NIST-F1 is a cesium fountain clock, a type of atomic clock, in the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Boulder, Colorado, and serves as the United States' primary time and frequency standard.  The clock took less than four years to test and build, and was developed by Steve Jefferts and Dawn Meekhof of the Time and Frequency Division of NIST's Physical Measurement Laboratory.  The clock replaced NIST-7, a cesium beam atomic clock used from 1993 to 1999.  NIST-F1 is ten times more accurate than NIST-7.  It has been succeeded by a new standard, NIST-F2, announced in April 2014.  The NIST-F2 standard aims to be about three times more accurate than the NIST-F1 standard, and there are plans to operate it simultaneously with the NIST-F1 clock.  Similar atomic fountain clocks, with comparable accuracy, are operated by other time and frequency laboratories, such as the Paris Observatory, the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in the United Kingdom and the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Germany.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NIST-F1  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_atomic_clocks and https://www.time.gov/ 

I would rather be bookfull than bookless.  Thank you, Muse reader! 

On May 27, 1936, John Steinbeck, then 34 years old and working on the manuscript that would eventually become Of Mice and Men, sent a letter to his agent, Elizabeth Otis.  In it, he thanks her for the $94 check, muses on the strangeness of criticism from England, and then reports:  Minor tragedy stalked.  I don’t know whether I told you.  My setter pup [Toby], left alone one night, made confetti of about half of my [manuscript].  Two months work to do over again.  It sets me back.  There was no other draft.  I was pretty mad, but the poor little fellow may have been acting critically.  Katie Yee  https://lithub.com/fun-fact-john-steinbecks-dog-ate-the-first-draft-of-of-mice-and-men/ 

Georges Joseph Christian Simenon (1903–1989) was a Belgian writer.  A prolific author who published nearly 500 novels and numerous short works, Simenon is best known as the creator of the fictional detective Jules Maigret.  In January 1919, the 15-year-old Simenon took a job at the Gazette de Liège, a newspaper edited by Joseph Demarteau.  While Simenon's own beat only covered unimportant human interest stories, it afforded him an opportunity to explore the seamier side of the city, including politics, bars, and cheap hotels but also crime, police investigations and lectures on police technique by the criminologist Edmond Locard.  Simenon's experience at the Gazette also taught him the art of quick editing.  He began submitting stories to Le Matin in the early 1920s.  Simenon's first novel, Au Pont des Arches, was written in June 1919 and published in 1921 under his "G. Sim" pseudonym.  From 1921 to 1934 he used a total of 17 pen names while writing 358 novels and short stories.  Simenon was one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century, capable of writing 60 to 80 pages per day.  His oeuvre includes nearly 200 novels, over 150 novellas, several autobiographical works, numerous articles, and scores of pulp novels written under more than two dozen pseudonyms.  Altogether, about 550 million copies of his works have been printed.  See partial bibliography and list of film adaptations at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Simenon 

AMUSING TERMS  online flea marketing * wet blanketry * creativity assassination * controlled chaos  Cheer Up, Mr. Widdicombe a novel by Evan James 

Delicious.  Nutritious.  Makes you Feel Ambitious.—originally an advertising jingle—is so much a part of our language that a May 23, 2021 search produced 3,710,000 results.

The suffixes -ation, -cation, -ition mean “action or process” or “result of an action or process.”  ©2010 Benchmark Education   Find chart with examples of words ending in a base consonant—or e—or y—or osh--or ize at http://wordstudyresources.benchmarkeducation.com/pdfs/1_K3_U17_BLM.pdf 

Tomfoolery (or Tom Foolery) is a musical revue based on lyrics and music that American mathematician, songwriter, and satirist Tom Lehrer first performed in the 1950s and 1960s.  Devised and produced by Cameron Mackintosh, it premiered in London at the Criterion Theatre, directed by Gillian Lynne, on 5 June 1980, where it had a successful run.  It subsequently opened on December 14, 1981 Off-Broadway at the Top of the Gate in Greenwich Village, New York, where it ran for 120 performances.  For the 1936 German comedy film, see Tomfoolery (film).  For the cartoon series, see The Tomfoolery Show.  See song list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomfoolery 

Tomfoolery was the term for a person as long ago as the Middle Ages (Thomas fatuus in Latin).  Much in the way the names in the expression Tom, Dick, and Harry are used to mean “some generic guys,” Tom fool was the generic fool, with the added implication that he was a particularly absurd one.  So the word tomfoolery suggested an incidence of foolishness that went a bit beyond mere foolery.  Arika Okrent  https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/548109/origins-of-common-phrases 

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway (L&M) opened on 15 September 1830.  Work on the L&M had begun in the 1820s, to connect the major industrial city of Manchester with the nearest deep water port at the Port of Liverpool, 35 miles (56 km) away.  Although horse-drawn railways already existed elsewhere, the Stockton to Darlington steam railway had been running for five years, and a few industrial sites already used primitive steam locomotives for bulk haulage, the L&M was the first locomotive-hauled railway to connect two major cities, and the first to provide a scheduled passenger service.  The opening day was a major public event.  Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington, the Prime Minister, rode on one of the eight inaugural trains, as did many other dignitaries and notable figures of the day.  Huge crowds lined the track at Liverpool to watch the trains depart for Manchester.  The L&M remains in operation, and its opening is now considered the start of the age of mechanised transport; in the words of industrialist and former British Rail chairman Peter Parker, "the world is a branch line of the pioneering Liverpool–Manchester run".  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opening_of_the_Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railway 

May 5, 2021  Freckles the lobster wasn’t destined to be served up next to a delicious basket of Cheddar Bay Biscuits.  The extremely rare Calico lobster is now at the Virginia Living Museum in Newport News, Virginia, after being discovered at a Red Lobster in Manassas, Virginia.  Restaurant staff discovered the orange and black speckled lobster and decided it was best for Freckles to head to the museum for the world to see.  Only 1 in 30 million lobsters in the world have his special shell, because having bright colors isn’t the best way to hide from predators.  Brian Reese  See pictures at https://www.kxan.com/news/weird-news/freckles-the-extremely-rare-lobster-saved-from-red-lobster-now-star-of-museum/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2384  June 30, 2021