Pork Chops Supreme  (pork, hot catsup, honey and lemon)  Find recipe at https://www.midwestliving.com/recipe/meat/easy-pork-chops-supreme/  Chicken may be substituted. 

As a successful Indianapolis attorney, Benjamin Harrison purchased a double lot on the west side of North Delaware Street in May 1868.  In 1874, he and his wife Caroline began construction of their 16-room Italianate style house, carriage house, brick drive and landscaping.  The cost was $24,008.59.  Harrison kept a detailed journal during the construction.  Except for the periods 1881 to 1887 when Harrison was in the U.S. Senate and 1889 to 1893, the presidential years.  Benjamin, Caroline and their two children Russell and Mary lived in the Delaware Street home.  After his presidency in 1893, Harrison returned to Indianapolis a widower.  Caroline died in the White House in 1892. Harrison made several changes to the Delaware Street home including the addition of an English-Regency front porch, electricity and updated plumbing.  In 1896, Harrison married his wife’s niece, Mary Lord Dimmick.  He and Mary had a daughter named Elizabeth in 1897.  Harrison died in the home on March 13, 1901.  After Harrison’s death, Mary and Elizabeth lived in the home until 1913 when they moved to New York. rom 1913 to 1937, the house was rented to various families and eventually became a rooming house.  In March of 1937, the Arthur Jordan Foundation purchased the house and furniture.  The Arthur Jordan Foundation used the home as a dormitory for the female students in the Jordan Conservatory of Music housed in a readapted home on a south adjoining lot.  The purchase of the home included a provision that the home would also be considered a memorial for Harrison.  In 1951, the music school moved to Butler University where it continues to be known as Jordan College.  As per their agreement with Mrs. Harrison, the Arthur Jordan Foundation Trustees opened the home to the public.  In 1964, the United States Department of Interior named the home a National Historic Landmark.  In 1966, the Jordan Foundation created the President Benjamin Harrison Foundation to maintain and operate the home in accordance with the statement of purpose.  And in 2003, the museum earned accreditation by the American Association of Museums (AAM).  In 2010, the Board of Directors changed the name of the Foundation to the Benjamin Harrison Presidential Site.  The President’s home is part of The Old Northside Neighborhood.  The boundaries of this community are 16th Street on the North; Pennsylvania Street on the West; Interstate I-65 on the South; and Bellefontaine Street on the East.  From the time Harrison purchased the empty lot in 1868 until the last room was painted in 1875, his Northside home had cost $29,000.  With H. Brandt as the architect and Petrie and Cummings as excavators, the 10,000 square-foot-home, complete with 16 rooms, three stories and a basement, was finished in one year.  Two-feet-thick Indiana limestone made up the basement and 380,550 bricks completed the home.  The finest French plate windows were installed along with three conveniences not enjoyed by most Victorians:  running water (in the kitchen, washroom and second-floor bathroom), a coal-fed furnace, 23 working gaslight fixtures and 12-foot ceilings.  See images at https://bhpsite.org/learn/the-house/  

July 9, 2021  A sandcastle in Denmark has entered into Guinness World Records for being the tallest sandcastle in the world.  The triangular-shaped sandcastle has been built in the town of Blokhus in Denmark.  It stands at a height of 21.16 metres (69.4 feet).  This new structure is 3.5m taller than the previous record held by sandcastle measuring 17.66 m in Germany in 2019.  Dutch creator, Wilfred Stijger, was assisted by 30 of the world’s best sand sculptors.  The structure is built in the shape of a triangle to avoid collapsing like many others have.  https://currentaffairs.adda247.com/worlds-tallest-sandcastle-constructed-in-denmark/ 

Guinness World Records, known from its inception in 1955 until 1999 as The Guinness Book of Records and in previous United States editions as The Guinness Book of World Records, is a British reference book published annually, listing world records both of human achievements and the extremes of the natural world.  The brainchild of Sir Hugh Beaver, the book was co-founded by twin brothers Norris and Ross McWhirter in Fleet Street, London, in August 1955.  The international franchise has extended beyond print to include television series and museums.  The popularity of the franchise has resulted in Guinness World Records becoming the primary international source for cataloguing and verification of a huge number of world records.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guinness_World_Records  

ca​hoot  plural cahoots  informal  PARTNERSHIP, LEAGUE—usually used in plural—usually used in phrase like in cahoots to describe people or groups working together or making plans together in secret.    Cahoot is used almost exclusively in the phrase "in cahoots," which means "in an alliance or partnership."  In most contexts, it describes the conspiring activity of people up to no good.  (There's also the rare idiom go cahoots, meaning "to enter into a partnership," as in "they went cahoots on a new restaurant.")  "Cahoot" may derive from French cahute, meaning "cabin" or "hut," suggesting the notion of two or more people hidden away working together in secret. "Cahute" is believed to have been formed through the combination of two other words for cabins and huts, "cabane" and "hutte."  https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cahoot#  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2713  August 30, 2023 

May 30, 2017  Before she become a novelist, Edith Wharton tried her hand at writing plays, and two scholars discovered one of her forgotten dramatic works hiding in an archive in Austin, Texas, Rebecca Mead reports in The New Yorker.  Wharton’s literary fame came later in life, and she wrote a number of unproduced plays in her 30s.  In 1901, her play The Shadow of a Doubt was slated to be produced, and a famous actress was cast in the lead role.  The producer pulled out before the premier, though, and the play faded into obscurity.  Laura Rattray, of the University of Glasgow, and Mary Chinery, of Georgian Court University, had discovered an article referencing The Shadow of a Doubt.  While attending a conference in Austin they searched the Harry Ransom Center’s holdings for the manuscript.  They came up with two copies and have published the text in the Edith Wharton Review.  It’s the first previously undiscovered work by the author found in 25 years.  Sarah Laskow  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/found-lost-play-edith-wharton    

Ordinal numbers are numbers that show position or order in a sequence.  For example, the words first and twentieth are ordinal numbers, as are numerals with suffixes at the end like 1st and 20th.  Cardinal numbers depict quantities or amounts and are used in mathematics and counting.  They are typically depicted as Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc.) but can also be written as words (one, two, three, etc.)   Matt Ellis  https://www.grammarly.com/blog/how-to-write-ordinal-numbers-correctly/   

John La Farge (1835–1910) was an American artist whose career spanned illustration, murals, interior design, painting, and popular books on his Asian travels and other art-related topics.  La Farge made stained glass windows, mainly for churches on the American east coast, beginning with a large commission for Henry Hobson Richardson's Trinity Church in Boston in 1878, and continuing for thirty years.  La Farge designed stained glass as an artist, as a specialist in color, and as a technical innovator, holding a patent granted in 1880 for superimposing panes of glass.  That patent would be key in his dispute with contemporary and rival Louis Comfort Tiffany.  La Farge rented space in the Tenth Street Studio Building at its opening in 1858, and he became a longtime presence in Greenwich Village.  In 1863 he was elected into the National Academy of Design; in 1877 he co-founded the Society of American Artists in frustration at the National Academy's conservatism.  In 1892 La Farge was brought on as an instructor with the Metropolitan Museum of Art Schools to provide vocational training to students in New York City.  He served as president of the National Society of Mural Painters from 1899 to 1904.  In 1904, he was one of the first seven artists chosen for membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_La_Farge  See also https://library.bc.edu/lafargeglass/biography and https://artvee.com/artist/john-la-farge/  

A leaky heart valve is a common form of heart valve disease.  It’s when one of the four valves in your heart doesn’t close tightly.  This allows some blood to flow in the wrong direction each time the valve closes.  The severity of your condition depends on how much blood leaks backward.  If it’s just a trace amount, you’ll likely have no symptoms or problems with heart function.  But moderate to severe leakiness may cause symptoms and/or need treatment to prevent damage to your heart.  https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/21484-leaky-heart-valve 

August 15, 2023  Nonnative grasses spread easily during the rainy season and dry out during droughts.  At a time such as this summer, when the landscape is arid, the plants’ desiccated and dormant state makes them highly flammable. And after a fire burns through, some of these species are adapted to recover quickly—as a result, they are first to repopulate the scorched Earth, crowding out native plants as they proliferate.  Less rainfall and thinner cloud cover—on top of higher temperatures in today’s era of global warming—have made wildfires in a tropical island like Hawaii not just a possibility, but a probability.  A good first step for fire mitigation is to reduce the fuel for future blazes.  That means reverting the overrun plantations back into tended agricultural lands.  Grazing animals can also be valuable allies to tamp down these invasive grasses.  This method is as simple as letting sheep, cattle or goats do what they do best on grass-dominated spaces, so they can trim the unruly kindling.  Moreover, fire breaks, or gaps between flammable vegetation, can also help contain a blaze once it gets going.  Instead of allowing fires to spread untrammeled on grasslands, University of Hawaii plant ecologist Clay Trauernicht recommends planting rows of pineapples, bananas, dragon fruit or taro to cut off a fire’s potential path of spread.  “Just like with climate change, we know what steps will reduce the risk of wildfire,” Trauernicht wrote in 2018.  “But actually taking these steps will require reinvesting in and, frankly, reimagining our individual and collective responsibility for the larger landscape.”  Shi En Kim  https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-swaths-of-invasive-grass-made-mauis-fires-so-devastating-180982729/ 

bumbershoot (plural bumbershoots) noun  (originally and chiefly US, slang, humorous)  An umbrella [from late 19th c.] quotations ▼synonyms ▲ (Australia, Britain, Ireland, New Zealand, informal) brolly  The musical film Mary Poppins, about the eponymous nanny with a magical umbrella, premiered in Los Angeles, California on August 27, 1964.  Wiktionary 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2712  August 28, 2023  

From:  Steve Benko  Subject:  Hannah Senesh thought for the day  There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct.  There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world though they are no longer among the living.  These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark.  They light the way for humankind. - Hannah Senesh, poet, playwright, and paratrooper (17 Jul 1921-1944)  Here’s part of a poem by Hannah Senesh set to music and performed by my daughter Julie: video (1 min.)

From:  Alex McCrae  Subject:  blood-and-guts, chopped liver  Warhorse US General George Patton was quoted as saying to his WWII officers-in-training, “You’re going to be up to your necks in blood and guts.”  From that point on, the Patton moniker, “Old Blood-and-Guts” stuck.  A common GI saying regarding Patton was, “Our blood, his guts.”  So many common food-words and phrases have entered our lexicon.  Cases in point:  red herring, cake walk, knuckle sandwich, Hot dog! (as an exclamation) . . . the phrases “That takes the cake”, “Easy as pie”, “Good egg”.  Our use of “chopped liver” could also be included in that list.   

From:  Ben Truwe  Subject:  chopped liver    
Chopped liver was sometimes formed into a centerpiece sculpture, surrounded by crackers.  One appears in the film Goodbye Columbus.  AWADmail Issue 1099   

Since its publication in 1667, readers have often used Paradise Lost to think critically about patriarchy.   Mary Shelley took the epigraph of Frankenstein from Milton, and one of the three books that her monster reads is Paradise Lost.  Virginia Woolf called Paradise Lost the “essence of which almost all other poetry is the dilution,” but in A Room with a View, the hyper-learned Milton is an inhibiting figure, someone women are not permitted to rival.  Barbieland, like Eden, is sumptuous, sweet, and sufficient in every sense.  Milton’s Paradise is a place of never-cloying sweetness.  He doesn’t use the word “pink” (first used to describe the color in 1669), but the word “rose” appears 32 times, and the poetry is saturated with luxurious description.  Near the beginning of the film, Ken injures himself trying to run into the sea.  When Barbie comforts him, Ken wilts into the nape of her neck.  This gesture is meant to look pathetic, and Ryan Gosling plays it cartoonishly, but something about it was strangely moving.  In her 2002 book Hollywood Flatlands, Esther Leslie describes how Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno found something redemptive in Hollywood cartoons.  It seems a mistake not to allow ourselves to enjoy something because we disagree with its message.  The capacity to take the world as it is given to us and make something radically new out of it is an early meaning of the word “plastic,” which emerged in the English language in the 17th century.  Orlando Reade  https://lithub.com/greta-gerwigs-paradise-lost/#:~:text=I%20think%20this%20is%20why,is%20not%20cause%20for%20contempt.    

Top 15 best cities to retire according to Orchard (home listing and buying service)  Of the 100 cities we analyzed, these 15 cities ranked the highest on our proprietary score.  Top two are: 

1.  Toledo, OH

This vibrant city situated along the western banks of the Maumee River is known for its friendly locals and welcoming atmosphere.  It also boasts the lowest list price of all the cities in our study and the second lowest rent prices—making it ideal for homebuyers and renters alike.

2.  Pittsburgh, PA

Nestled among the hills of western Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh is a dynamic city with a rich industrial heritage and a thriving modern identity.  The city boasts world-class medical institutions like the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) and a higher-than-average density of Medicare providers.  Allaire Conte  https://orchard.com/blog/posts/best-cities-to-retire#Top_15_best_cities_to_retire2 

John Edward Warnock (1940–August 19, 2023) was an American computer scientist, inventor, and technology businessman best known for co-founding Adobe Systems Inc., the graphics and publishing software company, with Charles Geschke in 1982.  Warnock was President of Adobe for his first two years and chairman and CEO for his remaining sixteen years at the company.  Although he retired as CEO in 2001, he continued to co-chair the Adobe Board of Directors with Geschke until 2017.  Warnock pioneered the development of graphics, publishing, web and electronic document technologies that have revolutionized the field of publishing and visual communications.  Warnock was raised in Salt Lake City, Utah.  Although he failed mathematics in ninth grade while graduating from Olympus High School in 1958, Warnock went on to earn a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and philosophy, a Doctor of Philosophy degree in electrical engineering (computer science), and an honorary degree in science, all from the University of Utah.  He also received an honorary degree from the American Film Institute.  He lived in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife Marva M. Warnock, a graphic designer.  Marva is a former partner and graphic designer at Marsh Design in Palo Alto, California, and is known not only for creating the iconic Adobe logo, but also as a designer for nonprofit organizations.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Warnock   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2711  August 25, 2023

The Neon Museum in Las Vegas, Nevada, features signs from old casinos and other businesses displayed outdoors on 2.62 acres.  The museum features a restored lobby shell from the defunct La Concha Motel as its visitors' center, which officially opened on October 27, 2012.  For many years, the Young Electric Sign Company (YESCO) stored many of these old signs in their "boneyard."  The signs were slowly being destroyed by exposure to the elements.  The signs are considered by Las Vegas locals, business owners and government organizations to be not only artistically, but also historically, significant to the culture of the city. Each of the restored signs in the collection holds a story about who created it and why it is important.  The Neon Museum was founded in 1996 as a partnership between the Allied Arts Council of Southern Nevada and the City of Las Vegas. Today, it is an independent 501(c)3 non-profit.  Located on Las Vegas Boulevard N., the Neon Museum includes the Neon Boneyard and the North Gallery.  The impetus behind the collecting of signs was the loss of the iconic sign from The Sands; after it was replaced with a new sign in the 1980s.  There was no place to store the massive sign, and it was scrapped.  After nearly 10 years of collecting signs, the Allied Arts Council of Southern Nevada and the city of Las Vegas worked together to create an institution to house and care for the saved signs.  To mark its official opening in November 1996, the Neon Museum restored and installed the Hacienda Horse & Rider sign at the intersection of Las Vegas Boulevard and Fremont Street.   However, access to the collection was provided by appointment only.  For the museum in Los Angeles, see Museum of Neon Art.  For the museum in Warsaw, see Neon Museum, Warsaw.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neon_Museum  

Flash fiction, also called minimalist fiction, is a fictional work of extreme brevity that still offers character and plot development.  Identified varieties, many of them defined by word count, include the six-word story; the 280-character story (also known as "twitterature"); the "dribble" (also known as the "minisaga," 50 words); the "drabble" (also known as "microfiction," 100 words); "sudden fiction" (750 words); "flash fiction" (1,000 words); and "microstory".  Some commentators have suggested that flash fiction possesses a unique literary quality in its ability to hint at or imply a larger story.  Flash fiction has roots going back to prehistory, recorded at origin of writing, including fables and parables, notably Aesop's Fables in the west, and Panchatantra and Jataka tales in India.  Later examples include the tales of Nasreddin, and Zen koans such as The Gateless Gate.  In the United States, early forms of flash fiction can be found in the 19th century, notably in the figures of Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, and Kate Chopin.  In the 1920s flash fiction was referred to as the "short short story" and was associated with Cosmopolitan magazine; and in the 1930s, collected in anthologies such as The American Short Short Story.  Somerset Maugham was a notable proponent, with his Cosmopolitans:  Very Short Stories (1936) being an early collection.  In Japan, flash fiction was popularized in the post-war period particularly by Michio Tsuzuki (都筑道夫).  It wasn't until 1992, however, that the term "flash fiction" came into use as a category/genre of fiction.  It was coined by James Thomas, who together with Denise Thomas and Tom Hazuka edited the 1992 landmark anthology titled Flash Fiction:  72 Very Short Stories,  and was introduced by Thomas in his Introduction to that volume.  In 2020 The Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin established the first curated collection of flash fiction artifacts in the United States.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_fiction   

Edward Hopper is widely acknowledged as the most important realist painter of twentieth-century America.  But his vision of reality was a selective one, reflecting his own temperament in the empty cityscapes, landscapes, and isolated figures he chose to paint.  His work demonstrates that realism is not merely a literal or photographic copying of what we see, but an interpretive rendering.  Edward Hopper was born in 1882, in NY, into a middle-class family.  From 1900 to 1906 he studied at the NY School of Art, and while in school, shifted from illustration to works of fine art.  At the age of 37, Edward Hopper received his first open invitation to do a one-person exhibit, featuring some of his finest pieces of art.  16 pieces of his work were shown at the Whitney Club, and although none of the pieces were sold at this exhibit, it did point his career in a new direction, it got his artwork out to the general public, and he became a more notable name in the type of work and the art forms which he most wanted to focus his career on.  In Edward Hopper's most famous piece, Nighthawks, there are four customers and a waiter, who are in a brightly lit diner at night.  It was a piece created during a wartime; and many believe that their disconnect with the waiter, and with the external world, represent the feelings of many Americans during this period, because of the war.  The piece was set up in 1942, in the Art Institute of Chicago, and was seen by many people while it was on exhibit for a show.  https://www.edwardhopper.net/ 

July through October is your chance to see the American artist Edward Hopper’s early works painted on number of visits to Cape Ann in Gloucester, MA at the start of his fame.  Though Hopper (1882-1967) had painted for years in relative obscurity, selling only one painting before the age of 40, it was on Cape Ann, with the encouragement of his eventual wife, Josephine “Jo” Nivison, that he began the watercolor landscapes and houses that launched his success.  The exhibit is open July 22, 2023-Oct. 16, 2023.  Find location and hours at https://home.capeannmuseum.org/edward-hopper/  

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2710  August 23, 2023

Roberto Bolaño, in full Roberto Bolaño Ávalos, (1953, Santiago, Chile-2003, Barcelona, Spain)  Bolaño’s literary career began when he published a poetry collection while living in Mexico.  In 1977 he left Mexico to travel the world and eventually settled in Spain, where he married and held a series of low-paying jobs while still working on his craft.  He turned to prose after the birth of his son in 1990, believing that fiction would be more remunerative than poetry.  Bolaño’s breakthrough work was Los detectives salvajes (1998; The Savage Detectives), which tells the story of a circle of radical Mexican poets known as the “visceral realists.”  The book begins as a diary of a young poet new to the group, but it then telescopes into a chronicle of the adventures of the visceral realists’ two founders on their search through Mexico for an elusive poet and their subsequent globe-trotting, as told from the perspectives of more than 50 narrators.  The novel made Bolaño a literary star throughout Latin America and won the prestigious Rómulo Gallegos Prize (the Spanish-language equivalent of the Booker Prize).  He continued his frenetic writing pace, publishing at least one new book each year, spurred in large part by a looming awareness of his impending death (he was diagnosed with a chronic liver ailment in 1992).  Although he became a well-known and critically hailed author in Spanish-speaking countries following the publication of Los detectives salvajes, Bolaño was not widely translated until after his death.   https://www.britannica.com/biography/Roberto-Bolano  

“We never stop reading, although every book comes to an end, just as we never stop living, although death is certain.”  Roberto Bolaño  https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/291304-we-never-stop-reading-although-every-book-comes-to-an  

Boston beans are a classic New England dish, and a confirmed favorite of H.P Lovecraft.  He loved this dish for its heartiness as much as for its frugality, and wrote to his aunt of enjoying a meal of canned baked beans—a “unique delicacy”—with his friends Kleiner and McNeill, lamenting that a dash of “catsup” would have improved them, “but McNeill— simple soul—keeps none of these worldly, highly spiced devices in his primitive & ascetick larder.”  If you don’t have time to cook up a batch of Boston beans, try Lovecraft’s recipe for beans on toast, described in a 1925 letter to his aunt:  “Just you take a medium-sized loaf of bread, cut it into four equal parts, & add to each of these ¼ can (medium) Heinz beans & a goodly chunk of cheese.  If the result isn’t a full-sized, healthy day’s quota of good fodder for an Old Gentleman, I’ll resign from the League of Nations’ dietary committee!”  A speedy twist on the classic dish, this recipe is vegetarian but you could add 4 ounces chunky bacon pieces at the same time as the celery and garlic.  serves four  excerpted from Recipes from the World of H.P. Lovecraft by Olivia Luna Eldritch  Copyright © 2023  Find recipe at https://lithub.com/how-to-make-boston-baked-beans-lovecraft-style/ 

August 14, 2023  Against a nationwide backdrop of book bans and censorship campaigns, Iowa educators are turning to ChatGPT to help decide which titles should be removed from their school library shelves in order to legally comply with recent Republican-backed state legislation, PopSci has learned.  According to an August 11 article in the Iowa state newspaper The Gazette, spotted by PEN America, the Mason City Community School District recently removed 19 books from its collection ahead of its quickly approaching 2023-24 academic year.  Andrew Paul  https://www.popsci.com/technology/iowa-chatgpt-book-ban/

The “dog days of summer” is a phrase used to describe the hot and humid days of summer.  It can be traced back thousands of years to the days of the Roman Empire.  It refers to the dates from July 3 through August 11, which is 20 days prior and 20 days after the star Sirius rises and falls in conjunction with the sun.  Sirius was known as the “Dog Star,” because it is the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major (Large Dog).  https://earthsky.org/earth/dog-days-of-summer/ 

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2709  August 21,  2023

American poet and florist Mary Elizabeth Frye wrote her poem Do not stand at my grave and weep on a brown paper shopping bag.  The poem was never copyrighted by the author, and more than 60 years passed between the year when the poem was written and the year when its authorship became known.  When BBC included the verse in its TV program Bookworm in 1995, they received over 30,000 requests for copies.  Hardly a surprise, it was ranked as “the Nation’s Favorite Poem” the following year.  https://emilyspoetryblog.com/biography-of-mary-elizabeth-frye/

A Claddagh ring is a traditional Irish ring in which a heart represents love, the crown stands for loyalty, and two clasped hands symbolize friendship.  The design and customs associated with it originated in Claddagh, County Galway.  Its modern form was first produced in the 17th century.  The Claddagh ring belongs to a group of European finger rings called fede rings.  The name derives from the Italian phrase mani in fede ("hands [joined] in faith" or "hands [joined] in loyalty").  This group dates to Ancient Rome, where the gesture of clasping hands meant pledging vows.  Cut or cast in bezels, they were used as engagement and wedding rings in medieval and Renaissance Europe to signify "plighted troth".  In recent years it has been embellished with interlace designs and combined with other Celtic and Irish symbols, corresponding with its popularity as an emblem of Irish identity.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claddagh_ring

Earthenware is usually fired at around 999°C/1140°C.  It is baked clay that is varnished to give it a better finish and greater resistance.  Stoneware plates are made from clay at a higher temperature, between 1176°C/1276°C.  Porcelain plates are made from a more refined clay (feldspar, quartz and kaolin) and fired at much higher temperatures than earthenware or stoneware, approximately between 1200°C/1450°C, resulting in a hard, white, non-porous pottery.  When we talk about bone china, we are talking about the same materials with which porcelain tableware is made of, but with the addition of at least 25 percent of bone ash (literally cow bones combined with porcelain clay).  On the other hand, fine china has a similar production process but without the bone ash, which at the end of the day makes it closer to porcelain dinnerware.  But don't forget that porcelain plates are fired at a much higher temperature resulting in a harder and more durable dinnerware.   Melanie Kalfaian  https://whatahost.co.uk/blogs/what-a-host-blog/tableware-earthenware-stoneware-porcelain-bone-china-or-fine-china     

skedaddle  verb  "run away, betake oneself hastily to flight," American Civil War military slang noted and popularized in newspapers from the summer of 1861, originally often skadaddle, a word of unknown origin.  There is an earlier use in a piece reprinted in Northern newspapers in 1859, representing Hoosier speech.  Perhaps it is connected to earlier use in northern England dialect with a meaning "to spill, scatter."  Related:  Skedaddled; skedaddling.  As a noun from 1862, "a hasty flight."  https://www.etymonline.com/word/skedaddle   

The Black Cat was an American fiction magazine launched in 1895 by Herman Umbstaetter, initially published in Boston, Massachusetts.  It published only short stories, and had a reputation for originality and for encouraging new writers.  Umbstaetter’s editorial approach was unusual in several ways:  the cover price was low, at five cents; he paid based on merit, not on story length; and he was willing to buy stories by new authors rather than insisting on well-known names.  He frequently ran story contests to attract amateur writers.  The magazine was immediately successful, and its circulation was boosted by the appearance in an early issue of “The Mysterious Card” by Cleveland Moffett, which was so popular that two print runs of the issue it appeared in sold out.  Many well-known writers appeared in its pages.  Two of the best-known were Jack London, whose 1899 story “A Thousand Deaths” sold just as he was about to give up attempting to become a writer, and Henry Miller, whose first published work was several short fiction critiques published in The Black Cat in 1919.  The magazine’s icon, a black cat that appeared on almost every cover for many years, was drawn by Umbstaetter’s wife, Nelly Littlehale Umbstaetter.  Others who sold stories to The Black Cat included O. Henry, Rex Stout, and Clark Ashton Smith.  In early 1923 it ceased publication for good.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Cat_(US_magazine)    

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2708  August 18, 2023