tog  from Old French togue, from Latin toga (“cloak, mantle”).  It started being used by thieves and vagabonds with the noun togman, which was an old slang word for "cloak".  By the 1700s the noun "tog" was used as a short form for "togman", and it was being used for "coat", and before 1800 the word started to mean "clothing".  The verb "tog" came out after a short period of time and became a popular word which meant to dress up.  The unit of thermal resistance was coined in the 1940s after the clo, a unit of thermal insulation of clothing, which was itself derived from clothes.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tog

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

bokeh  (BOH-kay/kuh) noun  The blurred effect in a photograph, typically as a soft out-of-focus background, that results in a pleasing effect and helps to draw attention to the subject of the photograph.  From Japanese boke (blur, haze) or boke-aji (blur quality).  Earliest documented use:  1997.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day  From:  Walter Levy  In the world of photography, the term bokeh has been in general use since around 1997.  A more recent neologism is bokehlicious, a portmanteau of bokeh and delicious, indicating a highly desirable quality of bokeh.  The term can be applied to a photograph with smooth, “creamy” out-of-focus areas, or to a lens that tends to produce such images.

If you're not already making labneh, now's the time to start!  This creamy, tangy yogurt cheese comes together with just 2 simple ingredients.  The hardest part of making labneh cheese is waiting.  Everything else is simple.  Mix together 2 ingredients--Greek yogurt and salt--wrap them in a cheesecloth, and hang it over a bowl to strain.  Then, things get tough:  you’ll have to wait 24 hours to open the cheesecloth and enjoy the thick, creamy yogurt cheese inside.  But if you try this labneh recipe, I think you’ll agree that the wait is totally worth it.  https://www.loveandlemons.com/labneh-recipe/  Thank you, Muse reader! 

DNA origami is the nanoscale folding of DNA to create non-arbitrary two- and three-dimensional shapes at the nanoscale.  The specificity of the interactions between complementary base pairs make DNA a useful construction material, through design of its base sequences.  DNA is a well-understood material that is suitable for creating scaffolds that hold other molecules in place or to create structures all on its own.  DNA origami was the cover story of Nature on March 16, 2006.  Since then, DNA origami has progressed past an art form and has found a number of applications from drug delivery systems to uses as circuitry in plasmonic devices; however, most applications remain in a concept or testing phase.  The idea of using DNA as a construction material was first introduced in the early 1980s by Nadrian Seeman.  The current method of DNA origami was developed by Paul Rothemund at the California Institute of Technology.  Examples include a smiley face and a coarse map of China and the Americas, along with many three-dimensional structures such as cubes.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_origami

“There is a land in the northern fringes of the state of Vermont known to locals simply as the Northeast Kingdom.  It takes in most of Essex County, with pieces of Orleans and Caledonia, a wild, mountainous place of lakes and rivers, hills and gorges, with here and there a bumpy track and a small village.”  “Wits from the South say there are only two seasons in the Kingdom—August and winter.  Those who know the place say this is nonsense; it is August 15th and winter.”  The Negotiator, a novel by Fredercik Forsyth  *  In 1990 Australian broadcaster Alan Jones had been a regular writer for The Sun-Herald when the newspaper announced that Jones' column would no longer appear following a petition by staff calling for his removal as a contributor.  This followed Jones' publication of a column predicting an oil crisis, in which a large amount of the material had been taken directly from Forsyth's novel The Negotiator without any attribution or indication that the source was a work of fiction.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negotiator_(novel)

Six hundred miles from the North Pole, on an island the size of West Virginia, at the end of a tunnel bored into a mountain, lies a vault filled with more than 1 million samples of seeds harvested from 6,374 species of plants grown in 249 locations around the world.  The Wall Street Journal  May 30, 2020

February 24, 2020  The so-called “doomsday” vault in Norway is taking in its biggest deposit of seeds since vital upgrades in 2019.  The deposit will feature over 60,000 seed samples from 36 different groups—the most to send their seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault at one time.  That includes the Cherokee Nation, the first tribe based in the US to make a deposit.  Departments of agriculture from Thailand, the US, and Ireland and universities and research centers from Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Lebanon, and elsewhere will make contributions as well.  The international nonprofit organization Crop Trust manages the vault in partnership with the Norwegian Ministry of Agriculture and Food and the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre.  Justine Calma@justcalma 
https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/24/21151298/doomsday-svalbard-vault-seed-deposit-cherokee-nation

FROM THE YEAR 2000  “This Friday is the first National Work at Home Day, an occasion when there won't be any need to feel guilty about negotiating a multimillion-dollar deal in your boxers and bunny slippers, or interviewing a chief executive while wearing just a towel.”  https://www.wired.com/2000/07/this-friday-make-it-real-casual/  The tradition continues (day after day after day) in 2020.

At the Bird Library in Virginia, birds (and the occasional squirrel) come and go, leaving with seeds and fruits instead of books.  It’s not actually a library, but a bird feeder that anyone can watch on a 24/7 livestream.  According to librarian Rebecca Flowers, she and woodworker Kevin Cwalina built the bird feeder five years ago after seeing The Piip Show, a popular-but-now-defunct livestream in Norway with the same concept, but set in a cafe.  It was their love of nature (and literature) that made them decide to do a similar project.  Over the years, the library has received diverse visitors, including goldfinches, cardinals, nuthatches, and more recently, a rose-breasted grosbeak.  Flowers says that one can learn a lot about birds and their unique personalities by simply watching them.  You can watch the Bird Library’s livestream on YouTube, and you can also see their archive of photos on their website.  Inigo Del Castillo https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/bird-library-livestream-36766357  Thank you, Muse reader! 

“I’m a librarian, I can handle anything.”  “It’s snack o’clock!”  “Why did the bird go to the library?  He was looking for bookworms.”  Quotes from https://www.birdlibrary.org/

                                                                                                  

David A. Taylor on Art as Social Intervention  When the economy collapsed in 1929, American jobs disappeared at the rate of 20,000 a day.  In the Great Depression, the publishing and arts sectors shrank by about a third.  Creatives were desperate.  There was private desperation and there was public desperation.  Harry Hopkins, the New Deal’s jobs program coordinator, focused on the public aspect and short-term solutions.  When Congress questioned the idea of supporting artists and writers with jobs in the Works Progress Administration, Hopkins replied that artists had to eat like everyone else.  In response to protests in New York by unemployed publishing workers who felt abandoned, the WPA began a small Federal Writers’ Project and others for art, music, and theater. The notion behind “work relief” was that paying work could sustain morale better than direct unemployment payments.  In visual art, a first federal art program in 1933 cranked out 15,000 works in six months.  It reached one-third of the country’s estimated 10,000 unemployed artists and the Federal Art Project reached still further.  Jacob Lawrence, who studied at the Harlem Community Art Center with Romare Bearden, was a WPA artist. Lawrence first considered becoming a writer.  He knew he “wanted to tell a story,” he said later, but was daunted by the competitive genius in Harlem’s literary scene.  So he chose to tell it in paint.  He created most of his Migration Series as a 23-year-old living in a Harlem loft.  Some WPA guidebooks were censored and denounced by citizens’ committees in their time, and some of the writers’ later works were banned.  They reflect art’s power in shaping and triggering American identities and norms.  Even in 2020,  Invisible Man appeared on an Alaska school board’s list of banned books (along with work by Maya Angelou and others) for mentions of incest, racial slurs, and profanity.  Maybe the WPA let new passions into the public space.  “Writing is an act of salvation,” Ellison wrote in a letter to Wright after seeing the Great Migration unspool in Wright’s photo essay, 12 Million Black Voices.  “God! It makes you want to write and write and write, or murder.”  https://lithub.com/how-did-artists-survive-the-first-great-depression/

A THOUGHT FOR JUNE 30  Not that I want to be a god or a hero.  Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone. - Czeslaw Milosz, poet and novelist (30 Jun 1911-2004)

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2292  June 30, 2020

HOMEMADE NAAN + INDIAN VEGGIE WRAP posted by Ali 

https://www.gimmesomeoven.com/homemade-naan-recipe/

HOMEMADE NAAN BREAD posted by Beth 

https://www.budgetbytes.com/naan/                                                                   

The art of origami or paper folding has received a considerable amount of mathematical study.  Fields of interest include a given paper model's flat-foldability (whether the model can be flattened without damaging it) and the use of paper folds to solve mathematical equations.  In 1893, Indian civil servant T. Sundara Row published Geometric Exercises in Paper Folding which used paper folding to demonstrate proofs of geometrical constructions.  This work was inspired by the use of origami in the kindergarten system.  This book had an approximate trisection of angles and implied construction of a cube root was impossible.  In 1936 Margharita P. Beloch showed that use of the 'Beloch fold', later used in the sixth of the Huzita–Hatori axioms, allowed the general cubic equation to be solved using origami.  In 1949, R C Yeates' book "Geometric Methods" described three allowed constructions corresponding to the first, second, and fifth of the Huzita–Hatori axioms.  The axioms were discovered by Jacques Justin in 1989, but were overlooked until the first six were rediscovered by Humiaki Huzita in 1991.  The first International Meeting of Origami Science and Technology (now known as the International Conference on Origami in Science, Math, and Education) was held in 1989 in Ferrara, Italy.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematics_of_paper_folding

Wu Yi tea is a type of oolong tea grown in the Wuyi mountain. The region is famous for the exceptional oolong teas produced.  The tea has a highly individual flavor that is not reproduced anywhere else because of the high mineral content of the soil.  The humid climate and the narrow valley enable the tea to grow without risk of scorching or bitterness.  The oolongs from wuyishan are also often referred to as Wuyi rock tea (or in Chinese 'Yancha').  Da Hong Pao is the most popular Wuyi source tea, right after Rou Gui, Shui Xian, and Tieluohan.  There is a Chinese saying:  'every rock has tea, and without the rocks there is no tea.'  Read more and see pictures at https://www.teasenz.com/chinese-tea/wu-yi-source-rock-tea.html

The artist who created some of the most memorable images of the 20th century was never fully embraced by the art world.  There is just one work by Maurits Cornelis Escher in all of Britain’s galleries and museums, and it was not until his 70th birthday that the first full retrospective exhibition took place in his native Netherlands.  Escher was admired mainly by mathematicians and scientists, and found global fame only when he came to be considered a pioneer of psychedelic art by the hippy counterculture of the 1960s.  His prints adorn albums by Mott the Hoople and the Scaffold, and he was courted unsuccessfully by Mick Jagger for an album cover and by Stanley Kubrick for help transforming what became 2001:  A Space Odyssey into a “fourth-dimensional film”.  In 1948, he made Drawing Hands, the image of two hands, each drawing the other with a pencil.  It is a neat depiction of one of Escher’s enduring fascinations: the contrast between the two-dimensional flatness of a sheet of paper and the illusion of three-dimensional volume that can be created with certain marks.  Most dazzling, perhaps, is the celebrated Ascending and Descending (1960), with its two ranks of human figures trudging forever upwards and eternally downwards respectively on an impossible four-sided eternal staircase.  It is the most recognisable of Escher’s “impossible objects” images, which were inspired by the British mathematician Roger Penrose and his father, the geneticist Lionel Penrose.  Fascinated by House of Stairs, the Penroses published a paper in 1956 in the British Journal of Psychology entitled “Impossible Objects:  A Special Type of Visual Illusion”.  Receiving an offprint a few years later, Escher wrote to Lionel expressing his admiration for the “continuous flights of steps” in the paper, and enclosing a print of Ascending and Descending.  (The paper also included the “tri-bar” or Penrose triangle, which is constructed impossibly from three 90-degree angles.  In 1961 Escher built his never-ending Waterfall using three of them.)  Steven Poole  https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jun/20/the-impossible-world-of-mc-escher  See also https://mcescher.com/about/biography/ and https://www.nga.gov/features/slideshows/mc-escher-life-and-work.html

Stuttgart City Library, situated in a concrete cube in the heart of southern Germany, isn't your average library.  The main attraction—a five-story reading room shaped like an upside-down pyramid—looks more like an M.C. Escher drawing than a library, until you notice the hundreds of thousands of neatly stacked books, that is.  Cozy?  Not really.  Beautiful?  You bet.  Caitlin Morton  See pictures and descriptions of 22 beautiful libraries around the world at https://www.cntraveler.com/galleries/2014-09-02/10-of-the-worlds-most-beautiful-libraries

Cathy Lee Guisewite (born September 5, 1950) is an American cartoonist who created the comic strip Cathy, which had a 34-year run.  The strip focused on a career woman facing the issues and challenges of eating, work, relationships, and having a mother—or as the character put it in one strip, "the four basic guilt groups."  At the peak of the strip's popularity in the mid-1990s, it appeared in almost 1,400 papers.  However, on August 11, 2010, Guisewite announced the strip's retirement after 34 years.  Its run ended on October 3, 2010.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathy_Guisewite   

“Cathy” ran in newspapers 365 days a year from 1976 to 2010.  It began as a way to cope with a changing world.  “I am woman.  Hear me snore.”  For that quote, see comic strip from the 1990s at

https://www.cathyguisewite.com/comic-strip

The ratification of the United States Constitution by Rhode Island was the 1790 decision by the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations ("Rhode Island") to accede to the United States Constitution.  It was a controversial process which occurred only after the United States threatened a trade embargo against Rhode Island for non-compliance.  Rhode Island acquired a reputation for opposing a closer union with the other former British colonies that had formed the United States of America.  It vetoed an act of the Congress of the Confederation which earned it a number of deprecatory nicknames, including "Rogue Island" and "the Perverse Sister".   Rhode Island took 101 years to call a vote on ratification of the 17th amendment which began the direct election of senators.  The measure came into force in 1913, but the Rhode Island General Assembly did not take up debate on it until 2013, finally passing it the following year.  Rhode Island earlier rejected the 16th amendment establishing a federal income tax, which came into force in 1913 despite its opposition.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratification_of_the_United_States_Constitution_by_Rhode_Island

fifth wheel  noun (chiefly U.S.)  (road transport) A type of trailer hitch, which consists of a horseshoe-shaped plate on a multidirectional pivot, with a locking pin to couple with the kingpin of a truck trailer.  In full, fifth-wheel trailer: a large caravan or travel trailer that is connected to a pickup truck for towing by a hitch similar to the one described in sense 1 located in the center of the truck's bed.  (road transport, historical) A horizontal wheel or segment of a wheel above the front axle and beneath the body of a carriage, forming an extended support to prevent it from overturning.  (idiomatic, informal) Anything superfluous or unnecessary.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fifth_wheel#English

Author Charles Webb, whose first novel The Graduate inspired the 1967 film, died June 16, 2020.  The Graduate was published in 1963, and was adapted into the Mike Nichols film starring Dustin Hoffman just four years later.  The book and the film follow Benjamin Braddock, a young man who embarks on an affair with Mrs. Robinson (played by Anne Bancroft), the wife of his father’s business partner.  Webb claimed the story is based on his own experiences growing up in Los Angeles after graduating from an East Coast college.  He said that the book is not autobiographical.  Bruce Haring 

https://deadline.com/2020/06/charles-webb-author-the-graduate-obituary-was-81-1202971920/  In 2007, Webb published a sequel to The Graduate, titled Home School. 

Illustrator, graphic designer, art director, visual philosopher and paterfamilias Milton Glaser died June 26, 2020, on his 91st birthday.  If Glaser had a breakout moment, it was his poster of Bob Dylan, from 1966.  It was commissioned by CBS Records, and a folded copy was slipped into the jacket of every LP of Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, from which it was then removed and posted on seemingly every dorm-room wall in America.  It looked fresh and modern, but it was also art-history-literate:  Glaser had borrowed the black silhouette profile from a portrait of Marcel Duchamp (a lift that he readily admitted).  Even the typeface was his own, a font called Baby Teeth.  MoMA has a copy of the poster in its permanent collection—it makes regular appearances in the design collection—and Glaser’s studio still sells reprints of it.  After the city’s fiscal crisis of 1975, New York State was pushing tourism with a big ad buy and a new jingle, and asked Glaser to propose a logo.  The story goes that he came up with the backseat of a yellow cab.  Four characters, scribbled in red crayon on a torn envelope:  I ♥ N Y.  A billion coffee mugs and T-shirts followed.  Because it was designed for the city he loved and a campaign that seemed temporary, Glaser did it pro bono, and he seems to have enjoyed the endless number of permutations, parodies, and ripoffs it has spawned.  The torn envelope from the taxi ride is also in the permanent collection of MoMA.  A sequel, designed after the 9/11 attacks, became yet another icon.  Christopher Bonanos   https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/06/milton-glaser-new-york-and-iny-designer-dies-at-91.html

http://librarianmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2291  June 29, 2020

Joyce Carol Oates’s Top Ten List

Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866).

Ulysses by James Joyce (1922).

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929).

The poems of Emily Dickinson (1830–86).

The stories of Franz Kafka (1883–1924).

The Red and the Black by Stendhal (1830).

The Rainbow by D. H. Lawrence (1915).

Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence (1920).

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (1851).

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1884).

New List by Ann Patchett

1.Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (1877).
2.One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (1967).
3.Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (1955).
4.The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann (1924).
5.The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925).
6.So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell (1979).
7.The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (1915).
8.Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West (1933).
9.Persuasion by Jane Austen (1817).
10.The Human Stain by Philip Roth (2000).

Link to lists including All-Time Top Ten Lists at https://www.toptenbooks.net/all-author-list

Nestled in a wooded bower, in the middle of spreading cornfields, just over the Michigan line, is the quiet, unassuming home of a couple who have spent their lives simply pursuing their love of the arts.  A humble, delightful pair, who by all modern standards would be labeled quirky children of the ‘60s, Bruce and Ann Tubbs exemplify the beauty that comes from a lifetime of pursuing their artistic dreams.  Ann Tubbs is known throughout the region as one of the foremost potters, specializing in colorfully ebullient majolica ware and tiles with her own distinctive flair.  Bruce, however, not as known locally, has made his impact around the world with his rather unique musical craft.  The retired lower school teacher from Maumee Valley Country Day School in Toledo, Ohio is an expert when it comes to all things French horn.  Not in performance--though he is no slouch in that department--but in the restoration and repair of instruments which have suffered the ravages of time.  His lifelong passion is evident from the moment one enters their wooded drive.  French Horn bells dangle festively from the surrounding trees in a free-form riot of artistic joie de vivre.  “It’s funny, there really are no true horn ‘manufacturers’ these days building from scratch.  Most companies actually just purchase already shaped parts and pieces from individuals who specialize in one part of the instrument:  bells, valves, bent tubing.  The companies assemble them, for a very high price, I might add.  “I found myself as the middleman in all of this.  There needed to be someone who did this for those who could not afford top dollar.  I rebuilt horns for those people; the aficionados who love the instrument but aren’t necessarily the top-tier, world-class players.  My clients are the people who play for the love of playing.”  He continued, “I’ve sent instruments all over the world.  Shipping can be a problem as some countries have very strict rules on the size of parcels which can be mailed.  Several times I’ve solved this dilemma by working with the American Consulates in the countries located near the purchasers.  I ship to the embassy, and the receiver picks it up from them.”  Wayne F. Anthony  https://www.toledoblade.com/a-e/music-theater-dance/2020/05/28/restoring-instruments-as-much-an-art-as-playing-them-french-horns-bruce-tubbs/stories/20200528004

According to the Billiard Congress of America, billiards was developed out of a lawn game similar to croquet in the 15th century.  When play moved indoors, green tables were used to simulate grass.  Originally, the balls in billiards were driven by a mace with a large tip instead of a stick and through something similar to a croquet wick.  The game evolved and expanded over time to include pocketed tables and shot-calling for points, enjoying wide popularity in America in the 1920s.  The term billiards comes from the French words billart ("wooden stick") and bille ("ball").  As the popularity of billiards grew, billiards tables became common sights in gambling parlors where horse racing wagers or other bets were being placed.  Because a collection of wagers is known as a pool, pocket billiards began to be associated with the term.  Some professional pool players still use the term billiards to describe what's more commonly known as pool.  Typically, billiards can refer to any kind of tabletop game played with a cue stick and cue ball, while pool largely means a game with pockets.  In the UK, however, billiards can refer to English Billiards, a variation in which only three balls are used, with the player striking his cue ball and a red striker ball to move his opponent's cue ball.  There are no pockets used in the game.  You may wonder where this leaves snooker, an even more obscure game.  Since it's played with a cue and a cue ball, it's technically billiards, but snooker has a specific rule set involving 22 balls that need to be sunk with consideration given to each color's point value.  At 10 to 12 feet in length, a snooker table is also larger than a conventional pool surface (from 7 to 9 feet) and its pockets are an inch smaller in diameter.  The bottom line?  If you're in a social setting and get challenged to a game of billiards, it's probably going to be pool.  If you're in the UK, it could mean the pocket-less version.  Jake Rossen  https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/582807/whats-difference-between-pool-and-billiards

June 2, 2020  The literary estates of 12 late authors have been acquired by the newly formed London- and New York-based company International Literary Properties, with the hope that the properties can be adapted for film and TV.  The eight-figure deal was made with one of the longest-established literary and talent agencies in the U.K. Peters, Fraser + Dunlo—and sees ILP acquire the rights formerly held by the agency for the literary estates of Georges Simenon, Eric Ambler, Margery Allingham, Edmund Crispin, Dennis Wheatley, Robert Bolt, Richard Hull, George Bellairs, Nicolas Freeling, John Creasey, Michael Innes and Evelyn Waugh.  This deal is the first major slate of acquisitions announced by ILP, which will pro­actively manage the estates it buys or buys into, working with agents to support their exploitation across all media platforms.  Alex Ritman  https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/newly-launched-literary-rights-group-acquires-estates-12-authors-1296789

We owe much to the fruitful meditation of our sages, but a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen.  Joseph Conrad  https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1511043-we-owe-much-to-the-fruitful-meditation-of-our-sages

Small cheer and great welcome makes a merry feast.  William Shakespeare  https://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/shakespeare/errors/page_52/

VIRUS VIEWS  “This is the time for awareness.  Time to quietly share love  Time to savor the gift of now  Time to forget to rush”  extract from Locked Down, a poem by Dosia Carlson  Thank you, Muse reader!

Twelve German postal workers received medical treatment and dozens more were evacuated due to a pungent suspect package--which turned out to be a shipment of the notoriously smelly durian fruit.  Police, firefighters and emergency services were called to a post office in the Bavarian town of Schweinfurt on June 20, 2020 after staff noticed the smell coming from a package.  Six ambulances, five first-responder cars and two emergency vehicles attended the incident.  Three different fire departments were also involved.  It turned out to contain four Thai durian fruits, which a 50-year-old resident of the town had sent home from a friend in Nuremberg.  The fruit was eventually delivered to its intended recipient.  It's not the first time durian has caused a panic.  Last year, staff at the University of Canberra library were forced to evacuate the building due to a suspected gas leak, but a search revealed the stench was in fact caused by the fruit.  And in November 2018, a cargo of durian caused an Indonesian plane to be temporarily grounded after passengers complained about the fruit's room-clearing stench in the cabin.  Rob Picheta and Frederik Pleitgen   https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/22/europe/durian-germany-evacuation-scli-intl-grm/index.html  Thank you, Muse reader!

Archaelogists on June 22, 2020 announced the discovery of a ring of shafts about 2 miles away from ancient stones at Stonehenge in Salisbury, England.  The latest revelation is the discovery of a ring of at least 20 prehistoric shafts about 2 miles from the famous Neolithic site of immense upright stones, according to an announcement from the University of Bradford.  Archaeologists say the "astonishing" shafts in Durrington Walls date back to 2,500 B.C.E., and form a circle more than 2 km (1.2 miles) in diameter.  Each one measures up to 10 meters (33 feet) in diameter and 5 meters (16 feet) deep.

Researchers say there may have been more than 30 of the shafts at one time.  Vanessa Romo  https://www.npr.org/2020/06/23/881970286/immense-neolithic-ring-discovered-near-stonehenge

The White House is now considering raising levies on wine from the European Union to 100% from 25% citing a lack of progress in negotiations over an Airbus-Boeing dispute.  The Wall Street Journal  June 26, 2020

The first book in the Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was published on June 26 in the United Kingdom in 1997.  See also https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/muggle#English

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2290  June 26, 2020

C. J. Box is the bestselling author of twenty-seven novels including the Joe Pickett series.  He won the Edgar Alan Poe Award for Best Novel (Blue Heaven, 2009) as well as the Anthony Award, Prix Calibre 38 (France), the Macavity Award, the Gumshoe Award, two Barry Awards, and the 2010 Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers Association Award for fiction.  He was awarded the 2016 Western Heritage Award for Literature by the National Cowboy Museum and the Spur Award from Western Writers of America for Best Contemporary Novel.  The novels have been translated into 30 languages and over ten million copies of his books have been sold in the U.S. and abroad.  He’s an Executive Producer on ABC’s Big Sky which is based on his Cassie Dewell novels starting with The Highway.  http://www.cjbox.net/  Novelist Charles James (C.J.) Box Jr. is a Wyoming native and currently lives in the state.  He grew up in the town of Casper.  Box graduated with a degree in Mass Communications from the University of Denver.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._J._Box

Polynesia is a sub-region in Oceania made up of than 1,000 islands spread across the southern and central Pacific Ocean.  The islands of Polynesia cover an area of approximately 800,000 square miles and form a triangle-like region.  The word “Polynesia” was first used in 1756 by Charles de Brosses, a French writer in reference to all the island groups in the Pacific.  However, a restriction on the use of the term was proposed by Jules Dumont in 1831 during a lecture in Paris to the Geographical Society.  The Polynesian Triangle can be described as an area in the Pacific Ocean with three groups of islands at its corners.  The three island groups located at the corners of the triangle are Hawai’i (also known as Sandwich Island), New Zealand, and Easter Island.  Apart from the three major island groups located at the corner of the triangle, the main islands within the triangle include Samoa, the Cook Islands, Tonga, Tokelau, Tuvalu, Wallis and Futuna, Niue, and French Polynesia.  https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-is-the-polynesian-triangle.html

The 1927 silent film Wings was lost for decades until a copy was discovered languishing in the Cinematheque Francaise film archive in Paris, France.  Trivia:  The only silent movie to win the Oscar for Best Picture (then called "Best Production"), until The Artist (2011) won that category in 2012. * Wings was the very first winner of the category of Best Picture, then called "Best Production," at the 1st Annual Academy Awards held at the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, CA on May 16, 1929.  The ceremony lasted all of five minutes and was broadcast on local Los Angeles radio station KHJ 930 AM. * The only movie to win an Academy Award for Engineering Effects.  * This film marks the first time that actors were filmed flying in the air. * The climactic battle scene involved 3500 soldiers and dozens of planes and was shot in one take that lasted five minutes. * The entire score was written, composed, and recorded using a Wurlitzer Pipe Organ. * William A. Wellman looked at 35 actors before casting Gary Cooper.  Although only a tiny role, it set Cooper on the road to stardom. * When Wings was revived in 1981 at the Radio City Music Hall in New York City, Carmine Coppola conducted a full symphony orchestra with synchronized special effects.  * Buddy Rogers (Jack) is shown playing a trombone.  He actually did play the trombone in real life and would make a good living as leader of his own jazz band.  https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0018578/trivia

The American soprano Anne Bollinger (1919–1962) was born in Lewiston, Idaho, studying first with Rosie Miller and later Lotte Lehmann.  She came to prominence in March 1948 singing in Bach's St Matthew Passion in Boston under Serge Koussevitzky.  Making her Metropolitan Opera début as Barbarina in Le nozze di Figaro in January 1949, she sang with the Company for six seasons until 1953.  There her rôles included Tebaldo in Don Carlo, Siebel in Faust, one of the Zaubermädchen in Parsifal, Emma in Khovanshchina and Frasquita in Carmen.  In 1953 she joined the Hamburg State Opera for four years where her rôles included Pamina in Die Zauberflöte in 1955.  She then returned to the United States before her premature death at the age of 39.  https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/142898256/anne-nielsen

A group is working to save the former home of the Lewiston Civic Theatre from demolition.  The Anne Bollinger Performing Arts Center Task Force wants the 111-year-old sandstone church building to be referred to by its official name, which comes from opera singer and Lewiston native Anne Bollinger.  City officials condemned the building in 2016, when a large roof truss failed and compromised its structural integrity.  A leaky roof was the culprit, but the incident shed light on several other problems that would take millions of dollars to fix.  http://savethebollinger.com/about/  April 1, 2018:  Lewiston grants a one-year reprieve for the building.  October 1, 1018:  New roof installed.  June 2020:  closed due to coronavirus

THE IMPORTANCE OF SPACE  Space between letters helps us recognize words.  Space between lines helps us read sentences quickly.  Space around edges frames the text on a page.

The roots of bubble tea can be traced back to the 1940s.  After working as a mixologist in an izakaya in Taiwan under Japanese rule during WWII, in 1949 Chang Fan Shu opened a tea shop selling unique shou yao (hand-shaken) tea made with cocktail shakers.  The result was a rich and silky iced tea with fine air bubbles on top--dubbed foam tea in Taiwan.  Today, shou yao is an essential bubble tea element.  No shou yao, no bubble tea.  In 1986, Taiwanese artist and entrepreneur Tu Tsong He decided to kick start a new business venture by riding on the tea shop trend.  "I thought to myself 'why don't I add some fenyuan into my green tea.'  The white fenyuan looks almost translucent with a white center when brewed inside the golden green tea, much like my mother's pearl necklace.  "So I coined it 'zhen zhu lu cha' (pearl green tea)."  Tu then experimented by adding bigger, black tapioca balls to milk tea for a richer taste and a chewier texture, which became the classic bubble milk tea most fans know and love today.  Maggie Hiufu Wong  https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/taiwan-bubble-tea-origins/index.html

Ursula K. Le Guin left behind a legacy unparalleled in American letters when she passed away in January 2018 at the age of eighty-eight.  Named a Living Legend by the Library of Congress for her contributions to America’s cultural heritage—the author of more than sixty books of fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction, children’s literature, drama, criticism, and translation—she was one of only a select few writers (the others being Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth) to have their life’s work enshrined in the Library of America while still actively writing.  She joined the likes of Toni Morrison, John Ashbery, and Joan Didion in receiving the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation, and her work garnered countless awards:  the National Book Award, the PEN/ Malamud, six Nebulas, six Hugos, and twentyone Locus awards among them.  The Imaginative Reality of Ursula K. Le Guin by David Naimon  Virginia Quarterly Review  Summer 2018 

April 14, 2020  If it were not for the pandemic, the Red Sox would already be a few games into their regular season.  But with baseball on hold, one musician has found a way to bring part of Fenway home.  Josh Kantor is Fenway Park's organist, and as of three weeks ago, he is also the host of a show called "7th Inning Stretch."  With help from his wife, Mary Eaton, he performs live on Facebook every day at 3 p.m. from their home.  "We were missing baseball and we needed a little something." Kantor said.  "It's a time when we forget about our troubles and we invite people to do the same."  Abbey Niezgoda   https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/red-sox-organist-plays-from-home-to-bring-the-fenway-feel-to-a-world-without-live-baseball/2107783/  See also Music Is My Life:  Red Sox Organist Josh Kantor | Episode 13 | Podcast  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0TayBgqceE

1:03:46  and Fenway Park's Organist Gives Fans That Ballpark Sound At Home—And He Takes Requests by Laurel Wamsley at

https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/07/829145228/fenway-parks-organist-gives-fans-that-ballpark-sound-at-home-and-he-takes-reques

The Shoot the Book adaption market—a staple at the Marché du Film since 2014 and a rising player on the global film scene—continues to evolve.  As the program—a joint initiative between publishing trade group SCELF (Société Civile des Editeurs de Langue Française) and the publicly funded Institut Français—continues to host curated pitch sessions at markets in Cannes, Shanghai and Los Angeles, it will also look to expand its B2B rendezvous component that was introduced last year.  On June 25, 2020 Shoot the Book will kick off this year’s edition with a morning pitch session—spotlighting 10 literary properties selected by an industry jury—and return in the afternoon for a three-hour meeting platform that will bring together publishers and producers and allow them to book direct discussions with one another.  Keeping those market forces in mind, Shoot the Book will host a conversation with Element Pictures’ Ed Guiney—the Dublin-based producer behind literary adaptations “Room,” BBC/Hulu’s limited series “Normal People” and its upcoming “Conversations With Friends”—to be broadcast on June 26.  Ben Croll  Find titles of the 10 literary properties chosen for adaptation potential at https://variety.com/2020/film/spotlight/cannes-shoot-the-book-2-1234643638/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2289  June 24, 2020

The Literary Landmarks Association was founded in 1986 by former FOLUSA president Frederick G. Ruffner to encourage the dedication of historic literary sites.  The first dedication was at Slip F18 in Bahia Mar, Florida, the anchorage of the Busted Flush, the houseboat home of novelist John D. MacDonald's protagonist Travis McGee.  In 1989, the Literary Landmark project became an official FOLUSA committee. Literary Landmarks™ continues with United for Libraries, the division of American Library Association created by the joining of FOLUSA and ALTA.  Dedications have included homes of famous writers (Tennessee Williams, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, William Faulkner), libraries and museum collections, literary scenes (such as John's Grill in San Francisco, immortalized by Dashiell Hammett, and Willa Cather's Prairie near Red Cloud, Nebraska), and even "Grip" the Raven, formerly the pet of Charles Dickens and inspiration to Edgar Allan Poe and now presiding (stuffed) at the Rare Books Department of the Free Library of Philadelphia.  Link to Landmarks by State and Landmarks by Author at http://www.ala.org/united/products_services/literarylandmarks  As of this writing, Ohio has five literary landmarks including the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library for Carolyn Keene.  Author and journalist Mildred A. Wirt Benson (known to many by her pen name, Carolyn Keene), moved to Toledo in 1938.  From 1930-1953, she wrote 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew mysteries.

What does it mean to “put on the dog”?  According to my research, the phrase “putting on the dog” began as 19th-century slang among college students.  Specifically, in his 1871 piece Four Years at Yale, author Lyman H. Bagg states that “to put on dog is to make a flashy display.”  One source claims that this may have involved dress shirts that had “dog collars.”  In modern usage, the meaning is basically unchanged, and relates to getting unusually dressed up or wearing fancier clothes than one is accustomed to.  Melvin Peña  https://www.dogster.com/lifestyle/7-more-common-dog-idioms-explained

“Early films of Shakespeare’s plays captured his poetry in images rather than words,” runs the opening caption in the BFI’s new anthology, Play On!  And that process was simpler than it sounds.  Many early Shakespeare films, such as the earliest surviving “adaptation”, a King John from 1899, were recordings of scenes from staged versions of the plays.  So in that film, Herbert Beerbohm Tree reprises the death scenes from his West End production in a studio on the roof of the British Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s office on the Embankment in London.  It’s not an attempt to tell the story of King John, but to give the cinema audience a glimpse of a great Shakespearean in action.  Elsewhere on the disc, you can see John Gielgud as a queasy Romeo in 1924 in a similar style.  A 23-minute condensation of Richard III in 1911 gives a taster of FR Benson’s skills as both actor and director.  And in 1916, the Broadwest Film Company went to the trouble of transporting stage legend Matheson Lang to Italy, to play Shylock with an authentically Venetian backdrop.  The Play On! disc, with a gorgeous score by the musicians of Shakespeare’s Globe, offers a smooth entry into these films, which were for a long time neglected and underappreciated.  Pamela Hutchinson  https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2016/jul/18/the-best-is-silence-why-shakespeare-in-early-film-is-worth-celebrating

One-hundred nineteen U.S. colleges and universities have received the Carnegie Community Engagement Classification, an elective designation that indicates institutional commitment to community engagement by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.  A listing of the institutions that currently hold the Classification endorsement can be found here.  https://www.aplu.org/news-and-media/blog/2020-carnegie-community-engagement-classification-recipients-announced  APLU stands for Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities. 

Is there a can of corn in the back of your cupboard . . . anyone?  Well, get ready for a real surprise with Indian-Style Creamed Corn from Tin Can Magic  by Jessica Elliot Dennison.  Canned corn is turned into a kind of dal/curry that will fill your kitchen with the smell of garlic, ground coriander, cumin, and hot chili.  It is really a standout recipe.  If you can find fresh curry leaves definitely add them, but don’t worry if you don’t.  Also, please note, we have not been above adding a teeny drizzle of fresh cream when we have had it on hand.

https://www.splendidtable.org/recipes/indian-style-creamed-corn-with-naan-coriander-and-toasted-spices  serves 2

I really want this library to serve the purpose for which it was intended—as a breeding ground for curiosity. * The library taught me that I could ask any questions I wanted and pursue them to their conclusions without judgment or embarrassment.  And it’s where I learned that not all questions have answers. * My parents had a knack for making everything into a game.  Learning was a reward.   When I came home from school, they’d say “What did you ask today?” * In the new school’s library was a virgin landscape of pages and paragraphs that gleamed so brightly under the fluorescent lights that they deserved a choir of singing angels to announce their advent. * A library is a miracle.  A place where you can learn just about anything, for free.  A place where your mind can come alive. *  The World’s Strongest Librarian:  A Book Lover’s Adventures by Josh Hanagarne  See also http://worldsstrongestlibrarian.com/

White City (Chicago), a recreational park in Illinois, 1905–1946 * The White City, an "ideal city" constructed for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Illinois  See other locations named White City in the United States and around the world at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_City  Chicago was referred to as the Black City before the 1893 World’s Fair.  See other uses for the name at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_City

27.5 million people visited the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition during the six months it was open--at a time when the population of America was only 65 million. * On its best day, the fair drew more than 700,000 visitors. * They tasted a new snack called Cracker Jack and a new breakfast food called Shredded Wheat. * The Great Chicago Fire in 1871 took nearly eighteen thousand buildings and left more than a hundred thousand people homeless.  The Devil in the White City:  Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson

Historian Jean Bottéro concluded his 2001 article, “The Oldest Cuisine in the World:  Cooking in Mesopotamia,” with an insult of sorts.  “I would not advise trying to incorporate their culinary tradition, just as it stands, into our own,” he wrote, speculating that a modern eater would not enjoy the garlic-heavy, salt-light dishes that people ate nearly 4,000 years ago.  But ever since, chefs around the globe have attempted Mesopotamian recipes, the oldest on record, in their home kitchens.  Nawal Nasrallah, an Iraqi scholar and and cookbook author, has written about adapting the ancient recipes for modern kitchens.  Nearly a decade ago, Laura Kelley, founder of the blog The Silk Road Gourmet, organized an ancient Mesopotamian cooking challenge.  More recently, an interdisciplinary team from Yale and Harvard whipped up a Mesopotamian feast in 2018.  All three endeavors had the same source material:  a set of four ancient clay tablets in the Yale Babylonian collection.   Early scribes impressed wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets with reed styluses.  Applying this method to the recipe tablets, scribes recorded culinary routines using Akkadian, an ancient Semitic language. Scholars estimate that three of the four recipe tablets originated around 1730 BC, and the fourth around 1,000 years later.  Unfortunately, little is known about their origins, except that Yale added them to their collection in 1911, in a purchase of therapeutic and pharmaceutical texts.   To sample flavors from the oldest cuisine in the world, today’s chefs must read between the lines.  The recipe for meat broth doesn’t even specify what meat to use.  However, census records from the time mention fowl, sheep, and cattle.  When it comes to the unknown ingredients, consensus on their translations is rare. In the case of the broth, the jury is out on whether shuhutinnu is an onion, an herb, or a root vegetable.  With all these varying translations, it’s impossible to argue for one interpretation with complete certainty.  Find two recipes including one for 12 mersu balls using just 1 cup dried date, 2 cups pistachios, raw and 1 tbsp butter, melted.  Jess Eng  Thank you, Muse reader!  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/mesopotamian-recipes

WORD OF THE DAY FOR JUNE 22  aphotic adj  Having no light, especially no sunlight; specifically (biology, oceanography) describing that part of deep lakes and oceans where less than one per cent of sunlight penetrates and where photosynthesis is not possible.  https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aphotic#English

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2288  June 22, 2020