Plum pudding is a steamed or boiled pudding frequently served at holiday times.  Plum pudding has never contained plums.  Why is Plum Pudding called Plum Pudding when there are no plums in it?  In the 17th century, plums referred to raisins or other fruits.  Plumb is another spelling of plum.  Prune is actually derived from the same word as plum--the Latin word was pruna, which changed in the Germanic languages into pluma.  But the terms were quite confused in the 16th and 17th centuries and people talked about growing prunes in their garden.  Find recipes for plum pudding and nutmeg sauce at http://whatscookingamerica.net/Cake/plumpuddingTips.htm

Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman  (1860-1935)  http://www.quotter.net/2_top-charlotte-perkins-gilman_retorts-quotes_1  

Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in a variety of genres, including "The Yellow Wallpaper," a short story highlighting the "rest cure" for women in the 19th century; Woman and Economics, a sociological analysis of women's place; and Herland, a feminist utopia novel.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman wrote in favor of equality between men and women.  http://womenshistory.about.com/od/quotes/a/c_p_gilman.htm 

Founded sometime before 1100 A.D., Timbuktu quickly grew from a seasonal camp for storing salt and other goods to a major center for caravan trade.  Travelers coming from the west brought gold to trade for salt from mines to the east.  Some of these travelers chose to make the location their permanent dwelling, and before long the town became a city.  By the early 1300s, Timbuktu belonged to the Empire of Mali and was truly prospering.  During this period, Europe was awash in rumors of Timbuktu’s seemingly endless wealth and resources.  It’s said that, in 1324, Mali’s sultan, Mansa Moussa, made a pilgrimage to Mecca with 60,000 slaves and servants and so much gold that, during his visit to Cairo, the price of the precious metal dropped precipitously.  Arabic explorer Ibn Battuta visited the famed city 30 years later, and his descriptions of the bustling metropolis stoked the flames of European imagination.  While Europeans struggled with a minor ice age and the bubonic plague, they dreamt of streets lined with gold in Timbuktu.  The city was a sort of African El Dorado, hidden somewhere south of the Sahara.  It wasn’t until the late 15th century, however, that Timbuktu experienced its “Golden Age.”  But it was books, not gold bars, that brought Timbuktu its prosperity.  Hundreds of scholars studied at the nearly 200 maktabs (Quranic schools).  These scholars worked as scribes, thus increasing the number of manuscripts in the city.  (You can browse through digital versions of some of the manuscripts here.)  Visiting strangers were treated like royalty in hopes that they’d share their knowledge and books with Timbuktu’s scholars.  As California State University’s Brent Singleton, wrote:  “the acquisition of books is mentioned more often than any other display of wealth, including the building and refurbishment of mosques” in texts from the era.  Timbuktu was one of the world’s great centers of learning.  Never had African Muslims seen a better time to be a scholar (or a librarian).  But when Moroccan troops seized control of the city in 1591, it began a long decline that pitted Timbuktu’s historic reputation against its increasingly depressing condition.  All the while, European explorers, their imaginations fired by Romanticism and lyrical poets (including Alfred Tennyson, who won a Cambridge poetry contest for his poem about Timbuktu), were making the dangerous trek into Africa in search of the mysterious city.  http://daily.jstor.org/golden-age-timbuktu/

Journey to Mali:  1350-1351 by Ibn Battuta  Read about Battuta's trip, see many graphics and link to a BBC documentary, The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu, at http://orias.berkeley.edu/resources-teachers/travels-ibn-battuta/journey/journey-mali-1350-1351

The Race to Save Mali’s Priceless Artifacts:  When jihadists overran Timbuktu last year, residents mounted a secret operation to evacuate the town’s irreplaceable medieval manuscripts by Joshua Hammer  Smithsonian Magazine  January 2014  Read the riveting story at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/Race-Save-Mali-Artifacts-180947965/ and borrow the book, The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu, from a public library.  (It took me four months to get the book through interlibrary loan, but it was worth the wait.) 

Cyclone—the word has struck dread in the hearts of many facing its fury.  For others, it means only a swirl of counterclockwise winds around a low pressure center.  It first surfaced in the Indian city of Calcutta from the mind of an Englishman.  While serving as President of the Marine Court of Calcutta, Henry Piddington, a former sea captain, studied the stormy weather of the Indian Ocean.  He had particularly focused on the devastating tropical storm of December 1789 that inundated the coastal town of Coringa with three monstrous storm waves that killed more than 20,000.  In a presentation to the Asiatic Society of Bengal around 1840, Piddington described that 1789 storm as a "cyclone," a term derived from the Greek word "kyklon" which means moving in a circle, like the "coil of the snake." Piddington introduced the word to mariners in his 1848 book The Sailor's Horn-Book for the Law of Storms whose purpose was to explain to seaman the theory and practical use of the Law of Storms.  "I suggest that we might, for all this last class of circular or highly curved winds, adopt the term 'Cyclone' from the Greek kyklos (which signifies amongst other things the coil of a snake) as expressing sufficiently the tendency to circular motion in these meteors."  In the book, he warned sailors that the storms in the Bay of Bengal blew with consistently-changing, counterclockwise winds.  The book included transparent storm cards with wind arrows for use by the captain to chart a course toward safer waters by sailing with the wind and then out of harm's way.  The term gained wide acceptance, then received a broader usage.  By 1856, the term was used to describe the storms we now call tornadoes:  the Kansas Cyclone of Wizard of Oz fame.  In many parts of the Midwest, tornado shelters are still called cyclone cellars.  In 1875, the international meteorological community adopted the term to describe a low pressure system with counterclockwise wind field.  Today, only tropical storms of the Indian Ocean are still called Cyclones.  http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/history/cyclone-word.htm

The Worst Hurricanes In Terms of Loss of Life In the United States  The Great Galveston Hurricane  September 8, 1900  This unnamed hurricane caused the greatest loss of life of any Hurricane in recorded US history.  First tracked in Cuba as a tropical storm on Sept. 3, it hit Galveston as a Category 4 Hurricane.  An estimated 6,000–12,000 people died as storm tides of eight to 15 feet washed over the barrier island.  The tragedy was documented in the book, Isaac’s Storm.  Read about the deadliest hurricanes in the United States and around the world at http://epicdisasters.com/tag/deadliest-hurricane/

Isaac's Storm:  A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Eric Larson   In 1627, German mathematician Joseph Furtenbach aimed a loaded cannon in the sky to prove Galileo's theory that the earth rotated on a fixed axis.  He fired the cannon--and when it fell to earth--the ball descended to the west of Furtenbach and the muzzle. **  In 1899, a blizzard swept much of the South.  Icebergs ten feet high flowed down the Mississippi.  **   The undersea landscape, or bathymetry, of Galveston Bay is similar to that of the Bay of Bengal.  **  Hurricanes use wind to harvest moisture and deliver it their centers.  **  In the hurricane of 1900, the wind blew the water out of Galveston Bay and into the city.  **

Imagine the special people in your life waking up on Christmas morning (or another winter holiday) to find a gift-wrapped book on their bed!  Be a part of this special holiday book tradition.  How it’s done:   (1)  Select a book.  It can be a new book, a donated book, or a cherished book that is handed down from one generation to the next with a heartfelt inscription.  (2)  Wrap it.  A gift carefully wrapped, holds the mystery of what story or adventure is waiting to be discovered, and presents the book as the special gift it is!  (3)  Place the book at the foot of a child’s bed.  http://www.familyreading.org/great-ideas/a-book-on-every-bed/

December solstice ‎(usually uncountable, plural December solstices)

(astronomy)  The moment when the sun reaches the southernmost point of the sky, occurring on December 21–22.  That would be winter solstice in the northern hemisphere and summer solstice in the southern hemisphere.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/December_solstice#English

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1667  December 21, 2016  On this date in 1879, the world premiere of Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House took place at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen, Denmark.  On this date in 1937, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the world's first full-length animated feature, premiered at the Carthay Circle Theatre.  Word of the Day  glitten  noun  A cross between a glove and a mitten, often in the form of a fingerless glove with an attached mitten-like flap that can be used to cover the fingers.