David Herbert Lawrence (1885–1930) was an English novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, literary critic, travel writer, essayist, and painter.  His modernist works reflect on modernity, social alienation and industrialization, while championing sexuality, vitality and instinct.  Four of his most famous novels–Sons and Lovers (1913), The Rainbow (1915), Women in Love (1920), and Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)–were the subject of censorship trials for their radical portrayals of romance, sexuality and use of explicit language.  Lawrence's opinions and artistic preferences earned him a controversial reputation; he endured contemporary persecution and public misrepresentation of his creative work throughout his life, much of which he spent in a voluntary exile that he described as a "savage enough pilgrimage".  At the time of his death, he had been variously scorned as tasteless, avant-garde, and a pornographer who had only garnered success for erotica; however, English novelist and critic E. M. Forster, in an obituary notice, challenged this widely held view, describing him as "the greatest imaginative novelist of our generation".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D._H._Lawrence    

The Palace of Truth is a three-act blank verse "Fairy Comedy" by W. S. Gilbert first produced at the Haymarket Theatre in London on 19 November 1870, adapted in significant part from Madame de Genlis's fairy story, Le Palais de Vérite.  The play ran for approximately 140 performances and then toured the British provinces and enjoyed various revivals even well into the 20th century. There was also a New York production in 1910.   After more than a century of inquiry, researchers in 2012 concluded that the three genera of Lemurs were named after characters in The Palace of Truth in 1870 by British zoologist John Edward Gray.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Palace_of_Truth    

yelm

The noun is derived from Middle English yelm, from Old English ġielm (“bunch or handful (of plant stems)”), from Proto-West Germanic *galmi (“bundle or handful of plants”), possibly ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *ǵʰelh₃- (“to flourish; green, yellow”) or *gʰel- (“to cut”).  The verb is derived from the noun.

Noun

yelm (plural yelms)  (UK, dialectal) A bundle of straw laid out straight, chiefly to be used for thatching; a helm. quotations ▼ Translations

bundle of straw laid out straight for thatching — see thatch

Verb

yelm (third-person singular simple present yelms, present participle yelming, simple past and past participle yelmed) (UK, dialectal)

(transitive) To choose and lay out (straw) straight to be used for animal fodder or thatching; to helm. quotations ▼

(intransitive) To choose and lay out straw straight to be used for animal fodder or thatching; to helm.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yelm#English    

March 13, 2025  Hand clapping is ubiquitous behavior for humans across time and cultures, serving many different purposes:  to signify approval with applause, for instance, or to keep time to music.  Acousticians often use a hand clap as a cheap substitute for pricey equipment to make acoustic measurements in architecture. While the basic physical mechanism is simple, the underlying physical mechanisms are less well-understood.  A new paper published in the journal Physical Review Research provides experimental support for the hypothesis that hand clapping essentially acts like a Helmholtz resonator—akin to the hum generated by blowing across the top of a bottle, or the hiss one hears when holding a conch shell to one's ear.  In 2020, engineers Nikolaos Papadakis and Georgios Stavroulakis, both at the Technical University of Crete, recruited 24 students to clap their hands once in different venues, varying their hand configurations in 11 different ways—changing the angle of the hands with respect to one another, for instance, or changing how many fingers of one hand overlapped with the fingers or palms of the other.  https://arstechnica.com/science/2025/03/how-ones-hand-configuration-affects-the-sound-of-clapping/    

Gustavo Dudamel and the New York Philharmonic will give the first performance of an early work of Maurice Ravel’s on 13th March, 2025 in celebration of the composer’s 150th anniversary.  Prélude et danse de Sémiramis, composed in 1902, is the opening to a partially lost cantata from Ravel’s student days.  The autograph manuscript of the opening prelude has been at the Bibliothèque nationale de France since 2000, but has not received an orchestral performance.  Composed at the age of 27, the same year as Ravel’s celebrated String Quartet in F, Sémiramis was among several choral and orchestral works Ravel wrote in pursuit of the Prix de Rome, which the composer never won despite entering four times.  His elimination in 1905, for allegedly nepotistic reasons, caused a scandal.  This new performing score was prepared by the Ravel Edition, and other documents relating to Ravel will be exhibited at David Geffen Hall from 3rd March to 20th May, 2025 including autograph manuscripts on loan from the Morgan Library & Museum.  Dudamel and the NY Philharmonic will perform Prélude et danse from 13th–16th March, together with Yuja Wang performing Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G and Piano Concerto for the Left Hand.  Dudamel will also conduct Varèse’s Amériques and Gershwin’s An American in Paris.  https://bachtrack.com/news-ravel-world-premiere-new-york-philharmonic-dudamel-february-2025    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2919  March 13. 2025 

Grace Brewster Hopper (née Murray; 1906–1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral.   She was a pioneer of computer programming.  Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today.  She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer.  She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator."  Before joining the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in both mathematics and mathematical physics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College.  She left her position at Vassar to join the United States Navy Reserve during World War II.  Hopper began her computing career in 1944 as a member of the Harvard Mark I team, led by Howard H. Aiken.  In 1949, she joined the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation and was part of the team that developed the UNIVAC I computer.  At Eckert–Mauchly she managed the development of one of the first COBOL compilers.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper    

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.   https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/flabbergast    

Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) or common buckwheat is a flowering plant in the knotweed family Polygonaceae cultivated for its grain-like seeds and as a cover crop.  Buckwheat originated around the 6th millennium BCE in the region of what is now Yunnan Province in southwestern China.  The name "buckwheat" is used for several other species, such as Fagopyrum tataricum, a domesticated food plant raised in Asia.  Despite its name, buckwheat is not closely related to wheat. Buckwheat is not a cereal, nor is it even a member of the grass family.  It is related to sorrel, knotweed, and rhubarb.  Buckwheat is considered a pseudocereal, because its seeds' high starch content allows them to be used in cooking like a cereal.  Buckwheat hulls are used as filling for a variety of upholstered goods, including pillows.  The hulls are durable and do not insulate or reflect heat as much as synthetic filling.  They are sometimes marketed as an alternative natural filling to feathers for those with allergies.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckwheat    

Buckwheat recipes:

Easy Buckwheat Porridge (Gluten-Free, Vegan, Plant Protein)  https://marinmamacooks.com/easy-buckwheat-porridge/

How to Cook Buckwheat  https://www.olgainthekitchen.com/how-to-cook-buckwheat/

Buckwheat with Mushrooms  https://momsdish.com/recipe/75/buckwheat-mushrooms    

On Mar 14, 1994, 31 years ago, I set a tiny linguistic snowball rolling down a hill.  It grew, gathered words and wordlovers, and morphed into Wordsmith.org, a haven for people in 170+ countries, united by their

love of words.  Anu Garg   

To celebrate, we're holding a contest.  Your poem must use only five-letter words. Your tale can be about yourself, someone you know, or a public figure.  Need inspiration?  This week's A.Word.A.Day emails are all five-letter words.  Though you don't have to use them in your poem. 

Selected entries will win their choice of: 

- A copy of any of my books https://wordsmith.org/awad/books.html

- The word game Word Up! oldscoolcompany.com/products/one-up 

HOW TO ENTER 

- Email your entries to contest@wordsmith.org by Fri, 3/14/25.

- Include your location (city, state).

- Enter as many times as you like. 

https://wordsmith.org/words/eclat.html    

http//librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2918  March 12, 2025

Liu Jiakun (born 1956) is a Chinese architect known for his focus on minimalism, humanism, and locally contextual design.  Liu's work emphasizes the integration of local context, traditional craftsmanship, and sustainable design, while avoiding flashy flourishes.  His projects often make use of local materials and the aesthetic of imperfection.  After the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, he repurposed earthquake rubble into new building materials.  The material and its essence are revitalized and enhanced with local straw fibers and cement, resulting in bricks that are physically superior and more cost-effective than the original material, demonstrating community resilience.  Liu's designs have been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale and a solo exhibition at Berlin's AEDES Gallery.  In 2018, he was commissioned to design the Serpentine Pavilion in Beijing, which draw international attention.  In 2025 Liu was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize; he was the third Chinese architect to receive the award, after Wang Shu in 2012 and I.M. Pei in 1983.  The Pritzker jury praised Liu's "reverence for culture, history and nature, chronicling time and comforting users with familiarity through modern interpretations of classic Chinese architecture."  The award citation read "Through an outstanding body of work of deep coherence and constant quality, Liu Jiakun imagines and constructs new worlds, free from any aesthetic or stylistic constraint."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Jiakun    

A paradox is a logically self-contradictory statement or a statement that runs contrary to one's expectation.  It is a statement that, despite apparently valid reasoning from true or apparently true premises, leads to a seemingly self-contradictory or a logically unacceptable conclusion.  A paradox usually involves contradictory-yet-interrelated elements that exist simultaneously and persist over time.  They result in "persistent contradiction between interdependent elements" leading to a lasting "unity of opposites".   In logic, many paradoxes exist that are known to be invalid arguments, yet are nevertheless valuable in promoting critical thinking, while other paradoxes have revealed errors in definitions that were assumed to be rigorous, and have caused axioms of mathematics and logic to be re-examined.  One example is Russell's paradox, which questions whether a "list of all lists that do not contain themselves" would include itself and showed that attempts to found set theory on the identification of sets with properties or predicates were flawed.  Others, such as Curry's paradox, cannot be easily resolved by making foundational changes in a logical system.   Examples outside logic include the ship of Theseus from philosophy, a paradox that questions whether a ship repaired over time by replacing each and all of its wooden parts one at a time would remain the same ship.  Paradoxes can also take the form of images or other media.  For example, M.C. Escher featured perspective-based paradoxes in many of his drawings, with walls that are regarded as floors from other points of view, and staircases that appear to climb endlessly.  Informally, the term paradox is often used to describe a counterintuitive result.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox  

In journalism and blogging, a listicle is an article that is structured as a list, which is often fleshed out with additional text relating to each item.  A typical listicle will have a title describing a specific number of items contained within, along with subsequent subheadings within the text for each entry.  The word is a portmanteau of list and article.  A ranked listicle (such as Rolling Stone's "The 100 Best Albums of the Last 20 Years") implies a qualitative judgement, conveyed by the order of the topics within the text.  These are often presented as a countdown, with the "number one" item as the last in the sequence.  Other listicles impart no overt rank, instead presenting the topics in an ad hoc, associative, or thematic order.  Alex Johnson, writing for The Independent, suggested that an 1886 speech by Sir John Lubbock which gave a list of around 100 books "which on the whole are perhaps best worth reading" was an early form of listicle, and that Lubbock should be considered the 'godfather' of the format.  Steven Poole suggested that listicles have literary precursors like Jorge Luis Borges's "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins".  He also compares it to more high-art versions like Umberto Eco's The Infinity of Lists, a book composed entirely of lists.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Listicle    

Cabaret is an American musical with music by John Kander, lyrics by Fred Ebb, and a book by Joe Masteroff.  It is based on the 1951 play I Am a Camera by John Van Druten, which in turn was based on the 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood.  Set in 1929–1930 Berlin during the twilight of the Jazz Age as the Nazis rise to power, the musical focuses on the hedonistic nightlife at the seedy Kit Kat Klub and revolves around American writer Clifford Bradshaw's relations with English cabaret performer Sally Bowles.  A subplot involves the doomed romance between German boarding house owner Fräulein Schneider and her elderly suitor Herr Schultz, a Jewish fruit vendor.  Overseeing the action is the Master of Ceremonies at the Kit Kat Klub, and the club itself serves as a metaphor for ominous political developments in late Weimar Germany.  The original Broadway production opened on November 20, 1966, at the Broadhurst Theatre in New York City and became a box office hit that ran for 1,166 performances.  The production won eight Tony Awards and inspired numerous subsequent productions around the world as well as the 1972 film of the same name.  Cabaret (musical) - Wikipedia  Thank you, Muse reader!   

March 1, 2025  MARIETTA, Ohio—A southeast Ohio city was named one of HGTV's most charming small towns in America.  Sitting along the convergence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers, HGTV says Marietta has become a thriving town.  Marietta is a two-hour drive away from Columbus and has a population of about 13,000.  HGTV says the town revitalized its historical downtown area to boast its art galleries, music hall, museums and unique shops.  Marietta, established in 1788, is the oldest city in Ohio and the first permanent settlement in the Northwest Territory.  https://www.wtol.com/article/news/local/ohio/marietta-ohio-hgtv-charming-town-list/530-b50cc93d-f63c-49d9-a6ed-00a98524d27f    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  March 10, 2025

In its original sense, a shaggy-dog story or yarn is an extremely long-winded anecdote characterized by extensive narration of typically irrelevant incidents and terminated by an anticlimax.  In other words, it is a long story that is intended to be amusing and that has an intentionally silly or meaningless ending.  Shaggy-dog stories play upon the audience's preconceptions of joke-telling.  The audience listens to the story with certain expectations, which are either simply not met or met in some entirely unexpected manner.  A lengthy shaggy-dog story derives its humour from the fact that the joke-teller held the attention of the listeners for a long time (such jokes can take five minutes or more to tell) for no reason at all, as the long-awaited resolution is essentially meaningless, with the joke as a whole playing upon humans' search for meaning.  The nature of their delivery is reflected in the English idiom spin a yarn, by way of analogy with the production of yarn.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaggy_dog_story   

Short shaggy dog stories

A tall, weather-worn cowboy walked into a saloon and ordered a beer.  The regulars quietly observed the drifter through half-closed eyelids.  No one spoke, but they all noticed that the stranger's hat was made of brown wrapping paper. Less obvious was the fact that his shirt and vest were also made of paper.  As were his chaps, pants and even his boots, including the paper spurs.  Truth be told, even the saddle, blanket and bridle on his horse were made entirely of paper.  The sheriff walks in and of course he arrests him immediately--for rustling.   

A king carried environmentalism too far when he prohibited hunting of any kind. Soon the realm was overrun with lions and tigers and bears.  "Oh My!" shouted the people.  They revolted and threw the king out of the country.  It was the first time the reign was called because of the game.   

Find more short shaggies at http://www.macscouter.com/stories/ShaggyShorts.asp 

March 4 2025  Never-before-seen short stories by Harper Lee will be published later this year, it has been announced.  Eight short stories written before the author started the novel that would become To Kill a Mockingbird were found in Lee’s New York City apartment after she died in 2016.  They will be published in a collection titled The Land of Sweet Forever, alongside eight previously published non-fiction pieces by Lee, and an introduction by Casey Cep, author of Furious Hours:  Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee.  Dr Edwin Conner, Lee’s nephew, said he and his family are “delighted that these essays, and especially the short stories, which we knew existed but were only recently discovered, have been found and are being published.  She was not just our beloved aunt, but a great American writer, and we can never know too much about how she came to that pinnacle.”  The Land of Sweet Forever “broadens our understanding of Lee’s remarkable talent” and “will prove an invaluable resource for anyone interested in Lee’s development as a writer”, according to the book’s UK publisher Hutchinson Heinemann, an imprint of Penguin Random House.  The stories contain Lee’s “signature wit, that splash of darkness and those heartwarming characters for which she is beloved,” said Ailah Ahmed, Hutchinson Heinemann publishing director.  “The pieces take us from Alabama to less familiar territory for Lee in Manhattan.”  Just two books by Lee were published in her lifetime, 1961 Pulitzer Prize winner To Kill a Mockingbird, and Go Set a Watchman, which began life as an earlier draft of Mockingbird.  There was controversy when that was published in 2015, with some raising questions about the extent of Lee’s involvement in the decision.  At the time the author was 88 years old and profoundly deaf and blind.  Born in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama, Lee was 34 years old when To Kill a Mockingbird, loosely based on observations of her family and neighbours in Monroeville was published.  Since then, it has been translated into more than 40 languages and more than 46m copies have been sold worldwide.  Lee won numerous awards throughout her lifetime, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  She died on February 19, 2016.   https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/04/unseen-harper-lee-stories-to-kill-a-mockingbird-the-land-of-sweet-forever    

This year’s Turing Award, an honor often dubbed the “Nobel Prize of Computing,” goes to two A.I. researchers who laid the foundations for tech breakthroughs like OpenAI’s GPT.  Andrew Barto, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Richard Sutton, a professor at Canada’s University of Alberta, will share the $1 million prize, as announced March 5, 2025.  Barto and Sutton won this year’s award for their contributions to the field of reinforcement learning, a process used to improve the behavior of machines.  “Their work has been a lynchpin of progress in A.I. over the last several decades,” said Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, in a statement.  “The tools they developed remain a central pillar of the A.I. boom and have rendered major advances, attracted legions of young researchers, and driven billions of dollars in investments.”  Barto and Sutton won this year’s award for their contributions to the field of reinforcement learning, a process used to improve the behavior of machines. “Their work has been a lynchpin of progress in A.I. over the last several decades,” said Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, in a statement.  “The tools they developed remain a central pillar of the A.I. boom and have rendered major advances, attracted legions of young researchers, and driven billions of dollars in investments.”  The duo began working together in 1978 at UMass Amherst, where Barto served as Sutton’s Ph.D. and postdoctoral advisor.  In the following years, they collaborated on numerous papers that shaped key algorithms and techniques of reinforcement learning and published the 1998 textbook Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction, which has been cited more than 75,000 times and remains the field’s standard reference.  https://observer.com/2025/03/andrew-barto-richard-sutton-win-turing-award/    

March 7 is the eve of International Women’s Day, which is commemorated by the United Nations to recognize women’s achievements and to promote their rights and participation in economic and political spheres.  March 8 was declared a holiday in Russia in 1917 after a huge demonstration on that date led by the Russian feminist and politician Alexandra Kollontai culminated in the Russian Revolution and to women gaining the right to vote.  Wikipedia   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2916  March 7, 2025 

The Załuski Library was established in Warsaw in 1747 by Józef Andrzej Załuski and his brother, Andrzej Stanisław Załuski, both Roman Catholic bishops, was a public library nationalized and renamed upon its founders' death into the Załuski Library of the Commonwealth which existed until the final demise of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the Third Partition of Poland in 1795.  The library was the first Polish public library, the largest library in Poland, and one of the earliest public libraries in Europe.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Za%C5%82uski_Library   

rhyme or reason (uncountable)  noun   (idiomatic, chiefly in the negative)  Logic; common sense.  Almost always used in a negative form, particularly with no and, adverbially, without.  May also occur as rhyme nor reason, e.g. after neither. 

Alternative form  rhyme nor reason

Calque of Middle French n'y avoir ryme ne raison (Eustache Deschamps), attributed to the poet Edmund Spenser in a conversation with Queen Elizabeth I.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/rhyme_or_reason    

Microsoft Copilot is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by Microsoft.  Based on the GPT-4 series of large language models, it was launched in 2023 as Microsoft's primary replacement for the discontinued Cortana.  The service was introduced in February 2023 under the name Bing Chat, as a built-in feature for Microsoft Bing and Microsoft Edge. Over the course of 2023, Microsoft began to unify the Copilot branding across its various chatbot products, cementing the "copilot" analogy.  At its Build 2023 conference, Microsoft announced its plans to integrate Copilot into Windows 11, allowing users to access it directly through the taskbar.  In January 2024, a dedicated Copilot key was announced for Windows keyboards.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Copilot   

In 1883, U.S. and Canadian railroads adopted a four-zone system to govern their operations and reduce the confusion resulting from some 100 conflicting locally established “sun times” observed in terminals across the country.  States and municipalities then adopted one of the four zones, which were the eastern, central, mountain, and Pacific Time zones.  Local decisions on which time zone to adopt were usually influenced by the time used by the railroads.  Federal oversight of time zones began in 1918 with the enactment of the Standard Time Act, which vested the Interstate Commerce Commission with the responsibility for establishing boundaries between the standard time zones in the continental United States.  This responsibility was transferred from the Interstate Commerce Commission to DOT when Congress created DOT in 1966.  Today, the Uniform Time Act of 1966 (15 U.S.C. §§ 260-64) establishes a system of uniform Daylight Saving Time throughout the Nation and its possessions, and provides that either Congress or the Secretary of Transportation can change a time-zone boundary.  The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) oversees the Nation's time zones.  The oversight of time zones was assigned to DOT because time standards are important for many modes of transportation.  DOT regulations at 49 CFR part 71 contain the official listing of the Nation's time zones.  DOT also oversees the Nation's uniform observance of Daylight Saving Time; however, DOT does not have the power to repeal or change Daylight Saving Time.  Nor does DOT have any role to play in a State's determination whether to observe Daylight Saving Time.  If a State chooses to observe Daylight Saving Time, it must begin and end on federally mandated dates.  Under the Uniform Time Act, States may choose to exempt themselves from observing Daylight Saving Time by State law.  States do not have the authority to choose to be on permanent Daylight Saving Time.  https://www.transportation.gov/regulations/time-act    

coddle (also Dublin coddle, Irish coddle) noun  an Irish dish made with sausages, bacon, sliced potatoes, and sliced onions cooked slowly together in liquid

coddle verb  to protect someone or something too much 

coddle verb  to cook food, especially eggs, in water just below boiling temperature  https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/coddle     

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2915  March 5, 2025