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Pooh book by A.A. Milne, Pooh and Piglet set out on a very windy day to visit as many friends as they can within the Hundred Acre Wood to wish them a happy Thursday and perhaps get a “little smackerel of something.” Their friend Owl remarks, “…am I right in supposing that it is a very Blusterous day outside?” I have often been reminded of this story in the past few weeks as many people have commented on how windy it has been. Much like in the Winnie the Pooh story, trees have been knocked down by the wind, and people have been blown about too. In the English language, we have ...

Wooden knives are functional works of folk art

Lifestyle Columns

A knife with a painted wooden blade might sound like something strictly decorative. If it’s a flax knife, or scutching knife, that’s not the case. Before mechanization, making flax into linen fabric was a very long, complicated, multi-step process. Scutching, removing the tough stalk from prepared flax stems, comes partway through this process. The resulting flax fibers are then further processed, spun into thread and finally woven into linen. The fibers are separated from the stalk by scraping or beating, not cutting; so scutching knives are made of wood. There are simple wooden ...

Dunwa Omot makes ‘his mark’

Lifestyle Feature

On March 15, Southwest Minnesota State University’s Dunwa Omot played the last game of his collegiate basketball career as the Mustangs took a close 69-62 loss to Winona State in the opening round of the DII NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament. In the game, Omot scored 12 points by hitting ...

Library services at risk

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Support libraries! Contact your Congressional representative regarding the Executive Order to defund the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Without Federal funding, Interlibrary Loan and other valuable library services to public, K-12, academic, and special libraries will be at risk! Minitex services will be greatly impacted if funding is lost. Minitex services offer a variety of resources including scholarly databases from high school to graduate level, item requests from libraries across the state, historical archives, job and licensure exam preparation, over 9,000 e-books for ...

Wiener Werkstatte ceramics feature modern designs

Lifestyle Columns

When the Arts and Crafts movement thrived first in the British Isles and then in the United States, Vienna, Austria, had the Wiener Werkstatte (Vienna Workshop). Founded in 1903 by designer Josef Hoffmann, painter Koloman Moser and financier Fritz Waerndorfer, the workshop, which lasted until 1932, was a cooperative community of artisans making all kinds of decorative and functional products. Everything from tableware to postcards to furniture to jewelry was made from quality materials with innovative, artistic designs. Like the modern designers that came later in the 20th century, ...