"Tofu has a bland, nutty-like flavor that gives it a chameleon-like capability to take on the flavor of the food with which it's cooked," according to The New Food Lover's Companion, the fifth edition of the classic food bible.  "Its texture is smooth and creamy, yet it's firm enough to slice."  Tofu comes as a 5-inch block in regular, low-fat and nonfat varieties, as well as extra firm, firm, soft, and silken (which is more like a liquid and comes in soft, regular, and firm styles).  You store it in the refrigerator covered in water.  You can slice, dice, or mash it up for soups, stir-fry dishes, casseroles, sandwiches, salads, salad dressings, and sauces.  It's easy to digest, low in calories, calcium, and sodium, and high in protein.  Tempeh is a soybean cake with a much different texture and nutritional profile.  Cooked, whole soybeans are fermented into a firm, dense, chewy cake that tastes nuttier and more earthy.  It possesses more protein, dietary fiber, and vitamins compared to tofu, as well as a firmer texture and stronger flavor.  You often see it in the store in flat, 8-inch rectangular pieces that look brownish with bits of soybean showing through.  Like tofu, tempeh absorbs the flavors with which it's cooked.  https://www.chowhound.com/food-news/177594/whats-the-difference-between-tofu-and-tempeh/

Absence of proof isn't proof of absence.  We need to focus on proving a positive, not proving a negative.  Guilty Minds , #3 in "private spy" Nick Heller series by Joseph Finder 

Joseph Finder’s plan was to become a spy.  Or maybe a professor of Russian history.  Instead he became a bestselling thriller writer, and winner of the Strand Critics Award for Best Novel for BURIED SECRETS (2011), winner of the International Thriller Writers Award for Best Novel for KILLER INSTINCT (2006) and winner of the Barry and Gumshoe Awards for Best Thriller for COMPANY MAN (2005).  Born in Chicago, Joe spent his early childhood living around the world, including Afghanistan and the Philippines.  In fact, Joe’s first language was Farsi, which he spoke as a child in Kabul.  After a stint in Bellingham, WA, his family finally settled outside of Albany, NY.  After taking a high school seminar on the literature and history of Russia, Joe was hooked.  He went on to major in Russian studies at Yale, where he also sang with the school’s legendary a cappella group, the Whiffenpoofs (and likes to boast that he sang next to Ella Fitzgerald, an honorary Whiffenpoof).  Joe graduated summa cum laude from Yale College, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, then completed a master’s degree at the Harvard Russian Research Center, and later taught on the Harvard faculty.  He was recruited to the Central Intelligence Agency but eventually decided he preferred writing fiction.  http://www.josephfinder.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Joseph-Finder-Extended-Bio.pdf

An Essay on Criticism is one of the first major poems written by the English writer Alexander Pope (1688–1744).  It is the source of the famous quotations "To err is human, to forgive divine" and "A little learning is a dang'rous thing," frequently misquoted as "A little knowledge is a dang'rous thing."  It first appeared in 1711 after having been written in 1709, and it is clear from Pope's correspondence  that many of the poem's ideas had existed in prose form since at least 1706.  Composed in heroic couplets (pairs of adjacent rhyming lines of iambic pentameter) and written in the Horatian mode of satire, it is a verse essay primarily concerned with how writers and critics behave in the new literary commerce of Pope's contemporary age.  The poem covers a range of good criticism and advice, and represents many of the chief literary ideals of Pope's age.  Pope contends in the poem's opening couplets that bad criticism does greater harm than bad writing:  Part II of An Essay on Criticism includes a famous couplet:  A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.  This is in reference to the spring in the Pierian Mountains in Macedonia, sacred to the Muses.  The first line of this couplet is often misquoted as "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing".  The Essay also gives this famous line (towards the end of Part II):  To err is human, to forgive divine.  The phrase "fools rush in where angels fear to tread" from Part III has become part of the popular lexicon, and has been used for and in various works.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_Criticism

Since it was first minted in 1787, the penny has always been symbolically important in America despite its small value, representing the spirit of the nation, often depicting images like lady Liberty or the flying eagle.  The penny was the first currency to be officially minted by the United States of America, giving it added importance, and the small value made it the currency of the people; although inflation has since caused it to lose its value, the penny was once a very commonly used mode of currency--over 300 billion one cent coins have been minted since 1787.  The design for America’s one-cent coin was initially suggested by Benjamin Franklin.  During the first century and a half of its existence, the penny had no single set design or make.  The design and the material that the mints used to produce the penny changed periodically--there have been eleven different designs minted since the penny was first introduced almost two and a half centuries ago.  The first penny was copper, fifty percent larger, and over five times heavier, but by the turn of the twentieth century when they introduced the Lincoln penny for the first time it was smaller (the size that it is today) and made of a combination of both copper and zinc.  By that time, the penny displaying lady liberty wearing an Indian headdress--the image has often been mistaken for an Indian Chief--had been in circulation since 1859.  The person responsible for authorizing the creation of the Lincoln penny was President Theodore Roosevelt.  For years, Roosevelt had believed that the art on American coins was bland and uninspiring, particularly in comparison with their European counterparts.  Favoring classically influenced sculpture and art, Roosevelt initially commissioned the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to redesign all American coins, but Saint-Gaudens died before he could finish his work.  Then, enamored with a portrait plaque of Lincoln created by Victor David Brenner in 1907, Franklin commissioned the artist to create the Lincoln penny in time for the 100^th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth in 1909.  Brenner used virtually the same design for the penny that he had on the plaque, which had been based on a photograph of the President taken by Anthony Berger in 1864 (which is why the image on this coin is facing in the opposite direction from all of the others).  The Lincoln penny was supposed to simply be a commemorative penny, only produced for that year, but the popularity of the coin among the American public was such that the design remained in production and has not changed to this day.  http://livinglincoln.web.unc.edu/2015/04/16/the-origination-of-the-lincoln-penny/

March 23, 2017  SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — Merriam-Webster, the oldest dictionary publisher in America, has turned itself into a social media powerhouse over the past few years.  Its editors star in online videos on hot-button topics like the serial comma, gender pronouns and the dreaded “irregardless.”  Its Twitter feed has become a viral sensation, offering witty—and sometimes pointedly political—commentary on the news of the day.  Kory Stamper, a lexicographer here, is very much part of the vanguard of word-nerd celebrities.  Her witty “Ask the Editor” video contributions, like a classic on the plural of octopus, and personal blog, Harmless Drudgery, have inspired a Kory Stamper Fan Club on Facebook.  But the company remains very much a bricks-and-mortar operation, still based in this small New England city where the Merriam brothers bought the rights to Noah Webster’s dictionary in the 1840s and carried on his idea of a distinctly American language.  Ms. Stamper is the author of the new book “Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries”.  In a dungeonlike storage room used as a podcast studio is the Backward Index, which includes some 315,000 cards listing words spelled … backward.  “It was conceived of as another way of shuffling information,” Ms. Stamper said of the index, which seems to have been produced intermittently from the 1930s to the ’70s.  “Basically, someone sat here and typed up all the entries backwards.  And then went crazy.”  Craziness is a bit of a leitmotif in “Word by Word.”  The book, published last week by Pantheon, mixes memoiristic meditations on the lexicographic life along with a detailed description of the brain-twisting work of writing dictionaries.  The Atlantic called it “an erudite and loving and occasionally profane history of the English language” that’s also “a cheerful and thoughtful rebuke of the cult of the grammar scolds.”  Jennifer Schuessler  Read much more and see pictures at https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/22/books/merriam-webster-dictionary-kory-stamper.html

The Anisfield-Wolf Awards recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity.  Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf established the book awards in 1935, in honor of her father, John Anisfield, and husband, Eugene Wolf, to reflect her family’s passion for social justice.  Presented by the Cleveland Foundation, it remains the only American book prize focusing on works that address racism and diversity.  Find list of 2017 winners at http://www.anisfield-wolf.org/  Find list of all winners by year at http://www.anisfield-wolf.org/winners/winners-by-year/

"The Toledo Lucas County Public Library is pleased to be partnering with Ohio Memory to present our growing digital archive."  Find list of categories, including yearbooks, maps, photographs, manuscripts and rare documents at http://www.ohiomemory.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16007coll33

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1684  March 27, 2017  On this date in 1746, Michael Bruce, Scottish poet and composer, was born.  On this date in 1868, Patty Hill, American songwriter and educator, was born.