Drove is a very old word.  Some form of the word was probably in use in England by no later than the 7th century (although there are few written sources to support this).  Drove as a noun meaning herd or flock can be found in the written record from at least the early 12th century, when English was barely recognizable as the language we use today.  In droves turns out to be a fairly old construction.  It wasn’t always applied to a literal flock or herd, even early on.  By the late 16th century the figurative sense was in use, but not necessarily common: a 1596 citation mentions creatures returning to their country in droves (the author was writing about salmon in Scottish rivers).  He tags the description with “as it war” (“as it were”) because he’s using it in a figurative sense:  he doesn’t seem entirely comfortable using droves (“draues“) to describe fish, or in using “their awne cuntrey” (“their own country”) to describe their native river.  (This history courtesy of the OED; the closer reading of “The historie of Scotland” courtesy of The Internet Archive.)  How common has this phrase, in droves, been? Surprisingly, it seems to have become popular only in recent history.  According to our good friend Google Ngrams, the phrase is nearly unheard of in the written record until near the end of the 17th century.  Early references (before about 1750) lean toward actual flocks or herds (of animals) but include people.  Christopher Daly  Read more at https://thebettereditor.wordpress.com/2017/09/30/coming-going-and-out-in-droves/

Boston Cream Pie is a cake, not a pie.  Find recipe for this sponge cake with cream filling and chocolate topping at https://www.chef-in-training.com/2016/05/boston-cream-pie-cake-roll/

Cate Tiernan (born 1961) is the pen name of Gabrielle Charbonnet, an American author.  Writing as Cate Tiernan, she is best known for her Sweep series, which follows the Wiccan adventures of a cast of high school students.  The stories are sold as the Wicca series in the UK, Belgium, The Netherlands and Australia, and as White Magic (Magie Blanche) in Italy and France.  Under her own name, she is chiefly known for children's books in the Princess, American Gold Gymnasts, and Disney Girls series.  In 2008 and 2009, Charbonnet collaborated with author James Patterson on two "young adult" novels, Sundays at Tiffany's and Witch & Wizard.  Charbonnet began her college education at New York University studying writing and Russian language and literature, then transferred to Loyola University in New Orleans, where she graduated with a degree in Russian.  She began her career as an assistant to the head of the Juvenile Audio and Video department at Random House in New York City, where she wrote her first children's books.  She also participated in the editing of The Secret Circle by L.J. Smith during this period.  Charbonnet has written about 75 books under her own name, her pseudonym Cate Tiernan, and miscellaneous other pen names as a ghost writer.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cate_Tiernan

In linguistics, back-formation is the process of forming a new word (a neologism) by removing actual or supposed affixes from another word.  Put simply, a back-formation is a shortened word (such as edit) created from a longer word (editor).  Verb:  back-form (which is itself a back-formation).  Also called back-derivation.  The term back-formation was coined by Scottish lexicographer James Murray, the primary editor of the Oxford English Dictionary from 1879 until 1915.  Read about suffix snipping, and find a list of "objectionable” verbs that are variations of already existing verbs (including cohabitate and orientate) according to Garner's Modern American Usage, 3rd ed., Oxford University Press, 2009.  Richard Nordquist  https://www.thoughtco.com/back-formation-words-1689154

NAME CHANGES  Bandleader, bass guitarist, singer and songwriter Nick St. Nicholas (born Klaus Karl Kassbaum 1943)   Actor, author, director and narrator Peter Coyote  (born Rachmil Pinchus Ben Mosha Cohon 1941)  Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi  (born Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó 1882, died 1956)

A Webby Award is an award for excellence on the Internet presented annually by The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, a judging body composed of over one thousand industry experts and technology innovators.  Categories include websites; advertising and media; online film and video; mobile sites and apps; and social.  Two winners are selected in each category, one by members of The International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, and one by the public who cast their votes during Webby People’s Voice voting.  Each winner presents a five-word acceptance speech, a trademark of the annual awards show.  In 2013, the creator of the Graphics Interchange Format (GIF), Steve Wilhite, accepted his Webby and delivered his now famous five-word speech, "It’s pronounced 'Jif' not 'Gif'." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webby_Award   List of Webby Award winners:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Webby_Award_winners

Collaboration uses col (with) and laborare (to labor together) to mean working with someone to produce or create something.  "A successful collaboration calls for an association of two or more people or entities.  There must be a combination of thoughts, ideas, assignments and activities.  Those involved have  to work in concert with one another, making sure everyone is on the same page."  There is an agreeable partnership, and teamwork includes dividing the tasks and utilizing each person's gift to the fullest.  Advice:  When you go out in the world . . . hold hands and stick together.   All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum  Source:  Michael Bedford in The American Organist magazine  October 2017.

Kern Pioneer Village opened the newly restored boyhood home of country music legend Merle Haggard on April 9, 2017.  The first Haggard Boxcar Festival included live music by Ben & Noel Haggard, Merle Haggard's sons.  Kern Pioneer Village location:  Bakersfield, California  3801 Chester Ave 93301  https://us.eventbu.com/bakersfield/haggard-boxcar-festival/2217648  See also Historic Places Tied to Music Strike a High Note by Katherine Flynn at https://savingplaces.org/stories/historic-places-tied-to-music-strike-a-high-note#.WdOVsVtSyUk  See pictures and read about "Hag's boxcar", Nashville's Music Row, and Atlanta's Tabernacle Music.  

Elizabeth Catlett (1915–2012)  The granddaughter of former slaves, Catlett was raised in Washington, D.C.  Her father died before she was born and her mother held several jobs to raise three children.  Refused admission to Carnegie Institute of Technology because of her race, Catlett enrolled at Howard University, where her teachers included artist Loïs Mailou Jones and philospher Alain Locke.  he graduated with honors in 1935 and went on to earn the first the first M.F.A. in sculpture at the University of Iowa five years later.  Grant Wood, her painting teacher at Iowa, encouraged students to make art about what they knew best and to experiment with different mediums, inspiring Catlett to create lithographs, linoleum cuts, and sculpture in wood, stone, clay, and bronze.  She drew subjects from African American and later Mexican life.  In 1946, a grant from the Rosenwald Foundation enabled Catlett to move to Mexico City with her husband, printmaker Charles White.  There she joined the Taller de Gráfica Popular, an influential and political group of printmakers.  At the Taller, Catlett met the Mexican artist Francisco Mora, whom she married after divorcing White and with whom she had three sons.  Catlett taught at the National School of Fine Arts in Mexico City from 1958 until her retirement in 1976, producing realistic and highly stylized two- and three-dimensional figures.  https://nmwa.org/explore/artist-profiles/elizabeth-catlett

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, translator, and lyricist Richard Wilbur died on October 15, 2017 at age 96.  Mr. Wilbur, who worked in the theatre mainly as a translator, was also a Tony nominee for his work as a lyricist on the 1956 Leonard Bernstein musical Candide.  Mr. Wilbur co-wrote the lyrics for Candide with Dorothy Parker and John Latouche.  The show, a musical adaptation of Voltaire's satirical novel of the same name, featured music by Bernstein and a book by Lillian Hellman.  Later productions would include additional lyrics from Stephen Sondheim.  Candide was last revived on Broadway in 1997, where it was nominated for four Tony Awards, including Best Revival.  In the literary world, Mr. Wilbur was best known as a poet, for which he received numerous honors including a National Book Award and two Pulitzer Prizes.  His Broadway credits as a translator include a number of French classics by Molière:  Tartuffe, The Misanthrope, The School for Wives, The School for Husbands, and The Imaginary Cuckold.

http://www.playbill.com/article/tony-nominated-lyricist-and-translator-richard-wilbur-dies-at-96  In 1987 Wilbur was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.     When only 8 years old, Wilbur published his first poem in John Martin's Magazine.  His first book, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems, appeared in 1947.   In addition to publishing poetry and translations, he also published several children's books including Opposites, More Opposites, and The Disappearing Alphabet.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Wilbur

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1785  October 17, 2017  On today's date in 1941, the Boston Symphony gave the first performance of a new symphony by a 31-year old American composer named William Schuman.  Schuman had written two earlier symphonies, but these were composed very much under the influence of his teacher, the American composer Roy Harris.  It was hearing one of the Harris symphonies played by the New York Philharmonic that gave Schuman the idea of writing symphonies of his own.  Schuman wrote his first symphony in 1935 and a second in 1937.  The Second was very well received, and had even been played by the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky.  It was Koussevitzky who commissioned Schuman to write a Third Symphony, and conducted its premiere on October 17, 1941.  It was with this work that Schuman felt he really found his own distinct voice as a composer.  He withdrew his two earlier symphonies, and they were never published.  Composers Datebook

Which letters in the alphabet are used most often?  The inventor of Morse code, Samuel Morse (1791-1872), needed to know this so that he could give the simplest codes to the most frequently used letters.  He did it simply by counting the number of letters in sets of printers' type.  However, this gives the frequency of letters in English text, which is dominated by a relatively small number of common words.  For word games, it is often the frequency of letters in English vocabulary, regardless of word frequency, which is of more interest.  An analysis of the letters occurring in the words listed in the main entries of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (11th edition revised, 2004) came up with its own list.  Find the lists of Samuel Morse and the Concise Oxford Dictionary at https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/explore/which-letters-are-used-most  See also http://letterfrequency.org/ and https://www.math.cornell.edu/~mec/2003-2004/cryptography/subs/frequencies.html  There is general agreement that ETAOIN are the first six of the most frequently used letters in English.

The English language is constructed of many different sounds:  vowels, consonants, long vowels and short vowels.  Consonant blends (also called consonant clusters) are a collection of two or three different consonant sounds that are each heard when the word is pronounced.  For example, let's look at the word "drink."  Both the letters "d" and "r" are consonants.  When the word "drink" is pronounced, you can clearly hear the sounds of both of these letters, making it a consonant blend.  When two consonants make a distinct sound it is called a "consonant digraph."  When three consonants are combined to form a sound it is called a "consonant trigraph."  Letters commonly mixed together:   bl, cl, fl, gl, pl, sl, br, cr, dr, fr, gr, pr, tr, sc, sk, sm, sn, sp, st, sw, and tw.  http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-consonant-blends.html  See also https://www.thoughtco.com/consonant-sounds-and-letters-1689914

Dictionary of American Regional English, the six-volume study of America’s dialects, affectionately known as dare.   There’s nothing terribly mysterious about the process of writing a dictionary.  You figure out what you want to include, research it, and then write it up.  But there are a lot of ways to do your research.  Several nineteenth-century projects, most notably the English Dialect Dictionary, managed this by sending surveys through the post and hoping to get useful answers back.  A modern option is to remain in one’s office and telephone people around the country, the process used by the Atlas of North American English (which focusses almost entirely on pronunciation).  The other obvious thing to do is go everywhere in person.  In the late nineteenth century, Edmond Edmont rode by bicycle around France, and corners of Belgium and Switzerland, conducting seven hundred interviews to research what became the Atlas Linguistique de la France.  When dare began its fieldwork, in 1965, its teams travelled in “Word Wagons”:  campers outfitted with detailed surveys, recording equipment, and linguistics graduate students.  The wagons travelled to more than a thousand communities, which were not always ready to welcome sixteen-hundred-question surveys, massive reel-to-reel tape recorders, or graduate students.  But they persevered, completing almost three thousand interviews, with a total of 2.3 million answers that were keyboarded in a prominent early example of the value of computing in the humanities.  Recordings of the interviews, and of a story called “Arthur the Rat,” which was written to elicit important pronunciation features, show the variation in speech sounds.  This fieldwork, combined with extensive original textual research, formed the core of the dictionary, which was ultimately published from 1985 to 2013.  Jesse Sheidlower  Read more at https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-closing-of-a-great-american-dialect-project

The Mohs scale of mineral hardness was created by German mineralogist, Friedrich Mohs in 1822 to measure the relative hardness or scratch resistanceof various minerals.  He based it on ten readily available minerals.  As it is an ordinal scale, two minerals must be compared to decide which is harder.  The scale is neither linear nor logarithmic.  For example, corundum is twice as hard as topaz, but diamond is almost four times as hard as corundum.  The hardness of a material is measured against the scale by finding the hardest material that the given material can scratch, or the softest material that can scratch the given material.  Find  the Mohs scale ratings for 144 types of gemstones:  at https://www.gemselect.com/gem-info/gem-hardness-info.php

"I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice!  And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!"   Barry Goldwater's 1964 speech at the 28th Republican National Convention, accepting the nomination for president.  "Well, you can thank your pistol of a young lawyer here for bringing me around.  She reminded me that there's no virtue in absolutism."  Reverend Dale, a fictional character in the series Designated Survivor, "Outbreak," season two, episode three

Reader question:  Was the Robert Lucas who became the first gov of Iowa Terr the person for whom Lucas County was named?  Answer:  Yes.  Robert Lucas was born in Shepherdstown, Virginia (modern-day West Virginia), on April 1, 1781.  When he was nineteen years old, he moved with his family to the Northwest Territory and settled near Portsmouth.  Three years later he worked as a surveyor, determining the boundary between Scioto and Adams Counties.  Lucas also joined the state militia, rising in the ranks to brigadier general by the time of the War of 1812.  He briefly served under Major General Duncan McArthur before joining General William Hull's campaign against Canada.  He also held a rank of captain in the regular army for a short time but resigned from that position in early 1813 to devote his time to his militia duties.  Lucas saw no additional combat during the war, although after the war he was promoted to major general and made commander of the Second Militia Division.  In addition to his military service, Lucas also became involved in state politics.  Prior to the War of 1812, he had served one term in the Ohio House of Representatives. In 1814, he was elected to the Ohio Senate for the first time.  He served as a state senator for several terms (1814-1822, 1824-1828, and 1829-1830) before returning to the lower house for a term in 1831-1832.  During the 1820s, Lucas became a supporter of Andrew Jackson and joined the Democratic Party.  His political and military reputation made him a widely respected figure in the state, and he even served as the first president of the Democratic National Convention.  By 1830, Lucas had become interested in the governorship.  He ran unsuccessfully against Duncan McArthur in 1830, losing the election by fewer than five hundred votes.  In 1832, he was more successful, winning against Darius Lyman.  In 1834, he was reelected as governor over Whig Party candidate James Findlay.  Much of his tenure as governor was relatively uneventful, but he did hold office during the dispute known as the "Toledo War".  Both Ohio and the Michigan Territory claimed a small strip of land along the northern border of Ohio, no more than eight miles wide.  This area was very important to Ohio because it included the community of Toledo, a port on Lake Erie that was expected to become a part of the state's canal system.  In his position as governor, Lucas called out the state militia and personally led them to defend Ohio's border with Michigan.  In the end war did not take place, as President Andrew Jackson intervened.  The United States Congress eventually decided that the land belonged to Ohio and compensated Michigan by giving it additional land in the Upper Peninsula.  In 1838, President Martin Van Buren named Lucas the governor of the new Iowa Territory.  He held this position until 1841, when Whig President William Henry Harrison chose to replace him with someone from his own political party.  Lucas briefly returned to Ohio and ran for Congress in 1843, but after his defeat, he returned to his new home in Iowa City, Iowa.  He was a member of Iowa's state constitutional convention in 1844, but after that point, he no longer actively served in politics.  http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Robert_Lucas 

For those of you blocked when you clicked on the recipe for Dutch Baby Pancakes from The New York Times, go to your favorite search engine and type in Dutch Baby Pancake--you will find many recipes including the NYT one.

Lawrence Argent, the acclaimed sculptor who created the 40-foot-high “big blue bear” sculpture that has become an artistic icon for the Mile High City, died on October 4, 2017.   Argent was born Jan. 24, 1957, in Essex, England, and grew up in Australia, later attending the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.  He received a master’s degree in fine arts from the Rinehart School of Sculpture in Baltimore in 1986, according to a biography on his website.  http://www.lawrenceargent.com/bio/  He joined the staff at the University of Denver in 1993 and, through his work, helped bring global awareness to Denver’s contemporary art scene—which in turn helped land high-profile exhibits and residents such as the Clyfford Still Museum.  But his biggest contribution—literally and figuratively—remains the big blue bear, which has been seen by countless people since it joined one of Denver’s busiest tourism and convention thoroughfares 12 years ago.  I See What You Mean” depicts a geometrically rendered—and originally 3D-printed—blue bear peering into the east-facing windows of the Colorado Convention Center.  It was installed in 2005 and has since become a marketing mainstay and popular item of merchandise for Denver Arts & Venues, which plays on its tourist-friendly reputation.  The $425,000 sculpture was part of more than $2.4 million for nine pieces of art commissioned for the convention center under the city’s 1-percent-of-art ordinance.  John Wenzel  http://theknow.denverpost.com/2017/10/06/lawrence-argent-big-blue-bear-sculptor-dies-2017/161342/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1784  October 16, 2017   Of all the orchestral works of Richard Strauss, the one that premiered in Dresden on today's date in 1925 ranks amount the least-known.  For starters, it has an odd title, "Parergon to the Symphonia Domestica."  "Parergon" means "an ornamental accessory or embellishment," and so Strauss meant his new work, written for piano left-hand and orchestra, was a follow-up to his earlier "Symphonia Domestica," a tone-poem written two decades years earlier, and a musical depiction of one day in the Strauss family household, complete with baby's bath.   For Paul Wittgenstein, the wealthy one-handed concert pianist who commissioned it, the new work was one of several he had requested from leading composers of his day, all designed as a public showcase for his talent.  Composers Datebook

PARAPHRASES from Nor All Your Tears, #3 in the Dr. Lance Elliot mysteries by Keith McCarthy  Bereavement is a disability that empowers you, yet also tethers you.  *  He declared ten a rubbish number, undermining with a single sentence some thousands of years of civilization.

Keith McCarthy was born in 1960 in Croydon, Surrey, first educated at Dulwich College, and then at St. George's Hospital Medical School.  He took specialist pathology training, received a research doctorate, and became a member of Royal College of Pathologists in 1995.  He wrote as a teenager, and began again as a junior pathologist.  He has written mysteries under the pseudonym Lance Elliot.   http://www.keithmccarthy.co.uk/pages/about-keith-mccarthy.php

Periodic Table of Elements  http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/  Periodic Table Of Elements Song   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8dtquYDXEU  1:35  The NEW Periodic Table Song (Updated)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VgVQKCcfwnU  2:53 

Dutch Baby, a large, fluffy pancake, is excellent for breakfast, brunch, lunch and dessert any time of year.  And it comes together in about five blessed minutes.  Just dump all of the ingredients into a blender, give it a good whirl, pour it into a heated skillet sizzling with butter, and pop it into the oven.  Twenty-five minutes later?  Bliss.  Florence Fabricant  Find recipe at https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/6648-dutch-baby?mcubz=3

The chemical compound hydrochloric acid (or muriatic acid) is the aqueous (water-based) solution of hydrogen chloride gas (HCl).  This strong acid is highly corrosive and must be handled with appropriate safety precautions.  It is the major component of gastric acid.  It is routinely used in chemical research laboratories and manufacturing plants.  Its applications include the large-scale production of certain compounds (such as vinyl chloride for polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastic), removal of rust and scale from metals, petroleum production, and ore processing.  Smaller-scale applications include the production of gelatin and other ingredients in food, and leather processing.  An estimated 20 million metric tons of hydrochloric acid are produced annually.  http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Hydrochloric_acid

When you're cooking up a big pot of greens, don't toss out what may be the most nutritious part—the brothy water that's left in the pot.  Lots of the beneficial nutrients cook out of the greens.  And what's left?  Well, if you learned to cook in a traditional Southern kitchen, you'd call it pot liquor.  (Though some insist it's "potlikker.")  As I explain in my conversation with Here & Now, some people drink it as a tonic. Others use it as a soup base.  And James Huff, chef de cuisine at Pearl Dive in Washington, D.C., who learned his trade in some of New Orleans' top kitchens, uses pot liquor to create some incredible entrees.  Allison Aubrey  Find James Huff's recipe for pot liquor at http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2013/08/06/209543044/pot-liquor-a-southern-tip-to-save-nutritious-broth-from-greens  See also Pot Liquor Soup from Southern Living at http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/pot-liquor-soup

A PAGE FROM THE PAST  June 9, 1973  Original Old Capitol Library Catalog Being Developed    Before Robert Lucas left Ohio in June of 1838 to become the first governor of Iowa Territory, he and "several literary friends" had already selected the contents of a territorial library.  Now Martha Esbin is trying to rebuid that library.  She's been at work since last November on a one-year halftime appointment as bibliographer for Iowa's Old Capitol restoration project.  A University of Iowa campus landmark, Old Capitol is being restored as a "living museum" of its period as Iowa's first permanent capitol, from 1842 to 1857.  Restoration of the library is a major part of the overall project.  Ms. Esbin's first major task was to develop an accurate catalog of the original library collection.  A clue she found during her first day's work in the University of Iowa Library led to her discovery of the 1839 and 1845 Iowa Territorial Library catalogs in the Iowa Masonic Library in Cedar Rapids.  Authored by Iowa's first territorial librarian, Theodore Parvin, the 1839 catalog concludes with a report that library holdings totaled 1,568 volumes, valued at "$3.80 cash per volume."  The collection was classified by subject--biography, education, history, law, medicine, periodicals, poetry, politics, science, theology, voyages, maps and miscellaneous. The titles reflected a selection of important contemporary works.  By 1857, when the library was moved to Des Moines along with the rest of Iowa's governmental offices, the library collection had grown to approximately 3,000 volumes.  In addition to the 1839 and 1845 catalogs, Ms. Esbin has searched the first Iowa State Library accessions book, dated 1875; all Iowa legislative journals and laws of the period; and various histories, periodicals, catalogs and state librarians' reports.  The first Old Capitol "original" acquired for the restoration is the paperback "Journal of the Seventh Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Iowa", printed in 1845.  Ms. Esbin has also confirmed that two volumes in the University Library were part of the original Old Capitol collection.  Beyond its part in showing what Old Capitol looked like during its frontier years, restoration of as much of the original serration specialist on the University Libraries staff, is checking and cleaning the volumes acquired for the restoration. The constant temperature and humidity controls essential to preservation of the collection must be provided in the structural restoration of Old Capitol, which will begin next winter.  In the interim, Ms. Esbin is taking steps to keep the acquisitions as well-housed as possible in temporary quarters.  https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/23342753/  See also Old Capitol Library:  Its History, Contents, and Restoration at http://ir.uiowa.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=10961&context=annals-of-iowa

A blue slip is the name for a piece of paper a home state senator returns to the chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee to show his or her approval of a federal judicial nominee.  The United States Constitution does not mandate the use of blue slips, but they are considered a senatorial courtesy.  Under current usage of blue slips, though United States senators have the power to prevent a federal judicial nominee from receiving a hearing and subsequently being confirmed, they are not required to ever state a reason.  On October 11, 2017, in comments published in The Weekly Standard, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) indicated that the practice of the Senate Judiciary Committee, where a home state senator's withholding of a blue slip prevented a judicial nominee from receiving confirmation hearings, would no longer be practiced.  The Weekly Standard article quoted McConnell as indicating, "'The majority'—that is, Republicans—will treat a blue slip 'as simply notification of how you’re going to vote, not as an opportunity to blackball,' . . .  The use of blue slips, he noted, is not a Senate rule and has 'been honored in the breach over the years.'  Now it won’t be honored at all."  An article published in Politico, however, indicated that the Senate Judiciary Committee chair, Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), had not given his assent to the plan.  https://ballotpedia.org/Blue_slip_(federal_judicial_nominations)

Nora Johnson, writer who created 'The World of Henry Orient,' dies at 84 by Steve Marble   Nora Johnson, who died October 5, 2017 in Dallas, was a child when her parents split—her father planting himself in Beverly Hills, her mother moving to New York.  At casual glance, there was a storybook charm to it all.  Summers in Hollywood meant playing croquet with Tyrone Power, going to Shirley Temple’s birthday parties, looking across the lawn of her father’s house and noticing “Judy Garland standing in front of me, her eyes ablaze, her small swaying body lit up with some tragic fire.”   During the school year she had New York, from the ice rink at Rockefeller Center to Broadway.  But she felt disassociated with both cities, and—to varying degrees—both parents.  Hollywood felt artificial and her father was so charismatic, Johnson said she felt as if she had to line up to get his affection.  She worried that she bored him.  “The things I saved up for months to tell him, never seemed worth bringing up when I was with him,” she wrote in “Coast to Coast.”  Her first marriage took her to Saudi Arabia, where she wrote “The World of Henry Orient,” the story of two schoolgirls who build romantic fantasies about a famous concert pianist.  Cloaked in humor, the girls’ efforts to spy on the pianist form a story of both obsession and youthful exuberance.  Johnson divorced, married again and then divorced a second time.  Her father, sensing his daughter was going through a grim time, reached out to her and suggested they collaborate on a film script for “Henry Orient.”  Peter Sellers was cast as the pianist in the 1964 film version of the story.  Don Ameche played the role in a subsequent Broadway musical adaptation of Johnson’s novel.  Both were deemed successes.  In a 1986 interview, Johnson said that, as much as anything else, she wrote to please her father.  “Even now when I write a passage that pleases me especially, I find myself thinking, ‘How he’d like this … I hope.’”  After her father’s death in 1977, Johnson seemed to write furiously—turning out novels like “Tender Offer” and “Perfect Together” and writing book reviews and reflections.  Though she made New York her home, she returned to Los Angeles frequently.  In 1985, she reminisced about her childhood summers in Beverly Hills in a story for the Los Angeles Times Magazine.  http://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-nora-johnson-20171011-story.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1783  October 13, 2017  On today's date in 1991, Dennis Russell Davies conducted a Carnegie Hall concert by the American Composers' Orchestra that included the premiere performance of a new orchestral work entitled "Black Light."  Its composer was Daniel Asia, a Seattle native who has emerged as one of the most productive contemporary composers of orchestral works.   Asia has written four symphonies to date, and a number of concertos and shorter orchestral works.  The final page of the score for Asia's "Black Light" is inscribed, "October 15, 1990—In Memoriam Leonard Bernstein."  Bernstein had died the previous day, as Asia was just finishing his new score, and a year later, almost to the day, Asia's "Black Light" was premiered in New York.  Bernstein was a composer that Asia openly acknowledges as a big influence in his own work.  Composers Datebook

Blueberry trees?  Oregon State University researcher Wei Qiang Yang has a couple of reasons to think so.  First, he says, in machine harvest of blueberry bushes, 15 to 20 percent of the berries are lost.  Second, blueberries now grow on their own roots.  Yang, who is both a researcher and an extension agent in Oregon’s major blueberry production region around the North Willamette Research and Extension Center in Aurora where he works, has tested grafted blueberry trees that grow on single stems since 2005.  “There are 180 grafted blueberry trees (30 each of six cultivars) and 180 blueberry bushes, so I can compare them side by side in the field scientifically,” he said.  “The plant spacing for the blueberry tree is three feet apart between plants and ten feet between the planting rows with grass middles.  They are all planted on flat ground, no raised beds.”  Yang is collaborating with researchers at land-grant universities in California and Florida as part of a multistate effort.  All are testing several blueberry varieties grafted onto rootstocks.  Yang himself has a rootstock testing plot with more than 800 rootstock seedlings.  http://www.goodfruit.com/blueberry-trees/

Blueberry trees in Ohio?  As a part of Gary Gao’s new specialty crop block grant, he travelled to the University of Florida in Gainesville to meet with professors Rebecca Darnell and Jeff Williamson. Together, they had a multi-year and multi-state USDA-SCRI grant to work on grafted blueberry trees.  Dr. Darnell was the PI of the project.  She showed Gary their grafted blueberry trees that were designed to improve harvest efficiency.  Southern highbush blueberry cultivars were grafted on the sparkleberry.  https://southcenters.osu.edu/newsletter/connections-newsletter-spring-edition-2017/blueberry-trees-focus-gary-gaos-university

The term "cold war" first appeared in a 1945 essay by the English writer George Orwell called "You and the Atomic Bomb."  Soviets resented the Americans’ decades-long refusal to treat the USSR as a legitimate part of the international community as well as their delayed entry into World War II, which resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of Russians.  After the war ended, these grievances ripened into an overwhelming sense of mutual distrust and enmity.  Postwar Soviet expansionism in Eastern Europe fueled many Americans’ fears of a Russian plan to control the world.  Meanwhile, the USSR came to resent what they perceived as American officials’ bellicose rhetoric, arms buildup and interventionist approach to international.  By the time World War II ended, most American officials agreed that the best defense against the Soviet threat was a strategy called “containment.”  In 1946, in his famous “Long Telegram,” the diplomat George Kennan explained this policy:  The Soviet Union, he wrote, was “a political force committed fanatically to the belief that with the U.S. there can be no permanent modus vivendi [agreement between parties that disagree]”; as a result, America’s only choice was the “long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies.” President Harry Truman agreed.  “It must be the policy of the United States,” he declared before Congress in 1947, “to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation . . . by outside pressures.”  The containment strategy provided the rationale for an unprecedented arms buildup in the United States.  American officials encouraged the development of atomic weapons like the ones that had ended World War II.  Thus began a deadly “arms race.”  In 1949, the Soviets tested an atom bomb of their own.  In response, President Truman announced that the United States would build an even more destructive atomic weapon: the hydrogen bomb, or “superbomb.”  Stalin followed suit.  The first H-bomb test, in the Eniwetok atoll in the Marshall Islands, showed just how fearsome the nuclear age could be.  It created a 25-square-mile fireball that vaporized an island, blew a huge hole in the ocean floor and had the power to destroy half of Manhattan.  Subsequent American and Soviet tests spewed poisonous radioactive waste into the atmosphere.  Space exploration served as another dramatic arena for Cold War competition.  On October 4, 1957, a Soviet R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile launched Sputnik (Russian for “traveler”), the world’s first artificial satellite and the first man-made object to be placed into the Earth’s orbit.  In 1958, the U.S. launched its own satellite, Explorer I, designed by the U.S. Army under the direction of rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, and what came to be known as the Space Race was underway.  That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a public order creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), a federal agency dedicated to space exploration, as well as several programs seeking to exploit the military potential of space.  Still, the Soviets were one step ahead, launching the first man into space in April 1961.  The fight against subversion at home mirrored a growing concern with the Soviet threat abroad.  In June 1950, the first military action of the Cold War began when the Soviet-backed North Korean People’s Army invaded its pro-Western neighbor to the south.  Many American officials feared this was the first step in a communist campaign to take over the world and deemed that nonintervention was not an option.  Truman sent the American military into Korea, but the war dragged to a stalemate and ended in 1953.  In the early 1960s, President Kennedy faced a number of troubling situations in his own hemisphere.  The Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban missile crisis the following year seemed to prove that the real communist threat now lay in the unstable, postcolonial “Third World”.  Nowhere was this more apparent than in Vietnam, where the collapse of the French colonial regime had led to a struggle between the American-backed nationalist Ngo Dinh Diem in the south and the communist nationalist Ho Chi Minh in the north.  Since the 1950s, the United States had been committed to the survival of an anticommunist government in the region, and by the early 1960s it seemed clear to American leaders that if they were to successfully “contain” communist expansionism there, they would have to intervene more actively on Diem’s behalf.  However, what was intended to be a brief military action spiraled into a 10-year conflict.  The Cold War heated up again under President Ronald Reagan.  Like many leaders of his generation, Reagan believed that the spread of communism anywhere threatened freedom everywhere.  As a result, he worked to provide financial and military aid to anticommunist governments and insurgencies around the world.  This policy, particularly as it was applied in the developing world in places like Grenada and El Salvador, was known as the Reagan Doctrine.  In November 1989, the Berlin Wall--the most visible symbol of the Cold War--was finally destroyed, just over two years after Reagan had challenged the Soviet premier in a speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin:  “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”  By 1991, the Soviet Union itself had fallen apart.  The Cold War was over.  http://www.history.com/topics/cold-war/cold-war-history  See also Origins of the Cold War at https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-us-history/period-8/apush-postwar-era/v/origins-of-the-cold-war

Reader feedback:  What do you call a group of clams?  A chowder!   Thank you, Muse reader!

Scientists have answered one of nature’s most pungent questions:  what gives the world’s smelliest fruit its distinctive aroma.  Scientists in Singapore said on October 9, 2017 they have mapped the genome of the durian, known throughout Southeast Asia as the “king of fruits” for its unique smell, flavor and formidable spiny appearance.  They identified a group of genes responsible for odor compounds called volatile sulfur compounds, and found that these genes become highly activated as the fruit ripens, driving its unusual smell.  “The durian smell has been described as a mix of an onion-like sulfury aroma with notes of sweet fruitiness and savory soup-seasoning.  A key component of the durian smell are volatile sulfur compounds, or VSCs, which have been characterized as decaying, onion-like, rotten eggs, sulfury and fried shallots,” said geneticist Bin Tean Teh, deputy director of the National Cancer Center Singapore, co-leader of the study published in the journal Nature Genetics.  Unlike other plant species that typically have one or two copies of these genes, this species boasted four copies, demonstrating that VSC production is, as Teh put it, "turbocharged" in durian fruits.  Will Dunham    https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2017-10-09/whats-that-smell-secrets-of-famously-pungent-durian-fruit-revealed  You’ll often hear that durian smells like hell but tastes like heaven.  Its pungent odor is acknowledged in Southeast Asia—the fruit is banned on most public transport, and you probably won’t be allowed in a hotel, a taxi or an airplane with a durian in your bag.  https://www.pri.org/stories/2015-03-16/insane-fruit-probably-world-s-most-celebrated-and-persecuted

Here Are The 2017 MacArthur 'Genius' Grant Winners by Colin Dwyer  http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/10/11/556891441/here-are-the-2017-macarthur-genius-grant-winners

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1782  October 11, 2017  The last two symphonies of the Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev both premiered on October 11.  Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony premiered in Leningrad in 1947, and Prokofiev's Seventh, his last Symphony, in Moscow, in 1952.  Composers Datebook  Word of the Day  surrey  noun  A light horse-drawn carriage with forward-facing seats accommodating two or four people, popular in the United States; a motorized carriage of similar design.  The musical film Oklahoma! featuring songs by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, including “The Surrey with the Fringe on Top”, premiered on October 11, 1955.

What do you call a group of cats?  A clowder.  Or a glare.  Thank you, Muse reader!

The first time I saw the library at Phillips Exeter Academy, I didn’t understand the fuss.  For five hours in the car, my interior-designer mother raved about this triumph by mid-20th-century architect Louis I. Kahn.  Arriving at the school’s admissions office for my interview, however, I distinctly remember my 14-year-old self glancing at the library and thinking that nothing about the 1971 building said “masterpiece.”  The brick nine-story cube—its corners chamfered and its windows and doorways forming a grid—stood bulky and boxy alongside the New Hampshire prep school’s neo-Georgian dorms.  Later, we passed through one of its unassuming glass and aluminum doors and entered a narrow vestibule dominated by a travertine double staircase.  The steps’ solid balustrades blocked our view until we reached the top—and then the heavens opened and the architecture angels sang.  The atrium soars 67 feet, capped by massive concrete X beams filtering light from windows just above.  Its concrete walls boast huge circular cutouts, across which run four open stories housing the book stacks, their in-facing walls clad in teak.  “When you arrive at that central void you are delivered into an architecture that has a lot more presence and grandeur than the Georgian buildings outside,” explained William Hall, author of “Concrete” (Phaidon), a book on contemporary buildings constructed of the material.  Kahn dispensed with the classic library layout:  a central reading room with rows of desks and sallow lamp light.  His square atrium remains nearly empty, and the outer rings of each floor offer sun-drenched sanctuaries that I found after some exploring.  Four cozy red armchairs on the main floor, each framed by an oversize rectangular window, and an empty carrel with views of the treetops became my go-to spots.  All flood with light during the day.  William Whitaker, University of Pennsylvania Curator of the Architectural Archives, is not surprised the library revealed its charms to me slowly.  “It’s not just a building, it is a work of art, and works of art take time,” he said.  “Kahn’s library asks something of you in terms of engagement and connection.”  Sara Bliss  https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-i-hated-americas-most-stunning-libraryat-first-1506016714?mod=itp&mod=djemITP_h

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio, on February 18, 1931.  She was the second of four children from an African-American working class family.  Her parents were Ellah Ramah (Willis) and George Wofford.  Her middle name honored her maternal grandmother, Ardelia Willis.  Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, was set in 1940s Lorain.  That novel and her others, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home and God Help the Child have received extensive critical acclaim.  Morrison worked for twenty years as Senior Editor at Random House where she encouraged the works of many new African-American authors.  Morrison received degrees from Howard and Cornell Universities.  She held teaching positions at Yale, Bard College, Rutgers University, and the State University of New York at Albany.  In 1989 she was appointed Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University.  On October 7, 1993, the Swedish Academy announced the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Morrison.  The Academy cited Morrison as an author “who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.”  On January 22, 1995, Morrison returned to the Lorain Public Library to join family and friends in attendance for the dedication of the Toni Morrison Reading Room.  In her school days in Lorain she had worked as a library aide in the "old" Carnegie Library building located on 10th Street.  Read much more at https://www.lorainpubliclibrary.org/research/local-research/local-authors/toni-morrison

Reader Feedback:  Today's article on Lewis Carroll--pretty sure he was a mathematician of long tenure at Oxford who dabbled in literature and not the other way around as per the article.  Really more of a Renaissance man who was noted in both fields.  Thank you, Muse reader!   In 1855, Charles L. Dodgson became the mathematical lecturer at Christ Church College in the University of Oxford, UK.  His job was to prepare Christ Church men (for it was all men) to pass examinations in mathematics. Dodgson (1832–98) would go on to publish Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871) under the pen name Lewis Carroll, but he also produced many pamphlets and ten books on mathematical topics.  In some of these, he exhibited unusual methods—for rapid arithmetic, for example.  Others featured innovative ideas that foreshadowed developments in the twentieth century, for instance in voting theory.  Francine F. Abeles  http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v527/n7578/full/527302a.html?foxtrotcallback=true  See also http://www.lewiscarroll.org/carroll/math/

An electrolyte is a substance that produces an electrically conducting solution when dissolved in water.  Electrolytes carry a charge and are essential for life.  All higher forms of life need electrolytes to survive.  In our bodies, electrolytes include sodium (Na⁺), potassium (K⁺), calcium (Ca²⁺), bicarbonate (HCO₃^-), magnesium (Mg²⁺), chloride (C1^-), and hydrogen phosphate (HPO₄^2-).   Electrolytes regulate our nerve and muscle function, our body's hydration, blood pH, blood pressure, and the rebuilding of damaged tissue.  Fresh fruits and vegetables are rich in electrolytes.  Our muscles and neurons are sometimes referred to as the "electric tissues" of the body.  Christian Nordkvist  https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/153188.php  

Make your Own Electrolyte Energy Drink   1/4 cup of freshly squeezed lime juice, 1/4 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice, 1 ½ to 2 cups fresh water, depending on how strong you want the flavor, 1/8 teaspoon of sea salt, 2 tablespoons natural sugar or honey, to taste.  Find other recipes for energy drinks at http://everydayroots.com/homemade-energy-drink

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS TRIVIA  Nina and Pinta were not the actual names of two of Columbus’ three ships.  In 15th-century Spain, ships were traditionally named after saints.  Salty sailors, however, bestowed less-than-sacred nicknames upon their vessels.  Mariners dubbed one of the three ships on Columbus’s 1492 voyage the Pinta, Spanish for “the painted one” or “prostitute.”  The Santa Clara, meanwhile, was nicknamed the Nina in honor of its owner, Juan Nino.  Although the Santa Maria is called by its official name, its nickname was La Gallega, after the province of Galicia in which it was built.  The Santa Maria wrecked on Columbus’ historic voyage.  On Christmas Eve of 1492, a cabin boy ran Columbus’s flagship into a coral reef on the northern coast of Hispaniola, near present-day Cap Haitien, Haiti.  Its crew spent a very un-merry Christmas salvaging the Santa Maria’s cargo.  Columbus returned to Spain aboard the Nina, but he had to leave nearly 40 crewmembers behind to start the first European settlement in the Americas—La Navidad.  When Columbus returned to the settlement in the fall of 1493, none of the crew were found alive.  Heirs of Columbus and the Spanish monarchy were in litigation until 1790.  After the death of Columbus, his heirs waged a lengthy legal battle with the Spanish crown, claiming that the monarchy short-changed them on money and profits due the explorer.  Most of the Columbian lawsuits were settled by 1536, but the legal proceedings nearly dragged on until the 300th anniversary of Columbus’ famous voyage.  http://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-christopher-columbus  Christopher Columbus is an important historical figure.  The Great Mariner has also become a controversial figure, especially in recent years, as many groups and historians have been prone to pointing out some of his negative accomplishments, such as slave trading, quests for gold and his treatment of New World Natives.   Fifteen years before he reached the New World, Columbus sailed to Iceland and visited a small Christian church on the Eastern end of the island.  This piece of trivia may be the most surprising or controversial, but Iceland had been a Christian nation, since the eleventh century, when Leif Eriksson, (a Christian convert) had established the first church there.  Going to Iceland was no big deal, as Catholic priests made the voyage from time to time on ships bound for Norway.  Further evidence can be found in Columbus's journals, where he speaks about going to Tiles (the name used for Iceland at that time).  https://owlcation.com/humanities/Christopher-Columbus-Trivia  Christopher Columbus never set foot on North America.  The first Columbus Day celebration recorded in the United States was in New York on October 12th, 1792, held  to honor Italian-American heritage.  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937 proclaimed October 12th to be Columbus Day, a national holiday.  In 1971, the holiday date was changed to the second Monday in October.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2013/10/14/christopher-columbus-3-things-you-think-he-did-that-he-didnt/?utm_term=.34ec726d09d4

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1781  October 9, 2017  On this date in 1593, Nicolaes Tulp, Dutch anatomist and politician, was born.  In this date in 1883, Maria Filotti, Greek-Romanian actress, was born.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_9

NAME CHANGES  Academy Award-winning Italian film actress Sofia Loren (born Sofia Villani Scicolone 1934)   Academy Award-winning actress Jennifer Jones (born Phylis Lee Isley 1919, died 2009)  Nobel Prize in Literature winner Tony Morrison (born Chloe Ardelia Wofford 1931)   Character actor Herbert Lom (born Herbert Charles Angelo Kuchacevich ze Schluderpacheru in Prague 1917, died 2012)  He made his screen debut in the Czech film Zena Pod Krizem (1937).  NOTE that Herbert Lom is best-known today as Inspector Clouseau's long-suffering boss, Chief Inspector Dreyfus, in the Pink Panther movies.

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

lection  (LEK-shuhn)  noun  1.  A version of a text in a particular copy or edition.  2.  A selection read in a religious service.  Also known as pericope.  From Latin lection- (reading), from lectus, past participle of legere (to read, choose, collect).  Ultimately from Indo-European root leg- (to collect) which also gave us lexicon, lesson, lecture, legible, legal, select, alexia, cull, ligneous, lignify, prolegomenon, subintelligitur, and syllogistic.  Earliest documented use:  1300.

Where does the expression ‘by the skin of my teeth’ come from?  The phrase comes from the Book of Job.  Exactly what ‘the skin of one’s teeth’ might be is not entirely clear, and there have been many theories put forward.  The most plausible explanation is that it refers to the thin porcelain exterior of the tooth (rather than the gums).  In other words, Job escaped with his teeth, but just barely.  Job is comparing the narrow margin of his escape with the shallow ‘skin’ or porcelain of a tooth: the equivalent, in fact, of a ‘hair’s breadth’.  An extract from What Made the Crocodile Cry? by Susie Dent.  Find other idioms explained, including 'cut the mustard' and  'in a nutshell' at http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2012/11/popular-idioms-explained/

When he was not writing literary works like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll dabbled in mathematics.  One of the results of his diversion was an 1887 perpetual calendar algorithm for calculating the day of the week for a given date.  Many calendar algorithms preceded Carroll's.  In fact, the great mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss had his own version in 1800.  But Carroll was the first person to devise an algorithm suitable for mental calculation.  Carroll himself could perform his calendar algorithm in his head, calculating the day of the week for a given date in about 20 seconds.  Many years later longtime Scientific American columnist Martin Gardner read about Carroll's calendar algorithm.  Gardner then told his friend, John Horton Conway, about Carroll's algorithm and challenged Conway to come up with a simpler one.  Conway, being a world-class mathematician, did come up with a much simpler algorithm in 1973.  He called his algorithm the "doomsday rule."  The doomsday rule is now more commonly known as the doomsday algorithm.  The algorithm is simple and only involves basic arithmetic.  Moreover, it requires very little memorization.  With practice, it can done mentally without paper and pencil in just a few seconds.  Despite its usefulness in retracing failed predictions by Camping and other prognosticators of end times, the doomsday algorithm has nothing to do with the apocalypse. Conway named his calendar algorithm after discovering an interesting property of a certain day of the week in a given year, which he called "doomsday."  But his use of "doomsday" is probably a misnomer.  One could just as easily refer to it as "anchor day."  The idea that makes the doomsday algorithm tick is that certain memorizable dates always share the same day of the week within any given year.  For example, April 4, June 6, August 8, October 10 and December 12 all fall on a Monday in 2011.  Conway used this fact as the basis for his algorithm.  This special day of the week, shared by 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10 and 12/12, is the anchor day.  (Which day of the week anchor day falls on varies from year to year.)  Other memorizable dates also fall on a given year's anchor day:  5/9, 9/5, 7/11 and 11/7 are all Mondays in 1994 and 2011.  Just as 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10 and 12/12 are easy to remember because of repeating digits, one can easily remember the four additional dates using Conway's simple mnemonic:  "Working  9 to 5 at the 7–Eleven."  Chamberlain Fong  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/calendar-algorithm/  See also a calendar calculation technique from a book called Mind Performance Hacks at   https://blog.artofmemory.com/how-to-calculate-the-day-of-the-week-4203.html

Forgiveness is for yourself because it frees you.  It lets you out of that prison you put yourself in.  Louise L. Hay  * The weak can never forgive.  Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.  Mahatma Gandhi  * Forgive your enemies--nothing annoys them so much.  Oscar Wilde  * https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_forgiveness.html

Phonetics deals with the production of speech sounds by humans, often without prior knowledge of the language being spoken.  Phonology is about patterns of sounds, especially different patterns of sounds in different languages, or within each language, different patterns of sounds in different positions in words etc.  Read much more at http://www.phon.ox.ac.uk/jcoleman/PHONOLOGY1.htm

Aioli or aïoli is a Mediterranean sauce made of garlic and olive oil; in some regions other emulsifiers such as egg are used.  The names mean "garlic and oil" in Catalan and Provençal.  Current versions of the French-Provençal sauce are typically closer to a garlic mayonnaise, incorporating egg yolks and lemon juice, whereas the original French Provencal and Spanish Catalan versions are without egg yolk and have considerably more garlic.  It is usually served at room temperature.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aioli

Classic aioli is made with nothing but garlic and olive oil pounded in a mortar and pestle.  Find a version using egg yolks at http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2015/01/two-minute-foolproof-aioli-recipe.html  A recipe using the term aiolo in a September 15, 2017 newspaper calls for 3 tablespoons mayonnaise, 1 tbsp maple syrup and 1/4 tsp. cinnamon.

Have you thought about the letter combination ough?  No letter combination in English is more frustrating.  It can be pronounced at least nine different ways:  rough (uff),  through (oo), bough (ow), cough (off), dough (oh), hiccough (up), fought (aw), Poughkeepsie (uh) and Coughlin (og).  Slough causes problems because it’s pronounced different ways, depending on meaning.  Slough pronounced sluff is the term for shedding skin, like snakes do.  Slough meaning wet, swampy ground can be pronounced either sloo or slou (rhymes with cow).  Dictionary.com prefers slou, while the American Heritage Dictionary prefers sloo.  Brian Wasko    http://blog.writeathome.com/index.php/2011/08/902/

Persian Cucumber and Radish Salad with Hungarian Paprika  recipe from “King Solomon’s Table,” by Joan Nathan  copyright 2017 by Random House  all rights reserved:  1/3 cup flavorful, light vinegar, such as white wine or white balsamic vinegar, 1 teaspoon sugar, ¼ teaspoon sweet Hungarian paprika, salt and freshly ground black pepper to taste, 1 large shallot or the white part of 2 scallions, peeled and diced, 6 tiny Persian cucumbers, thinly sliced, 4 radishes, thinly sliced.  In a small bowl, whisk together the vinegar, sugar, paprika, and salt and pepper to taste.  Add the diced shallot or scallions, then set aside until almost ready to serve.  Adjust the sugar to your taste.  About 15 minutes before serving, put the cucumbers and radishes in a serving bowl, then toss with the vinegar mixture and sprinkle with more paprika.  http://www.haaretz.com/jewish/food/1.782339

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1780  October 6, 2017  On this date in 1683, German immigrant families founded Germantown in the colony of Pennsylvania, marking the first major immigration of German people to America.  On this date in 1723, Benjamin Franklin arrived in Philadelphia at the age of 17.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_6