Here's an astonishing fact:  Half of America's mushrooms are grown in one tiny corner of southeastern Pennsylvania, near the town of Kennett Square.  But why?  It's not as though this place has some special advantage of climate or soil, the kind of thing that led to strawberry fields in Watsonville, Calif., or peach orchards in Georgia.  Mushrooms can grow indoors.  They could come from anywhere.  No, what turned Kennett Square into the Mushroom Capital of the World was nothing more than historical accident, combined with the presence of some very industrious Quakers, Italians and Mexicans.  Sometime around 1885, according to local lore, two Quaker flower growers from Kennett Square were bothered by wasted space under the carnation beds in their greenhouses, and they thought of growing mushrooms there.  So they steamed off to Europe, where people were already farming mushrooms, and brought back some spores.  They were Kennett Square's original mushroom farmers.  A few Quakers—or their descendants—are still in the business today.  They hired some Italians—laid-off workers from nearby stone quarries—to handle some of the hard physical labor.  And then the Italians started their own farms.  So did their sons and cousins.  By the 1950s, there were hundreds of mushroom farmers in Chester County, and most were Italians.  Fungus farming is completely different from growing plants, like wheat or potatoes.  There's something weird and magical about it.  It starts with the most basic thing:  the compost that feeds the fungi.  Mushrooms are finicky.  They don't like just any kind of manure.  "We've tried others, pig and cow [manure], and that just does not seem to work," says Chris Alonzo.  "But with horses, it works very well."  Loads of this compost will refill long beds inside those climate-controlled cinder-block buildings across Chester County.  Spores will get mixed in.  Dan Charles  https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/10/12/162719130/how-a-sleepy-pennsylvania-town-grew-into-americas-mushroom-capital  

Mushroom Festival  September 10 & 11, 2022  https://mushroomfestival.org/history-of-festival 

Fearless Girl is a bronze sculpture by Kristen Visbal, on Broad Street across from the New York Stock Exchange Building in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City.  The statue was installed on March 7, 2017, in anticipation of International Women's Day the following day.  It depicts a 4-foot high (1.2 m) girl promoting female empowerment.  Fearless Girl was commissioned by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA), a large asset management company, to advertise for an index fund that comprises gender-diverse companies that have a relatively high percentage of women among their senior leadership.  A plaque originally placed below the statue stated:  "Know the power of women in leadership. SHE makes a difference," with "SHE" being both a descriptive pronoun and the fund's NASDAQ ticker symbol.  The statue was first installed at the northern tip of Bowling Green on Broadway, facing down the Charging Bull statue.  Following complaints from that statue's sculptor, Arturo Di Modica, it was removed in November 2018 and relocated to its current location the following month.  A plaque with footprints was placed on the original site of Fearless Girl.  The commission by State Street Global Advisors specified that the statue should depict a girl with hands on her hips and chin up, with a height of 36 inches, which Kristen Visbal and her collaborators then increased to 50 inches, to better match the size of Charging Bull.  She modeled the sculpture on two children from Delaware "so everyone could relate to the Fearless Girl."   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fearless_Girl   

A laconic phrase or laconism is a concise or terse statement, especially a blunt and elliptical rejoinder.  It is named after Laconia, the region of Greece including the city of Sparta, whose ancient inhabitants had a reputation for verbal austerity and were famous for their blunt and often pithy remarks.  A prominent example involves Philip II of Macedon.  After invading southern Greece and receiving the submission of other key city-states, he turned his attention to Sparta and asked menacingly whether he should come as friend or foe.  The reply was "Neither."  Losing patience, he sent the message:  If I invade Laconia, I shall turn you out.  The Spartan ephors again replied with a single word:  If.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laconic_phrase     

Founded in June, 2011, Street Books is a bicycle-powered mobile library, serving people who live outside in Portland, Oregon.  Street Books librarians set up shifts around the city of Portland at the same time and place each week.  Patrons are issued an official Street Books library card without being required to show proof of address or identification.  We use an old-school library pocket and a card that patrons sign and leave with us.  There are no fees and no fines and if we don’t cross paths again, we encourage folks to pass the books on to people who will enjoy them.  Link to more information at http://streetbooks.org/what-we-do-1 

Published in 1921, Memoirs of a Midget is a surrealistic novel, told in the first person, by English poet, anthologist, and short story writer Walter de la Mare, best known for his tales of the uncanny and poetry for children.  We never learn her name, but the protagonist and principle narrator "Miss M." is playfully referred to as "Midgetina" by her faithless friend, Fanny.  Hers is the story of a person who, though at home in nature and literature, is physically, spiritually, and intellectually out of place in the world.  Her exact size is never made clear and seems to shift throughout the story.  At times she is described as being of Thumbellina-like smallness.  She recounts that she remembers as a child her father lifting her up in the palm of his hand to see herself in a small mirror. At the age of five or six, while sitting on a pomade jar watching her father shaving, she remembers being frightened when a jackdaw, attracted by her colorful red clothing, starts pecking at the window pane to get at her.  She says she jumped up in alarm and ran away, tripping over a hairbrush, and falling sprawling beside a watch on his dressing table.  She reads books that are taller than she is; and even at age twenty is carried on a tray and walks across the dining table.  Yet she becomes a skilled horsewoman—riding sidesaddle on a pony—and at one point, we are told, can pass for a ten-year-old child.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memoirs_of_a_Midget 

The Etruscan language was spoken by the Etruscans in Etruria (Tuscany and Umbria) until about the 1st century AD.  After which it continued to be studied by priests and scholars, and it was used in religious ceremonies until the early 5th century AD.  The emperor Claudius (10 BC-54 AD) wrote a history of the Etruscans in 20 volumes, however none of these volumes survive.  Etruscan was related to Raetic, a language once spoken in the Alps, and also to Lemnian, once spoken on the island of Lemnos.  It was also possibly related to Camunic, a language once spoken in the northwest of Italy.  The Etruscan alphabet developed from a Western variety of the Greek alphabet brought to Italy by Euboean Greeks.  The earliest known inscription dates from the middle of the 6th century BC.  Most Etruscan inscriptions are written in horizontal lines from right to left, but some are boustrophedon (running alternately left to right then right to left).  https://omniglot.com/writing/etruscan.htm 

There are more than 15 million photographic images in the Library of Congress’s holdings, so the chance of encountering anything familiar in an exhibition of a mere 400 of them is statistically slight.  But “Not an Ostrich:  And Other Images from America’s Library” begins with the reassuringly familiar.  The first section, titled “Icons,” displays reproductions of the library’s most requested photos, which include pictures of Abraham Lincoln and the Wright brothers, as well as Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” and Gordon Parks’s “American Gothic.”  People may not know those last two photos by their titles but will probably recognize the stark images of, respectively, a Dust Bowl-era refugee in California in 1936 and a Black cleaning woman in D.C. in 1942.  Also featured in this section is an 1839 photo that has become renowned as the first selfie:  Philadelphian Robert Cornelius’s self-portrait, made just months after Louis Daguerre announced his daguerreotype photographic process—and more than 150 years before the debut of the iPhone.  Not an Ostrich:  And Other Images From America’s Library  Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Building, 10 First St. SE. 202-707-9779. loc.gov.  Dates:  Through fall 2024.  Admission:  Free; timed-entry passes required.  Mark Jenkins  https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2022/04/28/library-of-congress-not-an-ostrich/   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2527   April 29, 2022