  In fact, 100 years before Wordle entered the scene, an even bigger word puzzle craze swept the nation.  I’m referring, of course, to the “cross-word mania” of the 1920s.  The modern “word-cross” appeared for the first time in print in the December 21, 1913 edition of New York World’s FUN Supplement.  Section editor Arthur Wynne, trying to fill the Christmas insert, drew inspiration from his native England, where Victorian newspapers and magazines regularly published word squares, acrostic puzzles where the same words can be read both across and down.  Building on this prototype, Wynne debuted FUN’s Word-Cross Puzzle.  The game looks different than what we’re accustomed to today—it’s shaped like a diamond, with 72 white squares clustered around a blank center.  “Crosswords were the Beatles of 1924,” reporter Margaret Petherbridge, who would go on to become the New York Times’ inaugural crossword editor under her married name, Margaret Farrar, later remarked.  By 1925, even Queen Mary (along with “lesser members of the royal family”) had taken up the pastime.  Jackie Mansky https://www.zocalopublicsquare.org/2022/04/01/before-wordle-there-was-cross-word-mania/ideas/culture-class/ 

Never mind the stir she created with the 1964 publication of “Life With Picasso,” a blisteringly candid account of her 10-year relationship with the artist.  (She was the only woman to have walked out on him.)  Or her stature as an artist:  Her works are exhibited in more than a dozen museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, their prices on the rise.  Francoise Gilot has said much of what she has to say in “Life With Picasso,” written with Carlton Lake, an American journalist.  Leaving Picasso was an attenuated process, the relationship ending in 1953.  Two years later, she married the artist Luc Simon.  They divorced in 1962, and in 1970 she wed Jonas Salk, the developer of the polio vaccine, the union lasting until Mr. Salk’s death in 1995.  In 2021 her painting “Paloma à la Guitare,” a 1965 portrait of her daughter, sold for $1.3 million at Sotheby’s in London, at seven times its high estimate.  Ruth La Ferla  https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/style/francoise-gilot-it-girl.html 

The North American elk, (Cervus elaphus), are divided into six subspecies.  The Rocky Mountain elk of the Rocky Mountain West has the largest antlers of all the subspecies.  The Roosevelt ranges the Coastal Pacific Northwest and is the largest in body size.  The Tule in Central California is the smallest.  The Manitoban lives in the northern Great Plains.  The Merriams of the Southwest and Mexico and the Eastern elk lived east of the Mississippi River and are both extinct.  One of the largest in the deer family, a mature male bull elk stands 5 feet at the shoulder and averages 700 pounds.  Tule elk weigh less and the Roosevelts can reach 900 pounds.  Elk are very adaptable and live in areas from alpine meadows to rainforests and hardwood forests to desert valleys.  Typically, elk habitat is a blend of large open areas and woodland cover.  Tes Jolly  https://www.mossyoak.com/our-obsession/blogs/elk/north-american-elk-facts-and-restoration 

CONNECT WITH LIBRARIES      

·        The Library of Congress is the largest library in the world, with more than 167 million items on approximately 838 miles of bookshelves, which would span roughly the distance from The Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., to Cape Canaveral, Florida.

·        Libraries are a smart investment.  A recent study shows that for every dollar spent on Ohio public libraries, Ohioans received $5.48 in economic value.

·        There are more public libraries than Starbucks in the U.S.–a total of 16,568, including branches.

·        Nearly 100% of public libraries provide Wi-Fi and have no-fee access to computers.

·        Libraries are the place for lifelong learning.

·        Books unite us.  They reach across boundaries and build connections between readers.  Censorship, on the other hand, divides us and creates barriers.  American Library Association  2022 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2520  April 13, 2022