The first female mannequins, made of papier-mâché, were made in France in the mid-19th century.  Mannequins were later made of wax to produce a more lifelike appearance.  In the 1920s, wax was supplanted by a more durable composite made with plaster.  Modern day mannequins are made from a variety of materials, the primary ones being fiberglass and plastic.  The fiberglass mannequins are usually more expensive than the plastic ones, tend to be not as durable, but are significantly more realistic.  Plastic mannequins, on the other hand, are a relatively new innovation in the mannequin field and are built to withstand the hustle of customer foot traffic usually witnessed in the store they are placed in.  Mannequins are used primarily by retail stores as in-store displays or window decoration. However, many online sellers also use them to display their products for their product photos (as opposed to using a live model).  Renaissance artist Fra Bartolomeo invented the full-scale articulated mannequin (more properly known as lay figure) as an aid in drawing and painting draped figures.  In 18th-century England, lay-figures are known to have been owned by portrait painters such as Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Arthur Devis for the arrangement of conversation pieces.  Mannequins were a frequent motif in the works of many early 20th-century artists, notably the metaphysical painters Giorgio de Chirico, Alberto Savinio and Carlo Carrà.  Shop windows displaying mannequins were a frequent photographic subject for Eugène Atget.  Mannequins have been used in horror and science fiction.  The Twilight Zone episode "The After Hours" (1960) involves mannequins taking turns living in the real world as people.  In the Doctor Who serial Spearhead from Space (1970), an alien intelligence attempts to take over Earth with killer plastic mannequins called Autons.  Military use of mannequins is recorded amongst the ancient Chinese, such as at the siege of Yongqiu.  The besieged Tang army lowered scarecrows down the walls of their castles to lure the fire of the enemy arrows.  In this way, they renewed their supplies of arrows.  Dummies were also used in the trenches in World War I to lure enemy snipers away from the soldiers.  A Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) report describes the use of a mannequin ("Jack-in-the-Box") as a countersurveillance measure, intended to make it more difficult for the host country's counterintelligence to track the movement of CIA agents posing as diplomats.  A "Jack-in-the-Box"–a mannequin representing the upper half of a human–would quickly replace a CIA agent after he left the car driven by another agent and walked away, so that any counterintelligence officers monitoring the agent's car would believe that he was still in the car.  The romantic comedy film Mannequin (1987) is a story of a window dresser who falls in love with a mannequin that comes to life.  The romantic thriller film Bommai (2023) is the story of a person who works in a mannequin factory and falls in love with one of the mannequins, imagining it as his childhood crush.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannequin  

A flip tax is a fee paid by a seller or buyer on a housing co-op transaction, typically in New York City.  It is not a tax and is not deductible as a property tax.  It is a transfer fee, payable upon the sale of an apartment to the co-op.  Flip taxes are considered a method to help raise money for a co-op's overhead expenses without raising the maintenance fees or assessing flat charge to all residences.  Charging the fee to those who are leaving the building seems to be the most politically feasible.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flip_tax   

Jasper, an aggregate of microgranular quartz and/or cryptocrystalline chalcedony and other mineral phases, is an opaque, impure variety of silica, usually red, yellow, brown or green in color; and rarely blue.  Jasper breaks with a smooth surface and is used for ornamentation or as a gemstone.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper   

Jasper Fforde (born 1961) is an English novelist, whose first novel, The Eyre Affair, was published in 2001.  He is known mainly for his Thursday Next novels, but has also published two books in the loosely connected Nursery Crime series, two in the Shades of Grey series and four in the The Last Dragonslayer series.  Fforde's books abound in literary allusions and wordplay, tightly scripted plots and playfulness with the conventional, traditional genres.  They usually contain elements of metafiction, parody, and fantasy.  His published books include a series of novels starring the literary detective Thursday Next:  The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing and The Woman Who Died a Lot.   The Eyre Affair had received 76 publisher rejections before its eventual acceptance for publication.  Fforde won the Wodehouse prize for comic fiction in 2004 for The Well of Lost Plots.  Several streets in the Thames Reach housing development in Swindon have been named after characters in the series.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasper_Fforde   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 2831  June 26, 2024