SCHIST VILLAGES--WHAT ARE THEY? by José Serra   The Schist Villages area is a region of Portugal’s interior that has successfully been promoted to tourists.  The brand is managed by the ADXTUR association, the Agency for the Touristic Development of the Schist Villages, and brings together 21 Municipalities of the central region of Portugal, and more than 100 private local operations, which all share the common strategy of promoting and revitalising an area where schist stone dominates the landscape.  The Schist Villages area is made up of four zones in the country’s interior, Serra da Lousã--with 12 villages, Zêzere--with 6 villages, the Serra do Açor--with 5 villages, and the Tejo-Ocreza--with 4.  These 27 villages are located in 16 of the 21 Municipalities of Central Portugal which are part of ADXTUR.  Read more and see wonderful pictures at https://www.cerdeiravillage.com/en/creative-blog/schist-villages-what-are-they

Schist is a foliated metamorphic rock made up of plate-shaped mineral grains that are large enough to see with an unaided eye.  It usually forms on a continental side of a convergent plate boundary where sedimentary rocks, such as shales and mudstones, have been subjected to compressive forces, heat, and chemical activity.  This metamorphic environment is intense enough to convert the clay minerals of the sedimentary rocks into platy metamorphic minerals such as muscovite, biotite, and chlorite.  To become schist, a shale must be metamorphosed in steps through slate and then through phyllite.  http://geology.com/rocks/schist.shtml

Kappo means “to cut” and "to cook."  The setting of Kappo  is similar to a small sushi bar, with counter seating and a few tables.  The Kappo chef will prepare a variety of dishes--sliced raw, grilled, steamed, braised and deep fried--right before your eyes, and may engage in some lively conversation.  Kappo falls somewhere between the traditional Kaiseki cuisine and the casual Izakaya style cuisine.  Kaiseki offers a seasonal course menu of elaborately prepared dishes, which are served in an environment that is serene.   Izakaya, on the other hand, offers an a la carte menu that consist mostly of small plates.  Drinking is the focal point of Izakaya style of dining.  With Kappo, it’s completely up to the chef.  This can range from formal to casual, classic to modern Japanese.  Fusion can come into play.  Sonoco Sakai   Read more and see pictures at http://www.cooktellsastory.com/apps/blog/show/6204780-kappo-cuisine-a-personal-style

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From:  Lynn Goodman  Subject:  Making Plurals  Some time ago I came across a cute story about a youngster who came home from school and announced to her grandmother that the class had learned how to make babies that day.  The little girl said, “It’s easy--you drop the ‘y’ and add ‘ies’.”

From:  Yitzhak Dar  Subject:  Language and Law  You wrote “ . . . that’s what a thousand years of history will do to a language.”  One of the great US minds, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, wrote in his book The Common Law, published in 1881, “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”  The same principle was used by him when he wrote in his opinion in NY Trust Co. v. Eisner, 256 US 345, 1921, “A page of history is worth a volume of logic.”  It seems that language and law have some similarities.

From:  Ray Schlabach   Subject:  Irregular plurals  When I was in high school, I often heard the band practicing.  I found in the music room sheet music and recognized it as the tune I often heard.  I memorized the words:  “May my kye come home at even.”  It obviously referred to cows.  But it is not in my dictionary.  I knew the plural kine from reading the Bible.  Recently I went to the Internet and found that kye is used in Scotland and northern England.

From:  Roy McCoy  Subject:  Regular plural in Esperanto  I yesterday read with interest your remarks about irregular plurals, and “what a thousand years of history will do to a language”.  Are you aware that Esperanto has no irregular plurals?  Nor will it ever have them even in a thousand years, because an essential trait of the language is that the plural is invariably formed by the simple addition of j.  Tablo = table, tabloj = tables, for example.

The Graphics Interchange Format (better known by its acronym GIF) is a bitmap image format that was developed by US-based software writer Steve Wilhite while working at the internet service provider CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.  The format supports up to 8 bits per pixel for each image, allowing a single image to reference its own palette of up to 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space.  It also supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each frame.  These palette limitations make the GIF format less suitable for reproducing color photographs and other images with continuous color, but it is well-suited for simpler images such as graphics or logos with solid areas of color.  The creators of the format pronounced the word as "jif" with a soft "G" as in "gin".  Steve Wilhite says that the intended pronunciation deliberately echoes the American peanut butter brand Jif, and CompuServe employees would often say "Choosy developers choose GIF", spoofing this brand's television commercials.  The word is now also widely pronounced with a hard "G" as in "gift".  The American Heritage Dictionary cites both, indicating "jif" as the primary pronunciation, while Cambridge Dictionary of American English offers only the hard-"G" pronunciation.  Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionaryand the OED cite both pronunciations, but place "gif" in the default position.  The New Oxford American Dictionary gave only "jif" in its 2nd edition but updated it to "jif, gif" in its 3rd edition.  On the occasion of receiving a lifetime achievement award at the 2013 Webby Award ceremony, Wilhite rejected the hard-"G" pronunciation, and his speech led to 17,000 posts on Twitter and 50 news articles.  The White House and TV program Jeopardy! also waded into the debate during 2013.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GIF

Kirkpatrick  ht//caledonianmercury.com/2012/08/22/useful-scots-wor-

Strait-laced means excessively rigid in matters of conduct; narrow or over-precise in one's behaviour or moral judgement.  Origin:  'Strait', which is often confused with its homonym 'straight', is a word that is rarely used alone but has stayed with us in expressions like 'strait and narrow', 'dire straits', 'strait-jacket' and 'straitened circumstances'.  The meaning of those phrases becomes clear when we know that 'strait' means, not 'free from curvature', but 'tight'.  http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/strait-laced.html

In 2016, the solar industry employed many more Americans than coal, while wind power topped 100,000 jobs.  Those numbers come from a Department of Energy report https://energy.gov/downloads/2017-us-energy-and-employment-report published in January by the Obama administration that provides the most complete picture available of American energy employment.  In 2016, 1.9 million Americans were employed in electric power generation, mining and other fuel extraction activities, according to the report--a field we’ll call power creation for short.  More than 373,000 Americans worked part or full time in solar energy, and just over 260,000 of them--or about 70 percent--spent a majority of their time on solar projects.  Most solar energy jobs were in installation, construction and manufacturing, as the relatively new industry continued to add capacity.  Solar power still generated a small share of United States energy output last year.  The coal industry, which has shed jobs since 2012, primarily due to competition from cheap natural gas, employed just over 160,000 workers nationwide.  About 54,000 coal jobs were in mining.  It's important to note that power creation isn’t the only source of energy employment.  The Energy Department report found another 2.3 million jobs in energy transmission, storage and distribution, a number that includes powerline and pipeline workers and more than 900,000 retail jobs, such as gas station workers and fuel dealers.  If non-traditional energy workers are included in the mix--those involved in manufacturing and installing energy-efficient products--the total number of energy-related jobs swells to 6.4 million.  Nadja Popovich  Read more and see a graph showing "power creation jobs in 2016" divided by fossil fuels and renewable and low emission technologies at https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/04/25/climate/todays-energy-jobs-are-in-solar-not-coal.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1699  April 26, 2017  On this date in 1862, Edmund C. Tarbell, American painter and educator, was born.  On this date in 1961, Joan Chen, Chinese-American actress, director, producer, and screenwriter, was born.