According to the Institute of Museum and Library Services, there are 35,000 small museums in the U.S.  In perspective, that’s 10,000 more than all Starbucks and McDonald’s in the USA combined.  Look at the list and you’ll only see 28 because three museums are grouped together since they relate to the same subject.  https://www.neverstoptraveling.com/small-museums    

Fluffernutters—two slices of white bread slathered with peanut-butter and marshmallow goop—were a lunchbox staple for some.  For the elementary school set, it’s a pretty optimal snack, one that fully dispenses with the vague pretense of fruit in a PB&J in favor of a maximum sugar rush.  We know it’s not good per se, but it holds a place of perverse regional pride that only comes from nostalgia.  In 2006, when Massachusetts Senator Jarret Barrios proposed legislation that would forbid schools from serving fluffernutters more than once a week, it caused such a public uproar that Democratic Representative Kathi-Anne Reinstein declared, “I’m going to fight to the death for Fluff.”  It’s not a coincidence that Campbell’s condensed soups started cropping up in recipes for everything from cakes to casseroles in the mid-20th century.  The company distributed recipes claiming that harried housewives could make their lives easier by swapping a canned product for a homemade béchamel sauce.  Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup debuted in 1934 and quickly became the default base for tuna noodle casserole, turkey tetrazzini, and even Mormon-style funeral potatoes.  Minnesota’s tater tot-loaded hot dish also incorporated cream of mushroom base, which earned the soup a nickname:  “the Lutheran binder.”  But the one that really takes the cake is green bean casserole, composed of only six ingredients, three of which are canned Campbell’s products.  In 1955, Dorcas Reilly invented the recipe for a “Green Bean Bake” in the company’s test kitchen and the rest is history.  https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/american-food-traditions-that-started-as-marketing-ploys.  Thank you, reader.             

Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed are two terms that developed independently of each other.  Bright-eyed supposedly comes from the late 1500s, while bushy-tailed is said to have hailed from 1865-1870, though no direct source is clear for either of them.  They were seen together for the first time in talking about a squirrel, which did, in fact, have bright eyes and bushy tail.  In St. Clair County, Michigan, Its History and Its People, published in 1912 by William Lee Jenks, we can read about the impossible attempt to capture the following in a painting, . . . o see the wild pigeon, chewink, fox sparrow, bobolink, scarlet tanager, the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed squirrel, the graceful motions of water birds . . .  https://writingexplained.org/idiom-dictionary/bright-eyed-and-bushy-tailed    

Quincy Jones–who, according to his publicist, “passed away peacefully” November 3, 2024 at age 91–was practically everything, everywhere, all at once, and therefore nearly impossible to pin down.  He was a producer, composer, arranger, instrumentalist, impresario, author, mentor, magazine founder, the celebrity father of celebrity children.  Jones released 16 albums under his own name, 10 of which topped the Billboard jazz charts.  As performer/composer/producer, his “Soul Bossa Nova,” from 1962, with its perky flutes and farting brass, was his best-known song:  Jet Age insouciance distilled.  It would go on to become a key track in the lounge-music revival of the 1990s, inextricably associated with the Austin Powers film franchise, which adopted it as a theme song.  Jones was the arranger on the 1964 recording of Sinatra’s “Fly Me to the Moon,” which, five years later, the Apollo 10 astronaut Eugene Cernan played on a cassette while orbiting the Moon.  https://www.vanityfair.com/style/story/music-impresario-quincy-jones-91-is-dead  

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more . . .    

See the rest of the poem at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44484/to-autumn

http//librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2873  November 4, 2024