Made primarily from sugar and ground apricot or peach cores, persipan is a substitute for the dessert filling marzipan.  The term itself is a hybrid of the scientific name for the peach, Prunus persica, and "marzipan."  Like marzipan, persipan is made worldwide but is most popular in Europe.  Whereas marzipan is created by grinding almonds and mixing them with sugar, persipan is created by grinding peach or apricot pits, often called kernels, and adding those to sugar.  The paste will contain about 35 percent sugar. The filling, however, will have closer to 60 percent sugar.  Unlike marzipan, persipan often contains 0.5 percent starch.  Both peach and apricot kernels are poisonous in their raw state.  They contain amygdalin, which, when broken down, becomes hydrogen cyanide.  These kernels are never safe to eat raw and must be processed before they are used in order to remove the toxin.  Angie Bates  http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-persipan.htm

“And don't think the garden loses its ecstasy in winter.  It's quiet, but the roots are down there riotous.”   Rumi  (1207-1273)  Persian poet  http://izquotes.com/quote/300030  See also http://www.onbeing.org/program/ecstatic-faith-rumi/feature/selected-poems-rumi-persian-and-english/875 and http://www.jigidi.com/solve.php?id=Y8XWK5LI

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

pinchbeck  (PINCH-bek)  adjective:  Counterfeit or spurious.  noun:  An alloy of zinc and copper, used as imitation gold in jewelry.  After watchmaker Christopher Pinchbeck (1670-1732), who invented it.  It’s ironic that today his name is a synonym for something counterfeit, but in his time his fame was worldwide, not only as the inventor of this curious alloy, but also as a maker of musical clocks and orreries--mechanical models of the solar system that represent the relative motions of the planets around the sun named after Charles Boyle, 4th Earl of Orrery (1676-1731).  The composition of this gold-like alloy was a closely-guarded secret, but it didn’t prevent others from passing off articles as if made from this alloy... faking fake gold!   “There had been something precious between them, like true gold among pinchbeck.”  Jo Beverley; The Secret Wedding; Signet; 2009.

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From:  Jascha Kessler  Subject:  pinchbeck  Some four+ decades ago, my wife, Julia Barrett, author of four wide-selling and variously translated Jane Austen sequels, bought a folding lorgnette in Bath:  pinchbeck.  That was during research for her first, Presumption.  She had the lenses changed and wore it on a chain to theater and opera to read programs.  An elegant piece of early Victorian vintage.  Admired everywhere in the US as exotic--and taken for gold, of course.

From:  Frank Belvin  Subject:  This week’s theme (Yours to discover)  When I was living in the Boston area some years ago, I occasionally played chamber music with William Lipscomb, a Harvard faculty member, who was awarded the Nobel prize in chemistry in 1976.  Bill was quite an accomplished clarinetist, and we enjoyed playing chamber music at his Belmont house.  Often our pianist was Stephen Morris, who also composed.  Some time after our learning of Bill’s having been awarded the Nobel prize, Steve came for an evening of music, and presented Bill with the score of a recent composition of his.  It was a chamber piece written for a sizable group.  I don’t recall the instrumentation, and I never heard it performed, but Steve made sure that we looked at the score, and he had us pay particular attention to the stave labeled “Bell”.  We weren’t quick enough on the uptake, and he had to point out to us that the bell part had no notes assigned, meaning that his piece was a “no bell” piece. 

As a whole, public libraries are the single largest supplier of books in the U.S.  No single other outlet can compete with public libraries—not Amazon, not Barnes & Noble, not Walmart or Costco, not all your local bookstores.  But you’d never know it to look at us on the web.  Type Kate Atkinson’s recent book A God in Ruins (or virtually any other title you want) into Google, for example, and records for Amazon and Barnes & Noble pop right up within the first page of results, along with hits on the author’s and publisher’s websites and dozens of reviews.  But although most public libraries carry this book, no library site is anywhere to be found among the first pages of results.  For the average reader looking for this title, the library never even shows up as an option, much less the best option, for getting the book at the best price.  While the new book “discovery” sites such as Goodreads and others attract millions of readers each month, even our largest public libraries fail to attract a fraction of that traffic.  For example, while Goodreads ranks 67th among most visited websites in the U.S., with 21.4 million unique visitors per month from the U.S. and 47.6 million from the world as a whole, OCLC’s WorldCat—our largest collective catalog and perhaps the closest thing we have to Goodreads—was ranked 3,748 of all websites in the U.S. and attracted just 487,884 visitors in April 2015, which is less than 3% of the traffic going to Goodreads.  According to the IMLS (Institute of Museum and Library Services), collectively, public libraries in the United States had 170,911,488 registered members in 2012, the most recent data available.  That number is more than half the total population of the U.S. and almost six times the number of members on Goodreads.  The problem is, of course, that all of these people are not searching one catalog, they are all searching for many of the same books in thousands of different catalogs, each maintained separately—and at great expense—by the more than 9,000 public libraries in the U.S.  Worse still, all these library catalogs are embedded in library automation systems completely isolated from the web search engines.  The catalogs all use an archaic MARC record format developed a half-century ago in the early 1960s, a format totally unsuited for modern web technologies.  The solution is obvious—ditch those 9,000 old, outmoded library catalogs and funnel all of our readers through one great catalog built on the web.  If we could get everybody to participate, such a catalog could provide information on the more than 891 million books and other materials held by public libraries in the United States alone.  Steve Coffman  http://www.infotoday.com/OnlineSearcher/Articles/Features/The-Cloud-Catalog-One-Catalog-to-Serve-Them-All-106464.shtml

ON LANGUAGE  By the time of our constitutional convention, in an unpublished letter to the putative lexicographer Noah Webster, Benjamin Franklin showed he was growing conservative in his view of the American language.  Using the word substantive for what we would now call ''nominative'' or simply ''noun,'' the apparently shocked revolutionist wrote to Webster:  ''I find a Verb formed from the substantive Notice. . . . Also another Verb, from the Substantive Advocate. . . . another from the Substantive Progress, the most awkward and abominable of the three. . . . If you should happen to be of my Opinion with respect to these Innovations you will use your Authority in reprobating them.''  William Safire  http://www.nytimes.com/2003/07/06/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-7-6-03-on-language-miffy-prometheus.html

PORT HADLOCK, WA   A small sample of the target audience has decided which children's picture books they like best.  Then came the American Library Association's turn.  At 3:45 p.m. January 14, 2016, the public can compare choices for the Caldecott Medal for the most distinguished picture book for children at the Jefferson County Library, in the North Olympic Peninsula, during a party to celebrate both sets of winners.  On January 11, 2016, the American Library Association, or ALA, announced the winner of the 2016 Caldecott Medal:  Finding Winnie:  The True Story of the World's Most Famous Bear, illustrated by Sophie Blackall and written by Lindsay Mattick.  Several honor books were also named.  See picture of the Mock Caldecott Selection Committee at  http://www.peninsuladailynews.com/article/20160112/NEWS/301129995

American Library Association announces 2016 youth media award winners  http://ala.unikron.com/2016/

See a list of Caldecott winners and honor books, 1938-2015, at http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/caldecottmedal/caldecotthonors/caldecottmedal

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1407  January 13, 2016  On this date in 1596, Jan van Goyen, Dutch painter, was born.  On this date in 1683,  Christoph Graupner, German harpsichord player and composer, was born.