Fairy Floss

To the French, it's papa's beard; in Germany, sugar wool, Great Britain says candy floss and in the good ol' USA, we say cotton candy.  However, my favorite name of all is the original - fairy floss! 

This super sweet treat is a favorite at fairs, carnivals, circuses and the like.  The kiddos flock and the parents usually cringe.  Not this parent though.  Maybe it's my super sweet tooth that supersedes common sense, but regardless of the reason, I love this sugar on a stick! Today, I'm celebrating the sticky stuff - spun sugar to be precise. 

1897 is the year it all began.  Two Tennesseans, William Morrison and John C. Wharton, have been given credit for creating the first electric machine to produce this sugary delight. These candy making men introduced what they called fairy floss to the world by taking their cylindrical centrifuge heating device on the road to the 1904 World's Fair. At an exuberant cost of 25 cents a serving, half of the fair admission price at the time, they sold a shocking 68,655 servings! The sugary goodness was an instant hit and has been ever since.

Interestingly, this cotton like candy, dubbed so in the 1920s, has served more than just a sugar fix.  Scientist have studied its unique transformation from one type of solid to a liquid to an entirely different solid form. By doing so, they have used cotton candy as a form or mold for developing artificial capillaries which could, when perfected, be used in artificial skin for burn victims.  Who knew?

I bet you also didn't know these quirky tidbits about fairy floss as well:

• each strand of cotton candy is a nanofiber, just 3/1000s of an inch across.
• a company called Gold Medal developed the current cotton candy machine in 1949 and still to this day makes almost 100 percent of all cotton candy machines.
• our fluffy fairy floss has its own holiday - December 7th is National Cotton Candy Day.
• a bag of cotton candy only contains about one to two tablespoons of sugar.
• even though this sweet treat is made from entirely sugar, a cone or bag of cotton candy contains less sugar and calories than a can of soda.

D'alto, Nick. "Ordinary Sugar, Extraordinary Science." Odyssey. Feb 2012, Vol. 21 Issue 2, p38-41.
Collier, Marcy L. "What's Candy Floss?" Fun For Kidz. Jan/Feb 2009, Vol. 8 Issue 1, p22-23.

Imprints

About a year ago I came across a book that instantly grabbed my attention.  I am an incredibly visual person and this book makes a huge impact by using over-the-top visuals and graphics.  While children are the target audience for Human Footprint: Everything You Will Eat, Use, Wear, Buy, and Throw Out in Your Lifetime by Ellen Kirk, the book definitely should be shared with any and all.  The book opens by defining your human footprint as "the mark you make on the Earth."  As the book continues, incredible photos magnify how much of what we consume in our lives impacts our planet.  The numbers are startling!

Now, before I am labeled a tree hugger (no offense intended to my arbor enthusiast friends), I want to further explain my interest in the book.  Granted, the statistics are intriguing and most definitely thought provoking, but it is the definition of "human footprint" that struck me.  Not, how much refuse I'm going to produce in my lifetime, but in reality, how much will my imprint impact the people I touch in my short lifetime. 

The past few weeks I have constantly been reminded of this theme.  As I walk my little nutter butter into school each morning and back out of school each afternoon, I often see the sidewalk tracked with the fallen leaves of the age old trees lining her schoolyard. Some of these leaves are trapped to the sidewalk by either a recent rainfall or the early morning dampness of an autumn dew.  The leaves, when moved, have left their exact replica on the sidewalk - their imprint. Maybe I just have mind that works on overdrive, but my instant thought was - how apropos!  Right in front of a school building, where children are impacted daily, I'm being reminded of the importance of imprints.  

Of course, after about a week of saying each day to my youngest-one-of-three, "I've got to bring my camera and get a photo of these leaf prints," I finally did.  An image to remind me, not about how much trash I'm going to leave on this earth, but how much treasure I can leave.  And to quote the book (with a slightly different intent), "Yes, you matter. What you do adds up."

  

Just in case you're curious, here are a few stats from Human Footprint:

• You wore a total of 3,796 diapers when you were a baby.
• Every 3 years, you eat your weight in bread.
• A parade of 28,433 little, yellow rubber ducks shows all the showers you'll take in your lifetime.
• You will drive the equivalent to 25 times around the world.
• You and your fellow Americans throw away 694 plastic bottles a second.
• In a lifetime, you will use 656 bars of soap, 198 bottles of shampoo, 389 tubes of toothpaste, 272 containers of deodorant, and 156 toothbrushes.

I will end with that note of irony - I guess we are really clean, trashy people.

LOL #19

I just need know right now if anybody out there under the age of 35 knows what book is in the photo above! 

This week's LOL is more like a little chuckle to myself.  Let me set the stage. The time is mid-morning and I'm sitting at my desk at work editing my school's website.  When I look up from my computer, around my desk, out my office window and into the vast expanse of library space, I see: 1 circulation computer, 6 student computers, 1 laptop by my side, 1 document camera to my left, 30 computers in an attached lab, 1 LCD projector, 1 smart board, 5 laptop carts, 1 iPhone, 1 piece of chocolate cake, 1 ice cream cone, 1 pickle... (sorry, I digress - I couldn't resist the Eric Carle mode I had going on there).  Needless to say, I'm sitting at my desk engulfed by technology.

I'm typing new information on the site; I think I may have misspelled a word, my chair swivels, and I grab the above pictured dictionary off of the bookshelf behind me!  Suddenly, it dawned on me that I couldn't remember the last time I actually looked up a word in a book-in-hand, paper-paged dictionary!  Online dictionaries have become commonplace to me.  I chuckled aloud.  I was surrounded by technology and I grabbed the physical dictionary!  My next thought was, "Hey, this feels good in my hands - the feel of the shiny, hard cover; the crisp pages, the print slightly raised."  Seeing those pages filled to the brim with word after word after word - all of those words that are just waiting to be spelled or spoken or spewed from our speech.  An appreciation, I guess, only experienced by word junkies such as myself.

Makes me wonder - what else have I replaced with technology that maybe, just maybe, might need a revival every now and then?

roy G biv

It's not that easy being green
Having to spend each day the color of the leaves
When I think it could be nicer being red, or yellow, or gold
Or something much more colorful like that

It's not easy being green
It seems you blend in with so many other ordinary things
And people tend to pass you over
'Cause you're not standing out
Like flashy sparkles in the water
Or stars in the sky

But green's the color of spring
And green can be cool and friendly-like
And green can be big like a mountain
Or important like a river
Or tall like a tree

When green is all there is to be
It could make you wonder why
But why wonder why wonder
I am green, and it'll do fine
It's beautiful, and I think it's what I want to be


At various times in my life, I've had the desire to be red, or yellow, or gold, or something more colorful - not ordinary green.  I'm quite sure it's a universal feeling.  But then, reason takes over and I say to myself, "What's so bad about being green?"  After all, green is verdant, green is growth, green is lush and flourishing!  Who wouldn't want to be green?

This past summer a friend of mine let me borrow a book on CD called It's Not Easy Being Green: And Other Things to Consider by Jim Henson, the Muppets and Friends and recently, I added a Jim Henson picture book biography to my libraryland collection called Jim Henson: The Guy Who Played with Puppets by Kathleen Krull.  Other than the fact that he was the creator of the Muppets, I really new very little about this amazing puppeteer.

After listening to and reading these stories, anecdotes, quotes, and facts, Jim Henson emerged as someone I really didn't think him to be - quite extraordinary.  His positive perspective, his desire to follow his dreams, his focus on his family, his forthright yet encouraging approach to colleagues, his effort to be the best he could be, his amazing creativity...  

When I was three years old, the Children's Television Network began a new show and enlisted Henson's help.  He hesitated, but then agreed.  Sesame Street was born and children for years to come would grow up with Oscar, Bert, Ernie, and the gang.  The children viewers may not have known Henson, but they sure knew his characters.  Sesame Street has since aired in 120 countries.

Henson's Muppets weren't limited to children though.  They've opened for Saturday Night Live and have interviewed notables such as Linda Ronstadt, Harry Belafonte, Rita Moreno, Florence Henderson, Harvey Korman, Lena Horne, Candace Bergen, Vincent Price, Don Knotts, Ethel Merman, Steve Martin, Dom DeLuise, Loretta Lynn, Racquel welch, John Denver, Dudley Moore, Christopher Reeve, Johnny Cash and many others.

I wonder if Henson ever thought of being red, yellow, gold or something more colorful.  Even though it's hard to imagine, I have to think he did; after all, he wrote Kermit's song.  I guess that just proves that it's universal.  Regardless of one's success or lack there of, being something other than what we are seems appealing.  However, after reflection and thought, just like Kermit (aka Jim Henson) says "I am green, and it'll do fine.  It's beautiful, and I think it's what I want to be." 

Afterall, green is so versatile.  It's emerald, chartreuse, sage, forest, lime, kelly, moss, olive, apple, aquamarine, pine, jade, verdigris, malachite...  How could one ask for more?

Today's photos are cropped and close up and GREEN!  I remember as a kid looking at zoomed-in-close photos in magazines and the objective was to try to guess what the whole picture was.  These were so much fun for me.  Maybe it was a foreshadowing of my fascination with photography.  Anyway, take a look at the above photos again, see if you guess what they are, and then check yourself by taking a look at the photos, in their entirety, below.