Friday, December 7, 2018


On December 5, 2018 the Eater staff announced the winners of the ninth annual Eater Awards, "shining a spotlight on the people who shaped food culture this year" and celebrating the standout achievements of a jam-packed year in the food and restaurant world.  The Eater Awards are meant to honor the people who shaped the way we thought about, talked about, and ultimately experienced dining this year—in restaurants, on television, and at home.  Eater Awards aren’t the only accolades we use to define the year in feasting—we’ve got lists of the year’s Best New Restaurants and nationwide essentials, too.  Read about and see pictures of the winners at

Sweet potatoes are not a type of yam, and yams are not a type of sweet potato.  They are both tuberous root vegetables that come from a flowering plant, but they are not related and actually don't even have a lot in common.  Yams are native to Africa and Asia, with the majority of the crop coming from Africa.  They are related to lilies, and can be as small as a regular potato or jumbo in size (some grow five feet long!).  Yams have a cylindrical shape with blackish or brown, bark-like skin and white, purple, or reddish flesh.  Compared to sweet potatoes, yams are starchier and drier.  There are many varieties of sweet potatoes, which come from the morning glory family.  Skin color can be white, yellow, red, purple, or brown, while the flesh can be white, yellow, orange, or even orange-red.  These vegetables have an elongated shape with tapered ends.  Kelli Foster  https://www.thekitchn.com/whats-the-difference-between-yams-and-sweet-potatoes-word-of-mouth-211176

Tom Cruise gives lesson in TV settings and 'motion smoothing' by Dave Lee   In an impassioned video posted to Twitter on December 4, 2018, the Mission Impossible star warned that a default setting on many high-end televisions "makes most movies look like they were shot on high-speed video instead of film".   “If you own a modern high-definition television," he said, "there’s a good chance you’re not watching movies the way the filmmakers intended, and the ability for you to do so is not simple to access."  Motion smoothing, or interpolation, is a technique that artificially adds additional frames to the moving image in order to prevent blurring--most effective when watching sport.  But many in the film industry hate it, however, as it can degrade the image quality of the original film, and alter colouring.  https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-46449906  Motion smoothing is also called the "soap opera effect." 

December 4, 2018   Seeing a rainbow is a stroke of luck, and a double rainbow is even more spectacular.  But a triple rainbow?  Impossible as it may seem, a bizarre tangling of colorful arcs was sighted in Robbinston, Maine, last week.  Tertiary and quadruple rainbows are real things, first photographed in 2011.  Third- and fourth-order rainbows are unlike their lesser-order siblings, instead appearing on the same side of the sky as and centered on the sun  The rain has to be opposite the sun for the first two bows, and then any rain to the left and right of the sun is the canvas for the third- and fourth-order bows—but at the same time, the sun has to be unobstructed.  It must also shine brilliantly enough that, amid all the reflections within the raindrop, enough light is left over for that fourth arc to shimmer. Lining up those conditions is about as tough as winning the lottery.  Matthew Cappucci  See graphics at https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2018/12/04/triple-rainbow-appeared-maine-last-week-heres-how-it-happened/?utm_term=.eba9fa132cc4
                                                                    
"Seeing isn't believing.  Feeling is believing."  "The library is like a candy store where everything is free."  The illusory presence of the stage--where the unreal becomes real . . .  Songs of Willow Frost, second novel of  Jamie Ford   quotes from the acknowledgments section:  I'm offering a rousing standing ovation to the staff of Seattle's Wing Luke Museum for your acceptance and encouragement . . . A wide-eyed wave, as I press my nose to the window of the Museum of History 8:  Industry (MOHAI).  I'm the kid.  You're the candy store . . . A shout-out to the Tacoma Public Library . . .

Jamie Ford (born July 9, 1968) is an American author.  He is best known for his debut novelHotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet.  The book received positive reviews after its release, and was also awarded best "Adult Fiction" book at the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Awards for Literature.  The book was also named the #1 Book Club Pick for Fall 2009/Winter 2010 by the American Booksellers Association.  Jamie Ford was born in Eureka, California, but grew up in Ashland, Oregon, and Port Orchard and Seattle, Washington.  His father, a Seattle native, is of Chinese ancestry, while Ford’s mother is of European descent.  His Western last name "Ford" comes from his great grandfather, Min Chung (1850-1922), who immigrated to Tonopah, Nevada in 1865 and later changed his name to William Ford  Ford's great grandmother, Loy Lee Ford, was the first Chinese woman to own property in Nevada.  Ford earned a degree in Design from the Art Institute of Seattle and also attended Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jamie_Ford
See also A Conversation with Jamie Ford at http://www.jamieford.com/interview/

Vermilion  An orangish red pigment with excellent hiding power and good permanence.  It's a mercury sulfide mineral (cinnabar) used from antiquity through to the present though only scarcely due to its toxicity.  Made artificially from the 8th century (vermilion), it was the principle red in painting until the manufacture of its synthetic equivalent, cadmium red.  The name "Vermilion" comes from Latin vermiculus = small worm, cochineal (which yields a red dye), from vermis = worm.  http://www.webexhibits.org/pigments/indiv/overview/vermilion.html

The Lure of the Red Herring  Before modern refrigeration and speedy transport, fish could not be got to customers more than a few miles inland before it went bad.  Various methods were invented for preserving them, using salting, smoking or pickling.  Kippers are herrings that have been split, salted, dried and smoked.  Yarmouth bloaters are made by a variation on kippering but are whole fish and do not keep so well.  Arbroath smokies are smoked haddock.  Red herrings are a type of kipper that have been much more heavily smoked, for up to 10 days, until they have been part-cooked and have gone a reddish-brown colour.  They also have a strong smell.  They would keep for months (they were transported in barrels to provide protein on long sea voyages) but in this state they were inedible and had to be soaked to soften them and remove the salt before they could be heated and served.  The first reference to them in English is from around 1420, although the technique is older than that.  Scott Ross and the Oxford English Dictionary now trace the figurative sense to the radical journalist William Cobbett, whose Weekly Political Register thundered in the years 1803-35 against the English political system he denigrated as the Old Corruption.  He wrote a story, presumably fictional, in the issue of 14 February 1807 about how as a boy he had used a red herring as a decoy to deflect hounds chasing after a hare.  He used the story as a metaphor to decry the press, which had allowed itself to be misled by false information about a supposed defeat of Napoleon; this caused them to take their attention off important domestic matters:  “It was a mere transitory effect of the political red-herring; for, on the Saturday, the scent became as cold as a stone.”  This story, and his extended repetition of it in 1833, was enough to get the figurative sense of red herring into the minds of his readers, unfortunately also with the false idea that it came from some real practice of huntsmen.  It was reinforced by the belief of Cobbett’s son that the origin was correct; he included it in a commentary on an edition of his father’s Rural Rides in 1853.

There are thousands of named date varieties. They fall into two main categories, soft and dry, and are most readily available from fall through winter.  See information on nine varieties, including medjool, known as the “queen of dates” for its large size, pillowy texture, and very sweet, strong flavor.  Its name means “unknown.”   https://www.marthastewart.com/1099106/glossary-dates

George H.W. Bush's biographer hails the late president as a noble man who made the world better and inadvertently made it chuckle.  Nashville historian Jon Meacham spoke at the state funeral for Bush Wednesday in Washington and told mourners that Bush's credo was, "Tell the truth, don't blame people, be strong, do your best, try hard, forgive, stay the course."  https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2018/12/05/jon-meacham-president-george-bush-funeral/2215276002/   Watch Jon Meacham's 12:11 G.H.W. Bush eulogy at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDeXqjhsLW0

The best ship is friendship is part of a proverb that George H.W. Bush  quoted to Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.  Mulroney recounted the story when he spoke at the G.H.W. Bush's state funeral on December 5, 2018.  Watch the 12:01 eulogy at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZflCmZq9dc

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  December 7, 2018  Issue 2000  341st day of the year

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