Fast away the old year passes

It always has and it always will. Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Or perhaps that truism is not true at all. Perhaps there was a time before the earth existed when it did not make a trip around the sun every year. And perhaps there will come a time when the earth will no longer exist when it won't make a trip around the sun every year, and such trips will be only a memory.

To whom?, you may be asking. To whom will they be only a memory?

Or perhaps the earth will continue to exist and make trips around the sun but they will be significantly longer or significantly shorter than at present. The planet Mercury orbits the sun once every 88 earth-days. The planet Neptune, on the other hand, orbits the sun once every 164.8 earth-years. Why not us? What would our lives be like in other scenarios?

Well, for one thing, on Neptune we definitely wouldn't be singing "Fast away the old year passes" and our auld lang synes would be very auld indeed. And in the southern parts of the United States of Mercury, would we be eating black-eyed peas and collard greens for good luck in the New Year every three earth-months or doing something far more exotic?

It's the stuff out of which science-fiction novels are born.

Perhaps you will write one in 2023.

Trust me, stranger things have happened, even stranger than this, my final post of 2022.

Happy New Year to each and every one of you.

Do you say ‘slow cooker’ or ‘crock pot’ or something else?

Im my last post (We Three Soups) I mentioned slow cookers. It occurred to me that some people call them crock pots, hence the title of this post. Here are some more things that people refer to in different ways:

• trousers, slacks, pants
• soft drink, soda, pop, tonic, Coke
• potluck meal, covered dish meal
• dinner, supper, tea
• pants, underpants, skivvies, knickers, bloomers, drawers, panties
• chick peas, garbonzo beans
• navy beans, northern beans
• Lima beans, butter beans

Most of those are regional differences within the US, but there are also many differences between American English and British English: chips/crisps, fries/chips, trunk/boot, hood/bonnet, truck/lorry, elevator/lift, diaper/napkin, zucchini/courgette, eggplant/aubergine. The list goes on and on.

Can you add any multi-named items to the list for our enlightenment? I can't think of a better thing to do on a cold winter day except long for Spring to arrive.

We Three Soups

The current size of Ye Olde Rhymeswithplague Family including hangers-on, wannabes, in-laws, and various and sundry fiancées hovers at 19. Not too big and not too small. Goldilocks-like, it is just right, at least for now, although we are certainly open to the idea of expansion.

And so it was, that while they were there (over the Christmas weekend), the days were accomplished that she should be delivered the family decided to start a new tradition.

But what? We put on our thinking caps. We thought and thought and came up with...

What else? Soup!

On Sunday night, a good time was had by all at our oldest son's house when three families brought slow cookers containing enough of the following deliciousness for everyone:

• Southwest Soup (an old recipe found in Southern Living magazine many years ago)
• Greek Egg Lemon Soup with orzo, fortified with a mirepoix of diced celery, carrots, and onions
• Jambalaya with three proteins (shrimp, chicken, and andouille sausage) served over cheese grits

There were other enticements as well but I don't want to divulge all of our secrets to having a great evening together.

At Thanksgiving, the highlght of the day was the announcement by our oldest grandson and his bride of 13 months that they are expecting their first child (our first great-grandchild) next July.

At Christmas, even three slow cookers full of wonderful soups couldn't top that!

Weather report

According to my trusty weather app, it is currently 5°F (-15°C) outside where I live (about 50 miles north of Atlanta's airport) but because the wind is blowiing at a speed of 12 mph (not too bad, really) it feels like -11°F (somewhere in Antarctica C) out there. We will have a heat wave today and the high is expected to be 24°F (-4.4°C).

The warmest place in the US yesterday was 84°F (28.8° C) in Boca Raton, Florida, where we lived for seven years when I was with IBM.

I'm beginning to wonder for the first time ever if we made the right decision when we decided to move.

Global warmng is the pits. Global warming is for the birds.

Penguins.

P.S.- It just came to my attention that yesterday, December 23rd, was Festivus (look it up if you weren't a Seinfeld fan) and my previous post easily qualifies as "airing of grievances."

Random thoughts at yuletide, or Keeping It Real

This was the year that Kiev (kee-EV) became Kyiv (keev), parts of Ukraine were taken over by Russia, the long reign of a beloved monarch in the UK came to an end, and the president of the US and his minions lackeys loyal appointees continued to insist that the southern border with Mexico is not open even as people continue to pour across it unabated (2.5 million in fiscal year 2022, with 5 million projected for fiscal year 2023, representing a doubling from 7,000 per day to 14,000 per day).

In other words, as Robert Browning once wrote, God's in His heaven; all's right with the world.

In spite of what you have just read, I am not in a "Bah, humbug!" mood this Christmas. Some might accuse me of being in a "Bah, humbug!" mood all year long. I beg to differ.

I am a realist. I call them like I see them, which brings me to the subject of life insurance.

For years on American television there has been a very misleading pitch by a certain life insurance company to the effect that anyone -- 54 years old, 67 years old, even 80 years old -- can get life insurance for the fixed price of $9.95 per month. "You cannot be denied coverage for any health reason and the price is fixed; your rate will never go up," they say. What they don't tell you is that the rate is PER UNIT and the amount of insurance per unit decreases as one gets older. So while your monthly premium stays the same, the amount of coverage becomes less and less. At age 40, one 'unit' may represent (these are my own figures just for example, they are not mentioned in the commercial) $10,000 worth of insurance, at age 60 it may represent $5,000 worth of insurance, and at age 80 it might represent $1,000 worth of insurance. So if you decided to buy five units at age 40 at $9.95 per unit (let's call it $10.00 to keep the math simple), you would be paying $50 per month to have $50,000 of insurance coverage. At age 60 you would be paying $50 per month for $25,000 worth of insurance coverage, and at age 80 you would still be paying $50 per month but receive only $5,000 worth of insurance coverage for your five units. At this company that shall remain nameless the actual cost of one unit ($1,000 of insurance) is closer to $300 at age 80, making it cost-prohibitive for a great portion of the population. The whole scheme as presented seems not only misleading but downright devious, fraudulent, unethical, and several other adjectives.

To summarize, then, while other insurance companies may charge you more and more for your insurance as you get older, the company on whom today's spotlight shines offers you instead less and less insurance for your money.

So while the world constantly seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, let us remember here two days before Christmas that the angels proclaimed peace on earth, good will to men. The earth could use a whole lot more of both.

I hope a certain insurance company is listening.

Do you hear what I hear? (not a Christmas post)

I repeat, this is not a Christmas post. What it is is a post about how easily one song can be mistaken for another.

For example, several years ago my friend Ellis D. (God rest his soul) asked me why an organist in a church would play the old pop song "Now Is The Hour (When We Must Say Goodbye)". I hasten to inject here that I was was not the organist in question. The song was very popular back in the day and such artists as Gracie Fields, Bing Crosby, and Vera Lynn all recorded it. I told Ellis that what he had heard was not "Now Is The Hour" but a Maori folk tune from New Zealand (Wikipedia now says it actually isn't) to which someone else had put these religious words based on the 139th Psalm:

Search me, O God
And know my heart today
Try me, O Savior
Know my heart, I pray
See if there be
Some wicked way in me
Cleanse me from every sin
And set me free.

Ellis had not heard "Now Is The Hour" at all but "Search Me, O God".

I have had a couple of similar experiences myself. Because I am a Christian and a musician, I probably watch more religious programming on television than the average person. So it was with great surprise that I began hearing violins playing "Arrivederci, Roma" as station-break music on one Christian network. Turns out it was not "Arrivederci, Roma" at all; it was "There came a sound from heaven like a mighty rushing wind" which is the opening line of the first verse of a song called "There Is A River." Who knew?

I learned a lot of new (to me) songs listening to that network, so when Mrs. RWP retrieves ice from the automatic dispenser on our new refrigerator and it makes a faint, far-off, French-horn-like sound consisting of the first and sixth tones of a major scale (I told you I was a musician), others might hear the opening of "My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean" and Americans of a certain age might hear two-thirds of the 1-6-4 combination of tones the National Broadcasting Company used for many years for its identifying chimes (N-B-C). What I hear instead is an old hymn written by African-American pastor G.T. Haywood around 1912:

I see a crimson stream of blood
It flows from Calvary
Its waves, which reach the throne of God
Are sweeping over me.

Johnny Carson (remember him?) used to get "Autumn In New York" confused with "Moonlight In Vermont".

I know many of you have thought from time to time in the privacy of your own homes that I am a bit weird. Now I have provided you with actual proof.

Has anybody out there in Blogland had similar experiences of mistaking one song for another?

Report it in the comments if you dare.

On Beethoven’s birthday, thoughts that have absolutely nothing to do with Beethoven

Sixty-five years ago when I was 16, I took two semesters of shorthand, Gregg Diamond Jubilee Shorthand to be exact, during my senior year of high school. My new skill came in very handy for taking notes while in college in the days before tape recorders, and often I was able to give back to the professors their exact words on written assignments and examinations.

I shall now seem to some to be taking off in an entirely different direction, but hold your criticism for a moment.

I became a church organist at the age of 13 or 14 at the First Methodist Church of Mansfield, Texas, where Mr. Thomas McDonald, who was also the band director at the local high school, led the choir. All of the hymns sung by the congregation were found in the old Cokesbury Hymnal, a slim volume that was the predecessor of today's Methodist Hymnal. I came to know most of those hymns very well, but there were many well-known hymns absent from the Cokesbury with which I remained unaware until much later when I was no longer attending Methodist churches, such hymns as T.O. Chisholm's "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" and Fanny Crosby's "To God Be The Glory" and Frances Ridley Havergal's "Like A River Glorious".

Over the years other beautiful hymns entered my consciousness too, such as "Lo, How A Rose E'er Blooming" and "Come, Thou Long-Expected Jesus" and "Abide With Me, 'Tis Eventide" and scores of others. By now I must know several hundred hymns.

There is a verse in the 35th chapter of the book of Job where Elihu says to Job that God, our maker, gives songs in the night. I find that it is true. I can't tell you how many times I have awakened in the night and have an old hymn running through my head. Often it is one of the hymns from the old Cokesbury Hymnal and I surprise myself by still knowing several verses of, such as "We're Marching to Zion (Come, We That Love The Lord)" or "My Jesus, I Love Thee" or "Blessed Assurance" or "I Am Thine, O Lord" or "Come, Thou Fount Of Every Blessing" or "Give Of Your Best To The Master" or "Dear Lord And Father Of Mankind" that invariably take me back to my days in Mansfield. I find the phenomenon fascinating. It has happened so often that I no longer find it unusual.

What is unusual, though, is what happened last night. As one song, then another, then another filled my mind, I found myself writing them out in my mind in Gregg Diamond Jubilee Shorthand. I hadn't even thought about shorthand in years, but apparently once you know it you never forget it.

Somehow it seems appropriate to end this post by saying, what else, "Roll over, Beethoven!"

Tell Tchaikovsky the news.

The Prodigal Pig

December is filled with such events as St. Nicholas Day; St. Lucy's Day; Beethoven's birthday; the winter solstice; Hanukkah; Christmas Eve; Christmas Day; Boxing Day; Kwanzaa; New Year's Eve; 38 of the 43 post-season American football bowl games (the other five will take place in January); the quarter-final, semi-final, and final games of the FIFA World Cup in Qatar; and the presentation in Oslo, in the presence of the king and qieen of Norway, of the Nobel Peace Prize, which has been awarded jointly this year to Belarus human rights activist Ales Bialiatski, the Russian human rights organisation Memorial, and the Ukrainian human rights organisation Center For Civil Liberties.

That's a pretty full docket for a single month to have to bear. I'm not going to write about any of those events in this post except to suggest that the prize-receiving trio at the end of the previous paragraph seems rather ironic given the current state of affairs in the world.

I want to tell you instead the story of the Prodigal Pig. I heard J. Vernon McGee tell it on the radio many years ago.

When the Prodigal Son came to himself and decided to leave the pigpen where he had been working in a far-off country after wasting his substance in riotous living and return to his father (full details in the 15th chapter of St. Luke's Gospel), one of the pigs thought the father's house sounded pretty neat and decided to go back with him. When they arrived at the father's house, the son was joyfully received and so was the pig. Both of them received a ring and a robe and new shoes, and both of them sat down to a sumptuous feast after the fatted calf was killed in their honor.

And the Prodigal Pig tried his best to fit in, he really did. But as the days and weeks went by, the Prodigal Pig enjoyed his new surroundings less and less. He didn't like having to bathe so often; he longed to roll in the mud of his old home. He didn't particularly enjoy having to learn to eat roast beef with a knife and fork; he missed rooting in the slop of the pigpen. He resented having to wear clean clothes every day; he wanted to be free to do as he liked. So one day he announced that he was leaving the Prodigal Son's father's house and was going back to the far-off country, where he could once again live the life he longed for. And he did.

J. Vernon McGee ended his story by saying he believed that if a person stands at the crossroads long enough he will find that all the Prodigal Sons will return to their father and all the Prodigal Pigs will return to their father.

It's a sobering thought that explains a lot of things you might have found confusing.

Wordplay is good for the soul

I have enjoyed playing with words since I was a child. It probably began when I saw the following riddle on the last page of Boys' Life magazine:

Q. When is a door not a door?
A. When it is ajar.

A real knee-slapper when you're 11 years old!

A few years later I heard a stand-up comic on television say, "If your nose runs and your feet smell, you're built upside down!" and I was hooked.

Someone else on late-night television quipped, "Did you hear about the guy who was half Black and half Japanese? Every December 7th he arracked Pearl Bailey."

Or how about the Jewish lawyer who moved to Japan and opened an office in Tokyo. The sign on his front door read "Sosumi." (translation for those who don't get it: "So sue me").

Those were all thought up by other people. I have finally reached the stage in life where I can create them on my own. For example, did you hear about the acupuncturist who decided to turn his waiting room into an Italian restaurant? His place is called Pins & Noodles.

I have to set this one up. In French, lunch is déjeuner and breakfast is petit déjeuner. The word petit means little.

My daughter had a friend in college named Bill DeJournett whose surname is pronounced deh-zhur-nay. It occurred to me all of a sudden this morning that his children, if he has any, might be known as petit DeJournett.

I can die happy now. I can do wordplay in two languages, three if you count faux Japanese.

Since I don't want to die just yet, the only place left for me is probably the loony bin.

You don't have to agree so wholeheartedly.

A day that apparently will not live in infamy

We all remember (or should) that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called December 7, 1941, "a day that will live in infamy" because the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on the island of Oahu in Hawaii on that day, bringing the United States into World War II. The 81st anniversary of that terrible day is two weeks away.

Today -- November 22nd -- is a day that should also live in infamy, but apparently it does not. Today is its 59th anniversary and I have heard no mention of it. I remember it vividly. People can still tell you exactly where they were and what they were doing.

Younger readers, was it:

1. The suicide of Marilyn Monroe,
2. The Challenger explosion in Florida,
3. The assassination of John F. Kennedy,
4. The induction of Elvis Presley into the U.S. Army, or
5. Neal Armstrong taking one giant leap for mankind on the surface of the moon?

This one should be easy-peasy, but you never can tell, given the state of education in the world today.

I just wish this blog had more younger readers. They're probably all on Tik-Tok.

Is it just me?

...or do you also find that news reporting of late is becoming more hysterical with each passing day? By "of late" I mean in the last few years. Perhaps it is only a characteristic of my particular online source of news (an internet service provider) but almost every headline contains words like shocking, horrifying, devastating, and other similarly alarming/provocative adjectives.

Maybe their entire staff consists of highly impressionable teen-agers who have no frame of reference except social media.

It just makes me wonder.

I say they should just report the facts and let me decide for myself how shocking, horrifying, devastating, or alarming it is. They should stop with all their editorializing. Most of all, I want them to stop trying to control my reactions, stop telling me what to think, stop doing their best to replace my conclusions with their conclusions.

America is still a free country and we still have freedom of speech here. I hope we always do. Do not be deceived, though. There are those who would take it away if they could. Some of them are on the left. Some of them are on the right. I hope they never can.

Apple or Google or Blogger or Something Out There doesn’t like me lately

I hope it's only temporary.

First I couldn't leave comments on certain, but only certain, blogs from my phone, but I could on others.

Then I couldn't leave comments on anyone else's blog from my phone but I could reply to comments on my own blog.

Then I could not leave a comment on anyone else's blog or reply to comments on my own blog from my phone.

But I could still do all those things from my desktop computer.

Then the same sequence of events started up on my desktop computer until yesterday I was unable to reply to Emma's comment on the previous post from my desktop computer. Things have come full circle, it seems.

I am flummoxed.

I repeat, Apple or Google or Blogger or Something Out There doesn't like me lately.

Fortunately, I am still able to create and publish posts, but who knows how long that will last?

I am undeterred. I intend to forge ahead, and if worse comes to worst, I will just talk to myself until the cows come home.

Needless to say, any helpful advice would be appreciated.

I repeat this too. I hope it's only temporary.

Word Salad #17,643

I mentioned in the previous post that people who live in Missouri but call it Missoura may have IFNCSCE (Indiana/Florida/North Carolina/South Carolina Envy), a malady I invented.

Today I am asking my many readers (no snickering, please) to chime in regarding the correct way to pronounce IFNCSCE. Here are four options from which to choose:

1. iffen-kiss-key
2. if-nick-sicky
3. eye-fences-see
4. eye-fink-skee

Which do you like best? If you don't like any of those, come up with a pronunciation of your own and share it with us in a comment.

Malapropism Of The Week (said twice during a single nationally televised newscast): "That really resignated with me."

Today is supposed to be very windy around here, and tomorrow we may be getting the rainy remnants of Nicole, the storm that made landfall near Vero Beach, Florida, this morning as a Category 1 hurricane. Category 1 means that its maximum wind speeds had reached 75 miles per hour. Nicole made landfall in combination with what meteorologists were calling a "king high tide" even though a king tide is defined as a spring tide when the moon is at perigee, and the recent full moon on November 8th occurred at apogee and during autumn in the northern hemisphere, which is, after all, where Florida is.

Finally (even though few things are ever final), your assignment today is to learn the difference between perigee, apogee, perihelion, and aphelion, and to explain to me if you can why apogee contains an o but aphelion does not.

Why did Billy Joel take a Greyhound on the Hudson River Line? .

The answer is at the end of the post.

Since North Georgia had November weather in October, it follows as the night the day (as Polonius once said to Laertes) that we are now having October weather in November. Today's high was 75°F (23.8889°C), and 80°F (26.6667°C) is not out of the question for Election Day on Tuesday. The sun is shining brightly; the red and gold leaves continue to fall. Meanwhile, Keith "Red" Kline in Red Deer, Alberta, Canada has reported the first blizzard of the season in his area.

Moving right along, class, we shall now learn how to pronounce correctly the names of certain states in the U.S. that many people do not pronounce correctly. You may think that you have no problems in this area. Read on.

Two of the most frequently mispronounced state names are the western states of Nevada and Colorado. You might be surprised to learn that accoording to natives of those places, the a in both words is not like the a in father. It is like the a in gather.

People from Missouri often pronounce the name of their state as though it were spelled Missoura. I don't know why. Maybe they have IFNCSCE (Indiana/Florida/North Carolina/South Carolina Envy).

Iowa is eye-oh-wuh, but one online source says that people in Iowa who are older or live in rural areas often say eye-oh-way. I hope Emma will let us know her thoughts on the subject.

Is Hawaii pronounced huh-wah-ya or huh-wah-ee or huh-wye-ee or huh-vie-ee or huh-vah-ee? Whichever one you choose, remember that the experts say a glottal stop is required and the spelling should include an apostrophe (Hawai'i). I know a woman who calls the state hah-wore-ya (she isn't trying to be funny) and my son-in-law always says "Fine, thank you, and you?" under his breath.

Louisiana is tricky and a lot of people get it wrong. I knew a woman, Marge Smith, back in Poughkeepsie, New York, 55 years who had grown up in Louisiana. She would get apoplectic whenever someone said Louise-iana. "It's named after Louis, not Louise," she would say, usually while clenching her teeth. The nearest I can come to Marge's own pronunciation is Looz-iana or Loo-iss-iana. This one might be a losing battle.

Massachusetts seems to be particularly difficult for many. I can't tell you how many times I have heard someone say Matchatoochits or Matchatooshits. I wonder sometimes if such people have a reading problem or a hearing problem.

I'm not trying to come across as judgemental. The state in which I find myself is one of bewilderment.

The answer to the question in the post title is because he was in a New York state of mind.

The Trinity explained through simple math

...and without the use of strange, multisyllabic Greek words. First, a little background.

St. Patrick tried to explain the Trinity with a shamrock (three leaves, one stem). Others have cited the three forms of H₂O (water, ice, steam), the three main parts of an egg (shell, yolk, white), or three relationships a person can have simultaneously (someone's son, someone's husband, someone's father, or to change genders, someone's daughter, someone's wife, someone's mother).

Many people accept these illustrations as valid but people with a longer view of Christianity and its history know and recognize the heresy of Modalism.

How can three be one? How can one be three? It can't, you say. Through simple mathematics, I will now prove that it can.

Not addition, though. Addition proves nothing, because where 1 represents a person of the Trinity (God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit):

1 + 1 + 1 = 3

That is not the Trinity. It is polytheism, the opposite of the Trinity.

Therefore, friends, let us turn to another part of mathematics. And because the God described in the Book of Genesis said, "I will multiply thee" on many occasions, let us turn to multiplication. Lo and behold, multiplication provides the answer:

1 × 1 × 1 = 1

Think about it.

You may not believe in Christianity or the doctrine of the Trinity or even In God, but you can't deny my math.

There are bloggers and then there are bloggers

Some people use a blog as a personal diary, telling all and sundry the minutiae of their daily lives down to what time they got out of bed and what they ate for breakfast. Others are observers of the world around them but refrain from divulging any personal information about themselves.

Some people take lots of photographs and display them by the hundreds; others take no photographs at all and confine themselves to the written word. Some people post every day; others post once or twice a month at best. Some people receive numerous comments and seem to revel in their popularity and influence; others receive hardly any comments but forge ahead valiantly, undeterred.

I am tempted to say there are as many types of blogs as there are people, but that would be an awful lot of types of blogs. Still, in its own way, each blog is unique.

More power to bloggers everywhere. Long may they wave.

Sorry about the brief hiatus

It was unplanned. It sort of just happened. Life got in the way, I think. Maybe I had post-quinceanara blues. Anyway, now I'm back.

One of my favorite songs of the past half-century is "When October Goes". The lyrics were written by songwriter Johnny Mercer who died in 1976. His widow presented Barry Manilow with several of her husband's unfinished songs in the hope that he might be able to compose music for them.

When Barry Manilow's album 2:00 AM Paradise Cafe was released in 1984, one of the tracks was "When October Goes" and I think it is great, bordering on exquisite, a perfect marriage of lyrics and music. Let's hear it for collaboration, even posthumously.

If you want to listen to Barry's version or Rosemary Clooney's (she's George's aunt, you know) or Nancy Wilson's -- they're all good but my favorite is Barry's -- be my guest. I am not including a link here as you are all big boys and girls who surely know how to find someone's YouTube video via Google.

I do have a request of you, however. Please tell me which of the following two layouts of the lyrics you prefer. One of them was with Barry Manilow's version and one was with Rosemary Clooney's (did I tell you she was George's aunt?).


A. Version 1, Layout of lyrics to "When October Goes":

And when October goes
The snow begins to fly
Above the smokey roofs
I watch the planes go by
The children running home
Beneath a twilight sky
Oh, for the fun of them
When I was one of them

And when October goes
The same old dream appears
And you are in my arms
To share the happy years
I turn my head away
To hide the helpless tears
Oh how I hate to see October go

And when October goes
The same old dream appears
And you are in my arms
To share the happy years
I turn my head away
To hide the helpless tears
Oh how I hate to see October go
I should be over it now I know
It doesn't matter much
How old I grow
I hate to see October go


B. Version 2, Layout of lyrics to "When October Goes":

And when October goes
The snow begins to fly
Above the smokey roofs
I watch the planes go by

The children running home
Beneath a twilight sky
Oh for the fun of them
When I was one of them

And when October goes
The same old dream appears
And I am in your arms
To share the happy years

I turn my head away
To hide the helpless tears
Oh how I hate to see
October go.

And when October goes
The same old dream appears
And I am in your arms
To share the happy years

I turn my head away
To hide the helpless tears
Oh how I hate to see
October go.

I should be over it now, I know
It doesn't matter much
How old
I grow
I hate to see
October
Go.


You see the difference. A has breaks every eight lines and B has breaks every four lines, then does something different at the end. It's interesting to me how the printed layout can affect one's enjoyment of what basically is poetry.

I do hope you will find the videos and listen to them. The song is hauntingly beautiful. Perhaps listening to it will even affect your choice of A or B.

For the record (see what I did there?), I prefer B.

I've got you under my skin

When the writer of the 139th Psalm wrote, "I am fearfully and wonderfully made" he wasn't kidding. Our bodies are very complex. Depending on which online article you happen to read, the human body is made up of several distinct systems. Here are some of the lists I found:

1. The integumentary system
2. The skeletal system
3. The muscular system
4. The lymphatic system
5. The respiratory system
6. The digestive system
7. The nervous system
8. The circulatory system
9. The endocrine system
10. The urinary system
11. The reproductive system

1. Circulatory system/Cardiovascular system
2. Digestive system/Excretory system
3. Endocrine system
4. Exocrine system/Integumentary ststem
5. Immune system and Lymphatic system
6. Muscular system
7. Nervous system
8. Renal system/Urinary syste
9. Reproductive system
10. Respiratory system
11. Skeletal system

1. Musculoskeletal system
2. Cardiovascular system
3. Respiratory ststem
4. Nervous system
5. Digestive system
6. Urinary system
7. Endocrine system
8. Lymphatic system
9. Reproductive system
10. Integumentary system

Integumentary was a new word for me. It means the outer layer. Ours includes the skin, hair, fingernails, toenails, sebacious glands, and sweat glands.

Some lists divide the reproductive system into two systems, reproductive system (male) and reproductive system (female). Some lists treat the skeleton and the muscles as two separate systems; other lists treat them/it as a single system (musculoskeletal). One list separates our five senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch) into a "nervous sensory subsystem" apart from the nervous system; other lists include them in the exocrine system. Some lists don't even mention an exocrine system.

Either the jury is still out or the science is not as settled as some would like us to believe.

The Psalmist didn't mention something significant that a man named Paul wrote several hundred years later in a letter that that wound up in the New Testament, that we are body, soul, and spirit.

That is a post for another day.

Round and round she goes

...and where she stops, nobody knows.

I'm referring to the world.

Continuing a glimpse into yesteryear from the previous post, I can honestly say that I know very few (hardly any, really) of the names of today's celebrities, musicians, athletes, or television shows. The young people today live in another world, one I don't recognize. I suppose it has been ever thus.

Kiki and Brittany at the ultrasound place were not familiar with Murphy Brown, Candice Bergen, Edgar Bergen, or Charlie McCarthy. I wonder if they have heard of Captain Kangaroo? Joan Baez? Bennett Cerf? Dorothy Kilgallen? Arlene Francis? Garry Moore? Durwood Kirby? Bill Haley and The Comets?

The list could go on and on.

There wasn't enough time to tell Kiki and Brittany about Bess Myerson, Henry Morgan, and Betsy Palmer on I've Got A Secret or Bud Collier (who was the voice of Superman on the radio) on Beat The Clock or Peggy Cass and Orson Bean on To Tell The Truth or Martin Landau and Barbara Bain on Mission Impossible or Luciano Pavarotti or Arthur Godfrey or Little Anthony and The Imperials. It's a pity.

On the other hand, shifting the shoe to the other foot, I didn't know my parents' world either. Who in the world was Ish Kabibble? Francis X. Bushman? Ed Wynn? Bix Beiderbecke? Eddie Cantor? Wendell Willkie? Bruno Hauptmann? Winnie Ruth Judd? Jean Harlow?

Their list went on and on too. As I said above, it has been ever thus. I would bet dollars to doughnuts that Socrates (circa 470-399 BC) and Plato (circa 427-347 BC), children of different generations, also viewed each orher across a vast gulf of mutual incomprehensibility, shaking their heads all the while.

I'm not being fair to Kiki and Brittamy. I am not part of their parents' generation. I'm part of their grandparents' generation. The gulf is wider than I thought.

יוֹם כִּפּוּר

Yom Kippur (that's what it says in the title in Hebrew) starts at sunset today, October 4, 2022. It will end at sunset tomorrow, October 5th.

Sixty-five years ago today, on October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik.

Also sixty-five years ago today, my mother died. I was 16 years old. She was 47.

Not only does that seem a long time ago, it is a long time ago.

Today, because I had some kidney stones blasted away about a month ago, I went for an ultrasound of both kidneys and my bladder. As the young blond woman led me into the room, she said, "My name is Kiki and I will be conducting your procedure today. And this is Brittany, a trainee who will be observing."

When she said, "My name is Kiki" my mind went immediately (as I'm sure yours did as well) to the television series Murphy Brown. I asked her if she had ever heard of it.

She said that she had not.

I said that the reason I mentioned it is that there was a blonde TV reporter on that show named Corky, a former Miss America from Louisiana. On one episode her entire family -- father, mother, and three younger sisters -- came from the South to visit. The sisters were all carbon copies of Corky -- young, beautiful, blonde, dripping with Southerness and y'alls. Their names were Kaki, Koki, and Kiki. (Note. I think I have the names correct but I may be off a little bit.)

I also happened to mention to Kiki and Brittany that Corky's last name was Sherwood and that when she married TV writer Will Forrest she became Corky Sherwood Forrest.

"What was the name of that show again?" asked Kiki.

"Murphy Brown," I said. "It starred Candice Bergen. Have you ever heard of her?"

Kiki and Brittany both said "No."

I told them that Candice Bergen's father was a famous ventriloquist named Edgar Bergen, and that his ventriloquist's dummy was named Charlie McCarthy.

"Have you ever heard of him?" I asked, and Kiki and Brittany again said "No."

I shrugged and said, "It was a different world back then."

My question is, is the conversation I had today with Kiki about that other Kiki covered by today's Day of Atonement (that's what Yom Kippur means) or must it wait until next year's Day of Atonement?

Maybe this whole post needs atoning for.

It occurs to me that Kiki and Brittany probably never heard of carbon copies either. I should have said clones.

Quinceañera!

News flash: I am not female and I am not Hispanic.

And neither is my blog. But if it were, today would be a day of great celebration!

Can you guess why? The title of this post gives a hint.

Quince (kin-seh) is the Spanish word for fifteen. A quinceañera (kin-seh-an-yehr-uh) is a festive time celebrating a Hispanic female's fifteenth birthday. It's rather like a Sweet Sixteen birthday party, only a year sooner. To be more accurate, in Spanish countries the word refers to the honoree herself; in the U.S. it refers to the festivities.

Sixteen in Anglo families and fifteen in Hispanic families has traditionally been the age when parents consider a daughter to be available for courting by suitors with an eye toward eventual marriage.

Today -- September 28, 2022 -- my blog is fifteen years old.

So even though this blog is neither female nor Hispanic, if you want to hire a mariachi band or do a flamenco dance or drink a margarita or two, I will not stop you.

No way, José.

It’s funny, the things you remember

I don't mean funny ha-ha, I mean funny peculiar.

I remember that before Bob Keeshan played Captain Kangaroo on TV he was the original Clarabell the Clown on Howdy Doody.

I remember that when I played clarinet in the Mansfield (Texas) High School band back in the 1950s, Marshall Tyson played alto saxophone, Dianne Phillips played tenor saxophone, and Bruce Hornell played baritone saxophone. John Galloway, Jerry Willis, and Jerry Harmon played trumpet and the latter Jerry's twin brother Terry played tuba. Kenneth Green played snare drum. There were a lot of other people in the band but I don't remember them or what they played.

I remember when there were nine planets in our solar system.

I remember that when Lady Diana Spencer married Prince Charles and became the Princess of Wales she bobbled the order of his names during their exchange of vows, saying "I take thee, Charles Arthur Philip George" instead of what she ought to have said, "I take thee, Charles Philip Arthur George" and I remember wondering whether the marriage was therefore not valid.

I remember watching the Democratic National Convention on our black-and-white television set in the summer of 1956 when newly-chosen candidate for the presidency Governor Adlai Stevenson of Illinois let the delegates decide who his Vice Presidential running mate would be. They chose Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee over someone I had never heard of, Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts.

I remember that Adlai Stevenson, when asked how he felt after losing to Dwight D. Eisenhower, cited Abraham Lincoln's remark after losing an election, that it reminded him of the little boy who stubbed his toe in the dark and said he was too old to cry but it hurt too much to laugh. I cannot remember whether he said this in 1952 or 1956 but he lost to Eisenhower both times.

I remember seeing Olga Korbut and Mary Lou Retton and Nadia Comaneci win gold medals in gymnastics at various Summer Olympic Games.

I remember Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean's spectacular ice dancing to the music of Maurice Ravel's Bolero in the 1984 Winter Olympics in Sarajevo. They wore lavender.

I remember attending two musical productions at the Texas State Fair in Dallas in the mid-1950s. In one, Victor Herbert's operetta Naughty Marietta, I remember Patrice Munsel singing "Ah, Sweet Mystery Of Life, At Last I've Found You". In the other, Rodgers & Hammerstein's South Pacific, I remember Kay Armen as Bloody Mary singing both "Happy Talk" and "Bali Ha'i". I have no memory at all of who portrayed Ensign Nellie Forbush or French expatriate Emile De Becque but undoubtedly they sang "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair" and "Some Enchanted Evening", respectively.

My most vivid memory from the world of sports is a tie between (a) Atlanta Braves TV announcer Skip Caray yelling "Braves win! Braves win! Braves win!" in 1992 after Sid Bream slid into home base in the bottom of the ninth inning of the seventh game of the National League Championship Series and (b) University of Georgia announcer Larry Munson yelling "Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott! Lindsay Scott!" in 1980 after the 93-yard winning touchdown play near the end of the fourth quarter in the Georgia-Florida game that year.

Here is a knock-knock joke for you.

Knock-knock.
Who's there?
Sam and Janet.
Sam and Janet who?
(singing) Sam and Janet evening you may see a stranger, you may see a stranger across a crowded room.

I'm guessing you will remember this knock-knock joke.

Connexion

As you may or may not know, I am somewhat of an Anglophile. I decided to watch today's funeral -- if you have to ask whose you must have just arrived here from another galaxy -- but not on one of the American television networks. Instead, wanting to experience what the people in the U.K. were experiencing, I decided to watch the day's proceedings on BBC television.

I'm glad I did. It was solemn, dignified, and riveting. Even better, I avoided commercial breaks, bantering hosts, royalty-fawning, and, as Americans are wont to make, inane comments about Harry and Meghan.

My Anglophilia didn't just come out of the blue. One of my maternal great-grandfathers, Solomon Aarons, was born in London in 1847 and came to America before the Civil War, I mean the War Between the States, I mean the War of Northern Aggression, I mean the Late Unpleasantness. I'm joking. As it happens, Solomon lived in Philadelphia and served as a drummer boy in the Union Army, the winning side.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained

In the last little while I have composed half a dozen blogposts and discarded them all. Nothing satisfied.

I spent two days in hospital last week, during which time two kidney stones were surgically removed from my right side. The larger of them measured 7mm (approximately 1/4 inch). No one wants to read about that. No one wants an organ recital unless your name is Diane Bish (British, E. Power Biggs).

Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral Castle in Scotland at the age of 96. Unless you have been living under a rock, you know this.

I was hoping Prince Charles would choose to become King George VII, but no one ever listens to me.

A blogger friend, Rachel Phillips of Norfolk in the U.K., is in the midst of her first trip to Albania. Today, on Day 4, her post included a photograph of a statue in Vlorë and she also mentioned visiting the excavations and museum at Apollonia. My father-in-law was from Vlorë, which he called Vlonë, and my mother-in-law was from Fier, only 5km (3 miles) from Apollonia.

People often say it's a small world, but today it seems smaller than usual.

Benched, Grilled, Pressure-Washed (illustrated)

[Editor's note. I apologize in advance for some of the photographs in this post. They are not very good photographs -- I press the button and the result is anyone's guess -- but they are essential to the post. Perhaps I should also be apologizing for the sheer number of photographs in this post. Some bloggers post many more, but there are far more than I usually include. I must have been on a roll. --RWP]

A friend of ours, Rosemary L., lived to be 94 years old. During the last 20 years of her life (the period when we knew her) she perplexed and amused her friends by celebrating her birthday every year throughout the entire month of February at multiple restaurants. So it struck me as downright Rosemaryesque when, through no fault of Mrs. Rhymeswithplague's own, her birthday celebration lasted for a whole week this year.

On the Saturday before her birthday, our older son and his wife, along with their daughter who was home for the weekend from summer session at the university, drove over from their town and took us out to eat at a local restaurant. We enjoyed it immensely; we left the place with our tummies full and a take-home box containing a piece of cheesecake. Back at our house, our son pulled a big box out of the back of his vehicle and began assembling something. It turned out to be a bench for our entrance! He had heard his mother mention a while back that she would really like us to get one. Here is the finished product along with Mrs. RWP:

A few seconds later I joined her on our new bench:

But don't look at us or the bench. Instead, notice the concrete. It will be important later in this post.

The next day, on the Sunday before Mrs. RWP's birthday, we were invited to our other son and daughter-in-law's home for a delicious home-cooked, gourmet meal.

Three days later, on Wednesday, Mrs. RWP's actual birthday, she and I went out for another birthday dinner at our favorite fake-Australian place where we enjoyed coconut shrimp, pumpernickel bread, Toowoomba salmon, and baked sweet potato. Once again we had cheesecake for dessert. This was now the third celebration. I gave Mrs. RWP a bouquet of flowers but didn't take a photograph. Our daughter and son-in-law in Alabama also had flowers delivered to our house on Wednesday afternoon:

On Saturday morning, three days after Mrs. RWP's birthday, our daughter called to tell us to eat an early, light lunch because she and our son-in-law were coming to cook dinner for us "for Mom's birthday." True to their word, they showed up with all the food and even the grill on which our son-in-law did the cooking. Unbeknownst to us, they had also invited our two sons and their wives as a further surprise. We kept adding places at the table as each couple joined the group. Much laughter took place, and a great time was had by all that day with eight of us at the dining table. As an additional surprise, the grill was left at our house as a gift to us:

So Mrs. RWP's birthday celebration turned out to be eight days long. Just like Hanukkah.

Once again, don't look at the grill. Look at the concrete.

What do you see?

I saw dirty concrete at our front entrance by the bench and I see dirty concrete on our patio by the grill. Dirty concrete, at least around here, means only one thing: it's time to do pressure washing!

So a couple of days later I hired a man to come and pressure wash our driveway (including the entrance way) and our patio. I don't have a "before" picture of the driveway but here is an "after" picture that includes the tip of my finger:

and here is an "after" picture of the patio:

We have lived in this house for 19 years and this is only the second time we have had our concrete areas pressure-wshed. Some of our neighbors do it much more frequently. Some have it done every year.

There's a word that applies to such people.

Rosemaryesque.

I’m from Big D, my, oh yes

...Big D, little a, double l, a, s.

Except that I'm not. I'm from Mansfield, a former wide spot in the road that now has 75,000 residents and is actually closer to Fort Worth in the sprawling Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex than to Dallas. By the way, Fort Worth is not pronounced FORT WORTH by locals. Locals say FOTE-worth (with the accent on the first syllable, which has no discernible R) instead.

Here are some more oddities one encounters in the pronunciation of place names:

Many people who grew up in Missouri call it Missoura, many people who grew up around Cincinnati call it Cincinnata, and many people who grew up in Florida say Miama, not Miami.

It's true.

People in other parts of the U.S. may say kah-loh-RAH-doh and nuh-VAH-duh but people who live in Colorado and Nevada say kah-loh-RAD-oh and nuh-VAD-duh.

Mrs. RWP (the lovely Ellie) and I lived in Boca Raton, Florida, for several years and the place is pronounced bo-ka ra-TONE, not bo-ka ra-TAHN, no matter how many times you may have heard it pronounced the second way.

The residents of the town of San Jacinto in Riverside County, California, pronounce it the Spanish way, san-hah-CHEEN-toh, but the place near Houston, Texas, where Texans remembered the Alamo and defeated Mexican General Santa Anna's army in 1836 is called sanja-SIN-ta.

Versailles may be pronounced vair-SIGH in France, but the town in Kentucky spelled the same way is ver-SALES. I kid you not.

Lima in Peru may be LEE-muh but the Lima in Ohio is pronounced LYE-muh. Similarly (or, rather, dissimilarly), Egypt's Cairo may be KYE-roh but the towns in Illinois and Georgia are both called KARE-oh, like the syrup.

We must not forget the twin curiosities of Nacogdoches, Texas, (NAK-uh-DOH-chiz) and Natchitoches, Louisiana (NAK-uh-tish).

When I tell you stuff like this I have the distinct feeling that I may have told it to you before. If I have repeated myself, chalk it up to the fact that I'm old and my memory isn't what it used to be

Don't get me started on England, which has Gloucestershire (GLAW-stir-shir), Leicestershire (LESS-ter-shir), Worcestershire (WUSS-ter-shir), St. John's Wood (SIN-jinz wood), and the Thames (TEMZ), none of which the English find the least bit odd.

In closing, when I tell you stuff like this I have the distinct feeling that I may have told it to you before. If I have repeated myself, chalk it up to the fact that I'm old and my memory isn't what it used to be.

Did I mention that I'm from Big D?

A most surprising fact, given the last few posts

English is the most widely-spoken language in the world.

According to the United Nations, there are nearly 8,000,000,000 people in the world today. They speak a total of 7,151 languages according to Ethnologue. These languages could not sound more different from one another. When God confounded the people's language at the Tower of Babel (a Judaeo-Christian story from the book of Genesis), He did a really good job of it. For example, a certain vegetable referred to in American English as eggplant is called aubergine in French and melixhan in Albanian. When people in Germany say Froeliche Weinacht, and people in Sweden say God Jul, and people in Australia say Merry Christmas, they all mean the same thing. I don't know about you but I find this fascinating.

Geographical proximity doesn't seem to matter eirher. People in New Zealand express gratitude by saying thank you, in Japan by saying arigato (ah-ree-GAH-toh), and in China by saying xèxèi ni (sheh-sheh nee).

Here are the 12 most-widely-spoken languages in the world according to Berlitz:

1. English (1,132 million speakers)
2. Mandarin Chinese (1,117 million speakers)
3. Hindi (615 million speakers)
4. Spanish (534 million speakers)
5. French (280 million speakers)
6. Arabic (274 million speakers)
7. Bengali (265 million speakers)
8. Russian (258 million speakers)
9. Portuguese (234 million speakers)
10. Indonesian (199 million speakers)
11. Urdu (170 million speakers)
12. German (132 million speakers)

If you simply can't live without knowing what the 13th most-widely-spoken language in the world is, it's Japanese (128 million speakers).

Besides those 13, many other languages have millions of speakers as well. Ethnologue has documented 7,138 other languages currently spoken on this planet. Some have only a few speakers and are nearly extinct.

Can you feature a world at some future time when English or Chinese would be nearly extinct? It is mind-boggling to contemplate.

A fine kettle of ghoti

Reader Tasker Dunham in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England and I exchanged a few words about ghoti in the previous post's comment section. I would like now to say that I was incorrect in telling him that it was George Bernard Shaw who brought it to the world's attention. Further reading on my part has revealed that ghoti pre-dated Mr. Shaw's career by a few decades, not that it matters in the least but I do try to keep my errors on a short leash as well as few and far between.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, the word 'ghoti' is merely an alternate spelling of the word 'fish'. Yes, it is, and I'll prove it. Say the 'gh' sound from enough, the 'o' from women, and the 'ti' fron nation, put them all together, and voila!, you have fish!

Next subject.

Have you ever noticed how many different ways in English the syllable 'ough' can be pronounced? By my count, there are eight:

• uff (enough rough, tough, slough)
• ooh (through)
• oh (though, dough)
• ow (bough, plough, drought)
• aw (thought, bought, ought, wrought)
• awf (cough)
• ock (lough)
• up (hiccough)

As I may have said somewhere recently, it's a wonder anyone who speaks English can spell anything correctly. Let me add a corollary to that. It's a wonder anyone who reads English can pronounce anything correctly.

It is, indeed, a fine kettle of ghoti.

Things I do that might be construed as OCD

...even though I definitely do not, repeat, do NOT have OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), at least I have never been diagnosed with OCD nor has anyone ever suggested that I have OCD even though he or she may have thought it in the privacy of his or her own home. After doing a great deal of reading in preparation for this post I may or may not have OCPD (obsessive-compulsive personality disorder), which is a different kettle of fish altogether. Here's my list:

When emptying the dishwasher, I silently count the number of dinner plates, salad plates, saucers, glasses, cups, each type of silverware (knives, dinner forks, salad forks, teaspoons, tablespoons). Furthermore, I take each category one at a time, counting as I go, and always remove them and put them away in the same sequence.

Because doesn't everybody?

When picking up the mail, I count the number of steps from the front door to the curbside mailbox, and back. When carrying out the trash, I count the number of steps from the back door to the trash bins, and back. I do not count steps when walking Abby, though, because she walks erratically, wandering here and there as she likes. Instead of walking in a straight line she stops abruptly to sniff or listen or stare, goes to the right or to the left, circles back again, darts after a rabbit, rolls in the grass, and does other things the members of the canine world find fascinating.

When taking men's shirts from the dryer and putting them on hangers, I button buttons 1, 3, 5, and 7 only. I leave buttons 2, 4, and 6 unbuttoned.

At the risk of repeating myself, doesn't everybody?

Were you even aware that men's shirts have seven buttons? Here's a news flash: women's shirts do not.

When I still worked in an office, I would arrange pens and pencils in parallel at a jaunty angle on my desk.

When I read blogs, I read them in alphabetic order.

I'm sure I could think of other things I do, but you probably think I am strange enough already.

What OCD-type quirks do you have that are suitable for sharing on a G-rated blog?

It’s a wonder anyone who speaks English can spell anything correctly

In some languages -- Albanian and Armenian, for instance -- once a person learns the alphabet he or she can spell every word in the language correctly because each letter has one and only one sound. Not so in English. There are many ways to spell a sound in English.

Here are a few examples out of thousands that cause people learning English as a second language to shake their heads in bewilderment:

• Words with Long I sound: bite, bight, byte, blight, bright, fight, flight, fright, height, kite, knight, light, mite, might, night, plight, quite, rite, right, site, sight, slight, spite, sprite, tight, white, wight, write, wright
  
  
• Words with Long A sound: ate, bate, bait, crate, date, eight, fate, fete, freight, gate, gait, grate, great, hate, late, mate, pate, plate, prate, rate, sate, slate, state, strait, straight, trait, wait, weight
  
  
• More words with Long A sound: bay, bray, cay, clay, claim, day, dray, epee, fey, flay, fray, gay, gray, grey, hay, hey, jay, lay, lei, may, nay, neigh, pay, play, pray, prey, quay, ray, say, shay, slay, sleigh, spray, stay, stray, strain, sway, tray, train, trey, vain, vein, way, weigh, yea
  
  
• Words with Long E sound: bee, brie, clean, fee, flee, flea, free, gee, glee, glean, he, key, knee, lea, me, peek, peak, plea, see, sea, she, tee, tea, three, tree, wee
  
  
• Words with Long O sound: beau, blow, crow, dough, dote, faux, float, flow, foe, fro, go, goat, gloat, glow, groat, grow, grown, ho, hoe, joe, know, lo, low, moat, mote, mow, no, roe, row, sew, so, sow, show, shoat, slow, snow, stow, tableau, though, throat, throw, toe, tow, whoa, woe
  
  
• More words with Long I sound: aisle, buy, by, bye, cry, die, dye, dry, eye, fie, fly, fry, guise, guy, high, I, isle, lie, lye, my, nigh, pi, pie, ply, pry, rye, shy, sigh, sly, spy, spry, sty, tie, try, vie, why, wry
  
  
• Words with Short U sound: buff, bluff, cuff, chuff, duff, enough, fluff, guff, gruff, huff, muff, puff, rough, snuff, stuff, tough
  
  
• Words with "Aw" sound: awe, aught, bought, brought, caught, cough, dawn, doff, fawn, fought, fraught, lawn, nought, off, ought, sauce, sought, taut, taught, thought, trough, wrought
  
  
• Words with Long "oo" sound: boo, blew, blue, brew, broom, bruise, clue, crew, cruise, do, dew, due, few, flew, flue, fuse, gloom, goo, glue, grew, hew, hue, igloo, loo, lieu, moo, mew, new, queue, revue, review, room, rue, sue, slough, slew, stew, strew, to, too, two, through, threw, true, view, woo, you
  
  
• Words with "Ow" sound: aloud, bough, bow, brow, chow, cloud, cow, clown, down, drown, frau, frown, gown, how, loud, now, plow, plough, prow, proud, row, sow, town, vow, wow, zowie
  
  

I could go on but your eyes would glaze over, if they haven't already glazed over.

Don't despair, however. You could be trying to learn Mandarin Chinese, which doesn't have an alphabet. It has more than 100,000 characters instead.

How’s that again? plus rhyming foods

Do you know what a malapropism is? According to Wikipedia, it is "the mistaken use of an incorrect word in place of a word with a similar sound, resulting in a nonsensical, sometimes humorous utterance." In my own words, a malapropism occurs when a person uses a word in a spoken or written sentence that is almost the right word, but wrong. The term can be traced to a character, Mrs. Malaprop, in The Rivals, a play written in 1775 by Richard Sheridan.

Here are some malapropisms I have either heard with my own two ears or been told by someone else who heard it with his or her (notice that I do not say their) own two ears. All of the following are actual instances from real life. There is not a made-up malapropism in the lot.

At a Christian concert, my son was playing saxophone in the band for a female singer fairly well known in Christian circles when she urged the college-aged audience to get up out of their chairs and give Jesus a standing ovulation.

A 94-year-old friend, Rosemary L., asked our mutual friend Sharon S. to take her to the mall because she wanted to get a manicure and a pedophile.

A friend of mine wrote on Facebook during Holy Week this year, "Let us be reminded Jesus died on that cross but He arose on the third day and now sets on the right hand of the Father, making intersections for us."

Those are all hilarious. The following, which all occurred during the last two weeks, are more mundane:

"The objection of this game is to..."

"This song really resignated with me"

"In these stories there is a concurring theme"

"Silence is an omission of guilt"

The words for which these people were searching but didn't quite find were ovation, pedicure, intercession, object, resonate, recurring, and admission. People make this type of mistake so frequently that it has practically become an epidemic. There was a time when I would have corrected them all but I don't do that any more. I just commit them to memory. Maybe I have become part of the problem.

Way back in 1967 I heard Blanche D., a woman in Poughkeepsie, New York, say "Before I spend that kind of money on a cruise I want to know what it would curtail". She meant entail, of course, and my hobby of listening for malapropisms was launched.

Enough about malapropisms. Here's a game we can all play.

A few nights ago on Wheel Of Fortune, in a category called Rhyming Foods, the puzzle turned out to be "chickpeas and cheddar cheese". Host Pat Sajak, quick wit at the ready, wisecracked that it was much better than his suggestion, "edamame and hard salami". He set me to thinking about other foods that rhyme and I came up with these:

• collard greens and garbanzo beans
  
• chocolate cake and sirloin steak
  
• leg of lamb and strawberry jam
  
• rigatoni and sliced baloney
  
• étouffée and crème brûlée
  
• shish kabob and corn on the cob
• beanie weenie and veal scallopini

What rhyming foods can you think of?

I leave you with a photograph of actress Louisa Lane Drew as Mrs. Malaprop in an 1895 production of The Rivals:

My dad graduated from the school of hard knocks

...but this post isn't going to be about him, it's going to be about me.

I had a good education, as far as it went. Most of the teachers in our local achool system were excellent, and with their help I wound up as valedictorian of the class of 1958. True, there were only 46 of us in the class of 1958, but it was a significant achievement nonetheless. I then attended four different institutions of higher learning in three different states but never received a degree, which fact brings to mind a scene from the 1972 screwball comedy What's Up, Doc? (it was supposedly modeled on Bugs Bunny cartoons) in which Barbra Streisand, after rattling off a long litany of universities she had attended and various courses of study she had pursued, answered someone's question, "What were you trying to do?" with a single word: "Graduate."

Well, so was I but life got in the way. I ran out of money, I left school, I joined the Air Force, I married Mrs. RWP, we began having children, you know, normal interruptions. As time went by, my desire to finish university simply became less and less important and the children's education became more and more important. I am happy to report that all three of our offspring turned out well (I would even say magnificently but I am biased, of course) and two of them have earned masters degrees.

On the strength of having more than three years of college credits (because the military gave me credit for two years worth of R.O.T.C. courses plus physical education) and three years of computer programming experience in the military, IBM graciously hired me after I received my honorable discharge and re-entered civilian life.

Near the end of the year at my second campus of higher learning, I concluded that a degree from some schools meant absolutely nothing or, to be more charitable, very little, chiefly because they were for all intents and purposes just diploma mills, churning out half-educated graduates year after year. So basically I ended up throwing out the baby with the bathwater but I did continue my never-ending education by following the very good advice written on signs at railroad crossings all over the country: Stop, Look, and Listen. In addition, I never stopped reading. By and large, my approach has stood me in good stead.

One thing having a college degree definitely helps determine is one's starting salary in many corporations. And not having a degree at the start of one's career but getting one later on seems to make very little difference to the powers-that-be in most Human Resources departments (formerly known as Personnel departments).

So I am that rarest of birds, a valedictorian who became a college dropout. Interestingly (I hope), I think I was the first person on my dad's side of the family who ever went to college and the first person on my mom's side of the family who failed to finish.

If you think I have painted too bleak a picture, tell me so in a comment, but please refrain from telling me about my lack of stick-to-it-iveness by not finishing what I started. I am well aware of that.

At least Tasker Dunham in Yorkshire and I both know what 65,536 is. Do you?

I have tried to keep snarkiness out of my writing, but it is an uphill and mostly losing battle.

Enough (more than enough) about me. Today our older son and his family are coming over to take us out to lunch in celebration of Mrs. RWP's birthday, which is four days away.

I’m slipping in more ways than one.

Bastille Day came and went this year with nary a mention about it from me. Slipping.

In certain areas, however, I am on solid ground and others are the ones slipping. Take speaking English, for instance. Words that used to be necessary for communicating clearly are often dispensed with in casual conversation nowadays. Here are two examples that set my teeth on edge:

"It was so fun." Really? Adverbs do not modify nouns, people. Say "It was so much fun" instead. "So much fun" is right; "so fun" is wrong.

"It needs to happen sooner than later." Again, a word is needed that has inexplicably disappeared. You should say "It needs to happen sooner rather than later" if you want to make sense, at least in my circles. The word 'rather' provides the difference between speaking Englsh and speaking, well, gibberish.

On another subject, the price of bedroom slippers, I am still the one slipping (no pun intended). A nice pair of comfy bedroom slippers should cost what, $6.99 tops, right? No way, José. The man who foisted My Pillow on an unsuspecting world has now made a television commercial for his company's bedroom slippers that cost a mere $49.98 (gulp) along with the news that this is $90.00 below the regular price (double gulp, followed by a dead faint). If bedroom slippers now cost $139.98 and nobody bats an eye, clearly I am out of touch.

But you probably knew that already.

Nine things I know that are of no value whatsoever

1. Yves St. Laurent succeeded Christian Dior at the House of Dior and Karl Lagerfeld succeeded Coco Chanel at the House of Chanel.
2. The Washington Monument in Washington, DC, is 13 feet shorter than the San Jacinto Monument near Houston, Texas.
3. Victorian-era poet Arthur Hugh Clough spent six years as Florence Nightingale's secretary, during which time he wrote no poetry at all.
4. Rock-and-roll star Jerry Lee Lewis, who has been married seven times, is the first cousin of televangelist Jimmy Swaggart.
5. The name of the horse ridden by Roy Rogers's wife Dale Evans in all those western movies was Buttermilk.
6. Charles the Bald's parents were Louis the Pious and Judith of Bavaria.
7. Although there definitely was a Pepin the Short, no record has been found of a Pepin the Tall.
8. The country of Russia covers 11 time zones.
9. Camilla Rosemary Shand Parker Bowles Mountbatten-Windsor, Duchess of Cornwall, and her husband, Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor, Prince of Wales, are ninth cousins, once removed.

I close with an old rhyme:

"A wise old owl sat in an oak.
The more he saw, the less he spoke.
The less he spoke, the more he heard.
Why can't we all be like that wise old bird?"

Especially me.

A one-topic post because the dog days are here

It's very hot but there's been a slight break in the weather around these parts. It's probably only temporary but it is very welcome. A few days ago our high was 97°F (36°C) here in Cherokee County with a heat index (factoring in humidity) of 104°F (40°C). That same day the high temperature in Plano, Texas, where I have relatives, was 105°F. I don't even want to think about the heat index.

In contrast, at 11 a.m. today our temperature was 74°F (23°C) and I actually felt a cool breeze while walking Abby.

I repeat, this little break in the heat is very welcome. We still have the rest of July, all of August, and part of September to go before the hope of having an early autumn would even be a remote possibility.

How is it where you live?

Thoughts on blogging on a hot summer day

The American writer Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) was once asked to describe the difference between writing a novel and writing a short story. Her answer--this may not be an exact quote--was that it was like finally emerging from wandering for a long time in a deep, dark forest only to be set upon by a pack of wolves.

I'm not sure what she meant exactly (more on this below) but I feel her pain. As a sometime writer of blogposts, I find that writing is fun except when it is anguish; it is easy except when it is extremely difficult. Most of the time I am my own worst critic and discard more posts than I publish.

Some bloggers seem to write with eloquence effortlessly while others seem to dump onto paper (okay, the screen) whatever garbage comes into their heads. Some pad their posts with photographs and some would never dream of doing that. Some strive to achieve a happy balance of words and pictures. Some blogposts succeed wildly and some fail miserably. The trick to successful blogging is being able to figure out which are which, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

The point Flannery O'Connor was making, I think, is that every type of writing is different; each type has its own set of surprises and challenges and obstacles to be overcome.

Why should blogging be any different? Some days I want to do it forever. Some days I never want to do it again. The best part, of course, is obvious: I get to interact with people I would never have met otherwise.

As Humphrey Bogart said to Ingrid Beegman in Casablanca, "Here's looking at you, kid."

Half gone?

Today is June 30th, so the year is half gone, right?

Wrong.

Let me explain. While it is true that six months have passed and six more remain, the year is not half gone.

In the first six months of non-leap years, there are 181 days (31+28+31+30+31+30) and in leap years there are 182 days (31+29+31+30+31+30). The last six months in every year contain 184 days (31+31+30+31+30+31). Using simple math, the midpoint of a non-leap year occurs at 182.5 days (365 divided by 2) and the midpoint of a leap year occurs after 183 days (366 divided by 2).

So now you know, based on simple math, that the midpoint of a non-leap year (2022, 2023) actually occurs at 12 noon on July 2nd, not on June 30th. And the midpoint of a leap year (2024) occurs at 12 midnight as July 2nd ends and July 3rd begins.

Do not begin your midpoint-of-the-year celebration too early. Today is too soon. Tomorrow is too soon. Begin promptly at noon on July 2nd. And if your neighbors complain about the fireworks and the loud music and the street dancing and the parade and tell you that you are celebrating too early, just tell them that the Fourth of July is not what you are celebrating, that that will come in due time. They will look confused, but it cannot be helped. If you are not in the United States, they probably won't think of the Fourth of July at all; they'll just wonder what in the world you are doing.

If we think of our journey through the year in terms of geometry, as a gradual ascending and a gradual descending like two sides of a long triangle, here is a poem by Sara Teasdale that is apropos, especially if you are female and have ever worn a floor-length dress. If you are male and have ever worn a floor-length dress, I don't want to know about it. Everyone, male or female, should be able to appreciate the poem's imagery as it applies to our journey through the year.

THE LONG HILL
by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

I must have passed the crest a while ago
And now I am going down--
Strange to have crossed the crest and not to know,
But the brambles were always catching the hem of my gown.

All the morning I thought how proud I should be
To stand there straight as a queen,
Wrapped in the wind and the sun with the world under me--
But the air was dull, there was little I could have seen.

It was nearly level along the beaten track
And the brambles caught in my gown--
But it’s no use now to think of turning back,
The rest of the way will be only going down.

Sunlight, sunlight in my soul today

Today, as most of you know, is what is called the "summer solstice" in the northern hemisphere (Nota bene. it is not called that in the southern hemisphere), popularly known as the longest day of the year (shortest day in the aforementioned southern hemisphere).

Just how many hours of daylight one experiences depends on one's latitude. The equator is at 0° and the North Pole (the geographic one, not the magnetic one) is at 90°N latitude. Today in Canton, Georgia (34.2368°N), where I live, the sun rose at 6:26 a.m. and set at 8:52 p.m., a period of 14 hours, 26 minutes. Allowing for some pre-sunrise "dawn's early light" and some post-sunset twilight at dusk, we had about 15 hours of daylght on the longest day of the year. This is three hours more (12+3=15) than on the equinoxes in March and September when everyone in the world gets 12 hours of daylight and 12 hours of darkness, so it follows as the night the day (see what I did there?) that on the winter solstice at my latitude there will be about nine hours of daylight (12-3=9).

Yorkshire Pudding reported on his blog that Sheffield, Yorkshire, United Kingdom (53.3811°N) where he lives had only about three hours of complete darkness and that he loves this time of year (24-3=21 hours of daylight). North of the Arctic Circle (66.30°N) the sun did not set at all today. Conversely, six months from now, at the winter solstice, the sun will not rise anywhere above the Arctic Circle.

The difference between the geographic North Pole's latitude (90°N) and the Arctic Circle's latitude (66.30°:N) is the number of degrees that the earth is tilted from vertical, or as we all surely learned back in our school days, "approximately 23-and-a-half degrees".

NEWS FLASH FOR SOUTHERN HEMISPHERE READERS! If you change Arctic to Antarctic and all the norths and degrees N to souths and degrees S, this post will work pretty well for you (with only a couple of minor inaccuracies) on the orher solstice in December, provided that you also change Canton to Sydney or Cape Town, and Sheffield to Tierra del Fuego.

I love it when a post can have an extended life!

Everything happens for a reason

Things come to me out of the blue in the middle of the night. I awake to popular songs of days gone by playing in my head, poems I had to memorize in school, complete hymns (sometimes several verses worth), Bible passages,

Here are some examples:

A few nights ago I awoke to all nine Beatitudes from the fifth chapter of the Gospel According To Matthew in my head that I had to learn when I was 14. Another night I found myself remembering Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Not just "Fourscore and seven years ago", the whole thing. Another night I couldn't get Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Anabel Lee" out of my brain. Last week I knew all the words of the song "P.S., I Love You" that I probably haven't heard since Gisele Mackenzie sang it on Your Hit Parade back in the fifties. It's uncanny. Two nights ago it was a hymn that I sang in the Methodist church as a child and teenager that hadn't crossed my mind in 60 years:

Just when I need Him, Jesus is near,
Just when I falter, just when I fear;
Ready to help me, ready to cheer,
Just when I need Him most,

Refrain:
Just when I need Him most,
Just when I need Him most,
Jesus is near to comfort and cheer,
Just when I need Him most.

Just when I need Hin, He is my all.
Answering when upon Him I call;
Tenderly watching lest I should fall,
Just when I need Him most.

In the morning, I checked hymnary.org and discovered that what had come trippingly to my tongue turned out to be verses 1 and 4 of a hymn written in 1907. I didn't recogniize verses 2 and 3 at all, but then our little church often left verses out in the interest of time.

I am just as apt to remember an old cheer from high school football games:

Beat me, Daddy, eight to the bar,
Mansfield Tigers going mighty far;
Swing me, sugar, with a boogie beat,
We're the team that can't be beat!

or

Orange crush, lemon ice!
Hit 'em once, hit 'em twice,
Hit 'em high, hit'em low.
Come on, Tigers, let's go!

I'm not bragging, I'm sort of complaining, but only sort of. I'm walking the fine line between having a cross to bear and not looking a gift horse in the mouth. The other side of the coin is I often can't remember what we ate for dinner yesterday. I do think everything happens for a reason.

It's difficult to explain. If David Barlow of Tooele/Manti/Ephraim, Utah a.k.a. Putz were still around, he would understand completely.

I miss him.

If I start naming people I miss, we could be here all day.

Windfall

Today I received a check in the mail along with the following letter:

To: [Me]

From: AT&T MOBILITY WIRELESS DATA SERVICES

Subj: AT&T MOBILITY WIRELESS DATA SERVICES SALES TAX LITIGATION SETTLEMENT

This payment represents your (pro-rata) settlement amount resulting from the resolution of the AT&T MOBILITY WIRELESS SERVICES SALES TAX LITIGATION. If you paid taxes, fees or surcharges ("Internal Taxes") to AT&T Mobility LLC ("AT&T Mobility") on internet access through certain services including iPhone data plans, Blackberry data plans, other smart phone data plans, laptop connect cards and pay-per-use data services on bills issued from November 1, 2005 up to and including September 7, 2010, you are deemed eligible to receive this amount from the class action settlement. The funds contained in the check are a refund of your taxes that were covered by the settlement. This settlement is final. Depositing this check does not obligate you to any future product or service and you will not receive any additional correspondence relating to this settlement. If you have questions about the check or the settlement, please visit [web address] for more information. You may also write a letter to the Settlement Administrator at [address].

And right there, below the perforated line, was a check made out to me for the following amount:


The sum of $****Zero Dollars AND Three Cents****
$****0.03****

I used to opine, or maybe I was prophesying, that when my ship came in, there would probably be a dock strike. Well, I was wrong. There wasn't a dock strike. I just don't know where I'm going to spend it all.

But wasn't it sweet of them to give me permission to write them a letter?

A shout-out to Francis Scott Key

We are having a heat wave in this part of the world just now. Yesterday our high temperature was 95°F (35°C) but it felt worse than that. Our heat index (which has something to do with humidity, and we are nothing if not very humid) was between 100° and 105°F (37° to 40°C). These conditions are expected to last at least another week. We may all be fried before it is over.

As a Christian evangelist might say, "And it's going to get a lot hotter if you don't start living right."

In case you don't get the connection, the Christian evangelist would be referring to the fires of Hell.

When I was a kid growing up in Texas, we had such a long hot dry spell that the Baptists were sprinkling and the Methodists were using a damp cloth. One time I saw a dog chasing a cat and they were both walking.

I'm kidding. Yuk it up, folks, these are the jokes.

Yesterday was Flag Day in the United States and I had intended to publish all four verses of our national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, instead of the more traditional story of General George Washington asking Betsy Ross in 1777 to make the first American flag in Philadelphia. Operating under the theory that it is better late than never, I will do it now.

Here is the complete version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" showing spelling and punctuation from Francis Scott Key's 1814 manuscript in the Maryland Historical Society collection.

O say can you see, by the dawn's early light,
What so proudly we hail'd at the twilight's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
O'er the ramparts we watch'd were so gallantly streaming?
And the rocket's red glare, the bomb bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there,
O say does that star-spangled banner yet wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave?

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep
Where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream,
'Tis the star-spangled banner - O long may it wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!

And where is that band who so vauntingly swore,
That the havoc of war and the battle's confusion
A home and a Country should leave us no more?
Their blood has wash'd out their foul footstep's pollution.
No refuge could save the hireling and slave
From the terror of flight or the gloom of the grave,
And the star-spangled banner in triumph doth wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

O thus be it ever when freemen shall stand
Between their lov'd home and the war's desolation!
Blest with vict'ry and peace may the heav'n rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserv'd us a nation!
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is just,
And this be our motto - "In God is our trust,"
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave
O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

There. I did it and I'm glad. Another unbelievably esoteric post straight from my brain to you. And I never once mentioned (until now) the War Of 1812.

A beautiful absolutely marvelous word

But first, did you know that each and every day 21,500,000 people in this world celebrate birthdays? It's true. The population of the world is estimated to have been 7,868,000,000 as of January 1, 2022, and there are 365.25 days in a year. Do the math.

The same article told me that the world had grown by 74,000,000 people since the preceding January 1st, and that every single second 4.3 people are born and 2.0 people die.

I do hope someone out there finds such data interesting.

Stated differently, if the population of the world is A, the number of days in a year is B, and the number of people celebrating birthdays each day is C, the formula for determining C is C = A over (divided by) B. Just remember, when it comes to numerators and denominators, there is a fine line between them.

Well, enough of that. Onward and upward.

Way back in 1969, during the first season of the children's television series Sesame Street, Big Bird saw a sign containing the whole alphabet and said, "Boy, look at that beautiful absolutely marvelous word". He tried to pronounce it as one word and it came out (this is an approximation) "Abka-def-ghi-jekyl-min-op-quer-stuv-wik-siz". Then he launched into what became an iconic song sung several times over the years:

ABC-DEF-GHI-JKL-MNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ
It's the most remarkable word I've ever seen
ABC-DEF-GHI-JKL-MNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ
I wish I knew exactly what I mean
It starts out like an "A" word, as anyone can see
But somewhere in the middle it gets awful "QR" to me
ABC-DEF-GHI-JKL-MNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ
If I ever find out just what this word can mean
I'll be the smartest bird the world has ever seen!

What can that strange looking word possibly mean?
Funny word

It might be kind of an elephant
Or a funny kind of kazoo
Or strange, exotic turtle
You never see in a zoo
Or maybe a kind of a doggie
Or particular shade of blue
Or maybe a pretty flower

Nah, not with a name like that, uh-uh

ABC-DEF-GHI-JKL-MNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ
It's the most remarkable word I've ever seen
ABC-DEF-GHI-JKL-MNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ
I wish I knew exactly what I mean
It starts out like an "A" word as anyone can see
But somewhere in the middle it gets awful "QR" to me
ABC-DEF-GHI-JKL-MNOP-QRSTUV-WXYZ
If I ever find out just what this word can mean
I'll be the smartest bird the world has ever seen!

Whenever I think of that song, I do not think of Big Bird. I think of Mr. Snuffleupagus, who actually fits the bill as "kind of an elephant".

I also think of four places in the book of Revelation, the last book of the Christian New Testament. In chapter 1, verse 8, and chapter 21, verse 6, we read "I [the Lord] am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end." In chapter 1, verse 11, and chapter 22, verse 13, we read "I [the Lord] am Alpha and Omega, the first and the last."

As you probably know, the New Testament was written in Greek nearly 2,000 years ago. In the Greek alphabet the first letter is called Alpha and the last letter is called Omega. To my way of thinking, the Lord is not only Alpha and Omega (the first and last, the beginning and the end, the A and Z, as it were) but also all the letters in-between, everything that is needed to describe anything, the Greek version of Big Bird's absolutely beautiful marvelous word.

Here's the Greek alphabet:

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to step into your Big Bird costume (you know you want to) and devise a pronounceable word out of the Greek alphabet and report back here with the result. I'll even start you off:

Abga-dez-huh-thikl-minx-op-... and you take it from there.

The same person who wrote Revelation also wrote in another place, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God....and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth."

Words are important. Use them wisely.

An interesting article

Ignorance is not a pejorative, it merely reflects a lack of information and can be dispelled through education. Stupidity, on the other hand, lasts forever. As Forrest Gump once said, stupid is as stupid does. Stupidity is the scourge of the human race. If someone wants to know who said that, tell them I did.

I recommend for your reading entertainment and edification the following article by Corinne Purtill that was published in Quartz:

"The Five Universal Laws Of Human Stupidity"

Since it is June and it's hot and the humidity is rising, and the cloying fragrance of gardenias hangs heavy over our garden, and even though 78 years ago today Allied forces established a foothold on the beaches of Normandy, I shall end this post without further ado.

Until next time, I remain
Yr obdt svt and peripatetic observer

The ever-vigilant Rhymeswithplague

>