What’s wrong with this picture?

The correct answer, I suppose, is “Nothing.”

This is a photo of Harry Reid, the senior United States Senator from Nevada, a member of the Democratic Party, and the Majority Leader of the U. S. Senate since January 2007. He is to the Senate as Representative Steny Hoyer from Maryland’s Fifth Congressional District is to the House of Representatives. Notice I did not say Nancy Pelosi. She is Speaker of the House, a different office entirely than Majority Leader. Her counterpart in the Senate is Vice-President Joe Biden. So much for getting the details right. Let us move on.

I don’t know when that photo was taken, or where, or at what occasion, but Senator Reid appears to be praying. As a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (that is, Mormons) he may well be praying. Nancy Pelosi is a member of the Roman Catholic Church. She probably prays also.

A more pertinent question might be, “What do Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi pray for?”

I will hazard a few guesses. The passage of their version of Healthcare legislation in their respective spheres of influence? The demise of FOX News? Re-election? Forgiveness? No one knows, really.

But these lyrics from one of the songs in Godspell might be a good place for all of us to start:

Day by day,
Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord,
Three things I pray:
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.

Day by day by day by day by day....

Not by eastern windows only

Here’s a real-life example of what I think the nineteenth-century English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough (1819 - 1861) was talking about in that poem of his I showed you the other day (you can read the poem here):

Fred Rogers’ Acceptance Speech after receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1997 Daytime Emmy Awards ceremony


If you happen to be among the few people who have never heard of either the much-beloved Mr. Rogers or his long-running, award-winning children’s program on American public television, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, you can read about him and it here and here.

And if you do remember Mr. Rogers, here is a message from him to you.

The shortest distance between two points...

...is a straight line, as we all know, except when one of the points is the town of Sheffield in England and the other point is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

In a comment on the previous post, Mr. David Barlow of Ephraim, Utah, took me to task. He accused me of rambling and even of being a tease, all because I had mentioned Santiago, Chile, and the Andes Mountains and these seemed to him to be unrelated to the rest of my post (which, you will recall, was about my friend Yorkshire Pudding’s trip to Easter Island or, as it is known to its closest friends, Rapa Nui).

What I neglected to say in that post was that YP had left his home in Sheffield, England, in the capable hands of his wife, Shirley, and made his way to Heathrow Airport in London (a distance of 176 miles), where he boarded a plane bound for Madrid, Spain (a distance of 783 miles), where he boarded another plane bound for Santiago, Chile (a distance of 6637 miles), where he did a little sightseeing, and then boarded still another plane bound for his ultimate destination, Easter Island (a distance of 2000 miles), a total distance of 9596 miles, give or take a furlong. In Texas, that is what is known as “a mighty fur piece.”

Something else I neglected to mention was that Santiago, Chile, was Yorkshire Pudding’s final “jumping off point” for Easter Island.

More, I trust, will be forthcoming regarding Easter Island itself from the aforementioned Yorkshire Pudding.

Here is a photograph of chili peppers growing.


It has nothing to do with either Santiago, Chile, or Easter Island. I just threw it in for good measure.

Blogging is so broadening enlightening

My British blogging friend, Yorkshire Pudding, whose real name I have never been able to determine, retired a couple of months ago from a 30-year teaching career. As a sort of present to himself, he has decided to fulfill a lifelong dream and take a trip to Rapa Nui to see the Moai. (If that last part made no sense whatever to you, Rapa Nui is another name for Easter Island and the Moai are the 887 monumental statues that have been found on the island.)


That is not Easter Island. Don’t be silly! That is Santiago, Chile, from the air, with some of the Andes Mountains in the background and a layer of smog obscuring the view. According to Wikipedia, the Andes range is over 7,000 km (4,300 mi) long, 200 km (120 mi) to 700 km (430 mi) wide, and of an average height of about 4,000 meters (13,000 ft). The metropolitan area of Santiago, Chile, is home to more than 7,000,000 people, which helps to explain the smog.

No, dear hearts, this is Easter Island:



To read more about Easter Island, click here.

To read more about the Moai, click here.

Here is a sample of the so-far-indecipherable "rongo-rongo script" of the original inhabitants of Rapa Nui, the ones who apparently erected the 887 moai:



Perhaps Yorkshire Pudding is also going to Easter Island to see these:


They are described in the middle row of the rongo-rongo script if I have interpreted it correctly.

Whatever his reasons, just click here to let Yorkshire Pudding be your guide on this fascinating journey.

When you’re feeling outnumbered or all alone or ready to give up

I recommend reading this poem by the nineteenth-century English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough (1819 - 1861):


Say Not The Struggle Naught Availeth
by the nineteenth-century English poet, Arthur Hugh Clough (1819 - 1861)

Say not the struggle naught availeth,
The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
It may be, in yon smoke conceal’d,
Your comrades chase e’en now the fliers,
And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!


This particular poem, though quite old-fashioned by modern standards, has been one of my favorites for a very long time. I especially like the last stanza. Did I mention that the poem was written by the nineteenth-century British poet, Arthur Hugh Clough (1819 - 1861)?

I thought I did.

I wonder if you might have any idea who this could be:


I thought you might.

Your government at work

This October 17, 2009, article from the Sun-Sentinel in Fort Lauderdale says it all.

Mr. David Barlow of Ephraim, Utah, please note that your home state is featured prominently near the end of the Sun-Sentinel article.

My brother-in-law and his wife, who moved to Orlando shortly after they spent their honeymoon in Florida almost 49 years ago, have put a For Sale sign in their yard and are planning to move back to North Carolina. Nothing could be finer than to be alive in Carolina in the morning.

Triage is basically good, I guess. And any plan is better than no plan at all.

Ya think?

Five, er, Twelve Golden Rings

Because I am interested in where the people who visit my blog are from, I installed that Feedjit thingy over there in the left sidebar to record your visits. When I see a country that has not visited before, I save its flag on my hard drive. Currently I have 97 different flags saved on my hard drive. The most recent addition, just yesterday, was Ghana.

Ghana (not to be confused with Guinea or Guyana) is located in West Africa. Specifically, it is bordered on the west by Côte d’Ivoire (formerly Ivory Coast), on the east by Togo (formerly French Togoland), on the north by Burkino Faso (formerly the Republic of Upper Volta), and on the south by the Gulf of Guinea (formerly part of the Atlantic Ocean -- oops, I mean, part of the Atlantic Ocean).


Ghana made me sit up and take notice because some friends of ours, Andy and Kate Ring, have lived in Ghana for most of the past thirty years. There must be something in Ghanaian water, because they eventually had ten children: Thad, Isaac, Toby, Ben, Hiram, Seth, Ethan, John, Alisha, and Mary. (To be fair, several of the children were born before the Rings went to Ghana.) One time I said to Andy, “I know what you’re trying to do, Andy. You’re trying singlehandedly to bring baseball to West Africa.” The Rings lived in northern Ghana, in Tamale (TOM-uh-lee, not tuh-MAH-lee as in Spanish):


When we met them in 1975, Andy was completing an MA in Structural Linguistics at Florida Atlantic University. Andy now holds a PhD in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University, and Kate holds an MA in Social Sciences from Azusa Pacific University. A few months after we met them, the Rings joined Wycliffe Bible Translators. After attending Wycliffe’s Jungle Camp in Mexico for several months, they eventually moved to Ghana in 1979. They started translation work among the Lelemi-speaking people in 1981. In 1995, the Ring family and a team of Ghanaian co-workers brought the Lelemi New Testament to completion. More recently, Andy (I should call him Dr. Ring) has been a pioneer in combining computers and teams of native translators from different language groups who met together regularly in what was called the Volta Region Multi-Project (VRMP). As a result, and much faster than previously, they recently completed four New Testaments in Selee (seh-LAY), Sekpele (SEK-peh-leh), Tuwuli (TOO-willy), and Siwu (SEE-woo). I'm sure I'm showing you only the tip of the iceberg about the work Andy Ring has done involving linguistics.

Apart from their translation work, the Rings have led survey teams in Ghana to identify languages still needing translation. According to Wikipedia, the 2009 edition of the Ethnologue contains statistics for 7,358 languages in the world (not all scholars share the same set of criteria for what constitutes a ‘language’ and what features define a ‘dialect’) and 580 of these are in Ghana (but see the Update at the end of this post. --RWP). Officially, the language of Ghana is English, but there are nine other government-sponsored languages recognized by Ghana's Bureau of Ghana Languages: Akan, Dagaare/Wale, Dagbane, Dangme, Ewe, Ga, Gonja, Kasem, and Nzema. In addition, Twi and Fante (two dialects of Akan), although not government-sponsored, are widely-spoken in Ghana, and Hausa is widely used by Muslims in Ghana.

And you thought learning Spanish was hard.

On April 18, 2009, the Sekpele New Testament was dedicated in Likpe-Maate. Mr. George Maalug Kombian, the acting director of GILLBT (Ghana Institute of Linguistics, Literacy, and Bible Translation), said that the New Testament has now been translated into 20 Ghanaian languages and the entire Holy Bible (Old and New Testaments) has been translated into 3 languages by GILLBT.

Here are recent photos of Kate (with Mary) and Andy (with one of his paintings):


(Photos © Andy & Kate Ring)

I almost forgot. The flag of Ghana looks like this:


[Update. I have received an e-mail from Andy Ring saying he believes the reference in Wikipedia to 580 languages in Ghana is incorrect. He thinks 580 is the correct figure for the number of languages in Nigeria. Andy also included a link to this page in the current Ethnologue that puts the number of languages in Ghana at 79. I apologize for the incorrect figure in my original post. -- RWP, Oct. 20, 2009]