Recent Triple Stumpers I Knew plus other topics

Who is Thor Heyerdahl?
What is Point Barrow?
What is jacuzzi?
What is Hong Kong?
Who is Calvin Coolidge?
What is Blithe Spirit?
What is sympathy?

If you do not watch Jeopardy!, these answers may seem easy but the clues are not always obvious. For Calvin Cooldge, for example, the category was "Vermont" (other answers in the category included what is skiing?, what is maple syrup?, what is Green Mountains?). This clue was a visual one, a photo of a house, while the emcee said, "In this house on August 2, 1923, this man was told that he was president of the United States." One contestant guessed William Howard Taft (who was president from 1909 to 1913). One contestant guessed Herbert Hoover (Coolidge's successor). One contestant guessed Warren G. Harding (Coolidge's predecessor). If one knew that 1923 was not a traditional inauguration year following an American presidential election it might have suggested that the former president died in office, an additional clue to figuring out the answer.

Thor Heyerdahl is the Norwegian who sailed on a raft from South America to the islands of Polynesia (it wasn't part of the clue but he wrote about his trip in the book Kon-Tiki). Point Barrow in Alaska is the northernmost place in the United States. Hong Kong is "a city in China whose name consists of two syllables that rhyme" (other answers in the category included the words hobnob and pinyin). What you might be offered in the play called "Tea And ________" is Sympathy. Blithe Spirit is the name of a play by Noel Coward whose title was taken from a description of a bird in a poem by Shelley.

Apparently no one ever had to read "To A Skylark" which begins 'Hail to thee, blithe spirit! Bird thou never wert'.

On to other topics.

1. A recent addition to my list of pet peeves is people who call fentanyl fentanol.

2. Today, April 4th, turned out to be a red-letter day in the rhymeswithplague household; we finally took down the Christmas decorations (the Nativity scene on the foyer credenza, the Dickensian Christmas village of 15 homes and community buildings spread rhrough two rooms with lots of little wintry figures on several feet of cotton batting for snow). We've never taken this long before. This year is a new record. We did manage to remove the wreath from the front door in January.

3. Speaking of Christmas, one of my favorite Christmas carols is the 17th-century French carol "Quelle Est Cette Odeur Agréable?" which became the English carol "Whence Is That Goodly Fragrance Flowing?" even though Google Translate translates the original as "What Is That Pleasant Smell?"

4. In his sermon two Sundays ago our young pastor Justin stated that the King James Version of the Bible is the only English version that has Jesus saying "In my Father's house are many mansions" in John 14:2, that all the others have 'rooms' or 'dwelling places' or 'abodes'.

I immediately went into Reaganesque "trust, but verify" mode. To put it in a better light spiritually, St. Paul wrote that the Bereans "were more noble than those in Thessalonica, in that they...searched the scriptures daily to see whether these things were so".

When i got home I entered John 14:2 into Biblegateway.com and asked to see every English version. There were 62 entries (I counted) and eight (8) of them said 'mansions'. The one that surprised me most among the eight was the Douay-Rheims (the Catholid version) of 1582, which preceded the KJV by 29 years.

This has been another day/week in the life of yours truly, rhymeswithplague. You are now free to comment on any of these subjects that piqued your interest or to ignore them all.