And so Saturn says and has sent to warn you: When you see the moon amiss and two monks' heads, And a maid have the mastery, and multiply by eight, Then shall Death withdraw and Dearth be justice, And Daw the diker die for hunger Unless God of his goodness grants us a truce. [William Langland, Will's Vision of Piers Plowman , E. Talbot Donaldson, tr., E. D. Kirk, J. H. Anderson, ed., (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1990), p. 70]. I - xxii - Far From Time. Lothar Flusstapfer, packing his bags for Vegas, has a premonition. At the apex of the chichi, Aira notices tail-gating neuro-Niceans. Heppleweis’ lax performance at Failsafe makes the late night sports wrap-up, also viewed by the fjulsfut whom, scattered by a Snorggi sneeze, are interned in the Forgotten Tents. A golf segue features a match involving the Trinity, crashed by Lucifer, who points out current parallel envelopments at the chichi, marking the collision between Aira and the neuro-Niceans, with collateral effect. The Van Etnabarons are safely reunited and resolve to confront perpetrators. ~ page 280 ~ Richard Strauss, portrait by Max Liebermann, 1918; in the National-Galerie, Berlin Strauss, Richard Act I, Signature xxii - (1) Born June 11, 1864, Munich, Ger. Died Sept. 8, 1949, Garmisch-Partenkirchen German composer and conductor. Son of a horn player, he began composing at age six. Before he was 20, he had already had major premieres of two symphonies and a violin concerto. In 1885 the conductor of the Meiningen Orchestra, Hans von Bülow, made Strauss his successor. Strongly influenced by the work of Richard Wagner, he began to write programmatic orchestral tone poems, including Don Juan (1889), Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (1894–95), and Also sprach Zarathustra (1896). After 1900 he focused on operas; his third such work, Salome (1903–05), was a succès de scandale. Elektra (1906–08) marked the beginning of a productive collaboration with the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, with whom Strauss wrote his greatest operas, including Der Rosenkavalier (1909–10). He remained in Austria through World War II and held a music post in the German government, but he was later cleared of wrongdoing in connection with the Nazi regime. After many years writing lesser works, he produced several remarkable late pieces, including Metamorphosen (1945) and the Four Last Songs (1948). [Following text courtesy of Wikipedia]: Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks (German: Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, 1894-95), Op. 28, is a tone poem by Richard Strauss, chronicling the misadventures and pranks of the German peasant folk hero, Till Eulenspiegel. The two themes representing Till are played respectively by the horn and the clarinet. The horn theme is a lilting melody that reaches a peak, falls downward, and ends in three long, loud notes, each progressively lower. The clarinet theme is crafty and wheedling, suggesting a trickster doing what he does best. The work opens with a 'Once upon a time' theme, with solo horn bursting in with two repetitions of the first Till theme. The theme is taken by the rest of the orchestra in a rondo form (which Strauss spelled in its original form, rondeau), and this beginning section concludes with the tutti orchestra repeating two notes, along the lines of a child's "ta da!" The clarinet theme is heard next, suggesting Till's laughter as he plots his next prank. The music follows Till throughout the countryside, as he rides a horse through a market, upsetting the goods and wares, pokes fun at the strict Teutonic clergy, flirts and chases girls (the love theme is given to soli first violin), and mocks the serious academics. The music suggesting a horse ride returns again, with the first theme restated all over the orchestra, when the climax abruptly changes to a funeral march. Till has been captured by the authorities, and is sentenced to beheading for blasphemy. The funeral march of the headsman begins a dialogue with the desperate Till, who tries to wheedle and joke his way out of this predicament. Unfortunately, he has no effect on the stony executioner, who lets fall the ax. The D clarinet wails in a distortion of the first theme, signifying his death scream, and a pizzicato by the strings represents the actual execution. After a moment of silence, the 'once upon a time' theme heard at the beginning returns, suggesting that someone like Till can never be destroyed, and the work ends with one last quotation of the musical joke. Beatrix Helen Potter, 1913 Potter, Beatrix Act I, Signature xxii - (2) Born July 28, 1866, South Kensington, Middlesex, Eng. Died Dec. 22, 1943, Sawrey, Lancashire English author and illustrator of children's books. In her childhood Potter spent holidays in Scotland and the English Lake District, which inspired her love of animals and stimulated her imaginative and technically superb watercolour drawings. The illustrated animal stories she sent to a sick child when she was 27 were published as The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1902), which became one of the best-selling children's books of all time. More than 20 sequels followed, featuring such original characters as Jeremy Fisher, Squirrel Nutkin, Jemima Puddle-Duck, and Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle. [Following text courtesy of Wikipedia]: Born into a privileged household, Potter was educated by governesses and grew up isolated from other children. She had numerous pets and, through holidays spent in Scotland and the Lake District, developed a love of landscape, flora and fauna, all of which she closely observed and painted. As a young woman her parents discouraged her intellectual development, but her study and paintings of fungi led her to be widely respected in the field of mycology. In her thirties Potter published the highly successful children's book The Tale of Peter Rabbit , and became secretly engaged to her publisher, Norman Warne, causing a breach with her parents, who disapproved of his social status. Warne died before the wedding could take place. Potter eventually published 23 children's books and, having become financially independent of her parents, was able to buy a farm in the Lake District, which she extended with other purchases over time. In her forties she married a local solicitor, William Heelis. She became a sheep breeder and farmer while continuing to write and illustrate children's books. Potter died in 1943, and left almost all of her property to her husband who, after his death in 1945, left it to The National Trust in order to preserve the beauty of the Lake District as she had known it, protecting it from developers. When Potter came of age, her parents appointed her their housekeeper and discouraged any intellectual development, instead requiring her to supervise the household. From the age of 15 until she was past 30, she recorded her everyday life in journals, using her own secret code, which was not decoded until 20 years after her death [http://www.peterrabbit.com/miss_pott er/miss_potter_world/diary.cfm]. An uncle attempted to introduce her as a student at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, but she was rejected because she was female. Potter was later one of the first to suggest that lichens were a symbiotic relationship between fungi and algae [Chet Raymo, "The Sharp and the Half-Sharp," Science Musings (blog of Stonehill College professor and former Boston Globe columnist, Chet Raymo), September 29, 2006]. As, at the time, the only way to record microscopic images was by painting them, Potter made numerous drawings of lichens and fungi. As the result of her observations, she was widely respected throughout England as an expert mycologist. She also studied spore germination and life cycles of fungi. Potter's set of detailed watercolours of fungi, numbering some 270 completed by 1901, is in the Armitt Library, Ambleside. In 1897, her paper on the germination of spores was presented to the Linnean Society by her uncle Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe, as women were barred from attending meetings (in 1997, the Society issued a posthumous official apology to Potter for the way she had been treated). The Royal Society also refused to publish at least one of her technical papers. She also lectured at the London School of Economics several times. Français: Feuilles de thé vert en infusion dans un zhong (author: Wikimol, December 2005).* flavonoid Act I, Signature xxii - (3) Or flavone. Organic compound, any member of a class of biological pigments containing no nitrogen that are found in many plants. They include anthoxanthins, which give yellow colours, often to flower petals, and anthocyanins, largely responsible for the red colouring of buds and young shoots and the purple and purple-red colours of autumn leaves. Their biological function is unknown; they may attract pollinators and seed dispersers. *[Image & caption credit and following text courtesy of Wikipedia]: Flavonoids (or bioflavonoids), also collectively known as Vitamin P and citrin ["Vitamin P," http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/vitamin+p], are a class of plant secondary metabolites. According to the IUPAC nomenclature ["Flavonoids (isoflavonoids and neoflavonoids)," IUPAC Compendium of Chemical Terminology , http://www.iupac.org/goldbook/F02424.pdf], they can be classified into: • flavonoids, derived from 2-phenylchromen-4-one (2-phenyl-1,4-benzopyrone) structure (examples: quercetin, rutin). • • isoflavonoids, derived from 3-phenylchromen-4-one (3-phenyl-1,4-benzopyrone) structure • • neoflavonoids, derived from 4-phenylcoumarine (4-phenyl-1,2-benzopyrone) structure. The three flavonoid classes above are all ketone-containing compounds, and as such, are flavonoids and flavonols. This class was the first to be termed "bioflavonoids." The terms flavonoid and bioflavonoid have also been more loosely used to describe non-ketone polyhydroxy polyphenol compounds which are more specifically termed flavanoids, flavan-3-ols, or catechins (although catechins are actually a subgroup of flavanoids).