'As pleased as Punch' derives from the puppet character Mr. Punch.  Punch's name itself derives from Polichinello (spelled various ways, including Punchinello), a puppet used in the 16th century Italian Commedia dell'arte.  In performance, the grotesque Punch character is depicted as self-satisfied and delighted with his evil deeds, squawking "That's the way to do it!" whenever he dispatches another victim.  'As pleased as Punch' is now the most common form of the expression, but when the term was coined it was just as usual to say 'as proud as Punch'.  Charles Dickens, for example used the two terms interchangeably in his novels; for example:  David Copperfield, 1850:  I am as proud as Punch to think that I once had the honour of being connected with your family.  Hard Times, 1854:  When Sissy got into the school here . . .  her father was as pleased as Punch.  http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/as-pleased-as-punch.html

Sing Sing Prison has been appearing in books, movies, songs, and stories since it opened in the nineteenth century.  New York State selected Ossining for the prison because of the large quantity of limestone, nicknamed “Sing Sing marble,” on the site. The convicts quarried the stone and built the prison.  The longest running warden was Lewis Lawes.  He wrote seven books and co-wrote a Broadway play about Sing Sing while warden.  He had a radio show and magazine columns.  Up the River, The Big House and The Last Mile were all phrases coined at Sing Sing.  ​Films made at Sing Sing include Castle on the Hudson, which borrowed a nickname for the Prison as its title, Angels with Dirty Faces and Alias Jimmy Valentine.  Read more and see graphics at http://www.singsingprisonmuseum.org/did-you-know.html

Howard L. Anderson has lived a varied life:  he flew with a helicopter battalion in Vietnam, worked on fishing boats in Alaska, in the steel mills of Pittsburgh, as a truck driver in Houston, and a scriptwriter in Hollywood.  After earning a law degree, he became legal counsel for the New Mexico Organized Crime Commission.  He is currently a district attorney in New Mexico, where he defends Mexican nationals charged with crimes north of the border.  Albert of Adelaide is his first novel.  https://serpentstail.com/howard-l-anderson.html  Albert is a platypus.  Other characters include Jack, a wombat, The Famous Muldoon, a Tasmanian devil, and a host of others:  bandicoots, wallabies, kangaroos, possum,  raccoon, and dingoes.

The platypus has no stomach, its bill is comprised of thousands of cells that can detect the electric fields generated by all living things.  It’s so sensitive that the platypus can hunt with its eyes, ears, and nose all closed, relying entirely on the bill’s electrolocation.  The prehistoric platypus was over 3 feet long—double the size of the modern animal.  http://mentalfloss.com/article/63062/10-curious-and-quirky-platypus-facts 

The wombat is a marsupial, or pouched animal, found in Australia and on scattered islands nearby.  Like other marsupials, wombats give birth to tiny, undeveloped young that crawl into pouches on their mothers' bellies.  A wombat baby remains in its mother's pouch for about five months before emerging. See pictures at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/c/common-wombat/ 

Tasmanian devils are small marsupials with ratlike features, sharp teeth and coarse black or brown fur.  The Tasmanian devil is just 20 to 31 inches (51 to 79 centimeters) tall and weighs only 9 to 26 lbs. (4 to 12 kilograms).  The Tasmanian devil is found on the island of Tasmania in Australia.  When the devil feels threatened, it goes into a rage in which it growls, lunges and bares its teeth.  It also makes otherworldly screams that can seem very devil-like.  It may be due to this temper that the Tasmanian devil is a solitary creature.  The Tasmanian devil is also nocturnal; it sleeps during the day and is awake at night.  During the night, they sometimes journey up to 10 miles (16 km) to hunt, according to the San Diego Zoo.  http://www.livescience.com/27440-tasmanian-devils.html

Upton Sinclair Jr. (1878–1968) was an American writer who wrote nearly 100 books and other works in several genres.  Sinclair's work was well-known and popular in the first half of the twentieth century, and he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1943.  In 1906, Sinclair acquired particular fame for his classic muckraking novel The Jungle, which exposed labor and sanitary conditions in the U.S. meat packing industry, causing a public uproar that contributed in part to the passage a few months later of the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act.  In 1919, he published The Brass Check, a muckraking exposé of American journalism that publicized the issue of yellow journalism and the limitations of the “free press” in the United States.  Four years after publication of The Brass Check, the first code of ethics for journalists was created.   Time magazine called him "a man with every gift except humor and silence".  Many of his novels can be read as historical works.  Writing during the Progressive Era, Sinclair describes the world of industrialized America from both the working man's point of view and the industrialist.  Novels like King Coal (1917), The Coal War (published posthumously), Oil! (1927) and The Flivver King (1937) describe the working conditions of the coal, oil and auto industries at the time.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upton_Sinclair

Harry Sinclair Lewis (1885–1951), better known as Sinclair Lewis, was an American novelist, short-story writer, and playwright.  His works are known for their insightful and critical views of American capitalism and materialism between the wars.  He is also respected for his strong characterizations of modern working women. H. L. Mencken wrote of him, "[If] there was ever a novelist among us with an authentic call to the trade . . . it is this red-haired tornado from the Minnesota wilds."  He has been honored by the U.S. Postal Service with a postage stamp in the Great Americans series.   As early as 1916, he began taking notes for a realistic novel about small-town life.  Work on that novel continued through mid-1920, when he completed Main Street, which was published on October 23, 1920.  As his biographer Mark Schorer wrote, the phenomenal success of Main Street "was the most sensational event in twentieth-century American publishing history."  Lewis's agent had the most optimistic projection of sales at 25,000 copies.  In its first six months, Main Street sold 180,000 copies, and within a few years, sales were estimated at two million.  Lewis followed up this first great success with Babbitt (1922), a novel that satirized the American commercial culture and boosterism.  The story was set in the fictional Midwestern town of Zenith, Winnemac, a setting to which Lewis returned in future novels, including Gideon Planish and Dodsworth.  Lewis continued his success in the 1920s with Arrowsmith (1925), a novel about the challenges faced by an idealistic doctor.  It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, which Lewis declined.  It was adapted as a 1931 Hollywood film directed by John Ford and starring Ronald Colman which was nominated for four Academy Awards.  Next Lewis published Elmer Gantry (1927), which depicted an evangelical minister as deeply hypocritical. The novel was denounced by many religious leaders and banned in some U.S. cities.  It was adapted for the screen more than a generation later as the basis of the 1960 movie starring Burt Lancaster, who earned a Best Actor Oscar for his performance.  Lewis next published Dodsworth (1929), a novel about the most affluent and successful members of American society.  He portrayed them as leading essentially pointless lives in spite of great wealth and advantages.  The book was adapted for the Broadway stage in 1934 by Sidney Howard, who also wrote the screenplay for the 1936 film version directed by William Wyler, which was a great success at the time.  The film is still highly regarded; in 1990, it was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry, and in 2005 Time magazine named it one of the "100 Best Movies" of the past 80 years.  In 1930 Lewis won the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first writer from the United States to receive the award, after he had been nominated by Henrik Schück, member of the Swedish Academy.  After winning the Nobel Prize, Lewis wrote eleven more novels, ten of which appeared in his lifetime.  The best remembered is It Can't Happen Here (1935), a novel about the election of a fascist to the American presidency.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Lewis

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1723  June 13, 2017  On this date in 1873, Karin Swanström, Swedish actress, director, and producer, was born.  On this date in 1970, "The Long and Winding Road" became the Beatles' last U.S. number one song.