The Ides of November

Do you remember the song "Scarborough Fair" that Simon and Garfunkel sang several decades ago? When it runs through my head, as it sometimes does, I usually get the second line wrong. For some strange reason, instead of singing:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme

my brain remembers it as:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, cheese, rosemary, and thyme

This glimpse into my daily life is not a lead-in to anything. I'm not going anywhere with it. I just felt like sharing it with you today. If you detect some deep psychological meaning or flaw in my make-up, please share the details with all of us in a comment.

Gene Simmons and all the members of Kiss, or Heath Ledger as The Joker in the Batman movie, now there are guys with the possibility of flaws in their make-up.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Moving right along....

Since many or even most of you don't seem to care for geography or quizzes, and especially geographical quizzes, today's Geographical Momennt (yes, we're going to have one) is not a quiz but a simple, straightforward presentation I call Obscure Countries And Their Obscure Capitals. The format is Country (Capital):

Uzbekistan (Tashkent)
Turkmenistan (Ashgabat)
Kyrgyzstan (Bishkek)
Tajikistan (Dushanbe)
Eswatini (Mbabane, Lobamba)
Azerbaijan (Baku)
Lesotho (Maseru)
The Gambia (Banjul)
Malawi (Lilongwe)
Tuvalu (Funafuti)

An alternate name for the preceding list might be Places I Never Heard Of or, a little more eruditely, Places With Which I Was Heretofore Unfamiliar.

If you haven't yet found something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, be thankful I didn't ask you to match capitals to all 195 countries recognized by the United Nations.

Yea, verily.

I can't believe that the month is half over already and this is only my second post. There are just 40 days until Christmas, which fact should not give you merely pause but yet another reason besides the existence of this post to fear, as did Julius Caesar of old, the Ides of November.

Or something like that.

As Tigger always said, Ta Ta For Now.

The power of suggestibility

Instead of our regular geography lesson today, class, we're going to have a pop quiz. Let's begin.

1. Ougadoudou, Bobo-Dioulasso, Kougoudou, and Ouahigouya are:

a. Four people groups in Papua New Guinea
b. Four cities in Burkina Faso
c. Four languages spoken in Ghana
d. Four islands in the Malay/Indonesian archipelago

2. Sekpele, Lelemi, Siwu, and Tumulung are:

a. Four people groups in Papua New Guinea
b. Four cities in Burkina Faso
c. Four languages spoken in Ghana
d. Four islands in the Malay/Indonesian archipelago

3. Buka Buka, Legundi, Sebesi, and Sebuku are:

a. Four people groups in Papua New Guinea
b. Four cities in Burkina Faso
c. Four languages spoken in Ghana
d. Four islands in the Malay/Indonesian archipelago

Before proceeding, let's review your answers to the three questions posed above. There is still time to change your answers if you are unsure of them.

I'll wait.

The correct answers are 1-b, 2-c, and 3-d. Let me now ask you a final question.

4. What are Bonete, Tupungato, Sajama, and Palcaraju?

If, thinking logically, you said to yourself "Okay, if 1 is b and 2 is c and 3 is d, the answer to 4 is "a. Four people groups in Papua New Guinea" you would be wrong.

Actually, question 4 is not related in any way to questions 1, 2, and 3. Notice that I didn't repeat choices a, b, c, or d.

Bonete, Tupungato, Sajama, and Palcaraju are mountain peaks in the Andes range of South America.

"No fair," some of you are saying, "you led us astray." I did not lead you astray. You were led astray by falling into a pattern and being susceptible to suggestion.

I learned about this all-too-human tendency of ours in the eighth grade when our teacher, Mrs. Mary Lillard, asked the whole class to answer in unison out loud the principal parts of various verbs in English class.

"Be" said Mrs. Lillard and we said "Am, was, been."

"Go" said Mrs. Lillard and we said "Go, went, gone."

We went through quite a few verbs that day, both regular and irregular, when Mrs. Lillard must have had a twinkle in her eye.

"Only three more," she said. "Sink."

"Sink, sank, sunk," we said.

"Drink" said Mrs.Lillard and we said "Drink, drank, drunk."

"Think" said Mrs. Lillard and the whole class, warming to the task and brimmng with confidence, called out in unison "Think, thank, thunk."

The absurdity of it hit us almost immediately and we burst into laughter. From that day until now I have always tried to stay alert for pitfalls when answering a question.

Zounds! Gadzooks! and other expressions of surprise and delight

...such as Glory be! and Ye gods and little fishes!

I find that I am once again able to create blogposts using my computer screen and QWERTY keyboard! Not only that, but I can once again reply to comments from you, my vast reading public (yeah, right) on my my own blog!

Enough already with what my son-in-law would call a plethora of exclamation points. Let us continue in a more sedate fashion.

The sea-change occurred when I humbled myself and decided to take Tasker's and Rachel's suggestions and sign on to Google via Chrome. Shortly after resetting my Google password, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer the world the way it used to be before I was so rudely interrupted.

I really prefer to use Mozilla Firefox and DuckDuckGo and will continue to do so for all activities except blogging, as Google and Microsoft and who knows what else have long-since fallen into the nasty habit of tracing one's every step. This doesn't happen, I am assured, with Mozilla Firefox and DuckDuckGo. I'm just saying. If you prefer to keep doing things your way, be my guest. More power to you.

Any hoo, I am back in harness and hope to blog more frequently now that my fingers can move at their accustomed speed, something they could not do on an iPhone screen.

That's all for now. Keep your powder dry. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

Trust me, my giddiness will pass. It always does.

P.S. I saw a meme on Facebook the other day that I want to pass along to you. It said "I do not celebrate Halloween for the same reason that Satanists do not celebrate Easter. Light has no fellowship with darkness."

Three completely unrelated paragraphs

My thanks to reader Terra for suggesting that the names P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton be added to the list of people known by their initials. I thought also of W.E.B. Du Bois (American Socialist), who didn't occur to me earlier.

My thanks to reader Jenny The Pirate for her own very interesting blog that for some unknown reason I can no longer access. Did she remove the blog altogether? Did she change it into a private blog? I want you to know, Jenny, that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to and watching the video clip of your son performing Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Opus 26 by Sergei Prokofiev at the Cleveland Institute of Music. It was brilliant, mesmerising, a virtuoso performance. I'm sure you must be very proud of that young man's musical accomplishments, and you have every right to be.

Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana (no relation to John Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who went on to occupy the highest office in the land), is proof positive that freedom of speech is alive and well in the United States of America. I know this because with my own eyes and ears I saw and heard Senaror Kennedy say on television yesterday, "President Biden is older than the Adirondack Mountains" and he went on to say that the president's nominee to become U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, is absolutely the wrong man for the job and that if Lew had been alive when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor he would have recommended creation of a commission to determine what the U.S. had done that offended the Japanese.

My initial reaction

Some people are known by their names and some are known by their initials only. I have known several individuals over the years who used their initials, including:

O.M. Nessler (a classmate's older brother)
D.K. Ward (a classmate)
L.W. West (a classmate)
C.B. Gilstrap (my childhood barber)
H.O. Watkins (my daughter-in-law's grandmother's husband)
F.B. Griffis (our church organist's husband)
F.M. Moore, Jr. (choir director and friend for 45 years)

F.M.'s long-dead father was not called F.M. Moore, Sr., however. He was called Frank, which led me some 35 years into my friendship with F.M. to ask him if his name might possibly be Francis Marion. He admitted that it was. My hunch was right. Francis Marion was an American Brigadier General during the Revolutionary War that George III inspired. Marion was nicknamed "The Swamp Fox" for introducing guerilla-like tactics into modern warfare in, of all places, South Carolina.

Lots of people in all walks of life go by their initials. Here are some of them:

J.R.R. Tolkein (author)
K.D. Lang (singer)
A.E. Houseman (poet)
A.A. Milne (creator of Winnie the Pooh)
e.e. cummings (poet)
Y.A. Tittle (professional football player)
J.K. Rowling (author)
N.T. Wright (theologian)
I.M. Pei (architect)
C.S. Lewis (author)
T.S. Eliot (poet)
S.I. Hayakawa (author, academic, politician)

Consider also P.D.Q. Bach, R.E.O. Speedwagon, T.J. Hooker. That last one is a fictional police sergeant played by William Shatner in a television series of the same name. When Agatha Christie created fictional characters she gave them names. Jane Marple. Hercule Poirot. If names work for Agatha Christie, they ought also to work for writers of television scripts.

On second thought, if my parents had named me Clive Staples or Yelberton Abraham, I might prefer to use my initials too.

Time out

In an old episode of Matlock that Mrs. RWP and I were watching recently, Ben Matlock's young assistant, Cliff Lewis, asked eccentric FBI Agent Ed Wingate how to proceed after he (that is, Cliff) received a kiss on his cheek from Matlock's private investigator Jerri Stone and wondered whether she might be interested in him romantically.

"As the old saying goes, 'Slow and steady wins the race'", said Wingate, an obvious reference to Aesop's well-known fable The Tortoise and the Hare. Cliff looked confused and replied, "I thought it was 'the race is to the swift'".

Cliff was mistaken.

Sometimes people think I have a photographic memory. I do not, though my memory is very good. (I hasten to add here that several decades ago in Florida my friend Gene H. told our mutual friend Dick V. that I had a photogenic memory.)

A very wise man, possibly King Solomon, wrote a very long time ago (3000 years) that "the race is not [repeat, NOT] to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned, but time and chance happen to them all". You can find it in a book we now call Ecclesiastes.

All I'm saying is that when an actor portraying a minor character in a decades-old semi-popular television series speaks words written by a scriptwriter who didn't do enough research, I not only notice, I tell my friends about it.

As you may have surmised by now, this post is unimportant in the overall scheme of things, and totally without redeeming social value, but my hope is that it managed to take your mind off the world's troubles for a few minutes.

P.S. - In spite of my very good memory, my inability to reply to commnts on my own blog or leave comments on anyone else's blog continues. Tasker Dunham suggested that it might be because I do not sign on using Google Chrome. I prefer using Mozilla Firefox and DuckDuckGo, so perhaps I am shooting myself in the foot.

I’m not trying to be morbid or anything

...but for the past week or so death and dying have been on my mind quite a lot. Not my death or my dying, please note, and I fervently hope and trust my own death is still quite some time in the future. No, I've been reminded by the calendar of the deaths of several people in my life.

On September 26th I saw a post on Facebook about the funeral the day before of a friend of ours for more than 45 years from a former church, with whom we had lost touch.

On September 27 I remembered that in 2018 our 53-year-old niece was found dead on the floor of her bedroom by her widiwed mother about an hour after midnight. Our niece had recently separated from her third husband and moved with Simone, her German Shepherd dog, into her mother's home. Simone, who always slept in the same room as our niece, had come into the mother's bedroom and awakened her.

On September 28 I remembered that in 2015 Mrs.RWP's 84-year-old brother died after having been placed on "at-home hospice" with visiting nurses for about a month. He was the father of the niece mentioned earlier and it was his death that made a widoe of his wife, also mentioned earlier, to whom he had been married for 64 years. She herself died in bospice in November 2020 during the pandemic.

October 1st would have been the birthday of the niece that I mentioned above who died five years ago a few days before her 54th birthday.

It occurred to me on October 2nd that the day was the birthday of my youngest step-brother who died of a massive heart attack at the age of 54 in 1996.

Also on October 2nd, our oldest son called to let us know that his father-in-law, a retired physician, had died peacefully in his sleep during the pre-dawn hours. His wife called 911 when she discovered that he was not breathing. He was 87 years old.br>
October 4th is a day I always remember because it marks the anniversary of the day my mother died in 1957. She fought cancer for eight years before succumbing.

I guess I have reached the stage in life when deathdays are more common than birthdays. They occur with increasing frequency; at least it seemed so this week. There have been a whole slew of them.