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Lucius Tarquinius, the last king of Rome, was better known as Tarquinius Superbus, due to his arrogant and disdainful personality.  His overthrow in 509 BCE led to the establishment of the Roman Republic.  The abbreviation SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus) is emblematic of the people’s determination to participate in the government practically to the time of Julius Caesar four hundred years later.  *  In Hungarian both apricot and peach are known as peach.  The first is called yellow peach, the second autumn peach.

When ordered in a restaurant, sweet plantains are delicious but swimming in a pool of oil.  This recipe bypasses the frying step, letting the oven create plantains that are slightly caramelized and chewy without all the additional fat.  Mojo is a classic Cuban sauce used as a marinade in this recipe.  No grill?  No problem.  Just cook the pork tenderloin in the oven with the plantains.  Follow directions above as far as wiping marinade off pork tenderloin and seasoning it.  In large sauté pan over high heat, warm 2 teaspoons canola oil over high heat.  Add pork to sauté pan, cooking on each side until golden brown, about 5 minutes total.  Transfer pork tenderloin in sauté pan or onto a baking sheet into the 450°F oven with the plantains.  Cook pork until a meat thermometer registers 145°, about 15 to 20 minutes.  https://recipes.heart.org/en/recipes/grilled-cuban-mojo-marinated-pork-tenderloin-with-fried-plantains  See also https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/healthy-eating/eat-smart/aha-cookbooks/cooking-in-color-cookbook

bunk, bunkum or buncombe (chiefly U.S.):  1830s, from “speaking to Buncombe” (or “for Buncombe”).  In 1820, Felix Walker, who represented Buncombe County, NC in U.S. House of Representatives, rose to address question of admitting Missouri as a free or slave state.  This was his first attempt to speak on this subject after nearly a month of solid debate and right before the vote was to be called.  Allegedly, to the exasperation of his colleagues, Walker insisted on delivering a long and wearisome “speech for Buncombe.”  He was shouted down by his colleagues.  His persistent effort made “buncombe” (later respelled “bunkum”) a synonym for meaningless political claptrap and later for any kind of nonsense. The term became a joke and metaphor in Washington, then entered common usage.  Find other terms for drivel including applesauce, blatherskite, hokum, malarkey and tripe at https://www.glossophilia.org/2013/03/49-shades-of-nonsense-a-thesaurus-of-piffle/

June 25, 2019  Once an indispensable part of daily life in Japan, washi paper was used for everything from writing and painting to lampshades, umbrellas and sliding doors, but demand has plunged as lifestyles have become more Westernized.  But, at a small workshop in western Japan, Hiroyoshi Chinzei, a fourth-generation traditional paper maker, creates washi with a unique purpose that may help revive interest—both at home and abroad.  Chinzei’s product, the world’s thinnest paper, has helped save historical documents at major museums and libraries—including the Louvre in Paris, the British Museum in London and Washington’s Library of Congress—from decay.  “Washi paper is more flexible and durable” than what Japanese refer to as “Western paper,” which disintegrates into tiny pieces when it becomes very old, the 50-year-old says.  The traditional handmade paper is manufactured from plants called kōzo, or mulberry, which has fibers that are much longer than materials used for paper in the west such as wood and cotton.  “Old Japanese books from the seventh or eighth century remain in good condition . . . thanks to the fibers of the kōzo plants,” the washi maker says at his small factory in Hidaka, a village located in Kochi Prefecture on the island of Shikoku.  Chinzei’s washi, a type called tengu-jōshi paper, also known as “the wings of a mayfly,” is 0.02 millimeters thick and weighs 1.6 grams per square meter.  This is compared to a standard sheet of photocopy paper, which is about 0.09 millimeters thick and weighs 70 grams per square meter.  Natsuko Fukue  Read more and see pictures at https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2019/06/25/lifestyle/skin-deep-japans-washi-paper-torn-modern-life/#.XrFW-6hKiUk

A novel by Simone de Beauvoir that was deemed too intimate to release in her lifetime will be published for the first time in 2021.  The French writer and feminist’s Les inséparables tells the story of the “passionate and tragic” friendship she had as a young girl with Elisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin, who died of encephalitis at the age of 21.  Written in 1954, in the first person, the novel sees the author of feminist classic The Second Sex, published five years earlier, tell the story of the beginning of the friendship, as Andrée, or Zaza, joins the same class as Sylvie, or Simone.  Beauvoir writes in her memoir Force of Circumstance that when she showed the novel to Jean-Paul Sartre, her partner, “he held his nose”.  “I couldn’t have agreed more:  the story seemed to have no inner necessity and failed to hold the reader’s interest,” she wrote.  Beauvoir would go on to tell the story of the friendship in her non-fiction Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter; Deirdre Bair’s biography of the author tells of how the two were known at school as “the inseparables” by teachers and students alike.  Alison Flood  https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/29/simone-de-beauvoir-too-intimate-novel-to-be-published-after-75-year-les-inseparables

levitate verb  to rise by virtue of lightness (intransitive), from Latin levitas "lightness," on the model of gravitate (compare levity).  Transitive sense of "raise (a person) into the air, cause to become buoyant" (1870s) is mainly from spiritualism.  Related:  Levitated; levitating.  https://www.etymonline.com/word/levitate

levity noun  humor or lack of seriousness, especially during a serious occasion  https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/levity

Annals of the Former World, Book 5:  Crossing the Craton by John McPhee  “As you cross Iowa and approach Des Moines, nothing on the surface—not a streamcourse, a fault line, an outcrop, a rise—so much as hints at what is now beneath you.  Six hundred feet down is the eastern edge of a great tectonic rift —a rupture of the lithosphere—that reposes there like a sunken boat in the waters of a lake.”  “The oldest rock in the United States is in the Minnesota River Valley—about 3.5 billion years.” 

craton  A craton (from Greek: κράτος kratos "strength") is an old and stable part of the continental lithosphere, which consists of the Earth's two topmost layers, the crust and the uppermost mantle.  Having often survived cycles of merging and rifting of continents, cratons are generally found in the interiors of tectonic plates.  They are characteristically composed of ancient crystalline basement rock, which may be covered by younger sedimentary rock.  They have a thick crust and deep lithospheric roots that extend as much as several hundred kilometres into the Earth's mantle.  The term craton is used to distinguish the stable portion of the continental crust from regions that are more geologically active and unstable.  Cratons can be described as shields, in which the basement rock crops out at the surface, and platforms, in which the basement is overlaid by sediments and sedimentary rock.  The word craton was first proposed by the Austrian geologist Leopold Kober in 1921 as Kratogen, referring to stable continental platforms, and orogen as a term for mountain or orogenic belts.  Later Hans Stille shortened the former term to kraton from which craton derives.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craton

President Trump signed an executive order May 28, 2020 aimed at limiting the broad legal protections enjoyed by social media companies, two days after he tore into Twitter for fact-checking two of his tweets.  "We're here today to defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history, frankly," Trump said from the Oval Office.  "A small handful of powerful social media monopolies control the vast portion of all private and public communications in the United States."  The president said the tech companies have "unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter" a large sphere of human interaction.  "They have points of view," he said.  The Trump administration hopes the order will eventually set the stage for new regulations on tech platforms such as Twitter and Facebook.  The White House order takes aim at a 1996 law passed by Congress that has often been at the center of political fights over regulating speech on social media platforms:  Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  The law protects Internet companies from being sued over content that appears on their platforms and allows for content moderation.  The removal of a post is left up to the internal rules of companies such as Twitter and Facebook, provided those decisions are made "in good faith."  Bobby Allyn 

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/28/863932758/stung-by-twitter-trump-signs-executive-order-to-weaken-social-media-companies

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2276   May 29, 2020