Either I am very shallow or I have great resilience.  Whichever it may be, cheesecake restores me.  The Alpine Advocate (Emma Lord Mystery, #1) by Mary Daheim  

http://www.goodreads.com/user_status/book/1062842.The_Alpine_Advocate

The Firelands or Sufferers' Lands tract was located at the western end of the Connecticut Western Reserve in what is now Ohio.  It took the name "Fire Lands" because the resale of this land was intended as financial restitution for residents of the Connecticut towns of Danbury, Fairfield, Greenwich, Groton, New Haven, New London, Norwalk, and Ridgefield.  Their homes had been burned in 1779 and 1781 by British forces during the American Revolutionary War. " Fire Lands" was later spelled as one word, 'Firelands'.  In 1792 the Connecticut legislature set aside 500,000 acres (2,000 km²), at the western end of the "Western Reserve" for the Connecticut "Sufferers".  The area consisted of nearly all of the present-day Huron and Erie counties, as well as Danbury Township (Marblehead Peninsula) and much of Catawba Island Township now in Ottawa County; and Ruggles Township now in Ashland County.  Almost none of the original "Sufferers" ever settled in the Firelands, because land speculators purchased all of the original claims for re-sale.

See graphics at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firelands

A row of books is more than a compendium of information.  It’s a map of all the places your mind has been, a group of friends standing silently by to comfort you.  The Executor by Jesse Kellerman   http://www.reads88.com/executor?page=0%252525252C49,36

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift is not really a children’s book, but it has been seen as a children’s story right from the start:  little people, big people, talking horses.  It was first published in 1726.  The book, which made fun of the political scene and certain prominent people in England, was published anonymously and was a great success.  In each of the three stories in this book, the hero, Lemuel Gulliver, embarks on a voyage, but, as in the Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor on which the stories may in part have been based, some calamity befalls him.  First, Gulliver arrives in Lilliput, where he finds himself a giant, held prisoner by tiny men.  The second land he visits is called Brobdingnag, a land of giants.  Gulliver is now a tiny person.  Gulliver finally ends up in the land of the Houyhnhnms, peaceful horses who have created a perfect society, except for the presence of monkey-like Yahoos.  Although Gulliver looks like a well-kempt Yahoo, he wants to be a Houyhnhnm.  Finally, he has to leave because he does not fit into this society.  http://www.penguinreaders.com/pdf/downloads/pr/teachers-notes/9781405878418.pdf

BIG EYES is a 2014 film starring Amy Adams, Christoph Waltz, Krysten Ritter, and Jason Schwartzman.  It is based on American painter Margaret Keane and her husband Walter Keane.  Margaret Hawkins met Walter Keane at an outdoor art fair in San Francisco in the spring of 1955.  Discussing her big-eyed paintings in a 2014 interview, Margaret Keane said:  "Those sad children were really my own deep feelings that I couldn't express in any other way."  "I was actually putting my own feelings into that child I was painting."  In the movie, Amy Adams character reasons that she paints the eyes big because the "eyes are the windows to the soul," a sentiment that the real Margaret Keane has echoed herself.  "Children do have big eyes," says Margaret.  "When I'm doing a portrait, the eyes are the most expressive part of the face.  And they just got bigger and bigger and bigger."  When Margaret Keane discovered Walter was taking credit for her paintings that he was selling at The Hungry i beatnik club, they were two years into their marriage and had been happy until that point.  Margaret says that Walter told her, "We need the money.  People are more likely to buy a painting if they think they're talking to the artist.  People don't want to think I can't paint and need to have my wife paint.  People already think I painted the big eyes and if I suddenly say it was you, it'll be confusing and people will start suing us."  The popularity of the big-eye paintings soared when the Keanes started to mass produce the images for sale as posters, on postcards, china plates, refrigerator magnets, etc., making the art affordable to the masses.  It was also available at mainstream locations like supermarkets and gas stations.  A 1965 LIFE Magazine story called the paintings "the most popular art now being produced in the free world."  Margaret revealed the truth during an October 1970 interview with a San Francisco radio talk show.  This was more than five years after she and Walter had separated.  She intended to discuss her art show at the Cory Art Gallery in San Francisco, but she ended up coming clean after the host began to ask about her ex-husband Walter.  The real Margaret Keane has a cameo in the Big Eyes movie.  "I'm a little old lady sitting on a park bench," says Margaret.  Find what was true and what was false in the movie and link to interviews at http://www.historyvshollywood.com/reelfaces/big-eyes/

Librarian of Congress James H. Billington announced that he will retire Sept. 30, 2015, three months earlier than scheduled.  Billington, 86, announced in June that he would retire at the end of the year.  The 13th librarian of Congress, he was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1987.  Billington’s abrupt departure comes weeks after the library experienced widespread computer failures that shut down the U.S. Copyright Office’s online registration system for more than a week and interrupted some electronic services of the National Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped.  In March, a congressional watchdog agency issued a scathing report about the technological problems at the Library of Congress that blamed the executive leadership for wasting millions of taxpayer dollars.  David Mao, the deputy librarian of Congress who has been part of the leadership team since January, will serve as acting librarian until a presidential appointment is made.  David Rubenstein, chairman of the library’s James Madison Council, praised Billington for launching the National Book Festival and other programs.  “Jim Billington is the Librarian of Congress, but in my view he is the Librarian of the United States.  He has done a great service for our country,” Rubenstein said in a statement.  Founded in 1800, the Library of Congress is a $630 million operation with 3,200 employees that serves as the research arm of Congress, provides Congress legal advice and runs the Copyright Office, a major contributor to the world’s digital economy.  Peggy McGlone  https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/librarian-of-congress-james-h-billington-to-retire-sept-30/2015/09/25/f92d13ca-63b0-11e5-8e9e-dce8a2a2a679_story.html

Daniel Thompson, who five decades ago automated the arcane art of bagel making, a development—seen variously as saving grace and sacrilege—that has sent billions of mass-produced bagels raining down on the American heartland, died on September 3, 2015 in Rancho Mirage, Calif.  He was 94.  A California math teacher turned inventor, Mr. Thompson was a shaper of postwar suburban culture in more than one respect:  He also created the first wheeled, folding Ping-Pong table, a fixture of American basements from the mid-20th century onward.  But it was for the bagel machine that Mr. Thompson remained best known. The invention changed the American diet, ushering in the welter of packaged bagels—notably Lender’s—now found in supermarkets nationwide, and making the bagel a staple of fast-food outlets.   Abraham Thomas Thompson was born on Jan. 16, 1921, in Winnipeg, Canada, where his father had established a bakery.  When he was a few weeks old, to memorialize a cousin who had recently died, his parents changed his name to Daniel.  The family moved to Los Angeles when Daniel was a baby.  Like his father before him, Mr. Thompson was a tinkerer.  In 1953, he received United States patent No. 2,645,539 for his “Folding Table, Tennis Table, or the Like.”  Though the table did not make him wealthy, his family said, it did give him the wherewithal to attain the grail his father had long sought: an automated bagel maker.  In 1961, Mr. Thompson and his wife, Ada, established the Thompson Bagel Machine Manufacturing Corporation.  Two years later, Lender’s, which had been making bagels in New Haven since the 1920s, leased the first Thompson machine.  Where a traditional bagel baker could produce about 120 bagels in an hour, Mr. Thompson’s machine let a single unskilled worker turn out 400.  This allowed Lender’s to make bagels in immense quantities and sell them, bagged and frozen, in supermarkets.  Lender’s, which still uses Thompson machines, is today among the largest makers of bagels in the United States, producing 750 million a year.  Margalit Fox  See pictures at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/22/business/daniel-thompson-whose-bagel-machine-altered-the-american-diet-dies-at-94.html?_r=0

September 28, 2015  A large swathe of the planet was treated to a rare lunar event on Sunday night and early Monday morning when a so-called "supermoon" coincided with a lunar eclipse.  Neither of these astronomical events are particularly rare in their own right, but their coincidence hasn't happened since 1982 and won't happen again until 2033.  Ian O'Neill  See a collection of photos from around the world at http://news.discovery.com/space/astronomy/stunning-supermoon-eclipse-wowed-the-world-photos-150928.htm

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1353  September 28, 2015  On this date in 1928, Sir Alexander Fleming noticed a bacteria-killing mold growing in his laboratory, discovering what later became known as penicillin.  On this date in 1951, CBS made the first color televisions available for sale to the general public, but the product was discontinued less than a month later.  Word of the Day:  pleonasm  noun  (uncountable, rhetoric)  Redundancy in wording.  (countable)  A phrase involving pleonasm, that is, a phrase in which one or more words are redundant as their meaning is expressed elsewhere in the phrase.