Julie D’Aubigny Was A 17th-century Bisexual French Opera Singer And Fencing Master Who Killed Or Wounded

Types of mooncakes

Right now(is festival for chinese singaporeans) is the mid-autumn festival. According to the ancient Chinese legend, the story of Chang Er, the wife of a merciless king who downed the elixir of immortality he had intended to drink, to save her people from his tyrannical rule.The tale goes that she ascended to the moon after that, and has been worshipped by the Chinese as a Moon Goddess ever since. 

Making and sharing mooncakes is one of the hallmark traditions of this festival. In singapore, we have main five different chinese dialect group(hokkien,teochew,hakka,cantonese,hainanese) so of course, there are five different types of mooncakes.

CANTONESE MOOKCAKE

This is the most common style of mooncakes sold by bakeries and hotels. The round pastry, which is about 10cm in diameter and about 4cm thick, comes from south China’s Guangdong province and is also eaten in Hong Kong and Macau. The traditional mooncake is filled with lotus seed or red bean paste with egg yolks inside. 

However, there are the modern snowskin mooncakes which contains anything from durian to champagne. (below are champagne mooncakes)

HOKKIEN MOONCAKE

They were known as Scholar Cakes in the past and given to those taking the Imperial Examination to fill junior and senior administrative positions in the Imperial Court. The filling usually comprises winter melon, tangerine peel and melon seeds. Sesame seeds are sprinkled on the white pastry to make it fragrant.

HAINANESE MOONCAKE

Hainanese ones are filled with dried fruit such as tangerine peel as well as sesame seeds and melon seeds. It has two verision with a salty and pepper version. The.The slightly flaky skin is made with pork lard and salt. According to a blog, they are actually only found in singapore as the story goes that the hainanese community in singapore was very poor and could not afford the normal mooncakes sold so they made their own type of mooncake.

TEOCHEW MOONCAKE

Yam-filled mooncakes with a flaky crust are the most common Teochew mooncakes sold in Singapore. Another type is la gao, which is a steamed black sesame cake. It comes plain or with green bean paste or yam filling. There is also another type of Teochew mooncake, a white disc that looks like a big biscuit and is filled with tangerine peel and sugar, flavoured with five-spice powder and topped with sesame seeds.

HAKKA MOONCAKE

This is actually uncommon and almost unheard of in singapore but moon cakes in Hakka regions of china, apart from common moon cakes, have “five-kernel moon cakes” and a kind of round cake made with glutinous rice flour and sugar, compressed into different size. (I can’t find an exact picture of the hakka mooncake so) 

Your pocket Constitution

The amazing Khizr Khan was onto something with his pocket U.S. Constitution - and our Labs team went ahead and made an app for that. Understanding the U.S. Constitution is an app that allows you to view the articles and amendments of the Constitution, and then links you to scholarship relating to each specific section. It’s free for iOS and Android. Keep fighting the good fight against “alternative facts.” 

More here: http://labs.jstor.org/constitution/

Rare Pics Of The Infamous ’50s London Girl Gang Photographed by Ken Russell Are Unbelievably Cool

March 24th 1944: The ‘Great Escape’

On this day in 1944, a group of Allied prisoners of war staged a daring escape attempt from the German prisoner of war camp at Stalag Luft III. This camp, located in what is now Poland, held captured Allied pilots mostly from Britain and the United States. In 1943, an Escape Committee under the leadership of Squadron Leader Roger Bushell of the RAF, supervised prisoners surreptitiously digging three 30 foot tunnels out of the camp, which they nicknamed ‘Tom’, ‘Dick’ and ‘Harry’. The tunnels led to woods beyond the camp and were remarkably sophisticated - lined with wood, and equipped with rudimentary ventilation and electric lighting. The successful construction of the tunnels was particularly impressive as the Stalag Luft III camp was designed to make it extremely difficult to tunnel out as the barracks were raised and the area had a sandy subsoil. ‘Tom’ was discovered by the Germans in September 1943, and ‘Dick’ was abandoned to be used as a dirt depository, leaving ‘Harry’ as the prisoners’ only hope. By the time of the escape, American prisoners who had assisted in tunneling had been relocated to a different compound, making the escapeees mostly British and Commonwealth citizens. 200 airmen had planned to make their escape through the ‘Harry’ tunnel, but on the night of March 24th 1944, only 76 managed to escape the camp before they were discovered by the guards. However, only three of the escapees - Norwegians Per Bergsland and Jens Müller and Dutchman Bram van der Stok - found their freedom. The remaining 73 were recaptured, and 50 of them, including Bushell, were executed by the Gestapo on Adolf Hitler’s orders, while the rest were sent to other camps. While the escape was generally a failure, it helped boost morale among prisoners of war, and has become enshrined in popular memory due to its fictionalised depiction in the 1963 film The Great Escape.

“Three bloody deep, bloody long tunnels will be dug – Tom, Dick, and Harry. One will succeed!” - Roger Bushell

In the days after the September 11 terrorist attacks, a number of spontaneous memorials appeared in the city. One, later named Tiles for America, displayed thousands of hand-painted tiles with inspirational messages. The tiles were hung on a chain-link fence at the corner of Seventh and Greenwich Avenues, where they remained as a place of remembrance for years afterward.

Irwin Silver. Tiles on fence, Greenwich House project, 7th Avenue & Greenwich Avenue. May 2002. New-York Historical Society. 

I am not a native Japanese speaker but the first word that comes to mind is 懐かしい (natsukashii), which is that warm fuzzy feeling you have when you think upon a fond memory or experience. Or that feeling you are having when you say, "sure brings back memories." Depending on context it gets translated to nostalgic, or longing, or dear, but by themselves they all feel somewhat inadequate.

For Chinese mandarin, I can think of 骗我的感情 (pian wo de gan qing) (there should be tone markers, but I don't know how to put them in, sorry!), which is literally "trick/bluff my feelings", which I am now finding quite to explain! Hmm... it's that disappointment you feel when someone sets your expectations up for something and then fails to deliver. I suppose like feeling cheated.

Hope that helps and good luck!

bobbies

YOU SPEAK A LANGUAGE AND I NEED YOUR HELP PLEASE I BEG YOU

hi. sorry about that catchy title, but you have something i need. you speak a language, maybe even multiple languages. you use emotions words everyday. i’m sure you know that languages have their own emotion words that are very hard to translate to other languages, for example, the word ‘anxiety’ doesn’t really exist in Polish, it is always a challenge to translate it in such way to convey its true meaning. Polish people don’t really feel anxiety, because they don’t have the word for it. i need your help with something: tell me an emotion word that is unique to your language or hard to translate. i’ll ask you a few questions and maybe i’ll write an essay about it using the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM). it’s a linguistic theory, whatever. please help a linguist out. i need an A. i promise i won’t get an F on your precious word. 

i am interested in emotion words from every language except for Polish and English.

you can reply under this post, you can message me privately, i can give you my e-mail, whatever works for you. it would really help me if you reblogged this post, but no pressure

help education.. pretty please?

Photograph of the XS-1 in Flight

On October 14, 1947, Captain Charles “Chuck” Yeager became the first human to break the sound barrier during powered level flight while flying the experimental Bell X-1 aircraft.

File Unit: X-1 Photographs, 12/11/1946 - 10/21/1947. Series: Flight Test Project Files, ca. 1945 - ca. 1959. Record Group 255: Records of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 1903 - 2006 .

Photograph of Captain Charles E. Yeager, 5/1948

Read Chuck Yeager’s notes from the moment that he broke the sound barrier:

“The needle of the machmeter fluctuated at this reading momentarily, then passed off the scale.  Assuming that the off scale reading remained linear, it is estimated that 1.05 Mach i was attained at this time.”

Pilot’s Notes from the Ninth Powered Flight of the XS-1 (First supersonic flight)

Read more Pilot’s notes from these test flights in the  X-1 Correspondence file in the National Archives catalog.

The beautiful stone church at Gallarus, Dingle, Co. Kerry, Ireland. It’s circa 1000 years old

IT’S FOLLOW A LIBRARY DAY!! (according to Twitter)

In honor of this excellent bookish occasion, allow us to give special shout outs to all of the libraries that we have followed and/or have followed us here on Tumblr. For all of you bookworms and library cats out there that can’t get enough Booklrs, make sure to check these pages out and #followalibrary!!

@alachualibrary (The Alachua County Library District)

@badgerslrc (The Klamath Community College’s Learning Research Center)

@bflteens (Baker Free Library’s Tumblr For Teens)

@bibliosanvalentino​ (Biblioteca San Valentino [San Valentino Library])

@boonelibrary (Boone County Public Library)

@cheshirelibrary (Cheshire Public Library)

@cmclibraryteen​ (Cape May County Library’s Teen Services)

@darienlibrary (Darien Library)

@dcpubliclibrary (DC Public Library)

@detroitlib (Detroit Public Library Music, Arts & Literature Department)

@dplteens (Danville Public Library Teens)

@fontanalib (Fontana Regional Library)

@gastonlibrary (Gaston County Public Library)

@glendaleteenlibrary (Glendale Public Library Teens)

@hpl-teens (Homewood Public Library For Teens)

@myrichlandlibrary (Mansfield/Richland County Public Library)

@othmeralia  (Othmer Library of Chemical History)

@petit-branch-library (Petit Branch Library)

@pflibteens (Pflugerville Public Library Teenspace)

@schlowlibrary (Schlow Centre Region Library)

@southeastlibrary (Southeast Branch Library)

@tampabaylibraryconsortium-blog (Tampa Bay Library Consortium)

@teencenterspl (The Smith Public Library Teen Center)

@teensfvrl (Fraser Valley Regional Library)

@teen-stuff-at-the-library (White Oak Library District)

@ucflibrary (University of Central Florida Library)

@waynecountyteenzone (Wayne County Public Library’s Teen Space)

Hopefully we didn’t miss anyone! (And, you know, if you’re not already following US, now’s a good a chance as any. ;) Just putting it out there.)