Parkinson was right

I don’t know for certain, but I may not be posting much in the next week or two, or perhaps month or two.

It’s nothing against you, my loyal readers. It’s just that life’s responsibilities have gotten in the way of my incessant and constant need to post something on my blog.

And by “life’s responsibilities” I mean specifically both (a) the fact that between the early voting period and the actual election day I will spend seven long, full days and parts of a couple of others working for the county and (b) the fact that as the person solely responsible for music in our small church I need to plan and rehearse with people for the upcoming Advent and Christmas seasons.

Our church has not had a choir in several years. Even though it has a choir loft that can seat more than 20 singers, the current congregation as a whole is perhaps less interested in music than any group I have encountered before. Many (though not all) enjoy listening to it but few are interested in producing it. Since I arrived in the summer of 2010, we have managed to put together a small men’s ensemble and a small women’s ensemble -- it’s the ensembles that are small, not the men and women -- who have sung a couple of times during the year, although meeting for rehearsals has been like pulling teeth at times. The pastor wants both groups to sing again during December, so I need to find suitable pieces of music with the right degree of non-difficulty. There is also the children’s handbell choir to contend with be joyfully involved with once again. Some of last year’s participants have aged out into the youth department; other new children have come in who never played handbells before, and we have only a portion of the Sunday School hour in which to learn and rehearse over the next few weeks, as virtually no parent will commit to evening rehearsals during the school year. I do not want to antagonize the Sunday School teachers either. There will also be two Christmas Eve services, one at 5 p.m. and one at 11 p.m., that require music.

Did I tell you that my official title is “pianist”?

I don’t mean to whine, and it’s not that I’m overwhelmed with tasks exactly, but the responsibilities weigh heavily upon me.
I will have more than enough to do without trying to find additional time for blogging.

If you are not involved in local politics or music, you may not feel my pain. If you are involved in two or more important activities at once, you understand where I’m coming from.

As Parkinson’s Law states, “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”

You know what? Parkinson was right.

We voted today

...by which I mean, by the time you are reading this, if you read it on the same day I finally got around to posting it, yesterday. Is that clear?

The U.S. presidential election will be held on Tuesday, November 6th. Many states, however -- but certainly not all of them -- have instituted an “early voting” process. In Georgia it seems to be limited to the more populous counties.

Cherokee County’s early voting began on Monday. Our county has 44 precincts. From October 15th through October 26th -- except Saturdays or Sundays -- early voting is permitted at one location only, the County Board of Elections building in the town of Canton, which is the county seat. Beginning on Saturday, October 27th, and then again from Monday, October 27th, through Friday, November 2nd, four of the county libraries will be added as advance voting locations. Any registered voter who lives in Cherokee County can go to any one of the five locations to vote early. On election day itself (Tuesday, November 6th), when all 44 precincts will be staffed, voters must vote in the precinct in which they reside.

Monday night’s news was filled with shots of long lines waiting to vote early in various counties around metro Atlanta. And although more than 1,100 people voted on Monday in Cherokee County, we encountered no lines and no wait whatsoever when we showed up at the Board of Elections building Tuesday afternoon around 4:00 p.m.

We waltzed in and we waltzed out.

The whole thing, from start to finish, took less than ten minutes.

So there won’t be any standing in long lines on election day for me. Nosirree. Nosirree, Bob.

For me, there will be a lot of sitting at a table inside the precinct and helping people who have been standing in the long lines.

Se habla Español aqui

I saw a commercial on TV the other day about learning Spanish, French, or German online, free of charge. I immediately decided to take up Spanish and hied myself over to the site and allowed as how I would like to learn it posthaste.

So far, things seem to be going well. After only a few days, I'm already at level 6. I have no idea how many levels there are, though. Probably 157.

We Level 6 virtuosos can say many useful things in Spanish that are sure to come in handy every single day. Here are a few actual sentences I have learned:

1. Nosotros no tocamos la cebolla. (We do not touch the onion.)

2. ¿Oyes caballos? (Do you hear horses?)

3. Yo bebo vino blanco mientres como pollo. (I drink white wine while I eat chicken.)

4. Mi perro duerme sobre mi camisa. (My dog sleeps on top of my shirt.)

5. La niña bebes jugo de naranja. (The child drinks orange juice.)

Once I have mastered Spanish, I am definitely planning to learn German and take a refresher course in French.

After all, the price is right and I have a lot of time on my hands.

A pome for my readers

If Yorkshire Pudding can be a self-confessed poemoholic, I can at least give it the old college try:

A Blogger’s Lament
by rhymeswithplague (1941 - )

My posts are a-growin’,
But my comments are slowin’,
And soon there may be none at all.
I’ve an urge to keep writin’
But the fish are not bitin’;
I might as well talk to the wall.

My blog is a-waxin’,
My audience wanin’,
Just like that old moon up above.
I’ll still keep on sharin’
Though few seem a-carin’;
They have other people to love.

So I sit here a-pinin’
While my blog is declinin’,
Perhaps people think I have germs;
I don’t know what they’re thinkin’
But their thinkin’ is stinkin’;
I’ll go outside now and eat worms.

(End of pome)

I don’t know why, but those three extremely clever little stanzas (if I do say so myself), which just seemed to create themselves in about five minutes flat, have put me in mind of a song the members of our high school band used to sing while riding on the band bus to our school’s football games:

“Nobody likes me,
Everybody hates me,
I’m gonna eat some worms.
Long, slicky, slimy ones;
Short, fat, and grimy ones;
Itsy-bitsy, fuzzy-wuzzy worms.”

(End of song)

We also sang “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall” and “Helen had a steamboat” but they are obviously off-topic.

Really, where else are you going to read posts like these?

Today is the real Columbus Day

...as opposed to the phony Columbus Day last Monday that was foisted upon us by our federal government during Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration to ensure that government workers enjoyed a three-day weekend every year during October, one of their many three-day weekends each year, if I may be so bold as to point out the obvious to you.

Accordingly, I have decided to dig into my archives and re-publish an old post:


American History, rhymeswithplague-style

In the European version of things, the New World (that is, actual land in the Western Hemisphere as opposed to more ocean) was discovered by the Vikings or Leif Ericson or somebody more than a thousand years ago. This event was commemorated in the British comedy film, Carry On, Norse.

(Note.The native population of the New World, who pointed out that the European version of things is not always accurate, were considered irrelevant and a bit of a nuisance.)

Later, during the year that Michelangelo sculpted this and this for Lorenzo de’ Medici, Queen Isabella I of Castile sent out one Christoffa Corombo of Genoa, Italy, and his merry men in three ships called the Nina, the Piñata, and the Santa Gertrudis. Christoffa Corombo, whose name morphed into Christoforo Columbo in modern Italian and Christopher Columbus in English, was known as Cristóbal Colón in Spain. This is fortunate, because Cristóbal and Colón are the names of two places on the isthmus of Panama, where Spanish is the predominant language, and Panamanians might otherwise have thought Cristóbal was part of a gypsy fortune-teller’s act and Colón referred to the part of the body between the stomach and the anal sphincter.

It’s not every day a person gets to use the word isthmus, and I am honored to have been able to use it today.

Lorenzo de’ Medici died in Florence, but we aren’t going to go there.

Christoffa Christoforo Cristóbal Christopher Isabella’s new friend set out from Spain on August 3, 1492, and returned a few months later saying he had claimed the entire New World for Spain on October 12, 1492, just because he had landed on a small island in the Bahamas. He returned to Lisbon, Portugal, in March 1493, and made four voyages in all to the New World, causing thousands of schoolchildren over the ensuing centuries to have to recite this little poem from memory:

“In fourteen hundred ninety-three,
Columbus sailed the deep blue sea.
He had done the same thing too
In fourteen hundred ninety-two.
He liked to sail so he sailed some more
In fourteen hundred ninety-four.
Though hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers fourteen ninety-five,
He made more trips ’til Spain said ‘Nix’;
He died in the year fifteen naught-six.”

Or something like that.

Portugal was definitely not a happy camper and wanted Pope Alexander VI to divide the newly discovered lands between Spain and Portugal. He did so, although by whose authority is a little murky, along a meridian 370 leagues west of the Cape Verde Islands, leading King Ferdinand II of Aragon, Isabella’s husband and also her second cousin, to wonder aloud, “How much is a league, exactly?”

A century later the English navy defeated the Spanish armada, Portugal had faded into obscurity, and it became a moot point how much a league is exactly, because the English, the French, the Dutch, and the Swedish (and, for all I know, the Maltese, the Luxembourgers, the Lithuanians, and the inhabitants of the Outer Hebrides) began to explore the northern part of North America and claim it for themselves. Spain had everything else in the new hemisphere from Mexico south except Brazil, which belonged to Portugal, and that is why to this day Brazilians write San Paulo as São Paulo.

Eventually the French had Quebec, downtown Pittsburgh, the federal prison in Joliet, Illinois, and Louisiana, which at that time included Montana. The English threw the French out in 1763, however, at the end of the Seven Years’ War, which had begun, conveniently, in 1756. The French got to keep Louisiana for another forty years, which is why one of the first sentences everyone learns in French is “Quelle temp est-il?” and another one is “Laissez les bons temps roulez!” Then they sold it to Thomas Jefferson, who considered going to New Orleans during Mardi Gras one of his unalienable rights.

Not to be outdone, the American colonists threw England out in 1776 after Patrick Henry cried, “Give me the Statue of Liberty or give me death” but Lord Cornwallis didn’t surrender until 1781 at Yorktown, not to be confused with York (Pennsylvania), New York (New York), or Yorkshire (home of Leeds, York, Sheffield, Bradford, and Hull, which, despite what you may think, is not the name of a Wall Street law firm).

Shortly after that, everything became George W. Bush’s fault.

[Editor's note. “American History, rhymeswithplague-style” was originally published on August 23, 2010, which was not Columbus Day either. --RWP]

It was Heraclitus, I think

...who said in the fifth century B.C., “The only permanent thing is change,” only he said it in Greek, of course, unless he didn’t say it at all, which is also a possibility. And if he didn’t say it at all, he said something very much like it: “No man steps in the same river twice” -- except it turns out he didn’t say that either. But “The only permanent thing is change” is a fair summation of what he is supposed to have said or not said, if you get my drift. So much for my exhaustive research.

I have been thinking of Heraclitus the last few mornings when I have taken Jethro out for his daily constitutionals around dawn. Dawn itself changes every day, being a little later each morning as our Earth moves around in its orbit, imperceptibly, and the direct rays of the sun at its zenith get a little farther south each day toward the Tropic of Capricorn because of the 23-and-a-half degree tilt of Earth’s axis. And when the direct rays of the sun at its zenith reach the Tropic of Capricorn, they will reverse themselves and start to move northward and dawn will become a little earlier each morning once again until the Earth is on the opposite side of its orbit and the direct rays of the sun at its zenith reach the Tropic of Cancer, when the whole 365-and-one-quarter-days cycle begins again.

I know too much astronomical trivia for my own good.

Anyway, as I was saying, I’ve been taking Jethro out around dawn and gazing up into the sky at a time when it isn’t night any more but it really isn’t day yet either. And do you know what I see?

Four lights.

The waning moon, the planet Venus, the dog star Sirius, and -- high overhead -- the planet Jupiter.

I know, to quote Carl Sagan, that there are “billions and billions” of stars out there, some of which, if I had ventured outdoors an hour earlier, I could have seen plainly. And even though they were all still there, I couldn’t see them at all. And had I waited another hour, even the four lights I did see would have been obscured in the light of old Sol.

You just know I’m going to make a Christian comment here.

Here goes:

In a universe where everything is changing constantly, where even rivers change in the length of time it takes to put your foot in, take it out, and put it in again, where one day Angelina Jolie is going to marry Brad Pitt and the next day she’s not, I’m so glad that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever (Hebrews 13:8) and that every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variation or shadow of turning (James 1:17).

Yes, I am.

(Image from stars.astro.illinois.edu/sow/oricma-p.html)

We might as well go ahead and get it over with

I mean, if Yorkshire Pudding (not his real name) can write about Yorkshire puddings, I’ll see his Yorkshire pudding and raise him a haggis.

In a comment on my previous post about F.M. Moore wearing a kilt, a commenter brought up the subject of Scottish restaurants, which made me think of Scottish food, which made me think of haggis, which made me think, naturally, of poetry.

If you’re not familiar with haggis, you can read all about it here.

When you’re finished retching, we can proceed.

I’ll wait.

So, being Scottish and all, Robert Burns wrote a poem in 1787 called “Address To a Haggis” because he had already written poems to a mouse and to a louse and was trying to plumb the depths, as it were, for more material.

I am going to show you the poem, but first, as a public service,
I am going to list nigh onto 30 explanatory notes (Scotsmen say things like “nigh onto” all the time) because without them you will never understand Burns’s poem:

Explanatory Notes for the Non-Scottish
1. sonsie = jolly/cheerful
2. aboon = above
3. painch = paunch/stomach
4. thairm = intestine
5. hurdies = buttocks
6. dicht = wipe, here with the idea of sharpening
7. slicht = skill
8. reeking = steaming
9. deil = devil
10. swall’d = swollen
11. kytes = bellies
12. belyve = soon
13. bent like = tight as
14. auld Guidman = the man of the house
15. rive = tear, i.e. burst
16. olio = stew, from Spanish olla’/stew pot
17. staw = make sick
18. scunner = disgust
19. nieve = fist
20. nit = louse’s egg, i.e. tiny
21. wallie = mighty
22. nieve = fist
23. sned = cut off
24. thristle = thistle
25. skinkin ware = watery soup
26. jaups = slops about
27. luggies = two-“eared” (handled) continental bowls


And now, here is the poem:

Address To a Haggis
by Robert Burns (1759 - 1796)

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang’s my arm.

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o’ need,
While thro’ your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.

His knife see rustic Labour dicht,
An’ cut you up wi’ ready slicht,
Trenching your gushing entrails bricht,
Like ony ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sicht,
Warm-reekin, rich!

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an’ strive:
Deil tak the hindmaist! on they drive,
Till a’ their weel-swall’d kytes belyve,
Are bent like drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
“Bethankit” hums.

Is there that o’re his French ragout
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
Wi’ perfect scunner,
Looks down wi’ sneering, scornfu’ view
On sic a dinner?

Poor devil! see him ower his trash,
As feckless as a wither’d rash,
His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash,
His nieve a nit;
Thro’ bloody flood or field to dash,
O how unfit!

But mark the Rustic, haggis fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his wallie nieve a blade,
He’ll mak it whistle;
An' legs an’ arms, an’ heads will sned,
Like taps o’ thristle.

Ye Pow’rs wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinkin ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer,
Gie her a haggis!

(End of poem)

You know something? It is my considered opinion that even with nigh onto 30 explanatory notes, you still will never understand Burns’s poem.

But I hope that Ian, a lad with a Scottish name who lives in Lancashire and shoots parrots in his spare time, has had his fill of things Scottish today.