Over the course of the last 170 years, Zinfandel has established a quality reputation in California becoming known as “America’s Heritage wine”.  The history of Zinfandel is a classic All-American success story—being transformed from a little-known grape into one that has achieved such tremendous popularity that it is grown on more than 39,000 acres.  Zinfandel is now the third most crushed wine grape in California, after Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay.  While the true origins of Zinfandel remained a mystery into the early 21st century, historians have traced Zinfandel’s roots in the United States back to the 1820s, when George Gibbs, a Long Island, New York nursery owner, imported unnamed cuttings from the Schonbrunn imperial horticultural collection in Vienna, Austria.   By 1832, a Boston nursery was advertising “Zinfendal” vines for sale.  Between 1835 and 1845 “Zinfandel” became a popular “table grape” grown in hothouses in the Northeastern United States.  Frederick Macondray a sea captain and horticulturist, who grew the “Zinfindal” in Boston, Massachusetts, is credited with bringing some of the first Zinfandel cuttings to California on his sailing ship in the early 1850s.  History of Zin – ZAP  Thank you, reader.    

The Federal Government recognizes 11 holidays.  However, several things can affect when you observe your holidays such as your alternative work schedule (if you work one) and if you work full-time or part-time.  There are also special rules for state and local holidays for employees who work outside the Washington DC metropolitan area.

Federal Holidays

New Year’s Day January 1

Martin Luther King’s Birthday 3rd Monday in January

Washington’s Birthday 3rd Monday in February

Memorial Day last Monday in May

Juneteenth National Independence Day June 19

Independence Day July 4

Labor Day 1st Monday in September

Columbus Day 2nd Monday in October

Veterans’ Day November 11

Thanksgiving Day 4th Thursday in November

Christmas Day December 25

https://www.commerce.gov/hr/employees/leave/holidays   

“House burping,” in which people open the windows of their homes to let in fresh air—even in the dead of winter—has grown in popularity.  It’s part of a German practice called “lüften,” which translates to “airing out,” in order to ventilate.  Air quality professional Tony Abate, who is the chief technology officer for AtmosAir Solutions, said house burping may actually be good for you, too, noting it prevents mold, contaminants and carbon dioxide build-up.  That kind of action can help Americans, who spend roughly 90% of their time indoors, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.  Lüften is practically a way of life in Germany.  The Washington Post reports that some leases contain a clause requiring tenants to open their windows several times a day.  What Is House Burping and Why Are Some People Doing It?  Thank you, reader.   

Violin by Giuseppe Guarneri, Cremona , ca. 1730, "Kreisler" in the Library of Congress

Fritz Kreisler acquired this violin from William E. Hill & Sons in London in 1931. The violin was described in Hills'1931 opus, The Violin-makers of the Guarneri Family (1626-1762):  Their Life and Work.  Prior to Kreisler's acquisition, the violin had an especially colorful history.  It was first seized by the French in Madrid and then seized at sea by the English.  Next, the violin was owned successively by a parson in Whitehaven; several gentlemen who cherished it throughout their lives--one of whom, William Thompson, marked out his appreciation by branding his initials on the pegbox; and two sisters who guarded it jealously and for many years refused to sell it.  Eventually, the violin was bought by the collector John Mountford, who also owned the 1699 "Castelbarco" violin.  Mountford kept the "Kreisler" for the rest of his life.  With the onset of World War II, Kreisler and many other European artists found refuge and a new home in the United States.  In 1952, he presented this violin to the Library of Congress, showing his gratitude to his new home by this matchless gift.  https://www.loc.gov/collections/musical-instruments-at-the-library-of-congress/articles-and-essays/stringed-instrument-collection/violins/kreisler/   

Noun  From forty +‎ winks, possibly referring to a nap supposedly lasting as long as it takes a person to wink (i.e., blink) forty times.  forty winks pl (plural only) (idiomatic, informal)  A short sleep, especially when taken during the day; a nap.  Synonyms:  shut-eye, twenty winks   

March 13, 2026

 

A tableau vivant; often shortened to tableau; pl. tableaux vivants; French for 'living picture') is a static scene containing one or more actors or models.  They are stationary and silent, usually in costume, carefully posed, with props and/or scenery, and may be theatrically illuminated.  It thus combines aspects of theatre and the visual arts.  They were a popular medieval form that revived considerably from the 19th century, probably as they were very suitable for recording by photography.  The participants were now mostly amateurs, participating in a quick and easy form of amateur dramatics that could be brought together in an evening, and required little skill in acting or speaking.  They were also popular for various sorts of community events and parades.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tableau_vivant  Thank you, reader.   

Ruth Reichl (born 1948) is an American chef, food writer and editor.  In addition to two decades as a food critic, mainly spent at the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times, Reichl has also written cookbooks, memoirs and a novel, and has been co-producer of PBS's Gourmet's Diary of a Foodie, culinary editor for the Modern Library, host of PBS's Gourmet's Adventures With Ruth, and editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine.  She has won six James Beard Foundation Awards.  Reichl's memoirs are Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table (1998), Comfort Me with Apples:  More Adventures at the Table, Garlic and Sapphires:  The Secret Life of a Critic in Disguise, Not Becoming My Mother, and Save Me the Plums: My Gourmet Memoir (2019).  In 2009, she published Gourmet Today, a 1,008 page cookbook containing over 1,000 recipes.  She published her first novel, Delicious in 2014, and, in 2015, published My Kitchen Year: 136 Recipes That Saved My Life, a memoir of recipes prepared in the year following the shuttering of Gourmet.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Reichl    

My mother “folds me into an embrace.  Heart origami.  That’s what she used to call it when we were small, and she’d open her arms and wait for us to run inside.”  Lone Wolf by Jodi Picoult (pee-coh) 

The Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations, one of the first accounts of how nations build wealth, was first published March 9, 250 years ago in 1776.  Wikipedia    

France brought all manner of new and exotic items to Vietnam during its colonization of the region, from beer to bread, carrots to coffee, but didn’t hand them over willingly.  The story of how the modern banh mi came together, the sort of banh mi you can pick up today at a farmers’ market in London, or from a food truck in Los Angeles, recounts 160 years of Vietnam’s history in one single, fiery package.  Recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary in 2011, and the American Heritage Dictionary in 2014, the term ‘banh mi’ has officially entered the lexicon of the English-speaking world.  But in Vietnam, it refers only to ‘bread’, or ‘wheat cake’, when translated literally.  The pork, paté, and pickles combination now familiar to the West is known as a bánh mì thịt ngoui, ‘bread, meat and cold cuts’, often referred to as the bánh mì đặc biệt, ‘the special’, the one with everything.  This is what every meat-eating traveler comes to Vietnam craving.  Như Lan may be an institution in Saigon, but the banh mi’s tale neither starts nor ends here.  Its journey to international fame began 250 yards down the street, on the banks of the Saigon River in 1859, when the first French gunships and troops arrived to storm the city and begin the 30-year conquest of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, eventually forming the federation of Indochina in 1887.  From here it would take another 70 years, two world wars, a long and bloody war with the French, the civil war that followed, and a young family fleeing the communist takeover in Hanoi to create the sandwich we know today.  https://roadsandkingdoms.com/2016/the-sandwich-that-ate-the-world/   

March 9, 2026

 

Morus, a genus of flowering plants in the family Moraceae, consists of 19 species of deciduous trees commonly known as mulberries, growing wild and under cultivation in many temperate world regions.  Generally, the genus has 64 subordinate taxa, though the three most common are referred to as white, red, and black, originating from the color of their dormant buds and not necessarily the fruit color (Morus alba, M. rubra, and M. nigra, respectively), with numerous cultivars and some taxa currently unchecked and awaiting taxonomic scrutiny.  M. alba is native to South Asia, but is widely distributed across Europe, Southern Africa, South America, and North America.  M. alba is also the species most preferred by the silkworm.  It is regarded as an invasive species in Brazil, the United States, and some states of Australia.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morus_(plant)   

The word quire is utilized to describe a specific quantity of paper.  Often found in the context of printing, publishing, or stationery, it is used when referring to the number of sheets bound together or as part of packaging.  Not commonly used in everyday language, it is more prevalent in industries dealing with paper goods.  A quire is a quantity of sheet paper, typically 24 or 25 sheets, which constitutes one twentieth of a standard ream of paper.  A quire is a quantity of sheet paper, typically 24 or 25 sheets, which constitutes one twentieth of a standard ream of paper.  https://www.grammarly.com/commonly-confused-words/quire-vs-choir   

QUIRE verb (quired, quiring, quires) is a playable word in Scrabble.  In bookbinding, a section, gathering, or signature is a group of sheets folded in half, to be worked into the binding as a unit.  A section, gathering, or signature is a group of sheets folded in half, to be worked into a binding as a unit.  The section is the basic building block of codex bindings.  In Western bookbinding, sections are sewn through their folds, with the sewing thread securing each section to the one bound before it.  The gatherings can be seen by looking at the top or bottom sides of the book, though some cheaper modern books are perfect bound with no gatherings, each sheet glued directly to the binding.  The gatherings are sewn together at the spine, done in such a way that two or more stretches of thread are visible along each gathering's innermost fold.  In medieval manuscripts, a gathering, or quire, was most often formed of four folded sheets of vellum or parchment, i.e. 8 leaves, 16 sides.  The term quaternion (or sometimes quaternum) designates such a unit.  A gathering made of a single folded sheet (i.e. two leaves, four sides) is a bifolium (plural bifolia); a gathering of two sheets (i.e. four leaves, eight sides) is a binion; and one of five sheets (10 leaves, 20 sides) is a quinion.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_(bookbinding)    

New York State is America’s top apple grower, after the State of Washington, but New York City’s nickname has nothing to do with fruit production.  In fact, the Big Apple moniker first gained popularity in connection with horseracing.  Around 1920, New York City newspaper reporter John Fitz Gerald, whose beat was the track, heard African American stable hands in New Orleans say they were going to “the big apple,” a reference to New York City, whose race tracks were considered big-time venues.  Fitz Gerald soon began making mention of the Big Apple in his newspaper columns.  In the 1930s, jazz musicians adopted the term to indicate New York City was home to big-league music clubs.  The nickname later faded from use and wasn’t revived until the early 1970s, as part of a tourism campaign to spiff up New York’s image.  The man credited with creating the ad campaign, Charles Gillett, president of the New York Convention and Visitors Bureau, was a jazz enthusiast who knew that the Big Apple had once been a sobriquet bestowing respect on the city.  https://www.history.com/articles/why-is-new-york-city-nicknamed-the-big-apple     

The Full Worm Moon reaches its peak on the morning of Tuesday, March 3, 2026, at 6:38 A.M. ET.  This year’s March Moon is especially notable because it coincides with a total lunar eclipse.  The eclipse reaches its greatest point at 6:33 A.M. ET—just minutes earlier—and during totality, the Moon can take on a coppery red or orange glow.  https://www.almanac.com/content/full-moon-march   

March 2, 2026

 

New York is a city of nicknames—the Big Apple, The City That Never Sleeps, Empire City, The City So Nice They Named It Twice  . . . but let’s just concentrate on one:  Gotham.  For some, the term Gotham City is forever tied to the Batman comic universe.  But writer Bill Finger was inspired by an entry in a telephone book for Gotham Jewelers.  Finger explains in the Steranko History of Comics that changing the locale from Manhattan to the fictional Gotham City made the setting of Batman more vague.  For a history of the term “Gotham,” one doesn’t have to go much further than Edwin Burrows’s and Mike Wallace's Gotham:  A History of New York City to 1898.  Always one of our most popular reference books in the Milstein Division of U.S. History, Local History, and Genealogy, Gotham is a massive but fascinating chronicle of New York City history.  It is here that we learn that the term Gotham is tied to the author Washington Irving, famous for his short stories “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and “Rip Van Winkle.”  It’s also here that we learn Irving was being less than flattering when he nicknamed the city in 1807.  Irving was sort of a ringleader of a group known as the Lads of Kilkenny, a group Burrows describes as “a loosely knit pack of literary-minded young blades out for a good time.”  https://www.nypl.org/blog/2011/01/25/so-why-do-we-call-it-gotham-anyway    

Batman & Bill is an American documentary film that premiered on Hulu on May 6, 2017.  Directed, written and produced by Don Argott and Sheena M. Joyce, the film explores the creation of the Batman, how Bob Kane was accepted as the sole creator, and how Bill Finger was never credited for his work despite creating much of the Batman mythos.   "Everyone thinks that Bob Kane created Batman, but that's not the whole truth.  One author makes it his crusade to seek justice for Bill Finger, a struggling writer who was the key figure in creating the iconic superhero, from concept to costume to the very character we all know and love.  Bruce Wayne may be Batman's secret identity, but his creator was always a true mystery."   The documentary focuses on the efforts of Marc Tyler Nobleman to find out about the history of Bill Finger, his involvement with creating the Batman mythos, how Bob Kane got all the initial and subsequent credit and then refusing, until his later years, to acknowledge Finger as being a key contributor, and Nobleman's efforts to find Finger's descendants and the legal battle to get Finger recognized as a co-creator of Batman.  His efforts become rewarded with finding Finger's granddaughter, and DC Entertainment reaching an agreement with Finger's family in 2015, wherein all future Batman media will list the character as "created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman_%26_Bill    

Insects are the most diverse group of animals, with more than a million described species; they represent more than half of all animal species.  The word insect comes from the Latin word insectum from in + sĕco, "cut up", as insects appear to be cut into three parts.  The Latin word was introduced by Pliny the Elder who calqued the Ancient Greek word ἔντομον éntomon "insect" (as in entomology) from ἔντομος éntomos "cut in pieces"; this was Aristotle's term for this class of life in his biology, also in reference to their notched bodies.  The English word insect first appears in 1601 in Philemon Holland's translation of Pliny.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insect   

48 states in the United States have officially designated State Insects.  Find list at https://www.si.edu/spotlight/buginfo/state-insects   

pea-brained  adjective:  Extremely stupid.  Alluding to the small size of a pea.  The word pea is formed from the misinterpretation of the already singular word pease. The word pease is fossilized in children’s nursery rhyme “Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold.”  Another mistakenly formed singular is the word cherry from the already singular cherise.  Earliest documented use: 1942.  https://www.wordsmith.org/words/pea-brained.html   

The selection of state birds began with Kentucky adopting the northern cardinal in 1926.  It continued when the legislatures for Alabama, Florida, Maine, Missouri, Oregon, Texas and Wyoming selected their state birds after a campaign was started by the General Federation of Women's Clubs to name official state birds in the 1920s.  The last state to officially adopt its bird was New York in 1970.  Pennsylvania never chose an official state bird, but did choose the ruffed grouse as the state game bird.  Alaska, California, and South Dakota permit hunting of their state birds.  Alabama, Georgia, Massachusetts, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Tennessee have designated an additional "state game bird" for the purpose of hunting.  The northern cardinal is the state bird of seven states, followed by the western meadowlark as the state bird of six states.  The District of Columbia designated a district bird in 1938.  Of the five inhabited territories of the United States, American Samoa and Puerto Rico are the only ones without territorial birds.  See pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._state_birds    

February 17:  Mardi Gras / Shrove Tuesday (2026); Chinese New Year (2026); Korean New Year (2026); Tết (Vietnam, 2026)  Wikipedia   

February 17, 2026