Perhaps you've read a recipe that calls specifically for canned San Marzano tomatoes.  But what's so great about these particular tomatoes anyway?  San Marzano tomatoes are the most famous plum tomato to come out of Italy.  They are grown in the rich volcanic soil at the base of Mount Vesuvius, which gives them a sweet flavor and low acidity and they are coveted for their firm pulp, deep red color, easy to remove skin and low seed count.  In fact while regular round tomatoes usually have four or five locules or seed pockets, plum tomatoes like those from San Marzano have only two.  In San Marzano, the tomato harvest begins in August and runs through September.  The crops are very delicate and all the tomatoes are picked by hand at the peak of their ripeness.  Because of the close attention to quality, many cooks consider San Marzano tomatoes to be among the best in the world to use in a sauce.  The tomatoes are grown under very specific and strict rules and as such, authentic San Marzano tomatoes will have an official DOP (Denominazione d' Origine Protetta) on the can or jar, although there are domestically grown versions using the same seed varieties.  http://www.thekitchn.com/whats-the-deal-14-16365

The San Marzano tomato is considered quite the very finest varietal of the fruit.  Some food historians say its origins were in Peru--and the first plants were presented as a gift from the Kingdom of Peru to the then Kingdom of Naples in 1770.  Others say, for me more probably, they would have come from Mexico via Spain, as did other tomato varieties--and began life as decorative pomodoro plants in the smarter gardens around the city.  They are known locally as ‘red gold’.  http://www.garethjonesfood.com/?p=3851

Mount Vesuvius is a stratovolcano on the Gulf of Naples, Italy.  It is about 9 kilometres (5.6 mi) east of Naples.  Mount Vesuvius is best known for its eruption in AD 79 which destroyed the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.  They were never built again.  The towns were buried so completely that people who lived there forgot about them until they were accidentally discovered again in the 18th century.  The eruption also changed the way the Sarno River flowed and raised the sea beach.  Because of this, Pompeii was not on the river nor next to the coast anymore.   https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Vesuvius

Margret Elizabeth Rey (1906–1996) was a German-born American writer and illustrator, known best for the Curious George series of children's picture books that she and her husband H. A. Rey created from 1939 to 1966.  Curious George was an instant success, and the Reys were commissioned to write more adventures of the mischievous monkey and his friend, the Man with the Yellow Hat.  They wrote seven stories in all, with Hans mainly doing the illustrations and Margret working mostly on the stories, though they both admitted to sharing the work and cooperating fully in every stage of development.  At first, however, Margret's name was left off the cover, ostensibly because there was a glut of women already writing children's fiction.  In later editions, this was corrected, and Margret now receives full credit for her role in developing the stories.  The de Grummond Children's Literature Collection in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, holds more than 300 boxes of Rey papers dated 1873 to 2002.  Dr. Lena Y. de Grummond, a professor in the field of library science at The University of Southern Mississippi, contacted the Reys in 1966 about USM's new children's literature collection.  H. A. and Margret donated a pair of sketches at the time.  When Margret Rey died in 1996, her will designated that the entire literary estate of the Reys would be donated to the de Grummond Collection.  Dr. Lena Y. de Grummond, a professor in the field of library science at The University of Southern Mississippi, contacted the Reys in 1966 about USM's new children's literature collection.  H. A. and Margret donated a pair of sketches at the time.  When Margret Rey died in 1996, her will designated that the entire literary estate of the Reys would be donated to the de Grummond Collection.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margret_Rey

To Write Better Code, Read Virginia Woolf  by J. Bradford Hipps   Fresh out of college in 1993, I signed on with a large technology consultancy.  After a six-week programming boot camp, we were pitched headfirst into the deep end of software development.  We (mostly engineers, with a spritzing of humanities majors) were attached to an enormous cellular carrier. Our assignment was to rewrite its rating and billing system.  I was assigned to a team charged with a program in the system which concerned the movement of individual mobile subscribers from one “parent” account plan to another.  Each one of these moves caused an avalanche of plan activations and terminations, carry-overs or forfeitures of accumulated talk minutes, and umpteen other causal conditionals that would affect the subscriber’s bill.  This program, thousands of lines of code long and growing by the hour, was passed around our team like an exquisite corpse.  The subscribers and their parent accounts were rendered on our screens as a series of S’s and A’s.  After we stared at these figures for weeks, they began to infect our dreams.  Our first big break came from a music major.  A pianist, I think, who joined our team several months into the project.  Within a matter of weeks, she had hit upon a method to make the S’s hold on to the correct attributes even when their parent A was changed.  We had been paralyzed.  The minute we tweaked one bit of logic, we realized we’d fouled up another.  But our music major moved freely.  Instead of freezing up over the logical permutations behind each A and S, she found that these symbols put her in the mind of musical notes.  As notes, they could be made to work in concert.  They could be orchestrated.  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/opinion/sunday/to-write-software-read-novels.html

The Peabody 30 complete winner's list http://www.peabodyawards.com/stories/story/the-peabody-30   The Peabody Awards for excellence in electronic media are based at the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication.  The Peabody ceremony on May 21, 2016 will air in a 90-minute special, “The 75th Anniversary Peabody Awards,” on Pivot, Monday, June 6, 2016 (8 p.m. ET/PT).

John R. "Jack" Horner (born 1946), who was doing field-work in Montana with his research partner Bob Makela, called on rock shop owner Marion Brandvold to identify bones she had found.  Horner was shown tiny bone parts.  He identified these as a baby duck-billed dinosaur--the smallest he had ever seen.  Brandvold then showed him more bones and the site they had come from.  Horner excavated the site, finding parts of 15 dinosaur babies.  In 1979 he published a paper about this find in Nature; this paper changed everything, both scientifically and personally.  It described a new dinosaur genus, which Horner named Maiasaura and a new species Maiasaura peeblesorum.  It described the first ever discovery of young dinosaur fossils in a nest, showed that dinosaurs had cared for their young, which lived in the nest after hatching, and it established Horner as a well-known professional paleontologist, despite the fact that he did not have a degree.  In 1980 Horner was awarded National Science Foundation funding for a fossil-hunting expedition close to the site where Marion Brandvold had found the first tiny Maiasaura bones.  The site was near the small town of Choteau, Montana.  This expedition again brought major discoveries:  the first dinosaur egg clutches in North America, evidence that dinosaur nests were built around one another, meaning some dinosaurs nested in colonies, evidence that Maiasaura peeblesorum typically laid about 25 eggs in a nest, and the hatchlings were about a foot (30 cm) in length.  The location of these discoveries is now called Egg Mountain.  In 1982 Horner was offered a position at Montana State University’s Museum of the Rockies and returned to live in Montana permanently.  Horner’s discovery of dinosaur colonies led him to conclude that many species of dinosaur were sociable and lived in herds.  This contrasted with the previous view that dinosaurs lived solitary lives.  In his 1993 book The Complete T. Rex, Horner promoted the idea that T. Rex may have been primarily a scavenger.  In the movie Jurassic Park, dinosaurs are rescued from extinction when viable DNA is found, allowing scientists to hatch dinosaurs into the modern world.  In the real world, Horner has found that he cannot actually recover dinosaurs from ancient DNA, but he believes he can do the next best thing.  His 2009 book How to Build a Dinosaur:  The New Science of Reverse Evolution looks at the possibility of genetically modifying a chicken into a dinosaur: Chickenosaurus.  Horner keeps a chicken skeleton at his workplace and says:  “If I could just grow those bones a little different, tilt this one way, that another, I’d have a dinosaur skeleton.”  If any of this sounds a little familiar, it’s interesting to bear in mind that Horner was the technical consultant for all four Jurassic Park movies released to date.  He was also the real-life scientist that Dr. Alan Grant was modeled on in the movies.  Horner himself makes a cameo appearance in the fourth movie, Jurassic World.  Read more and see Jack Horner giving a TED talk in 2011 at

http://www.famousscientists.org/jack-horner/  See also http://www.bendbulletin.com/localstate/4398818-151/jurassic-park-paleontologist-retiring-from-museum-he-built

On the second floor of an old Bavarian palace in Munich, Germany, there's a library with high ceilings, a distinctly bookish smell and one of the world's most extensive collections of Latin texts.  About 20 researchers from all over the world work in small offices around the room.  They're laboring on a comprehensive Latin dictionary that's been in progress since 1894.  The most recently published volume contained all the words beginning with the letter P.  That was back in 2010.  And they're not as far along as that may lead you to believe.  They skipped over N years ago because it has so many long words, and now they've had to go back to that one.  They're also working on R at the same time.  That should take care of the rest of this decade.  The Thesaurus Linguae Latinae was one of many big, scholarly projects taken on by the German government in the late 19th century.  Through two World Wars and German reunification, generations of Latin scholars have been chipping away at the same goal: documenting every use of every Latin word from the earliest Latin inscriptions in the 6th century BC up until around 200 AD, when it was in decline as a spoken language.  Befitting the comprehensive nature of the project, the scholars will also include some words up to the 6th century AD.  That means poetry and history and speeches.  But it also means every gravestone and street sign.  It means architectural works, medical and legal texts, books about animals or cooking.  Byrd Pinkerton  Read much more and see pictures at http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/05/14/476873307/the-ultimate-latin-dictionary-after-122-years-still-at-work-on-the-letter-n

National Doughnut Day started in 1938 as a fund raiser for Chicago's The Salvation Army.  Their goal was to help those in need during the Great Depression, and to honor The Salvation Army "Lassies" of World War I, who served doughnuts to soldiers.  Soon after the US entrance into World War I in 1917, The Salvation Army sent a fact-finding mission to France.  The mission concluded that the needs of US enlisted men could be met by canteens/social centers termed "huts" that could serve baked goods, provide writing supplies and stamps, and provide a clothes-mending service.  Typically, six staff members per hut would include four female volunteers who could "mother" the boys.  These huts were established by The Salvation Army in the United States near army training centers.  About 250 Salvation Army volunteers went to France.  Because of the difficulties of providing freshly baked goods from huts established in abandoned buildings near to the front lines, the two Salvation Army volunteers (Ensign Margaret Sheldon and Adjutant Helen Purviance) came up with the idea of providing doughnuts.  These are reported to have been an "instant hit", and "soon many soldiers were visiting The Salvation Army huts".  Margaret Sheldon wrote of one busy day: "Today I made 22 pies, 300 doughnuts, 700 cups of coffee."  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Doughnut_Day

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1479  June 3, 2016  On this date in 1888, the poem "Casey at the Bat", by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, was published in The San Francisco Examiner.  On this date in 1992, Aboriginal Land Rights were granted in Australia in Mabo v Queensland (No 2), a case brought by Eddie Mabo.