More evidence I am slipping

...can be found in the sad fact that April 18th is now 21/24ths over in my time zone (Eastern Daylight Time, EDT) and I have neglected to tell you that today is the 250th anniversary of Paul Revere's ride, an event that inspired the 19th-centuy Anerican poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) to write a very famous poem called, what else, "Paul Revere's Ride" which begins:

"Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year."

The poem went on to tell of the expected British invasion of the American colonies and how Paul Revere on the opposite shore would be, ready to ride and spread the alarm to every Middlesex village and farm, for the country folk to be up and to arm if his friend would climb to the belfry of North Church and signal him via lantern light whether the invasion was by land or by sea, specifically, one if by land and two if by sea.

You ought to read it sometime.

Revere was a silversmith in Boston, Massachusetts and a member of the colonial group The Sons Of Liberty at the beginning of the American Revolution.

Another 19th-century American poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882), wrote another poem to commemorate the Battles of Lexington and Concord that took place the following day. The poem, called "Concord Hymn", begins:

"By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world."

I end this post by telling you that a word that means 250th anniversary is semiquincentennial (literally half-500th).

I will sleep well tonight.

What’s in a name?

William Shakespeare had Juliet Capulet say of Romeo Montague, "A rose by any other name would smell as sweet"; Robert Burns wrote, "O my Luve's like a red, red rose that's newly sprung in June"; William Faulkner gave us A Rose For Emily; Gertrude Stein repeated herself with "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" (not "A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" as some erroneously think).

Would it make a difference if Shakespeare had decided to have Juliet say gladiola instead? What if Burns said his Luve was like a yellow dandelion? What if Faulkner had written A Chrysanthemum For Emily? If Gertrude Stein said "Aster is an aster is an aster is an aster" would it have been an unmitigated disaster?

I jest, and yet names, which are thought to be important, are changed all the time:

• Denali in Alaska became Mt.McKinley in 1896, then Alaska changed it back to Denali in 1975. The federal government still referred to it as Mt. McKinle until 2015, when it agreed with Alaska and began calling it Denali as well. Now President Trump wants it to be Mt. McKinley again.
• Cape Canaveral in Florida was called Cape Kennedy from 1963 to 1973, when it became Cape Canaveral again.
• George Washinton's cabinet included a Department of War. In 1947 it was renamed during President Truman's administration and became the Department of Defense.
• Speaking of Departments at the Federal level, there was a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) until President Carter carved out a separate Department of Education. What remained was not called the Department of Health and Welfare (HW) but the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
• Terminus, Georgia became Thrasherville, Georgia, which became Marthasville, Georgia, which became Atlanta, Georgia.
• Hot Springs, New Mexico, changed its name to Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico.
• Fort Christina, New Sweden is now called Wilmington, Delaware.
• Burma is Myanmar, Siam is Thailand, East Pakistan is Bangladesh.
• A whole post could be devoted to the name changes of countries in Africa. Today's map looks nothing like the one of my youth.
• The Gulf of Mexico is now being called the Gulf of America. For how long, nobody knows.

None So Blind As Those Who Will Not See Department: This is not about name changes, just names in general. When I lived in Bellevue, Nebraska, in the 1960s, I could look across the Missouri River and see Pottawattamie County, Iowa. I thought at the time that the name Pottawattamie was very funny. It is, of course, the name of a Native American tribe, not funny at all. It never occurred to me until today that Bellevue is in Sarpy County, Nebraska. (Moral: When you point a finger at someone else, you have three fingers pointing back at yourself.)

Civil War Week

My all-time favorite joke is this one I heard Red Skelton tell on his television show 50 years ago:

A spaceship from Mars lands on earth. Two Martians get out, look around, and start walking up the street. They see a parking meter, and one Martian turns to the other and says, "Do you have change for a hern?"

Maybe it's an acquired taste. I think it is hilarious, but then I am weird. I like weird movies, too, really quirky ones like Harold And Maude and Big Fish and Raising Arizona, and I like weird television series like Twin Peaks and Six Feet Under and Northern Exposure..

Younger readers, if there are any, have no idea what I'm talking about. Suffice it to say that I told you I am weird.

I have dubbed this week Civil War Week because (a) 164 years ago today on April 12, 1861, the American Civil War began when Confederate forces attacked Fort Sumter, South Carolina; (b) 160 years ago this past Wednesday on April 9, 1865, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House in Appomattox, Virginia, bringing an end to the Civil War; and (c) also 160 years ago this week, on April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth assassinated U.S. President Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.

In between were famous battles and sieges with names like Manassas (Bull Run), Vickburg, Shiloh, Antietam, Gettysburg, Atlanta, and on and on. Over 698,000 Americans lost their lives at a time when the nation's population was 31,443,321 according to the census of 1860. Some modern research concludes that a more accurate estimate is closer to 750,000 with a range from 650,000 to 850,000. According to the National Park Service, there were 642,427 Union casualties, including 110,100 killed in battle and 224,580 deaths from diseases like dysentery and typhoid, and that there were 483,026 Confederate casualties with 94,000 killed in battle and 164,000 deaths from disease. Whatever the actual numbers were, around 2% of the total U.S. population at the time perished in the Civil War.

By contrast, the U.S. casualty figures for World War II are 416,800 military personnel killed and 671,278 wounded. More than 16 million Americans served in the armed forces during World War II. Since the U.S. population in 1940 was 132,164,569 the deaths of Americans in World War II represented 0.003% of the nation.

World War II casualties in the United Kingdom were 383,600 military deaths and 450,700 civilian deaths according to one chart. Germany's figures are staggering, 5,533,000 military deaths and 6,600,000 to 8,800,000 civilian deaths. A very large proportion of the civilian deaths were victims of the Holocaust carried out by the leaders of the Nazi regime. In the Pacific, Japan's figures are 2,120,000 military deaths and 2,600,000 to 3,100,000 civilian deaths, of which several hundred thousand perished when the U.S. dropped two atomic bombs on Yokohama and Nagasaki.

As General William Tecumseh Sherman once said, "War is hell."

I love the old spiritual song that goes, "I'm gonna lay down my burdens down by the riverside, down by the riverside, down by the riverside. I'm gonna lay down my burdens down by the riverside, ain't gonna study war no more."

I can admit it when I am wrong

Somewhere I read or heard or latched onto the idea that Donald J. Trump's mother had been involved in a well-documented and fairly lengthy religious revival that had occurred on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. I was wrong. She wasn't.

Mary Trump neé MacLeod was indeed born in the village of Tong, four miles from the town of Stornoway (home of blogger Graham Barry Edwards) on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland in 1912. In 1932 she emigrated to the United States, met and married Fred Trump, and bore several children, the youngest of whom, Donald John, was born on June 14 (Flag Day) in 1946. President number 45/47 took the oath of office in 2017 with his hand placed on his mother's Bible. For some reason, I was under the impression that the fairly well-known revival involving Duncan Campbell took place in the 1930s when two elderly sisters, aged 82 and 84, began praying. I discovered only recently that the revival in fact occurred during the years 1949 to 1953, long after Mary MacLeod was no longer there. I do think her Scottish upbringing accounts for the fact that Donald called himself a Presbyterian when he entered the political arena. He no longer does, by the way.

All of which is neither here nor there; I just threw it in as an interesting factoid. Here are two more [factoids]: Richard "I am not a crook" Nixon's mother was a devout Quaker. Dwight Eisenhower's mother was a River Brethren pacifist whose son became a five-star General and Supreme Allied Commander Europe before he was elected president.

Sometimes, apparently, the apple manages to distance itself from the tree.

Wikipedia states that Eisenhower's mother joined a Bible study group that later evolved into the Jehovah's Witnesses. Although her home became a meeting place for the group, none of her children ever joined it.

As I said, sometimes the apple manages to distance itself from the tree. I will now quote from the song "Some Enchanted Evening" by Oscar Hammerstein II: "Who can explain it? Who can tell you why? Fools give you reasons; wise men never try."

Let's move on.

Time, as you undoubtedly have noticed, marches on. People come, people go, and so do words. Some words remain in use for a very long time but some become archaic. Here are a few English words that you will probably not be hearing any time soon:

anon
forsooth
odd's bodkin!
daguerrotype
stereopticon
nickelodeon
lavaliere
antimacassar
floppy disc
eight-track tape
reel-to-reel
pompadour

Can you think of other words that have fallen by the wayside?

You’ll never count sheep again

The other night when I couldn't go to sleep I passed the time with a new time-waster of my own invention, which I now pass along to you for using whenever you like, not just during periods of insomnia. It could prove very useful while waiting in a doctor's office, for example, or when sitting for hours in an airport.

What I did was simply go through every pair of letters in the entire alphabet systematically and tried to match each to a real-world entity. Starting with AA, AB, AC and going all the way to ZX, ZY, ZZ you will consider 676 pairs (26 times 26). It is interesting to see how many answers you can come up with, and also how many you can't. I'm sure every person's list will be different. Here's how mine started off:

AA - American Airlines, Alcoholics Anonymous
AB - Alberta (province of Canada)
AC - air conditioning, alternating current
AD - Anno Domini (Year of our Lord)
AE - initials of the poet A.E. Housman who wrote "When I Was One And Twenty" and "Loveliest Of Trees, The Cherry Now"
AF - Air Force
AG - Attorney General
AH - Anno Hegirae (Year of the Hijrah), the Islamic calendar which commemmorates the beginning of the Prophet Mohammed's journey from Mecca to Medina in 622 AD
AI - artificial intelligence

and so on through AZ (Arizona) and on to BA (Bachelor of Arts), all the way to ZZ. It may take awhile. Several days. Several months. Knowing the periodic table of elements helps (AU is gold, FE is iron, HG is mercury, PB is lead).

The only rule is that each answer must come out of your own memory banks spontaneously without referring to anything in a book or on your phone or computer.

It won't put you to sleep, though. Just the opposite, actually. It will keep you awake. To go to sleep, try doing something really useful like praying for your family and friends. It works every time because our old enemy doesn't want us to do that, ever.

This has been another fun suggestion great idea annoying contribution to humanity blogpost from (who else?) moi, the one and only rhymeswithplague.

P.S. - PB is also peanut butter.

A whole lot of nothing sets one to thinking

In the last 24 hours alone, my email inbox received 172 new messages, 171 of which held no interest for me. All but three or four of them were political in nature (enough already, the election was nearly five monhs ago). and the remaining except for one were hoping to interest me in their products or services for an exchange of money from my pockets into theirs. The lone email I considered legitimate and not junk was a receipt for an onlne payment I had recently made.

There were also 17 new messages in my email's "spam" folder. I could detect no discernible reason why these particular incoming missives were singled out for this special treatment. All of the 171 mentioned in the preceding paragraph could have been designated as spam as far as I'm concerned.

i deleted the 171 and the 17 and continued with my day. I think all of the continuing political folderol is generated based on the fear that the old saying "out of sight, out of mind" is true. Someone should remind the senders that there is also truth in two other old sayings, namely "absence makes the heart grow fonder" and "don't wear out your welcome."

How one is to achieve a balance between the conflicting truths in a myriad of old sayings is an ongoing, nay, a never-ending task.

If there are any old sayings you have found to be either true or false in your own life, please tell us what they are so that we may benefit from (or avoid the pitfalls of) your experience.

The birdies that sing 🎶 in the spring, tra la

...may commence as of 5:01 a.m. Eastern Standard Time (EST) today, as that is, or was, this year's moment for the vernal equinox to occur. It is one of two days each year -- the other is the autumnal equinox in September -- when all latitudes have 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of datkness, and an egg set on end will not fall over.

I wonder if people in the Southern Hemisphere call this the vernal equinox too when it is so clearly autumn there. Kylie, please let us know.

When I was a boy we called March 21st the first day of spring. It also is, or was, the birthday of my maternal grandfather, Nathan Silberman (1875-1970) of Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, who would be turning 150 tomorrow.

I wonder if he was one of the 2.8 million people who, according to Elon Musk at the Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE), were shown in the Social Security tecords as being over 120 years old, still alive, and possibly (if not probably) still being paid monthly benefits. Until this week, that is, when their status was changed to deceased.

I hope not.

I do know one thing for certain. His money wasn't coming to me.