It’s all in how you look at it

There was a period in my life when I was fascinated (I almost said obsessed) with spelling things backwards in my mind and saying the new word out loud. For example, if someone said, "The thought of eating raw oysters makes me want to barf" I would say, "Barf spelled backwards is frab." Or if someone said, "Let's go grab a sandwich somewhere" I would say, "Grab spelled backwards is barg."

These are not theoretical, by the way, these are real-life examples that actually happened. I believe the previous sentence contains a redundancy. Anyway, there is a progression of events that occur when you make a habit of doing this. People look startled and say "What?", they laugh nervously because it is rather titillating, they join in the fun, they tire of it, they become mildly irritated, they tell you to knock it off, they start shouting at you, they avoid your company completely.

So it is a marvelous way to find out who your true friends are.

It is especially fun to play the backwards game with people's names. It can be a real conversation starter or an ice-breaker, whether at family parties or among groups of complete strangers.

Most of you know, and the rest of you will shortly, that my name is Robert Brague. I don't know how many times I have said over the years that Robert spelled backwards is Trebor and Brague spelled backwards is Eugarb. It occurred to me this morning that in writing, at least, this is not strictly true. Robert spelled backwards is not Trebor and Brague spelled backwards is not Eugarb. Robert spelled backwards is treboR and Brague spelled backwards is eugarB. You do see the difference, don't you? Capitalization, or as they say in England, capitalisation, is always important. Anyway, you can have hours of fun doing this while waiting for the men in white coats to come get you. (I jest, but only slightly.)

Sometimes I wake up in the morning with the lyrics of an old hymn or popular song as my first conscious thought. Today I awoke with this sentence in my mind; it sprang forth fully grown like Athena from the forehead of Zeus:

Trebor spelled backwards is Eugarb.

Now that is just preposterous and demonstrably untrue. I will prove it with mathematics. If Robert were 4x3 then Trebor, er, treboR would be 3x4 and if Brague were 7x2 then Eugarb, I mean eugarB would be 2x7 but there is no way on God's green earth that 3x4 equals 2x7.

I rest my case and trust that all hearts and minds are clear. Perhaps next time, but only perhaps, we will explore the significance of Melchizedek in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There I go, jesting again.

But only slightly.

For those of you still wondering how and if I stayed warm during my trip to Stockholm, Sweden (is there any other Stockholm?) during the month of February 1969 after forgetting to take a winter coat because I was living in South Florida at the time, I will tell you in my next post.

Mundane is also a word

My blogger friend Rachel Phillips is currently in the midst of a series of posts (three so far) about a trip she took with her friends Liz and Allal to Fés, Morocco. My blogger friend Tasker Dunham is currently in the midst of a series of posts (also three so far) about a trip he took with his friend Neville to Iceland. Both series are fascinating, somewhat exotic, and have a sense of immediacy about them because they are written in present tense.

I, on the other hand, haven't posted anything in a couple of weeks because my life in recent days is best described by The Three B's (or Bs): Blah, Bland, and Boring. [Editor's note. There really is no such thing as The Three B's (or Bs): Blah, Bland, and Boring. I just invented them. What truly would be Blah, Bland, and Boring would be if I told you that I still use the Oxford comma, which I most certainly do. --RWP]

I will tell you about a trip I took to Stockholm, Sweden, in 1969. I hope it will be fascinating and somewhat exotic. I will write in present tense in the hope that it will also have an immediacy about it.

It is February 1, 1969. I am sitting in the airport in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, waiting for my plane to New York City to start boarding. My wife and two small sons have come to see me off. I will be gone for a month. The temperature is 85°F (29°C). Suddenly a woman carrying a long woolen coat with a big fur collar hurries down the concourse. I say to my wife, "She must be going somewhere cold" and immediately realise that I too am going somewhere cold, Sweden in February, and the heavy coat I intended to take with me, which I kept when we moved from New York to Florida a year earlier, is hanging in our closet at home. It was so hot and tropical today that I forgot to bring it, and there is not enough time to go back for it. I will have to figure out something when I get to Sweden so that I do not freeze. I do not make dumb mistakes often, but when I do they are lulus.


On the long flight from New York to Copenhagen, the flight attendants come by and say "coop cough?" occasionally, which I take to mean "Would you like a cup of coffee?" It is not English exactly, but neither is it Swedish. The attendants also provide us with blankets and pillows. It is nighttime over the Atlantic and we cannot see the ocean. I do not sleep at all. As morning comes, I see that we are flying at a great height over a land white with snow-covered hills. I ask the flight attendant "What is that down there?" and she replies "Scotland". It is to be the only view of Scotland, apparently a frozen wasteland, that I will have in my entire life.

I land midmorning in Copenhagen, disembark, and get my brand-new passport stamped. Danes do not like it when people say "CopenHAHgen" because that is the way the Germans pronounced it when they invaded back in 1940. Danes prefer that you say "CopenHAYgen" whch I find odd since they themselves say "CoobenHAWN" and spell it "Købnhavn".

Upon arriving in Stockholm on the same plane, I get my passport stamped again and make my way to my hotel on Strandvägen, a beautiful boulevard in Östermalmstorg (the eastern part of central Stockholm) next to a canal. Stockholm is known as "the Venice of the North". After unpacking, I take a taxicab to the IBM laboratory on the island suburb of Lidingö, which is not pronounced "la dingo" but "leeding uh".

I have learned a few phrases in Swedish out of a little book. Till höger (to the right), Till vänster (to the left), Var ar herrtoaletten? (where is the men's toilet?). Travel is so broadening.

A man of my word, I have told you about my trip TO Sweden. Perhaps in the next installment, if there is a next installment, I will tell you about things I did and saw WHILE I WAS IN Sweden. It seems only fitting.

I may be wrong, but somehow this post doesn't seem fascinating or somewhat exotic to me. Let me know if you don't think you can stand a second installment.

I guess some bloggers have it and some bloggers don't.

Saturday morning thoughts

Although my audience seems to be dwindling and the number of commenters is in decline, I continue to blog. Not as often as in previous years -- hey, we're all slowing down -- but fearlessly into the future. Head held high, resolutely looking forward, eyes on the prize.

No one knows why. It's just part of being human. We may be talking only to ourselves, but we continue to talk.

It's either very sad or very funny, or both.

Irrelevance, here I come. I'm halfway there already. The world has passed me by. Actually, I would expect it to have [passed me by] as I celebrated my 80th birthday a few months ago and some gosh-awful huge percentage of the world's population are now Millennials or Gen Z types. Young whipper-snappers, all of them. It has been ever thus. The old have their day in the sun, peak, and die off eventually (although Betty White and Dick Van Dyke and even, God help us, Pat Boone seem to go on forever). One generation is replaced by another generation. There's a certain inevitability to it all. Prince Philip is gone, and Queen Elizabeth II cannot be far behind.

Each of us is moving rapidly from "I think, therefore I am" to "I no longer think, therefore I must not be" to "I don't remember your name, but your face is familiar" to "Who was that masked man anyway?"

As one horse said to another, "I don't remember your mane, but your pace is familiar."

Yuk, yuk. Laugh it up, folks, these are the jokes.

Creative writing courses are for the timid. Who needs an outline?

Just open your mouth (or pen) and let 'er rip.

Maybe that has been my problem all along, as well as the secret of my success. I am weak mentally (Spanish, loco en la cabeza), I am unconventional (I don't care what others think), and I am indefatigable (a big word meaning I don't know when to quit).

Not to worry. Everybody has to be something.

If you like, you may continue discussing "what's wrong with rhymeswithplague?" in the comments section.

Or not.

Today’s pet peeve / Today’s fun fact

Today's post has two sections, Today's pet peeve and Today's fun fact. If you don't like one section, maybe you will like the other.

A. Today's pet peeve: Putting the em-PHA-sis on the wrong syl-LA-ble.

Today I heard a man on television say -- not once, not twice, but three times -- "tem-POR-al". I wanted to throw a brick through the television screen. The word is pronounced "TEM-por-uhl", people.

During the months leading up to the American presidential election and, in the case of the most recent one, for many months afterward, I heard day after day the phrase "elec-TOR-al college" on radio, television, and in conversations throughout America. Friends, it's the "e-LEC-tor-uhl college".

Sometimes poor spelling and poor reading skills contribute to the problem when people add a syllable where none exists. Take the word "mischievous". It does not, repeat, NOT rhyme with "devious". It is a three-syllable word, not a four-syllable word. It is not pronounced "mis-CHEE-vee-us" because it is not spelled "mischievious". It is spelled "mischievous" (without an extraneous "i") and is pronounced "MIS-chih-vus".

I know language is constantly changing and that the changes happen based on what the majority of speakers say, but wouldn't it be nice if language changes happened based on what informed, educated speakers say?

There used to be standards in dictionaries for what was acceptable. What ever happened to them?

(End of Today's pet peeve)

B. Today's fun fact: Bluetooth is named after an ancient Viking king, Harald Bluetooth.

What follows is adapted from a USA Today article published in February 2021.

Bluetooth is named after an ancient Viking king who unified Denmark and Norway. Harald Bluetooth, son of Gorm the Old, reigned as the king of Denmark and Norway from 958 to 985. He was known for consolidating Jutland and Zealand into Denmark and converting the Danes to Christianity, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica.

Scholars say Harald was nicknamed "Blåtand," meaning blue tooth, because he had a dead tooth that looked blue and dark. One meme that made the rounds claimed that Harald was called Bluetooth because he loved blueberries and ate so many of them that his teeth became permanently stained blue.

In December 1996, Intel's Jim Kardach, who had read a book on Viking history, suggested the name Bluetooth as a codename until the marketing group could come up with a formal technology name.

"When asked about the name Bluetooth, I explained that Bluetooth was borrowed from the 10th century, second King of Denmark, King Harald Bluetooth, who was famous for uniting Scandinavia just as we intended to unite the PC and cellular industries with a short-range wireless link," Kardach wrote in a 2008 column for the EE Times.

He added that he created a PowerPoint foil with a version of the Runic stone where Harald held a cellphone in one hand and a notebook in the other hand.

The codename Bluetooth was inserted into contracts as a placeholder until an official name was finalized. When other names that were being considered did not work out, Bluetooth remained.

The ubiquitous logo symbolizes "a bind rune merging the Younger Futhark runes (Hagall) (ᚼ) and (Bjarkan) (ᛒ), Harald’s initials," according to Bluetooth's website.

The claim that Bluetooth got its name from Viking King Harald "Bluetooth" Gormsson is therefore TRUE, based on our research. An Intel representative suggested the name based on the reasoning that Harald united Scandinavia and Bluetooth wanted to unite mobile PCs and cellphones to communicate. But Harald reportedly got his "Bluetooth" nickname from a dark, dead tooth, not from eating an extreme amount of blueberries, as claimed in one meme.

Just for fun, here is the Bluetooth logo created out of blueberries.

(End of Today's fun fact)

P.S. -- When I was working for IBM in South Florida back in the 1970s, a new computer system was being developed that eventually would be marketed as System/7. Because a certain kind of tropical tree, the banyan, grew in South Florida, the codename Banyan was used throughout the development of the project. One of my responsibilities as a member of the Technical Publications Department was to produce a manual that would be called "User's Guide to System/7". I wanted to call it "The Banyan Companion" during the development phase but my supervisor didn't have a sense of humor.

Hopes, dreams, and aspirations, or Well-travelled is a relative term

My paternal grandfather was born in Pennsylvania, went to western Wisconsin when he left home, married a girl from the other side of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, and spent the rest of his life in Iowa.

My maternal grandfather was also born in Pennsylvania, travelled as far west as Minneapolis (Minnesota), as far south as Mount Vernon (Virginia), as far north as Montreal (Canada), and as far east as Old Orchard Beach, Maine, where he took his family on vacation every summer.

My dad grew up in Iowa, joined the Navy and saw the world, so to speak, from the deck of a Patrol Craft Escort ship, all the way from Greenland to the Panama Canal to Portland, Oregon. He went partway across the Atlantic and partway across the Pacific more than once but returned without ever reaching another continent. On being released from the Navy after World War II, he moved our family from New England to Texas, where he is buried.

I was born in Rhode Island and was raised in Texas. I have visited 38 of the 50 states in the United States. It is easier to tell you the states I have NOT visited: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Alaska, and Hawaii. I have been to eight countries outside my own -- Canada, Mexico, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, England, Bermuda, and the Bahamas. Here's a newsflash: each person's life is unique, unlike any other person's.

Both of Mrs. RWP's parents were born in the country of Albania. Her father received some of his education in Italy. He came to the U.S. in 1917 and became a citizen of the U.S. in 1924. He went back to Albania in 1926 to marry his butcher's niece (it's a long story); she became a U.S. citizen in 1943. They spent their married lives in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Florida.

Mrs. RWP was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her family moved to North Carolina when she was 12. When she was in her twenties her father retired to Orlando, Florida. We met and married there. Our first child was born in Omaha, Nebraska, and our two younger children were born in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Let's take a short intermission here, during which you can enjoy the Beach Boys singing "I Get Around" (2:09).

Intermission is over. Our story resumes.

Our oldest son visited Toronto, Canada, as a teenager, worked in England for a while in his thirties, and took a university Jazz Band (he was its director) to Esterházy, Hungary in his forties. Before my son married his wife, she worked for several years for a cruise ship line and visited many, many places in the world -- Norway, Singapore, South Africa, Rio de Janeiro, Japan, Sydney, the Taj Mahal in India, the Great Wall of China, to name a few (the last two not aboard a ship, of course).

Our second son and his wife have visited Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras several times.

I don't think our daughter has been outside the United States. Oh, wait, she and her husband went on a cruise to Cancun, Mexico, on their tenth anniversary.

One of our grandsons spent five weeks in western Kenya when he was 18. Another grandson spent 11 weeks in southern Kenya (he could see Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania from his house) when he was 20. He has been to Alaska, Dubai, Mumbai, and just returned in May from a year-and-a-half stay in Uganda.

On his last trip home but one, my grandson's KLM flight from Entebbe to Amsterdam flew over South Sudan, Sudan, Egypt, the Mediterranean Sea, Greece, Albania, and several EU countries. Here is a screenshot my son made in Atlanta showing my grandson's whereabouts during his flight.

As it happens, his great-grandmother was from Fier and his great-grandfather was from Vlorë. A phenomenal coincidence or a "God wink"?

The point is that although we love one another and are family, we are individuals. We cannot live one another's lives. Each of us must live the life we have been given.

Have you ever thought about how different your life is from your parents' lives or from your children's lives?

When you do think about it, it is probably mindboggling.

A slight interruption, followed by a continuation and a couple of red herrings

How is it that an athlete who is attempting to secure a spot on a country's Olympic team does not know of the traditional Olympic ceremony that follows each and every event? To recap, the top three winners are presented with their medals (bronze, silver, or gold), they watch their countries' flags displayed, and they hear the national anthem of the first-place winner's country performed. Since the modern Olympics have been held every four years since 1896 (except that the 1940 and 1944 games were cancelled because of World War II) and there has been worldwide. wall-to-wall television coverage in recent decades, anyone who has ever watched the Olympics is aware of this. So how is it possible that the young woman in the news this week would not be aware of it also? It isn't possible. She placed third in her event during the U.S. Olympic Trials this week and qualified to be a member of the U.S, team, but she feels that she "was set up" and "disrespected" by the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the end of the event. Really? She must be either incredibly ignorant or incredibly disingenuous or incredibly self-centered, or all three. It is impossible to reach any other conclusion.

Moving right along...

In the preceding post I invited you to play Last Lines From Movies. I gave you the line and the person who said it. You were to name the movie in which it was the last line. You could receive an extra point if you also named the person or group to whom the line was spoken, and you could receive another extra point if you knew the year the film was released. I told you, "No fair looking anything up. You either know the answers or you don't. Guessing is always allowed. Since there are seven questions, the maximum score is 21." I also added, and this is very important, that there might be a red herring or two in the list.

Here is the list:

1. "Nobody's perfect." (Joe E. Brown)
2. "All right, Mr. DeMille, I'm ready for my close-up." (Gloria Swanson)
3. "Mediocrities everywhere, I absolve you, I absolve you, I absolve you, I absolve you, I absolve you all." (F. Murray Abraham)
4. "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn." (Clark Gable)
5. "Rosebud." (Orson Welles)
6. "Louie, this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship." (Humphrey Boogart)
7. "Say? Oh, I'll say, 'The play is over. Go home.'" (Helen Hayes)

We had a whopping two participants in the game. At least it wasn't a complete washout.

Bonnie from Missouri said the following:

1.Some Like It Hot
2.Sunset Boulevard
3. ?
4.Gone With the Wind
5.Citizen Kane
6.Casablanca
7. ?

and probably thought she had scored a 5 (out of 7 in the simple version of the game, out of 21 in the expanded version of the game) but I gave her a score of 3.

Emma Springfield who lives so far northwest in northwest Iowa that she is almost in Minnesota and South Dakota said that she scored a whopping 15 points but didn't show any of her work. I mentally gave her a score of 0 and said I would explain and elaborate in the next post.

Which brings us to here. Here are the answers, along with the explanations and elaborations.

1. Some Like It Hot (1959). Joe E. Brown (Osgood) said it to Jack Lemmon (Daphne) as he whisked her away in his speedboat.

2. Sunset Boulevard (1950). Gloria Swanson as the mentally deranged Norma Desmond said it ostensibly to Cecil B. DeMille but actually to the movie audience (all those wonderful people out there in the dark).

3. Amadeus (1984). F. Murray Abraham (Antonio Salieri) said it to a hallway full of mental patients.

4. The correct answer is None, because the line spoken by Clark Gable (Rhett Butler) to Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara) as he left Tara was not the last line in Gone With The Wind (1939). The last line in Gone With The Wind (1939) is Vivien Leigh (Scarlett O'Hara) saying "I'll think about that tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another day!" to herself.

5. The correct answer is also None, because, again, the line spoken by Orson Wells (Charles Foster Kane) on his deathbed to no one in particular was not the last line in Citizen Kane (1941). The last line belonged to the unidentified workman who threw Rosebud (Kane's childhood sled) into a fiery furnace.

6. Casablanca (1942). Humphrey Boogart (Rick Blaine) said it to Claude Raines (Captain Louie Renault) after Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa) boarded a plane to escape to America with her husband, Victor Laszlo. At least Rick and Ilsa will always have Paris.

7. Anastasia (1956). Helen Hayes (Dowager Empress Alexandra Feodorovna) planned to say it to a ballroom full of Russian nobility.

Well, I enjoyed it, red herrings and all, very much, even if not many of you - at last count, only two -- did.

I am not discouraged. I will not be deterred. I will go on blogging.