Saturday, April 30, 2022

Friday’s no-buzz-ins on Jeopardy!

...that I nonetheless knew:

What is Sugar Loaf?
Who is Pepin?

Can you tell me (without Googling anything) the clues that resulted in these two responses?

My dad used to say some strange things, such as "Fingers were made before forks" and "Wish in one hand and spit in the other and see what you get the most of" and "put your hand on your 'huh?' and see if your heart's beating". What strange things did your dad say?

He also said that "Hesky hokey damey, hubisku" meant "Nice girl, give me a kiss" in 'Bohunk' but Google Translate is of no help whatever.

Tomorrow being May 1st, it is 12 days until what would have been my dad's 116th birthday. Maybe I suffer from a sort of seasonal affective disorder where he is concerned. Who is to say?

This post makes no sense at all, but I'm going to publish it anyway. Why should today be any different?

Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Another happy day

A couple of weeks (British, fortnight) ago, our entire family and an entourage of prospective members, 19 of us in all, traveled about 250 miles to an area not far from Savannah, Georgia, to attend and witness the wedding of our second oldest grandson, Matthew, and his lovely bride, Katy. It was a beautiful outdoor wedding in a pastoral setting at a place called Spring Hollow Farm, and a good time was had by all.

Here's proof:
Above: Parents and siblings of the bride and groom gather to pray for the newlyweds. Matthew's parents (our older son and daughter-in-law) have their backs to the camera. Katy's parents are on their left. Mrs. RWP's shoulder is in the foreground.

Above: First kiss after being pronounced husband and wife.

Above: Our daughter and her husband are on the left, our younger son and his wife are on the right.

Above: Our two sons and our two daughters-in-law.

Above: A good time being had by all.

Above: Our younger son and his wife with their niece, the groom's sister, our only granddaughter. As one of Katy's bridesmaids, she made it into all of the official photographs but hardly any of the candid ones.

Above: All the twigs on one branch of our family tree.

Above: All the twigs on another branch of our family tree.

Grandpa (me) did appear in a few candid photos, but you already know what I look like.

The fact that seven of the groom's relatives came down with Covid-19 upon returning to our places of residence after the wedding is merely a footnote to history.

Now that our two oldest grandsons are married and a third became engaged two days ago, we can begin to look forward to the arrival of great-grandchildren.

Wednesday, April 20, 2022

This is a test

In my last post I changed fonts so many times to achieve the kaleidoscope of hues that when I was finished old Blogger was confused and continued the brown through the remainder of the post and all through the comments section. Commenter Neil Theasby (our friend Yorkshire Pudding) said that he preferred 'boring old black'.

This short post is a test to see whether Blogger has returned to its/her/his/their senses and restored boring old black as the default value for my posts.

Pushing 'Publish' will determine if my suspicions are correct. I will push it now and we will all see together.

You needn't comment on this post unless you really want to because, as I said, this is a test.

Monday, April 18, 2022

What if poetic devices announced themselves in color?

Alliteration might be red:

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

and we mustn't leave out "a damsel with a dulcimer" a few lines later in the same poem.

A dactyl (a metric foot consisting of one stressed syllable followed by two unstressed syllables) might be orange:

This is the forest primeval, the murmuring pines and the hemlocks....

An anapest (a metric foot consisting of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable) might be, oih, I don't know, magenta:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,
And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
When the blue wave rolls nightly on dark Galilee.

What if an iamb (a two-syllable metric foot with the stress on the second syllable) were gold and blue? You would see:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

What if a trochee (a two-syllable metric foot with the stress on the first syllable) were brown and chartreuse? You would see:

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

If poetic devices announced themselves in color, the world would be a much more colorful place. Life would be a lot more interesting, or a lot more confusing, or both.

I hope this post didn't make your head swim.

Can you identify the poems and the poets?

Wednesday, April 13, 2022

An important announcement:

...because (a) I am in the world but not of the world according to Jesus Christ and (b) keeping up with myself is a full-time job.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

P.S. - As a response to a question from Tasker Dunham in the comments section (Who are the Kardashians?), I am adding several articles about them below for your edification.

Kardashian family

Kim Kardashian

Khloé Kardashian

The Kardashians

If you can't be bothered reading all of that, you might find these facts interesting: Kris Kardashian's husband, Robert Kardashian, was one of O.J. Simpson's lawyers (along with the well-known attorney Robert Shapiro) at O.J.'s trial for murder. After Kris and Robert Kardashian were divorced, Kris married Bruce Jenner, the American athlete who won the gold medal in the decathlon in the 1976 Summer Olympics. Bruce is known today as Caitlin Jenner for reasons of his/her own.

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Tuesday, April 5, 2022

Everybody doesn’t know what everybody knows

I have written three very long posts since the middle of last month and ended up discarding all three. They were hopelessly boring and the last thing I want to do is bore you.

So I will just wing it today with a short post before you forget about me altogether.

I continue to watch Jeopardy! each weekday evening and I continue to be amazed that people smart enough to be on that program do not know stuff that everybody knows. Here are the latest two mind-bogglng examples:

Nobody knew that the song that contains the lyrics "you may see a stranger across a crowded room" is "Some Enchanted Evening" from South Pacific. I'm sure that Ezio Pinza and Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II are all spinning in their graves.

And nobody knew that the name by which Cape Canaveral was known from 1963 to 1973 was Cape Kennedy. I mean, really?

I guess I shouldn't be too hard on the younger crowd. At 81, I am obviously a child of the 20th century.

<b>Always true to you, darlin’, in my fashion</b>

We are bombarded daily by abbreviations in everyday life, abbreviations that are never explained, only assumed to be understood by everyone...