"I remember walking into the
library at my
terrifying new school and seeing a table that said 'Explore New Worlds.' Those books were my first taste of science
fiction and fantasy. It was like some
angel librarian had offered me an escape hatch." - Leigh Bardugo Find advice for aspiring writers and how to
deal with writer's block at http://www.leighbardugo.com/about/
QUOTES from All the
Light We cannot See, novel by Anthony Doerr
"Radio: it ties a million
ears to a single mouth." "To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of
blindness. Beneath your world of skies
and faces and buildings exists a rawer and older world, a place where surface
planes disintegrate and sounds ribbon in shoals through the air."
Anthony Doerr
was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. He
is the author of the story collections The Shell Collector and Memory Wall,
the memoir Four Seasons in Rome, and
the novels About Grace and All the Light We Cannot See,
which was awarded the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the 2015
Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction. Doerr’s short stories and essays have
won four O.
Henry Prizes and been
anthologized in The Best American Short
Stories, New American Stories, The Best American Essays, The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction, and
lots of other places. His work has won the Barnes & Noble Discover Prize, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, a Guggenheim
Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, an Alex Award from the American Library Association, the National Magazine Award for Fiction, four Pushcart
Prizes, two Pacific Northwest Book Awards, four Ohioana Book Awards, the 2010
Story Prize, which is considered the most prestigious prize in the
U.S. for a collection of short stories, and the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award, which is the largest prize in the
world for a single short story.
How an Apple Pie American Learned to Love French
Macarons by Anthony Doerr
"We’d been in Paris a month when our son Owen decided
that eating macarons was not sufficient; it would be even
better to make them. Thirty seconds on
the Internet was enough to realize that macaronage demanded culinary skills far beyond
my own. The woman on the other end of
the phone at a cooking school reported that the twins were too young to enroll
in a macaron class
by themselves. Maybe there was an adult
who could participate with them? This was how, one day last
April, I shut off my phone, nestled a foot-tall paper chef’s toque on my head,
and spilled half a bag of sugar into my shoe." Read the rest of the story at http://www.cntraveler.com/stories/2016-01-20/how-an-apple-pie-american-learned-to-love-french-macarons
In February
2014, Russell Graves walked into
collectibles dealer Maritime International with a treasure to peddle: 75 Civil War–era photographs and 50 original
World War I– and World War II–era posters.
It was a collection the owner normally would have been interested in
buying, but the items seemed familiar.
What Graves didn’t know was that by the time he brought them to the
dealer, the owner had already seen the items at the library a few weeks earlier. “I had been talking about them to the owner
while he was visiting our special collections area,” says special collections
librarian Bill Cook of Bangor (Maine) Public Library. Graves was working as a janitor at the
library through the city’s workfare program and often spent time in the special
collections area, claiming he was cleaning while in reality he was pilfering
historical artifacts and documents to sell for a profit. The items had an estimated value of $31,000,
and Graves was later charged with a felony.
Theft of rare books, historical materials, documents, maps, and pictures
isn’t a new crime, says Travis McDade, curator of rare books at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s law library.
“It’s a crime about one day less old than libraries themselves,” says
McDade, author of Thieves
of Book Row, about the worst book theft
ring in American history, a series of heists from the New York Public Library’s
rare-book room during the 1920s and 1930s.
http://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/2015/09/16/thwarting-book-thieves/
Toledo Museum of Art Feb. 12–May 8, 2016 Indigenous Beauty:
Masterworks of American Indian
Art from the Diker Collection features more than 100 masterworks
representing tribes across the North American continent. Organized by the American Federation of Arts,
this exhibition is made possible by the generosity of an anonymous donor, the
JFM Foundation, and Mrs. Donald M. Cox. http://www.toledomuseum.org/exhibitions/indigenous-beauty/
The Election Cake is actually a classic English
fruitcake or plum cake. The original
cakes included molasses, spice, raisins, and currants were used in this cake. Later
brandy was added. Also known as Oak
Cake, Hartford Election Cake, and Training Cakes, because another name for
Election Day was Training Day. Election Day was considered an important holiday in
early New England. In importance, it
ranked second only to Thanksgiving. As
our Puritan ancestors were denied the joys of Christmas and Easter, Election
Day with its festivities of parades, religious ceremonies, balls, and fine
foods helped compensate for the loss.
Because of this, they made Election Day into a holiday in which
everything broke loose, people gathered in town and visited each others’
houses. Ruled by the English, colonial
American farmers were called to military practice for days of training sessions
(know as mustering) to the nearest designated towns. Alice Ross, in her article on Election Cakes
for the Journal of Antiques and Collectibles states: They traveled (sometimes for days) and
descended on the nearest designated towns for days of training sessions
(mustering) and nights of socializing, carousing, and partaking of what became
known as "Muster Cake."
Townsfolk, of necessity, had prepared for the onslaught by baking and
cooking for the numbers that would fill every bed in homes, taverns, and
inns. The Yankee Magazine Cookbook says
the cake was "served either at the church supper preceding the town
meeting, or sold outside the polling place, like a one-cake bake sale, to help
sustain voters." These cakes were
baked to celebrate Election Days at least as early as 1771 in Connecticut,
before the American Revolution of 1775.
The Election Cake, as all cakes baked in colonial homes, was
yeast-leavened, as there was no commercial baking powder, and they were baked
in brick fireplace ovens. Colonial women
vied with each other as to who baked the best cakes as families exchanged
visits and treated their guest with slices of this cake. Historians feel that the recipe for Election
Cake was adapted from popular period English yeast breads. Find recipes at http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/Cakes/ElectionCake.htm See also http://nourishedkitchen.com/election-cake-a-touch-of-american-culinary-history/
and https://culinaryguild.wordpress.com/2012/11/02/election-day-cake/
Sean Riddle
accidentally crashed a drone into the 40th floor of the Empire State Building
on February 4, 2016. It then fell and
landed on the 36th floor, says CBS New York.
Riddle called building security and asked for his drone back. He was arrested and charged with reckless
endangerment and navigation inside the city.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/empire-state-building-makes-aviation-history-again-hit-by-drone/http://www.cbsnews.com/news/empire-state-building-makes-aviation-history-again-hit-by-drone/
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1421
February 5, 2016 Word of the
Day: pony keg noun
(US) A container for beer holding 7.75 US gallons, equal to half the size of a
standard beer keg. (Cincinnati, colloquial) A drive-through liquor store; by extension, any convenience store. Quote of the Day: “My definition
of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.” - Adlai
Ewing Stevenson II (February
5, 1900 – July 14, 1965), 31st Governor of Illinois, U.S. presidential candidate in 1952 and 1956, and
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, 1961-1965
No comments:
Post a Comment