MAZE OR LABYRINTH  In the English-speaking world it is often considered that to qualify as a maze, a design must have choices in the pathway.  Popular consensus also indicates that labyrinths have one pathway that leads inexorably from the entrance to the goal, albeit often by the most complex and winding of routes.  These unicursal designs have been known as labyrinths for thousands of years, and to qualify as a labyrinth, a design should have but one path.  However, the dividing line between what constitutes a maze or a labyrinth can sometimes become blurred, as mazes with single paths and labyrinths with more than one path can exist, although their intent is usually clear from their designs.  http://www.labyrinthos.net/typology.html  See also http://www.diffen.com/difference/Labyrinth_vs_Maze and http://www.unmuseum.org/maze.htm

brunch = breakfast and lunch   linner = lunch and dinner

breakfast, lunch and dinner = ?  brunner?  one meal?  the meal?  day's meal?

Hilary Mantel (born 1952) is the bestselling author of many novels including Wolf Hall, which won the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.  Bring Up the Bodies, Book Two of the Thomas Cromwell Trilogy, was also awarded the Man Booker Prize and the Costa Book Award.  She is also the author of A Change of Climate, A Place of Greater Safety, Eight Months on Ghazzah Street, An Experiment in Love, The Giant, O'Brien, Fludd, Beyond Black, Every Day Is Mother's Day, and Vacant Possession.  She has also written a memoir, Giving Up the Ghost.  Mantel was the winner of the Hawthornden Prize, and her reviews and essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, and the London Review of Books.  http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/58851.Hilary_Mantel 

See also http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/15/the-dead-are-real and http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6360/art-of-fiction-no-226-hilary-mantel

The Problem with Historical Fiction is That it Needs Heroes--History Doesn't by Paul Lay   One of my favourite places in the world is the Living Hall of the Frick Collection in Manhattan’s Upper East Side.  Either side of its fireplace, crowned by a St Jerome of El Greco, hang two portraits by Hans Holbein the Younger of Henry VIII’s two great statesmen:  on the left, Thomas More, to the right, Thomas Cromwell.  The portraits, though contemporary, already suggest the stereotypes that More and Cromwell would come to represent, in historical fiction, if not in history.  More, luxuriant, confident, born to the purple, is every bit the Renaissance Man.  Cromwell, jowly and clad in black, looks furtive, anxious and insecure, a man who by birth, though certainly not intellect and cunning, is out of position.  Judging by reactions to the BBC’s six-part adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s novels, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, the contest over the legacies of More and Cromwell is as bitter as ever and damaging to serious widespread engagement with this crucial period of history.  Read more and link to related articles at http://www.historytoday.com/paul-lay/no-more-heroes-thomas-cromwell-and-thomas-more

Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658), Lord Protector of England, was born in Huntington, a small town near Cambridge, to Robert Cromwell and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of William Steward.  Although not a direct descendent of Henry VIII’s chief minister Thomas Cromwell, Oliver Cromwell’s great-great-grandfather, Morgan Williams, married Thomas’ sister Katherine in 1497.  It was Morgan and Katherine’s three sons who took the surname Cromwell in honour of their famous maternal uncle. This practice was repeated by many of their descendants, who also occasionally used the surname Williams-alias-Cromwell.  http://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/oliver-cromwell/

City chicken (also known in some locations as mock drumsticks or mock chicken) is an entrée consisting of cubes of meat (usually pork), which have been placed on a wooden skewer (approximately 4–5 inches long), then fried and/or baked.  Depending on the recipe, they may be breaded.  Despite the name of the dish, city chicken almost never contains chicken.  A similar dish known as "mock chicken" was described as early as 1908.  The first references to city chicken appeared in newspapers and cookbooks just prior to and during the Depression Era in cities such as Pittsburgh.  City chicken typically has cooks using meat scraps to fashion a makeshift drumstick from them.  During the Depression, cooks used pork because it was then cheaper than chicken in many parts of the country, especially in those markets far from rural poultry farms.  Sometimes cooks would grind the meat and use a drumstick-shaped mold to form the ground meat around a skewer.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_chicken  Find city chicken recipes at http://www.cooks.com/rec/search/0,1-0,city_chicken,FF.html

Q:  Among Muslims, are most Sunnis or Shiites?  A:  More than 85 percent of the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are Sunni, living across the Arab world, including in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Indonesia.  Shiites dominate Iran, Iraq and Bahrain.  Saudi Arabia is the leading Sunni state.  Iran is the leading Shiite state.  The Saudi royal family practices Wahhabism, a very conservative Sunnism.  It controls Islam’s holiest shrines, Mecca and Medina. — The New York Times.  http://thecourier.com/opinion/columns/2016/01/25/how-long-will-the-turbines-last/

Two big-name legal research companies are battling in federal court over the right to exclusively publish the law—in this case, the Georgia Administrative Rules and Regulations.  The lawsuit http://ia801500.us.archive.org/3/items/gov.uscourts.gand.224009/gov.uscourts.gand.224009.1.0.pdf comes as states across the nation partner with legal research companies to offer exclusive publishing and licensing deals for digitizing and making available online the states' reams of laws and regulations.  The only problem is that the law is not copyrightable—or so says one of the publishers involved in the Georgia litigation.  In this instance, District of Columbia-based legal publisher Fastcase wants a judge to fend off a cease-and-desist demand from rival Virginia-based Lawriter, which has been designated as the exclusive publisher (PDF) of Georgia's compilation (PDF) of the rules and regulations of its state agencies.  David Kravets  Read more at http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/online-legal-publishers-squabble-over-the-right-to-copyright-the-law/

The proof of the pudding means to fully test something you need to experience it yourself.  'The proof of the pudding' is just shorthand for 'the proof of the pudding is in the eating'.  That longer version makes sense at least, whereas the shortened version really doesn't mean anything--nor does the often-quoted incorrect variation 'the proof is in the pudding'.  The continued use of that meaningless version is no doubt bolstered by the fact that the correct version isn't at all easy to understand.  The meaning become clear when you know that 'proof' here is a verb meaning 'test'.  The more common meaning of 'proof' in our day and age is the noun meaning 'the evidence that demonstrates a truth'--as in a mathematical or legal proof.  The verb form meaning 'to test' is less often used these days, although it does survive in several commonly used phrases:  'the exception that proves the rule', 'proof-read', 'proving-ground', etc.  When bakers 'prove' yeast they are    letting it stand in warm water for a time, to determine that it is active.  Clearly, the distinction between these two forms of the word was originally quite slight and the proof in a 'showing to be true' sense is merely the successful outcome of a test of whether a proposition is correct or not.  'The proof of the pudding is in the eating' is a very old proverb.  The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations dates it back to the early 14th century, albeit without offering any supporting evidence for that assertion.  The phrase is widely attributed to Cervantes in The History of Don Quixote.  This appears to be by virtue of an early 18th century translation by Peter Motteux, which has been criticised by later scholars as 'a loose paraphrase' and 'Franco-Cockney'.  Crucially the Spanish word for pudding - 'budín', doesn't appear in the original Spanish text.  It is doubtful that 'the proof of the pudding' was a figurative phrase that was known to Cervantes.  The earliest printed example of the proverb that I can find is in William Camden's Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine, 1605:  "All the proof of a pudding is in the eating."  http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/proof-of-the-pudding.html  See also http://www.npr.org/2012/08/24/159975466/corrections-and-comments-to-stories and http://www.word-detective.com/2008/12/the-proof-is-in-the-pudding/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1428  February 17, 2016  On this date in 1753 in Sweden, February 17 was followed by March 1 as the country moved from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar.  On this date in 1904, Madama Butterfly received its première at La Scala in Milan.