The idiom take the cake has its roots in Ancient Greece, though it did not come into common use until the 1800s.  To take the cake means to receive the top honors in a situation, though the phrase is most often used sarcastically to mean being the best at something negative or representing the apex of something negative.  The term take the cake is derived from the cakewalk.  A cakewalk was a competitive dance performed by black slaves which mocked the over-refined manners that plantation owners employed at their formal balls.  The winner or winning couple of these competitions was awarded a cake.  Plantation owners often knew about these get-togethers, and ignored them as harmless.  Whether or not the plantation owners understood that they were being mocked is unclear.  The practice of presenting a cake as a prize goes back to Ancient Greece, though the idiom take the cake doesn’t appear until the 1800s in the United States.  Related phrases are takes the cake, took the cake, taking the cake. https://grammarist.com/idiom/take-the-cake/   

How to Make Homemade Cake Flour  Sift 14 Tablespoons (110g) all-purpose flour and 2 Tablespoons (16g) cornstarch together two times.  Measure (spoon & level) 1 cup from this mixture.  You’ll have about 1 cup anyway, but sometimes sifting can produce more volume since it’s adding air.  Sally Mckenney  https://sallysbakingaddiction.com/cake-flour-substitute/

"City," a vast complex of outdoor structures and landmasses the land artist Michael Heizer began constructing in the desert of Nevada in 1970, will finally begin welcoming public visitors September 2, 2022.  "City" has been described as quite possibly the largest contemporary artwork on the planet, stretching more than a mile and a half long and half a mile wide, evoking the scale of ancient sites like Native American mounds, Mesoamerican metropolises and Egyptian devotional complexes.  It is situated in the remote Basin and Range National Monument in central eastern Nevada, within the ancestral lands of the ​​ Nuwu (Southern Paiute) and Newe (Western Shoshoni), around 160 miles north of Las Vegas.  Benjamin Sutton  See graphics at https://www.cnn.com/style/article/artist-michael-heizer-city-nevada-tan/index.html

Leonard "Lenny" Lipton (born May 18, 1940) is an American author, filmmaker, lyricist and inventor.  At age 19, Lipton wrote the poem that became the basis for the lyrics to the song "Puff the Magic Dragon".  He went on to write books on independent filmmaking and become a pioneer in the field of projected three-dimensional imagery.  His technology is used to show 3D films on more than 30,000 theater screens worldwide.  In 2021, he published The Cinema in Flux, an 800-page illustrated book on the history of cinema technology.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenny_Lipton 

If you have ever been beachcombing for treasures along the shoreline then you may have been lucky enough to find a mermaid’s purse.  They may not look like much, but these dried-out leathery pouches are actually the used egg cases of sharks and skates, created to develop and protect their babies.  Around 43% of all Chondrichthyes species (cartilaginous fish including sharks, rays, skates and chimaeras) give birth to their offspring in these purses.  Between them they produce a diverse array of different types, sizes and colours, that eventually wash up on our beaches when they’ve been emptied.   Posted by Harry Baker  See graphics at https://marinemadness.blog/2020/04/13/a-beachcombers-guide-to-finding-and-identify-a-mermaids-purse/ 

Glop.  Mire.  Ooze.  Cohesive sediment.  Call it what you want, mud—a mixture of fine sediment and water—is one of the most common and consequential substances on Earth.  Not quite a solid, not quite a liquid, mud coats the bottoms of our lakes, rivers, and seas.  It helps form massive floodplains, river deltas, and tidal flats that store vast quantities of carbon and nutrients, and support vibrant communities of people, flora, and fauna.  But mud is also a killer:  Mudslides bury thousands of people each year.  Earth has been a muddy planet for 4 billion years, ever since water became abundant.  But how it forms and moves have changed dramatically.  About 500 million years ago, the arrival of land plants boosted the breakdown of rock into fine particles, slowed runoff, and stabilized sediments, enabling thick layers of mud to pile up in river valleys.  Tectonic shifts that gave rise to mountains, as well as climate changes that enhanced precipitation, accelerated erosion, and helped blanket sea floors with mud hundreds of meters thick.   Over time, many mud deposits hardened into mudrock, the most abundant rock in the geologic record, accounting for roughly half of all sedimentary formations.  Now, humans are a dominant force in the world of mud.  Starting about 5000 years ago, erosion rates shot up in many parts of the world as our ancestors began to clear forests and plant crops.  DAVID MALAKOFF  https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.369.6506.894 

Feng shui sometimes called Chinese geomancy, is an ancient Chinese traditional practice which claims to use energy forces to harmonize individuals with their surrounding environment.  The term feng shui means, literally, "wind-water".  From ancient times, landscapes and bodies of water were thought to direct the flow of the universal Qi–“cosmic current” or energy–through places and structures.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feng_shui  Thank you, Muse reader!  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2555  August 24, 2022