Toyota originated from the family name of the founder, "Toyoda", with early vehicles produced by the company originally sold with a "Toyoda" emblem.  In 1936, the company ran a public competition to design a new logo, which lead to a change in the brand name to what is now called "Toyota".   It has been regarded as a favorable transition from "Toyoda" to "Toyota", because voiceless consonants sound more appealing than voiced consonants.  In addition, through the concept of "jikaku" (counting the number of strokes in writing characters to determine good and bad luck), its eight-stroke count is associated with wealth and good fortune.  http://www.toyota-global.com/showroom/emblem/history/

Phaedrus may refer to:  people  Phaedrus (Athenian) (c. 444 BC–393 BC), an Athenian aristocrat depicted in Plato's dialogues; Phaedrus (fabulist) (c. 15 BC–c. AD 50), a Roman fabulist; Phaedrus the Epicurean (138 BC–c. 70 BC), an Epicurean philosopher.  Phaedrus may refer to:  Art and literature  Phaedrus (dialogue), a dialogue of Plato; Phaedrus (play), a 3rd-century BC comedic play by Alexis (poet); Phaedrus, character in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance; A work by Cy Twombly  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phaedrus

Philosopher, mathematician, academic and scientist René Descartes (1596-1650) is regarded as the father of modern philosophy for defining a starting point for existence, “I think; therefore I am.”  ("Cogito ergo sum.")”  René Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine, a small town in central France, which has since been renamed after him to honor its most famous son.  Descartes was the youngest of three children, and his mother, Jeanne Brochard, died within his first year of life.  His father, Joachim, a council member in the provincial parliament, sent the children to live with their maternal grandmother, where they remained even after he remarried a few years later.  But he was very concerned with good education and sent René, at age 8, to boarding school at the Jesuit college of Henri IV in La Flèche, several miles to the north, for seven years.  The subjects he studied, such as rhetoric and logic and the “mathematical arts,” which included music and astronomy, as well as metaphysics, natural philosophy and ethics, equipped him well for his future as a philosopher.  So did spending the next four years earning a baccalaureate in law at the University of Poitiers.  https://www.biography.com/people/ren-descartes-37613

Cartesian  adjective  Of, or pertaining to Descartes, his mathematical methods, or his philosophy, especially with regard to its emphasis on logical analysis and its mechanistic interpretation of physical nature.  adjective  Of, or pertaining to co-ordinates based on mutually orthogonal axes.  noun  One who follows the philosophy of Cartesianism.  GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English  https://www.wordnik.com/words/Cartesian

A hypernym is a type of thing, such as colour, car, road.  A hyponym is a variant of a type of thing, such as:  Colour (red, yellow, orange, green, blue)  Car ( Ford, Honda, Renault, Mercedes, Hyundai)  Road (by-road, highway, motorway, a-road, b-road, lane)   A word can be a hypernym in one context and a hyponym in another.  Blue is a hyponym of colour but is itself a hypernym of different shades of blue, such as cyan, navy, turquoise, and aqua-marine.  An eponym is a word named after a person.  A metonym is a word which describes someone by way of their features.  Calling someone a ‘hoodie’ is an example of a metonym.  A synonym is a word which has the same meaning as another, interchangeable word.  An antonym is a word which is the opposite of another. http://theenglishlanguageproject.blogspot.com/2009/10/hypernyms-hyponyms.html

Aramark and their Super Bowl LII partners in Minnesota will have foods from Andrew Zimmern’s Canteen, including his rotisserie and canteen hoagies, Be Graceful Bakery and Catering, Curds and Cakes, Ike’s Food and Cocktails, Kramarczuk’s Sausage Company , Lola’s Café, Prairie Dogs, R Taco, Revival Restaurant, Twin Cities Foodie, A Peace of Cake, Chocolat Celeste, Just Truffles, Thomasani’s Cashew Brittle and T-Rex Cookie Company.  The servings on Super Bowl Sunday will include tributes to the New England Patriots and Philadelphia Eagles, with a New England clam roll and South Philly roast pork sandwich and two drinks--The Wicked Red (cranberry juice, rum and blueberry) for the Patriots and Midnight Green Punch (vodka, sour apple and lemon-lime soda) for the Eagles.  https://scout.com/nfl/vikings/Article/Saturdays-Super-Bowl-activities-114271451

January 17, 2018  The 27th annual Party with a Purpose by Taste of the NFL, a nonprofit raising resources for food banks across America, comes to the Twin Cities this year.  The annual event held in that year’s Super Bowl city teams celebrity chefs from the 32 NFL cities with NFL players to provide tastings for 2,500 guests.  Local restaurateur Wayne Kostroski founded Taste of the NFL.  Taste of the NFL’s Party with a Purpose, brought to you by General Mills, will be Saturday, Feb. 3, at St. Paul’s RiverCentre.  Tickets for the star-studded event start at $700 and include food and drink and live entertainment from O.A.R. (tasteofthenfl.com).  Nancy Ngo  Chefs behind Taste of the NFL, from Twin Cities chef / restaurateur Thomas Boemer to New York’s David Burke, share their favorite Super Bowl party recipes at https://www.twincities.com/2018/01/17/taste-of-the-nfl-chefs-share-favorite-super-bowl-party-recipes/

SCOTTSVILLE, N.Y. — Wendell Castle, a visionary woodworker, furniture-maker and sculptor, has died at the age of 85.  Castle died January 20, 2018 at his estate near the Genesee River in Scottsville, according to an announcement by Rochester Institute of Technology, where he was an Artist in Residence.  In more than a half-century of work, Castle melded furniture with art, creating provocative tables, chairs, clocks and other objects that bemused, surprised and baffled those who saw them.  He placed form above function, and frequently shifted styles and genres.  Of late, he had been sculpting furniture with a robot.  Castle's work—best-known in wood but also plastic, concrete, bronze—is exhibited in galleries and displayed in museums worldwide.  His Scottsville workshop, which employs 10 people, produces fine art pieces.  A separate workshop turns out furniture that is sold through a handful of select dealers in the United States and Canada.  Castle has been honored by the Smithsonian Institution, the American Craft Council, the American Craft Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and countless other institutions.  Castle's son, Bryon Castle, an artist, is in charge of the finishes on the furniture created in the Scottsville workshop.  His daughter, Alison Castle, an author, editor and film-maker who lives in Brooklyn, was a frequent visitor with her two children.  
She is just finishing a documentary film about her father.  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/01/21/visionary-furniture-artist-wendell-castle-dies-85/1052470001/
NOTE that The Toledo Museum of Art owns a Steinway concert grand piano with an art case designed by Wendell Castle. 

January 7, 2018  This past week, John Pace of Germantown, Tenn. found the largest prime number known to humankind.  And that number goes on to more than 23 million digits.  Prime numbers can only be divided by 1 and themselves.  Pace found his prime as part of an online collective called the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS. Pace and thousands of volunteers ran software on their personal computers crunching numbers day-in and day-out.  Anyone can participate, you just need a computer, an internet connection and a lot of patience.  Pace began his prime hunt 14 years ago.  Pace's prime holds the title for the largest, but there are other bigger ones out there.  And they're important, especially when it comes to cryptography, internet security and the future of computing.  Lulu Garcia-Navarro  https://www.npr.org/2018/01/07/576301169/new-prime-number-discovered

See rare supermoon, blue moon and lunar eclipse  Posted January 31, 2018 at 07:47 AM | Updated January 31, 2018 at 08:13 AM  See photos in New York City and around the world at http://www.syracuse.com/us-news/index.ssf/2018/01/super_blue_blood_moon_2018_photos_supermoon_lunar_eclipse.htmlom/us-ws/index.ssf/2018/01/super_blue_blood_moon_2018_photos_supern_nar_eclipse.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1835  January 31, 2018  On this date in 1801, John Marshall was appointed the Chief Justice of the United States.  On this date in 1865, the United States Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, abolishing slavery and submitted it to the states for ratification.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_31

"There should be a fountainhead in the city for music and art, and it seems to me that [New York] City Center fills that need." —Leonard Bernstein, 1945  Long before there was a Lincoln Center, there was City Center.  City Center was always an open door for the artistic underdogs, the scrappy companies that charged popular prices and didn't play by the established rules.  When the Ancient and Accepted Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine built their Mecca Temple meeting hall on West 55th Street in 1924, it was the rival of any of the great movie palaces that lined Times Square.  Boasting two balconies and two ornate lobbies, it had a 3,000-seat auditorium with a rich, riotous polychromatic decorative scheme.  The Depression eventually took its toll on the building, the Masons defaulted on their taxes, and Mecca Temple was shut down.  It would have been demolished were it not for the initiative taken by arts publicist Jean Dalrymple, City Council president Newbold Morris, and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia.  What New York needed, they realized, was an all-purpose theatre for the people, where performing arts could be enjoyed at prices accessible to all.  Securing funding from local philanthropists, union members, and arts organizations, they were able to save the building and turn it into the performing arts center we know today.  With LaGuardia himself leading the New York Philharmonic in "The Star-Spangled Banner" on his birthday, Dec. 11, 1943, the newly christened New York City Center opened.   It was now the official home of three new companies:  New York City Center Opera, New York City Symphony, and New York City Center Theatre.  A fourth, the New York City Ballet, would have its inaugural season there five years later.  Throughout the 1940s, New Yorkers spending $1.50 for the top ticket price could experience a dazzling series of cultural events.  In addition to all the City Opera, City Ballet, and City Symphony performances (the latter led by Leopold Stokowski and the young Leonard Bernstein), there were visits from the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo, the Don Cossack Chorus, and the Paris Opera Ballet.  Interspersed among these were such memorable stage events as Gertrude Lawrence in Susan and God, Eva Le Gallienne in The Cherry Orchard, Tallulah Bankhead in A Streetcar Named Desire, and Paul Robeson in Othello.  But the talent was not just onstage.  Three other smaller Masonic halls within the building were constantly in use as rehearsal studios.  And during the 1950s, one of the building's sixth-floor office spaces held the team of young geniuses who wrote the scripts for Sid Caesar's hit TV series "Your Show of Shows."  Among them were Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Neil Simon.  Simon went on to immortalize those years in his Broadway show Laughter on the 23rd Floor starring Nathan Lane.  By the late 1960s, City Center was in trouble.  There was no denying that the newly-built Lincoln Center had stolen its thunder—and its audiences.  The cost of producing live musical and theatrical events had spiraled, and at the same time the city's economic fortunes were going into a free-fall.  The municipal economic crisis of 1975 seemed to spell doom for the building, which came close to being bulldozed for a parking structure.  Once again, a dedicated coterie of arts aficionados came to its aid.  Four of the city's major dance companies—American Ballet Theater, Alvin Ailey, the Joffrey, and Eliot Feld—began playing regular seasons there.  The City Center 55th Street Theater Foundation was formed to ensure its survival as a non-profit organization, and the Foundation's chairman Howard Squadron led a movement that helped the building finally attain landmark status.  Since then, the fortunes of City Center have been on a continuous upswing.  Eric Myers  http://www.playbill.com/article/a-palace-for-the-people-com-142377

January's moon is the third in a series of “supermoons,” when the Moon is closer to the Earth and is about 14 percent brighter than usual.  It’s the second full moon of the month, commonly known as a “blue moon.”   While the Moon is in the Earth’s shadow, it will take on a reddish tint, known as a “blood moon.”  And on January, 31^st , 2018 skywatchers will get a chance to see all three moons in one.  “While none of these 3 things are rare on their own, the fact that they are all happening on the same day is pretty remarkable.  It has been about 150 years since the 3 events happened on the same day, which is exciting that they are happening now,” said Adjunct Professor of Physical and Environmental Sciences at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, Sabrina Krueger.  “A super moon is when the moon is at its closest point in its orbit to us.  It will be about 223,000 miles away from us, as opposed to its normal 238,000 miles away from us,” said Krueger.  It’s the first time a Super Blue Blood Moon will have been witnessed since March 31,1866  Roland Rodriguez  http://www.kristv.com/story/37346624/its-been-150-years-since-the-last-super-blue-blood-moon

The founder of the Dead Poets Society of America suffered a fatal heart attack a little more than a month after commissioning his own tombstone.  Walter Skold enlisted the son of novelist John Updike to carve a unique tombstone that will be topped with a dancing skeleton and a quill.  Michael Updike, who received the poet’s deposit last month, said he never expected to be carving the monument so soon.  There was no indication of any premonition of an untimely death before Skold’s passing at age 57 on Jan. 20, 2018 in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, Updike said Friday.  “He was a sweet soul,” said Updike, of Newbury, Massachusetts.  “He was a kind person with this quirky predilection to poets’ graves and death and the macabre.”  Known as the “Dead Poets Guy,” Skold visited the final resting places of more than 600 poets after launching the Dead Poets Society in 2008 in Maine, drawing inspiration for the name from the 1989 Robin Williams movie.

https://www.pressherald.com/2018/01/26/walter-skold-dead-poets-founder-dies-after-commissioning-tombstone/

In 1964, four businessmen—Joe Neuhoff, Julius Schepps, John Stemmons, and Peter Stewart—wanted the City of Dallas to be known not only for its worldly aspirations and economic accomplishments, but also for the enduring heart of its citizens.  The Thanks-Giving Foundation was chartered to create a public space in the heart of the city dedicated in gratitude to God and to the “most ancient and enduring of American traditions.”  Forming the first public-private venture in the city’s history, the Thanks-Giving Foundation worked with the City of Dallas to acquire land in 1968.  Construction began in 1973.  Designated as one of the region’s American Revolution Bicentennial Projects, the Chapel of Thanksgiving and the Bell Tower were dedicated on Thanksgiving Day, 1976.  President Gerald Ford recognized Thanks-Giving Square as a “major national shrine.”  The remainder of the grounds opened in 1977, two hundred years after General George Washington proclaimed the first national Day of Thanksgiving on request of the Continental Congress.  As much as 6,000 gallons of water continuously cascade down the Great Fountain and recirculate throughout the system.  Thanks-Giving Square sits atop the city-operated Bullington Truck Terminal, which provides loading docks for 43 trucks servicing surrounding high-rise buildings via cartways and conveyor systems.  It was estimated that this facility could remove up to 350 trucks daily from city streets.  A time capsule dedicated in 1996 contains statements of thanksgiving to be opened by the citizens of Dallas in the years 2064 and 2164.  It is located in the Court of All Nations.  Three monoliths set in surrounding street corners celebrate the traditions of thanksgiving in Texas, America, and across the world.  Each is made from Sierra Granite and weighs 7.5 tons.  http://www.thanksgiving.org/thanks-giving-square/aboutthesquare/  Visionary Peter Stewart died January 11, 2018 at the age of 97.  See also https://www.untdallas.edu/news/unt-dallas-mourns-loss-peter-stewart-friend-university

January 26, 2018   What one thing in this life is truly worth fighting for?  Justice?  Freedom?  The love of a good man or woman?  Or a small tub of brown gooey paste that tastes kind of like chocolate but also kind of like hazelnuts?  The answer, if you were in a French supermarket this week, was the brown gooey chocolate paste.  The grocery chain Intermarché slashed its price on tubs of Nutella by 70%.  Word got around.  People got crazy.  The result:  a run on Nutella and commotion in the aisles.  Hundreds of millions of metric tons of this brown gold gets eaten around the world every year.  It's chocolatey, it's creamy, it's nutty, and because it's nutty that means that it's probably healthy, right?  Well, right-ish.  Sure, a glance at the nutritional label shows that it is 56.3% sugar and 10.6% fat--about the same as a Mars bar.  But since it has the word "nut" in the title, and a picture of two hazelnuts on the label, Nutella is implicitly positioned as a food that doesn't just taste good--it actively nourishes you.  Dan Jones  https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/26/opinions/why-the-french-went-nuts-for-nutella/index.html

There’s a reason history museums are packed with stone statues, pottery and arrow heads—these things resist decay while exposed to hundreds (or even thousands) of years in the sun, wind and rain.  It’s rare to find organic materials, like a woven shawl or a leather shoe, but there’s at least one circumstance when these types of artifacts survive:  when they’re frozen in ice.  Glaciers and permafrost hold many of these treasures, but as climate changes they’re releasing their haul to the elements.  And as Kastalia Medrano at Newsweek reports, this is exactly what’s happening in Norway.  A group of glacial archaeologists have recovered over 2,000 artifacts from the edges of Norway’s glaciers, and the find promises to help researchers better understand the history of mountain populations.  Archaeologists from the United Kingdom and Norway have surveyed the edges of glaciers in Norway’s highest mountains in Oppland since 2011 as part of the Glacier Archaeology Program and its Secrets of the Ice Project.  They’ve uncovered thousands of objects that date as far back as 4,000 B.C., including wooden skis, near complete bronze-age arrows and wooden shafts, Viking swords, clothing and the skulls of pack horses.  Norway is not the only place where artifacts are emerging from the ice due to climate change.  As Marissa Fessenden wrote for Smithsonian.com in 2015, bodies of soldiers lost during World War I have emerged from the Alps and Incan mummies have emerged from glaciers in the Andes. Melting permafrost in southwest Alaska has also released 2,500 artifacts, including woven baskets and wooden masks.  Researchers even think Ötzi the iceman, the most famous glacier mummy, likely emerged due to the warming climate.  Jason Daly  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/2000-artifacts-pulled-edge-norways-melting-glaciers-180967949/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1834  January 29, 2018  On this date in 1845, "The Raven" was published in The Evening Mirror in New York, the first publication with the name of the author, Edgar Allan Poe.  On this date in 1861, Kansas was admitted as the 34th U.S. state. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_29

What is Bulgur Wheat? by JOLINDA HACKETT  Bulgur wheat is a whole wheat grain that has been cracked and partially pre-cooked.  Though bulgur wheat is most commonly found in tabbouleh salad, you can use it just like rice or couscous, or any other whole grain,  such as barley or quinoa.  Instead of rice, try pairing your favorite vegetable stir-fry or vegetable curry with cooked whole grain bulgur wheat.  Link to easy bulgur wheat recipes at https://www.thespruce.com/what-is-bulgur-wheat-3376810  See broken wheat also known as Cracked wheat, Dalia, Bulgar, Burghul, Fada, Lapsi, Bulgar Wheat, Couscous at https://www.tarladalal.com/glossary-broken-wheat-426i

Bulgar is the name for an inhabitant of Bulgaria (or, historically, of one of the predecessor states or tribes).  The word is derived from the Bulgarian language, which from the 7th century has been a form of Slavonic.  Bulgur wheat is a type of cereal.  It is made by boiling wheat, drying it and then crushing it.  It forms a staple in Turkey, from which the word comes.  It is often spelled bulghur, as is the equivalent transliteration into Arabic, in English, and also, confusingly, bulgar is recorded.  In America, bulgur is more usually called cracked wheat.  http://hull-awe.org.uk/index.php?title=Bulgar_-_bulghur_-_bulgur

The Gishwati Area Conservation Programme (GACP) began in September 2007, when H.E. President Paul Kagame, and the Founder and Chair of the Great Ape Trust/Earthpark Ted Townsend, pledged at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York City to found a "National Conservation Park" in Rwanda to benefit climate, biodiversity and the welfare of the Rwandan people.  Since then, Great Ape Trust of Iowa/Earthpark and the Republic of Rwanda co-sponsor and manage the programme.  The work is centred in an area around the Gishwati Forest Reserve today recognised as "Forest of Hope".  Gishwati region is a part of the Congo-Nile Divide and Albertine Rift.  The relief is dominated by hills with high slopes.  The characteristics of that relief have an important impact on the local climate which is characterised by cool temperatures and high rainfall.  Gishwati Forest Reserve is a protected area.  Gishwati has a history of deforestation extending over the past 50 years.  This deforestation was mainly caused by ill-advised large-scale cattle ranching schemes, resettlement of refugees after the genocide, inefficient small-plot farming, free-grazing of cattle, and establishment of plantations of non-native trees.  As a result, the area is plagued with catastrophic flooding, landslides, erosion, decreased soil fertility, decreased water quality, and heavy river siltation, all of which aggravate local poverty.  This forest had 28,000 ha in the 1970s, while in 2005, the remnant forest was 600 ha.  And today, the Gishwati Forest Reserve is 1,484 ha.  http://www.forestlandscaperestoration.org/learning-site-gishwati

Land of a Thousand Hills  The years-long effort of Des Moines businessman Ted Townsend and colleagues to save two tiny forests and a group of chimpanzees in the small East Africa country of Rwanda is on the verge of success.  Part-time Urbandale resident Townsend and his colleagues from the Des Moines area helped establish a new Rwanda, from a different continent.  More than once, they left the insurance buildings of Greater Des Moines for the “Land of a Thousand Hills,” where a forest had nearly disappeared, along with a small group of chimpanzees.  Because of this work, the isolated chimps that called Gishwati Forest home before Townsend showed up have an even better chance of survival.  The number of Gishwati chimpanzees grew to 24, double the level when work began under the moniker “Forest of Hope.”  Part of that success came as “ecoguards” hired by Townsend’s team cracked down on forest-raiding, and as husband-wife researchers Rebecca Chancellor and Aaron Rundus, now of West Chester University in Pennsylvania, observed the chimps and learned more about their dietary habits.  Read more at https://businessrecord.com/PrintArticle.aspx?aid=68269&uid=c7025de5-1011-4caf-9cf8-e38882ddcc3f

The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts houses one of the world's most extensive combinations of circulating, reference, and rare archival collections in its field.  These materials are available free of charge, along with a wide range of special programs, including exhibitions, seminars, and performances.  An essential resource for everyone with an interest in the arts—whether professional or amateur—the library is known particularly for its prodigious collections of non-book materials such as historic recordings, videotapes, autograph manuscripts, correspondence, sheet music, stage designs, press clippings, programs, posters, and photographs.  https://www.lincolncenter.org/venue/new-york-public-library-for-the-performing-arts-dorothy-lewis-b-cullman-center

"With four research centers in Manhattan and eighty-eight neighborhood libraries throughout Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx, the New York Public Library looks forward to welcoming you.  Providing far more than access to books and materials, the Library offers 55,000 free programs annually—serving everyone from toddlers to teens to seniors."  https://www.nypl.org/about/locations

Harold Clayton Lloyd Sr. (1893–1971) was an American actor, comedian, director, producer, screenwriter, and stunt performer who is best known for his silent comedy films.  Lloyd made nearly 200 comedy films, both silent and "talkies", between 1914 and 1947.He is best known for his bespectacled "Glasses" character, a resourceful, success-seeking go-getter who was perfectly in tune with 1920s-era United States.  Lloyd's Beverly Hills home, "Greenacres", was built in 1926–1929, with 44 rooms, 26 bathrooms, 12 fountains, 12 gardens, and a nine-hole golf course.  After attempting to maintain the home as a museum of film history, as Lloyd had wished, the Lloyd family sold it to a developer in 1975.  The grounds were subsequently subdivided but the main house and the estate's principal gardens remain and are frequently used for civic fundraising events and as a filming location, appearing in films like Westworld and The Loved One.  It is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lloyd  The January 2018 issue of The American Organist magazine shows a picture of Virgil Fox with Harold Lloyd at the console of the 31-rank Aeolian organ installed at Lloyd's Greenacres estate.  The organ, still in the house, is restored with a computer player system.  Pipes are in the basement and speak through a tone chamber into the living room.  The Echo organ is installed between the first and second floors, speaking into the hall ceiling.

The word ‘serendipity’ was invented by Horace Walpole.  He is credited by the Oxford English Dictionary with introducing over 200 words into the English language, among them beefy, malaria, nuance, sombre, and souvenir.  But his most celebrated neologism was ‘serendipity’, meaning the ‘faculty of making happy and unexpected discoveries by accident’.  This was coined in a letter of 28 January 1754 written to another man named Horace, namely Horace Mann.  The word ‘serendipity’ comes from Serendip, the old name for Sri Lanka, but Walpole was indebted to a specific work of literature for the creation of the word.  ‘The Three Princes of Serendip’ is one of the earliest detective stories in existence:  it tells of how three princes track down a missing camel through luck and good fortune.  However, that’s not the whole truth.  The three princes in the story do actually utilise what we would now call forensic deduction--almost Sherlockian in its method--and that, ironically, is what gets them into trouble.  https://interestingliterature.com/2015/01/28/a-short-history-of-the-word-serendipity/  Read about Serendip, serendipity and serendipitist at http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/serendip/about.html

"Young people are the antidote to hopelessness."  Jason Reynolds  See Jason Reynolds:  From Kid Poet to Award-Winning Author by Jordan Foster at https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-authors/article/73381-jason-reynolds-from-kid-poet-to-award-winning-author.html and Jason Reynolds at http://www.pippinproperties.com/authors/jason-reynolds/

June 26, 2017  The OED's latest update to the dictionary is the addition of the definition of woke, which TIME defines as a term "embraced by the Black Lives Matter movement."  woke, adjective:  Originally:  well-informed, up-to-date.  Now chiefly:  alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice; frequently in stay woke.  Katherine Martin, head of Oxford's U.S. dictionaries, explains that in the 1920s, the term simply meant to "stay awake."  For example, there was an event held in Harlem with ran from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m. called the "Stay Woke Ball."  However, in the 1960s, people began using "woke" to signal a more figurative sense of the word "awakened," referring to those who are aware or well-informed.  Samantha Scelzo  http://mashable.com/2017/06/26/oed-adds-woke-to-dictionary/#99ut8uaHfkqK

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1833  January 26, 2018  On this date in 1837, Michigan was admitted as the 26th U.S. state.  On this date in 1838, Tennessee enacted the first prohibition law in the United States.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_26

The pioneers of the sustainable farming movement are mourning what they call the downfall of the organic program, following a November 1, 2017 vote by a group of government farming advisers that could determine the future of the $50 billion organic industry.  At issue was whether a booming generation of hydroponic, aquaponic and aeroponic farms—which grow plants in nutrients without using soil, frequently indoors—could continue to sell their produce under the “organic” label.  In a series of narrow votes, an advisory board to the U.S. Department of Agriculture voted to allow the majority of these operators to remain a part of the organic program.  The November 1 recommendation, issued by the National Organic Standards Board, came in four parts.  The board voted to keep out aeroponic farming, which grows plants—typically herbs and leafy greens—suspended in the air with their roots exposed.  But it voted to allow hydroponics, which grow plants in water-based nutrient solutions, and aquaponics, which combine hydroponic systems with farmed fish operations.  The board also declined to tighten its restrictions on container growing, a variation on hydroponics that involves raising plants in containers filled with a mixture of organic matter, water and nutrients.  That system has been adopted by a number of major organic berry growers, such as Driscoll’s and Wholesum Harvest.  During NOSB testimony Tuesday, several organic farmers protested the certification of hydroponic farms, wearing T-shirts that said “Save the Organic Label.”  At recent rallies in Hanover, N.H., and Burlington, Vt., protesters held signs with slogans such as “keep the soil in organic.”  “This notion that organic farmers are stuck in the past, or that they’re a bunch of Luddites hanging on to the way things used to be—that’s a misnomer,” said Cameron Harsh, the senior manager for organic and animal policy at the Center for Food Safety.  “Soilless systems are just incompatible with the organic program and its regulations.”  But in a series of close 8-7 votes, the NOSB appeared to disagree.  Instead, it sided with hydroponic growers, many of whom have spent several years and several thousand dollars acquiring their organic certification.  Their advocates have argued that soilless farming is consistent with the goals of the organic program:  It utilizes organic fertilizers and cuts down on pesticide and water use—often to levels much lower than those on land-based organic operations.  Because hydroponic farms are frequently built indoors, they are said to provide opportunity to urban growers who could not otherwise access agricultural land.  Caitlin Dewey  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/02/pioneers-of-organic-farming-are-threatening-to-leave-the-program-they-helped-create/?utm_term=.3a55275160f5

The Motograph News Bulletin, or "zipper" as it was known informally, was an impressive sight when it was first unveiled in the fall of 1928.  It extended 380 feet around the fourth floor of what was then the Times Tower at One Times Square--the second tallest building in Manhattan when it opened in 1904.  With a band five-feet tall, the moving letters, comprising 14,800 light bulbs, were visible from a distance of several city blocks.  November 6, 1928also happened to be election day in the United States, and the zipper's first message was "Herbert Hoover defeats Al Smith."  The zipper, also known at that time as the "Motogram" sign, was installed for The New York Times by Frank C. Reilly, who is credited as being the inventor of electric signs with moving letters.  According to a New York Times article, "Inside the control room, three cables poured energy into transformers.  The hookup to all the bulbs totaled 88,000 soldered connections.  Messages from a ticker came to a desk beside a cabinet like the case that contained type used by old-time compositors.  The cabinet contained thin slabs called letter elements.  An operator composed the message letter by letter in a frame.  The zipper was updated in 1997 with 227,200 amber-colored LEDs, expected to last up to 100,000 hours--30 times as long as the bulbs they replaced and using only about one-tenth the electricity.  Dow Jones currently holds the lease to the operate the sign.  Headlines are now auto-published with feeds from The Wall Street Journal Online, the Associated Press, and AccuWeather.com.  https://www.edn.com/electronics-blogs/edn-moments/4400674/Motograph-News-Bulletin-debuts-in-New-York-City--November-6--1928

On May 6, 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order creating the Works Progress Administration (WPA).  The WPA was just one of many Great Depression relief programs created under the auspices of the Emergency Relief Appropriations Act, which Roosevelt had signed the month before.  The WPA, the Public Works Administration (PWA) and other federal assistance programs put unemployed Americans to work in return for temporary financial assistance.  http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/fdr-creates-the-wpa

The success of Roosevelt’s New Deal programs has been argued about for years.  Some say that the government overstepped its bounds and that the United States was dangerously close to becoming a totalitarian government under President Roosevelt.  Some argue that unemployment was not erased during the New Deal years and only World War Two was responsible for the end of the Great Depression.  What cannot be debated, however, is that the New Deal programs gave hope to millions of citizens who had given up hope.  What cannot be debated is that the infrastructure of the United States was rebuilt and modernized and many of the projects were springboards for a future where the U.S. would dominate world affairs.  The sheer number of accomplishments is staggering.  CCC projects included 3,470 fire towers erected, 97,000 miles of roads built, 3 billion trees planted, 711 state parks created and over 3 million men employed.  The PWA funded the construction of over 34,000 projects, including airports, dams, schools and hospitals.  The WPA is credited with having constructed 651,087 miles of roadways, repaired 125,110 public buildings and constructed 853 landing fields.  From 1933 and the birth of the New Deal to 1939, unemployment dropped from approximately 15 million to 9 million and most of those workers were employed by New Deal programs.  https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Great-Depressions-The-Top-Five-Public-Works-Projects-of-the-New-Deal  See also Records of the Work Projects Administration [WPA] at https://www.archives.gov/research/guide-fed-records/groups/069.html

An "alphabet soup" of federal programs, including REA (Rural Electrification Administration), SSB (Social Security Board) and PWAP (Public Works of Art Project) were part of the New Deal.  In Ohio, Poindexter Village, the first Columbus housing project, opened in 1940.  The Ohio History Connection has approved purchase of the two remaining buildings of Poindexter Village as its 59th historic site.  Echoes, January-February 2018 

List of characters in the works of Charles Dickens.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dickensian_characters

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

hokum   (HO-kuhm)  noun  1.  Nonsense.  2.  Trite material introduced to evoke an emotional response from an audience.  A blend of hocus-pocus + bunkum.  Earliest documented use:  1917.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day 
From:  Ossie Bullock  Subject:  hokum  Through the wonderful (and free access) California Digital Newspaper Collection (part of the National Digital Newspaper Program), I have managed to push the word’s first appearance back nearly a decade.  A theater review in the LA Herald of 9 Nov 1908 says of two performers in a new show, “Watson and Williams, who jingle the bells for this spicy aggregation, hand out a high class line of hokum, and some of their merry quips have the surprising quality of newness.”
From:  Galen Denio   Subject:  Hokum  Hokum bowing with the fiddle is a style of bluegrass music.

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein people of low ability suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their cognitive ability as greater than it is.  As described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."  The psychological phenomenon of illusory superiority was identified as a form of cognitive bias in Kruger and Dunning's 1999 study "Unskilled and Unaware of It:  How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments".  The identification derived from the cognitive bias evident in the criminal case of McArthur Wheeler, who robbed banks with his face covered with lemon juice, which he believed would make it invisible to the surveillance cameras.  This belief was based on his misunderstanding of the chemical properties of lemon juice as an invisible ink.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

January 21, 2018  Jack Whitten (1939–2018)   Jack Whitten, a conceptual painter who tested the medium’s limits for more than five decades, has died at seventy-eight.  The artist, awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 2016 for “remaking the American canvas,” was dubbed the father of new abstraction by the New York Times. Throughout his career, Whitten eschewed the popular or marketable for what interested him philosophically, and was largely unrecognized by the mainstream until recent years, following a major 2014 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, California.  Born in segregated Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, Whitten became engaged in activism while he was a student at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, before moving to New York in 1960 to attend Cooper Union. There, influenced by Willem de Kooning and Norman Lewis, he started making his earliest paintings, vaguely figural impressions that reflected on the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam.  It was in the 1970s that Whitten became interested in abstraction, experimenting with forms of painting without conventionally gestural elements by employing combs, metal sheets, laminations, rakes, and a twelve-foot-long squeegee to administer acrylic on large canvases.  These pieces, which he called his “Slab” works, were displayed in the lobby of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974 for the artist’s first institutional solo show.  Whitten would later reference ancient mosaics in his art, combining chips of dried acrylic into monumental portraits of people important to him, like Ralph Ellison and Miles Davis.  “I have changed the verb ‘to paint,’” Whitten said in a 1994 interview in Bomb.  “I don’t paint a painting, I make a painting.  So the verb has changed.  And in doing that, I’ve broken through a lot of illusionistic qualities.”  https://www.artforum.com/news/id=73715

Ursula K. Le Guin, a prolific novelist best known for the Earthsea series and The Left Hand of Darkness, died January 21, 2018 at the age of 88.  Across more than 20 novels and scores of short stories, Le Guin crafted fantastic worlds to grapple with profoundly difficult questions here on Earth, from class divisions to feminist theory.   Across the decades-long span of her career--from her first short story submission at the age of 11 to her work well into her 80s--Le Guin stood as a towering figure in science fiction and fantasy.  Indeed, she completed a triple crown of the genres' biggest prizes, earning the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards several times over.  Colin Dwyer  https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/01/23/580109007/ursula-le-guin-whose-novels-plucked-truth-from-high-fantasy-dies-at-88  Le Guin published more than 20 novels and 100 short stories, wrote 12 collections of poetry and several of essays, and 13 books for children.  Michael Berry  https://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Ursula-K-Le-Guin-inspired-countless-read  Read A Left-Handed Commencement Address (Mills College, 1983) by Ursula Le Guin, ranked one of the top 100 speeches of the 20th century by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Texas A&M University, at http://www.ursulakleguin.com/LeftHandMillsCollege.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1832  January 24, 2018  On this date in 1968, London witnessed a double debut:  the first concert of the London Sinfonietta, a chamber group which would go on to become one of the Britain’s most famous new music ensembles and, on their debut program, the premiere performance of a dramatic cantata by John Tavener, who would go on to become one of Britain’s most famous contemporary composers.  Tavener’s cantata was titled, “The Whale.”  In 1997, when the funeral service for Princess Diana was broadcast worldwide, it was Tavener’s serenely lyrical anthem “Song for Athene” that was chosen to accompany the Princess’s coffin as it left Westminster Abbey.  Composers Datebook

Originally known as Long Acre (also Longacre) Square after London’s carriage district, Times Square served as the early site for William H. Vanderbilt’s American Horse Exchange.  In the late 1880s, Long Acre Square consisted of a large open space surrounded by drab apartments.  Adolph S. Ochs, owner and publisher of The New York Times from 1896 to 1935, selected a highly visible location to build the Times Tower, which was the second tallest building in the city at the time.  In January 1905, the Times finally moved into their new headquarters, built between Broadway and Seventh Avenue and 42nd and 43rd Streets.  The previous spring, Mayor George B. McClellan signed a resolution that renamed the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue from Long Acre Square to Times Square.  Ochs told the Syracuse Herald, “I am pleased to say that Times Square was named without any effort or suggestion on the part of The Times.”  Yet, he clearly felt proud:  the new building represented “the first successful effort in New York to give architectural beauty to a skyscraper,” he said.  Within a decade, the Times outgrew their space and moved to a new location, but not before starting a tradition that continues today: the New Year’s Eve spectacular.  Ochs staged the first event to commemorate the new building and crowds still gather today to bring in the new year.  Read much more and see pictures at https://www.timessquarenyc.org/history-of-times-square

Emoticons (English: “emote” + “icon”) are a vast set of ad-hoc symbols formed by typing punctuation marks and letters to simulate faces and other things.  Emoticons were invented at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1983 with the familiar smiley to highlight something meant to be taken lightly.  The true Carnegie-Mellon smiley has a hyphen for a nose, but many people leave it out.  Emoji (Japanese: “e”: “picture” + “moji”: “character”) are a large (more than 1000 as of 2016 and growing) set of characters officially defined by the Unicode standard.  The similarity between “emoji” and “emoticon” is purely coincidental.  Also, Japanese words do not form plurals with a final “s,” so the plural of emoji is emoji.  Emoji originated with several Japanese mobile phone companies in the late 1990s and were incorporated into Unicode in 2010.  Kaomoji, (Japanese: “kao”: “face” + “moji”: “character”) are a kind of emoticon that use characters from all over Unicode.  Dave Land  https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-emoji-and-emoticons

GIF  ("Graphics Interchange Format") is an image file format commonly used for images on the web and sprites in software programs.  Unlike the JPEG image format, GIFs uses lossless compression that does not degrade the quality of the image.  However, GIFs store image data using indexed color, meaning a standard GIF image can include a maximum of 256 colors.  The original GIF format, also known as "GIF 87a," was published by CompuServe in 1987. In 1989, CompuServe released an updated version of the format called "GIF 89a."  The 89a format is similar to the 87a specification, but includes support for transparent backgrounds and image metadata.  Both formats support animations by allowing a stream of images to be stored in a single file.  However, the 89a format also includes support for animation delays.   Even though the GIF format was published more than a quarter century ago, it is still widely used on the web.  NOTE:  A GIF image can actually store more than 256 colors.  This is accomplished by separating the image into multiple blocks, which each continue unique 256 color palettes.  The blocks can be combined into a single rectangular image, which can theoretically produce a "true color" or 24-bit image. However, this method is rarely used because the resulting file size is much larger than a comparable .JPEG file.  https://techterms.com/definition/gif

TAKE YOUR PICK  According to Steve Wilhite, the creator of the original GIF format, it is pronounced "jiff" (like the peanut butter brand).  Most people pronounce it "gif" (with a hard G).  Forte, meaning a strong point, should be pronounced fort.  FOR-tay is a musical term, meaning loudness, and comes from Italian.  The two-syllable version is so entrenched that it is accepted.

The boll weevil, a very small variety of beetle, is native to Mexico, and nests in the boll--or seed capsule--of cotton, hence its name.  With its distinctive long snout, the boll weevil is a legendary pest, one of the all-time greats on the list of most feared insects of the agricultural world.  It moves where the cotton grows, and migrated across the Rio Grande from Mexico into Texas as soon as the land there had decent cotton fields for it to feed on, in 1892.  It moves quickly; the beetle is a decent long-distance flier, and individual beetles have been found as far as 150 miles away from where they were tagged.  By 1909, the boll weevil had landed in Alabama.  By 1915, the incorrigible weevil had made its way all the way to Enterprise, a small city near the state’s southern border.  In Coffee County, where Enterprise sits, almost 60% of the cotton crop was destroyed that year.  Peanuts were mostly ignored in the U.S. until the late 1800s, when P.T. Barnum began selling them at the circus.  At the turn of the century, an array of new machines for planting, harvesting, and shelling peanuts were invented, and in 1915, George Washington Carver began his crusade on behalf of the crop.  Enterprise began growing peanuts just after the weevils arrived, and by 1917, Coffee County was the leading producer of peanuts in the entire country.  The switch from cotton to peanuts is credited not just with saving the town from destruction by weevils, but also for introducing a level of prosperity that was new to in Enterprise.  On December 11, 1919, the town unveiled a beautiful, earnest statue in honor of the boll weevil, for forcing the town to abandon one crop and adopt a far better one.  Initially, the statue was just a Grecian-looking woman raising her hands above her head, but 30 years later, in 1949, a boll weevil was added on a pedestal atop her hands.  For some reasons, the statue was the victim of frequent vandalism; it was damaged beyond repair in 1998.  A replica was made and stands in its place, while the original stands in the Pea River Historical & Genealogical Society, a museum dedicated to preserving the history of Enterprise.  Dan Nosowitz    https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/boll-weevil-monument-alabama  See also https://www.enterpriseal.gov/history-of-enterprise and https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/agricultural-pest-honored-herald-prosperity-enterprise-alabama-180963506/

Find attractions and oddities at https://www.roadsideamerica.com/  Search by name of attraction, town or state-and link to latest visitor tips and field sightings.  You may also sign up for a Sightings Newsletter.

The Kazakh language is currently written using a modified version of Cyrillic, a legacy of Soviet rule, but president, Nursultan A. Nazarbayev  announced in May 2017 that the Russian alphabet would be dumped in favor of a new script based on the Latin alphabet.  The decision, however, raised a tricky issue:  how to write down a tongue that has no alphabet of its own but has always used scripts imported from outside.  The president’s ardent intervention in Kazakhstan’s passionate debate over a new script and his proposed solution—he wants lots and lots of apostrophes—have highlighted how virtually everything in this former Soviet land, no matter how small or obscure, hinges on the will of a single 77-year-old man, or at least those who claim to speak for him.  “This is the basic problem of our country:  If the president says something or just writes something on a napkin, everybody has to applaud,” said Aidos Sarym, a political analyst and member of a language reform commission set up last year.  The Republic of Kazakhstan, for example, will be written in Kazakh as Qazaqstan Respy’bli’kasy.  In a country where almost nobody challenges the president publicly, Mr. Nazarbayev has found his policy on apostrophes assailed from all sides.  Linguists, who had recommended that the new writing system follow the example of Turkish, which uses umlauts and other phonetic markers instead of apostrophes, protested that the president’s approach would be ugly and imprecise.  Others complained the use of apostrophes will make it impossible to do Google searches for many Kazakh words or to create hashtags on Twitter.  “We are supposed to be modernizing the language but are cutting ourselves from the internet,” Mr. Sarym said.  Andrew Higgins  https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/world/asia/kazakhstan-alphabet-nursultan-nazarbayev.html 

Naomi Parker Fraley, the real "Rosie the Riveter," died January 20, 2018 at the age of 96.  A photo of a young Fraley, with arm flexed and head topped by a red-and-white polka-dot bandana, would inspire the 1943 Rosie the Riveter poster designed by J. Howard Miller.  Promulgated across the home front during the war years, Fraley's portrait would outlive the war and establish an indefinite place in the American visual lexicon, most recently appearing on posters at national Women's Marches held on the day of her death.  Michelle Robertson  https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Naomi-Parker-Fraley-rosie-the-riveter-alameda-died-12516102.php

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1831  January 23, 2018  On this date in 1546,  having published nothing for eleven years, François Rabelais published the Tiers Livre, his sequel to Gargantua and Pantagruel.  On this date in 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell was awarded her M.D. by the Geneva Medical College of Geneva, New York, becoming the United States' first female doctor.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_23  Word of the Day  glossolalia  noun  Speaking a language one does not know, or speaking elaborate but apparently meaningless speech, while in a trance-like state (or, supposedly, under the influence of a deity or spirits); speaking in tongues.

            

Throughout history, societies have had numbers they consider special.  For example, in ancient Rome the number 7 was auspicious, in Maya civilisation the number 13 was sacred, in modern-day Japan people give three, five, or seven gifts for luck, and in China the number 8 is considered lucky and 4 is avoided whenever possible.  In Western cultures the number 13 is often considered unlucky, hence the term triskaidekaphobia, fear of the number 13.  Controlled experiments with numbers date back to 1933 when the researcher Dietz asked Dutch people to name the first number to come to mind between 0 and 99.  The number 7 was mentioned most, as it was in various later replicas of the study in other countries.  The number 7 also came out on top in studies that asked people to name their favourite number.  In an online poll by Alex Bellos, a columnist for The Guardian, more than 30,000 people from all over the world submitted numbers, with 7 the most popular.  All numbers under 100 were submitted at least once and nearly half of the numbers under 1,000.  Marketing researchers King and Janiszewski investigated number preference in a different way.  They showed undergraduate students random numbers and asked them to say quickly whether they liked the number, disliked it, or felt neutral.  The number 100 had the highest proportion of people liking it (70%) and the lowest proportion of people disliking it (5%).  The numbers 1 to 20 were liked by 9% more people than the higher numbers; the numbers that are the result of rote-learned multiplication tables (i.e. 2 × 2 to 10 × 10) were liked by 15% more people than the remaining numbers.  The researchers concluded that number fluency predicts number preference:  hence multiplication table numbers are preferred over prime numbers.  The closely related field of letter-preference research dates back to the 1950s.  In 1985, Belgian psychologist Nuttin reported the unexpected finding that people tend to disproportionately prefer, unknowingly, the letters of their own name.  The name-letter effect has been replicated in dozens of follow-up studies in different languages, cultures and alphabets, no matter whether participants selected their preferred letter from a random pair, or picked the top six of all letters in the alphabet, or rated each individual letter.  Nuttin predicted that because the driving force behind the name-letter effect is an unconscious preference for anything connected to the self, there would also be a birthday-number effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday-number_effect

Thousands Once Spoke His Language in the Amazon.  Now, He’s the Only One.  by Nicholas Casey   Amadeo García García speaks Taushiro.  A mystery to linguists and anthropologists alike, the language was spoken by a tribe that vanished into the jungles of the Amazon basin in Peru generations ago, hoping to save itself from the invaders whose weapons and diseases had brought it to the brink of extinction.  A bend on the “wild river,” as they called it, sheltered the two brothers and the other 15 remaining members of their tribe  The clan protected its tiny settlement with a ring of deep pits, expertly hidden by a thin cover of leaves and sticks  They kept packs of attack dogs to stop outsiders from coming near.  In the last century, at least 37 languages have disappeared in Peru alone, lost in the steady clash and churn of national expansion, migration, urbanization and the pursuit of natural resources.  Forty-seven languages remain here in Peru, scholars estimate, and nearly half are at risk of disappearing.  https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/26/world/americas/peru-amazon-the-end.html

Easy parfait:  The night before, layer jam, chopped pistachios and yogurt in jars.  Cover and put in fridge.  *  Roasted nuts:  Coat any kind of nut in extra virgin olive oil (use one tsp. for every 2 cups) and put on rimmed baking sheet.  Sprinkle with kosher salt and bake at 350 degrees until golden, 10 to 15 minutes.  *  Mirepoix:  Allegedly named after Duc de Lévis-Mirepoix, this "holy trinity" of finely diced onion, carrot and celery is the basis of many French dishes.  Martha Stewart Living magazine  January/February 2018

Gaston Pierre de Lévis, known as the duc de Lévis-Mirepoix (Gaston-Charles-Pierre-François de Lévis; 1699–1757), maréchal de France (1757) and Ambassador of Louis XV, was a member of a family established in Languedoc as Seigneurs of Mirepoix, Ariège since the 11th century.  The chef de cuisine to Lévis, Duke of Mirepoix established the sautéed three vegetables that served as a basis for his culinary art, as a mirepoix in honor of his patron.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaston_Pierre_de_L%C3%A9vis

"Charlestonians never sweat.  We sometimes dew up like hydrangea bushes or well-tended lawns."  "San Francisco is a city that requires a fine pair of legs, a city of cliffs misnamed as hills, honeycombed with a fine webbing of showy houses that cling to the slanted streets with the fierceness of abalones."  "Don't be afraid to make a mistake.  You learn by making mistakes.  You get better by making mistakes."  "People change.  That's one of the nice parts about growing up."  South of Broad, a novel by Pat Conroy 

Pat Conroy, born in Atlanta in 1945, was the first of seven children of a young Marine officer from Chicago and a Southern beauty from Alabama, to whom Pat often credits for his love of language.  The Conroys moved frequently to military bases throughout the South, and Conroy eventually attended The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, South Carolina.  Conroy often joked that a military school was an unconventional choice for someone who dreamed of being a writer, but, in fact, he found a number of deeply supportive faculty there, and Conroy's first book, The Boo (1970), is a tribute to Lt. Col. Thomas Nugent Courvoisie, who served as a mentor to many Citadel cadets.  Following graduation, Conroy taught English and psychology at Beaufort High School, his alma mater, and in 1969 he took a job teaching underprivileged children in a one-room schoolhouse on Daufuskie, a small island about three miles off the South Carolina mainland.  After just a year of teaching on Daufuskie, Conroy was fired for his unconventional teaching practices, including his refusal to allow corporal punishment of his students, and for his clashes with the school's administration.  Conroy's fifth novel and ninth book, South of Broad (2009) uses James Joyce's Ulysses as a loose model, and follows its aptly named protagonist, Leopold Bloom King, as he makes his way though Charleston and, later, San Francisco.  Despite Conroy's nod to Joyce, the novel is generally viewed as "quintessentially Conroy" in its fast-moving plotline and lyrical descriptions of Charleston.  Just a year later, Conroy released My Reading Life (2010), a collection of essays that celebrate the books that have most influenced him, and tantalizingly offers fascinating glimpses into the daily life of a writer.  In 2013, Conroy published The Death of Santini.  Subtitled "The Story of a Father and His Son," the memoir details the impact that the publication of The Great Santini had on Conroy's father, who, when faced with that novel's portrait of him, underwent a radical reinvention, becoming a "kinder, gentler" Santini.  In 2014, Pat Conroy assumed the mantle of editor at large for Story River Books, his original southern fiction imprint at the University of South Carolina Press.  Story River Press was launched in 2015.  Conroy died on March 4, 2016 and is buried in a small cemetery on St. Helena Island near the Penn Center, where as a teenager he first met Martin Luther King and where he was honored in 2011 for his dedication to social justice.  Read much more and see pictures at http://www.patconroy.com/about.php

On January 16th, 2018 around 8:10 p.m. EST, a brilliant, green fireball crackled across southern Michigan skies.  Eyewitnesses described it as brighter than the full Moon with sparks and an orange tail.  At least 77 observers reported hearing explosive sounds as the meteoroid broke apart overhead.  The American Meteor Society (AMS), a clearinghouse for meteor sightings, has received 657 reports of the fireball with some as far away as Iowa and southern Ontario.  The fireball traveled relatively slowly at around 45,000 km (28,000 miles) per hour.  That sounds fast, but it's more than 4½ times slower than a typical summertime Perseid.  While fireballs are relatively common, ones that drop meteorites are rare, and it's rarer still for someone to find those black treasures.  But by using Doppler weather radar data and seismic traces, meteorite hunters were able to pinpoint the strewn field, the name for the ground footprint where the space rocks might have fallen.  Lately of the asteroid belt, these interplanetary fragments now call the Township of Hamburg, Michigan, home.  A preliminary analysis indicates it's possibly an L6 chondrite, a common stony meteorite type.  The "L" stands for low iron and "6" (on a scale from 3 to 7, from least to most altered by heat) indicates that the meteorite was strongly heated, so it likely originated from a larger asteroid.  Samples are on their way now to the Chicago Field Museum for more detailed analysis.  Bob King  See graphics at http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-news/observing-news/michigan-fireball/

Ed Moses, who formed the “Cool School” of artists including Ed Ruscha, Robert Irwin, Larry Bell, Edward Kienholz, John Altoon, Ken Price and Billy Al Bengston died January 17, 2018 at the age of 91.  Architect Frank Gehry, one of Moses’ closest friends, met the painter when he was just starting out.  “He opened a lot of doors for me, doors of thinking, to a way of looking at life, of thinking about work and creativity and freedom and expressing oneself—taking chances,” Gehry said.  “He was the first person that was in that world that sort of took me under his wing.  He was very supportive.  “I think he influenced others by his sense of freedom, his personality, his willingness to step into the unknown.  He epitomized that."  "I think of him as my north star.”  Moses captured critical attention in 1961 with graphite drawings of repetitive patterns of roses inspired by Mexican tablecloths.  His “Cubist Paintings” of the mid-1970s resemble exquisitely woven lengths of silky fabric.  In relatively earthy works made in 1987, the paths of fat, juicy squiggles emulate snails' trails.  Expanding his reach in the 1990s, Moses combined passages of explosive energy and soulful introspection in vast mural-like compositions.  Deborah Vankin and Suzanne Muchnik  Read more and see pictures at

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-me-ed-moses-dies-20180118-story.html

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1830  January 22, 1018  On this date in 1980, John Williams led the Boston Pops Orchestra in the premiere performance of his own Overture to “The Cowboys.”  This concert overture was based on material from Williams’ score for a John Wayne film entitled “The Cowboys.”  Composers Datebook