Isabella Mary Beeton (née Mayson; 1836–1865), also known as Mrs Beeton, was an English journalist, editor and writer.  Her name is particularly associated with her first book, the 1861 work Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management.  She was born in London and, after schooling in Islington, north London, and Heidelberg, Germany, she married Samuel Orchart Beeton, an ambitious publisher and magazine editor.  In 1857, less than a year after the wedding, Isabella began writing for one of her husband's publications, The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine.  She translated French fiction and wrote the cookery column, though all the recipes were plagiarised from other works, or sent in by the magazine's readers.  In 1859 the Beetons launched a series of 48-page monthly supplements to The Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine; the 24 instalments were published in one volume as Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management in October 1861, which sold 60,000 copies in the first year.  The Book of Household Management has been edited, revised and enlarged several times after Isabella's death and is still in print as at 2016.   Her name has become associated with knowledge and authority on Victorian cooking and home management, and the Oxford English Dictionary states that by 1891 the term Mrs Beeton had become used as a generic name for a domestic authority.  She is also considered a strong influence in the building or shaping of a middle-class identity of the Victorian era.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Beeton

Canceled is more common in American English, and cancelled is more common in British English.  The AP Stylebook recommends canceled.  http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/grammar/canceled-or-cancelled  American English has only recently adopted the one-l spellings of canceled, canceling, etc., and the change is not fully engrained in the American language.  In web searches of American publications covering the last couple of years, cancelled and cancelling still appear about once for every five instances of canceled and canceling.  Outside the U.S., meanwhile, the one-l spellings appear only very rarely.  http://grammarist.com/spelling/cancel/

NAME CHANGES  Actor Charlton Heston (born John Charles Carter 1923),  Actress Merle Oberon (born Estelle Merle O'Brien Thompson 1911), Singer and composer Sir Elton Hercules John (born Reginald Kenneth Dwight 1947), Veterinarian and author James Herriot (born James Alfred Wight 1916),  Author Jax Miller (born Anne O'Donnell 1985)

Lipogram is a work written with a constraint.  Imagine you've just started your great epic novel and one of the keys on your keyboard is broken.  It would be trivial to manage without a Q, X, or Z, but writing without a single E--ah, that'd be some challenge.  If it sounds undoable, consider that whole books have been written without an E, the most used letter in the English language.  Without an E, one has to give up some of the most common pronouns such as he, she, we, me, and so on.  What's more, even the article "the" is barred.  Coming back to books written without Es, Ernest Vincent Wright's 1939 novel Gadsby is written without the second vowel.  One of the best known E-less works is Georges Perec's lipogrammatic French novel, La Disparition (The Disappearance).  Its plot is full of wordplay, puzzles, and other word-fun.  For example, a character is missing eggs, or is unable to remember his name because it needs E in the spelling.  Though it may be hard to believe considering the restriction under which it is written, the novel is said to be quite engrossing.  Apparently, many reviewers were not even aware that a special constraint was used in writing it.  After writing the novel, Perec faced a protest from the A, I, O, and U keys on his keyboard that they had to do all the work.  So Perec had no choice but to write a short work called Les Revenentes, where he put to work all those idle Es:  the only vowel used was E.  http://wordsmith.org/words/lipogram.html

Primary school teacher Margherita Aurora, in the small town of Copparo in central Italy, was intrigued when one of her students, Matteo, used an unfamiliar word in a written assignment.  Matteo described a flower as "petaloso" ("full of petals").  The word doesn't officially exist in the Italian dictionary, but grammatically it makes sense as a combination of "petalo" ("petal") and the suffix "-oso" ("full of").  The assignment got Aurora thinking--could the eight-year-old Matteo have invented a new word? With his teacher's help, the student wrote to the Accademia della Crusca--the institution that oversees the use of the Italian --to ask for their opinion.  To their surprise, the pair got an encouraging reply.  "The word you invented is well formed and could be used in the Italian language," one of the Crusca's top linguistic experts wrote.  "It is beautiful and clear."  The Crusca itself--an institution created in 1583--joined in the online effort and retweeted messages using the word.  The Zanichelli publishing house--which publishes one of most widely referenced Italian dictionaries--hinted that it would include the word in its next edition.  Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi even chipped in to congratulate the young student.  http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-35653871

The chickpea or chick pea (Cicer arietinum) is a legume of the family Fabaceae, subfamily Faboideae.  It is also known as gram, or Bengal gram, garbanzo or garbanzo bean, and sometimes known as Egyptian pea, ceci, cece or chana, or Kabuli chana (particularly in northern India).  Its seeds are high in protein.  It is one of the earliest cultivated legumes:  7,500-year-old remains have been found in the Middle East.  Read more and see pictures at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chickpea

Most garbanzo beans found in the grocery (especially canned garbanzos) are cream-colored and relatively round.  This type of garbanzo bean is called the "kabuli-type."  Worldwide, there's a far more common type of garbanzo bean called the "desi-type."  This second type of garbanzo bean is about half the size of cream-colored type we're accustomed to seeing in the grocery, and it's more irregular in shape.  The color is also different—varying from light tan to black.   Researchers have recently determined that many of the antioxidants present in garbanzo beans are especially concentrated in the outer seed coat that gives the beans their distinctive color.  Darker-colored "desi-type" garbanzo beans appear to have thicker seed coats and greater concentrations of antioxidants than the larger and more regularly shaped cream-colored garbanzos that are regularly found at salad bars and in canned products.  http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=58

Ancient Icelandic sagas told of a larger-than-life Viking warrior with a shock of red hair, banished from his home for killing another man, who sailed with hundreds of followers to an icy island in the sea.  And they told of his son, who set out only a few years later to an even more distant place he knew as “Vinland,” but which today’s historians believe were the eastern coasts of modern day Canada and the United States.  To date, the sagas have only led archaeologists to one actual, verified Norse historical site in the New World—the 1000-year-old seaside settlement L’Anse aux Meadows on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland.  It would take 55 years and a view from space to track down a possible second one.  The new archaeological find, announced March 31, 2016, offers tantalizing evidence of a Viking presence 300 miles from the only place in Canada they’d ever been seen before.  It doesn’t look like much—a fire-cracked stone and some mangled scraps of iron unearthed from a muddy patch of ground called Point Rosee.  But lead archaeologist Sarah Parcak says the site is almost certainly only one of two things:  “Either it’s … an entirely new culture that looks exactly like the Norse and we don’t know what it is,” she told The Washington Post in a phone interview.  “Or it’s the westernmost Norse site that’s ever been discovered.”  Sarah Kaplan  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/04/01/an-ancient-site-spotted-from-space-could-rewrite-the-history-of-vikings-in-north-america/

30 ways to celebrate National Poetry Month  https://www.poets.org/national-poetry-month/30-ways-celebrate-national-poetry-month  Held every April since 1996--for variety, you may celebrate a month to honor those with ties to your state.  For instance, in Ohio that could include Hart Crane, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, and Lois Lenski.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1450  April 1, 2016  On this date in 1871, F. Melius Christiansen, Norwegian-American violinist and conductor, was born.  (Our high school choir followed the "Christiansen choral tradition.")  On this date in 1873, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Russian pianist, composer, and conductor, was born.