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Word-Wednesday for July 4, 2018

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, July 4, 2018, brought to you by the Roseau Area Food Shelf. Please contact us directly by phone to donate and/or volunteer;(218) 463-1154; 108 Third Avenue SW Roseau, MN 56751.

Days without a timberwolf, black bear, or lemur attack on a Wannaska Almanac contributing author: 26,033

July 4 is the 185th day of the year, with 180 days remaining until the end of the year, and 271 days remaining until April Fools Day.

Earth/Moon Almanac for July 4, 2018
Sunrise: 5:23am; Sunset: 9:21pm
Moonrise: 1:08am Moonset: 10:48am, waning gibbous

Temperature Almanac for July 4, 2018
            Average    Record    Today
High        76            90            84
Low         51             34            56

July 4 Celebrations from National Day
Independence Day (USA)
National Barbecued Spareribs Day
National Caesar Salad Day

July 4 Math Riddle
If Thor throws an isoscoles triangle out of his car while the car is moving at 20 kilometers/hour, how many cupcakes can Chairman Joe buy with his one human soul?*

July 4 Notable historic events, literary or otherwise, from On This Day
1054 brightest known supernova, SN 1054, creates the Crab Nebula, 1st reported by Chinese astronomers, Russians later claim they saw it first

1796 1st Independence Day celebration is held

1827 Slavery abolished in New York

1845 Henry David Thoreau moves into his shack on Walden Pond
1855 the first edition of Walt Whitman's book of poems Leaves of Grass is published

1862 Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) creates Alice in Wonderland for Alice Liddell on a family boat trip on the river Isis (Thames) in Oxford [persons from shore report trail of mushrooms in boat's wake]

1865 First edition of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll is published
1866 Firecracker thrown in wood starts fire destroying half of Portland, Maine [please be careful today]

1884 Statue of Liberty presented to US in Paris, shipping charges discussed later

1888 1st organized rodeo competition held, Prescott, Arizona, after long discussion of abandoning the merits of disorganized rodeo

July 4 author/artist birthdays, from On This Day
1804 Nathaniel Hawthorne, House of 7 Gables, The Scarlet Letter

1850 Ole Olsen, Norwegian composer and organist

1868 Henrietta Swan Leavitt, American astronomer

1883 Rube Goldberg, cartoonist

1905 Lionel Trilling, author

1927 Neil Simon, Odd Couple, Plaza Suite, Biloxi Blues

1943 Milan Máčala, Czech football coach

Yankee Doodle Dandy [from the theatrical production, "Little Johnny Jones" written by George M. Cohan, where The play opened at the Liberty Theater on November 7, 1904]

Words I looked up this week: Arcadian, avvocato, canard, crèche, frisson, nebbish, omakase, otiose, pantoum, perfay, prosecco,  quob, rasgueado, redound, rutilant, xeriscape

July 4 Joke
A lamb, a drum, and a snake all fall off a cliff. 

Wait for it...

Ba Dum Tss.

Today's edition of Wannaskan Almanac Word-Wednesday explores the American identity in honor of Independence Day. We live in an era of "identity politics" where we are increasingly encouraged to see the specific ways that we identify our selves differently, to focus on our personal center of this large, beautiful land. The Uniqued States of America, "E Pluribus Plures Plura" is not the place I want to live.

Today I am remembering all the ways that my liberty and freedoms depend on my trust and dependence on all my friends and neighbors in my township, my county, and my state, whether or not they like me or think like me. It's like the Roseau River today - raindrops splashing, sometimes making ripples, each joining the flow.


Shakespeare reminds us what it would be like to live in the alternative world:
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;'
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake.
Hamlet, Act IV, Scene IV

Hannah Arendt describes our personal responsibilities as citizens, here.

From A Year with Rilke, July 4 entry:
The tragedy of nations is perhaps this: that even the best rulers use up a piece of their people's futures.
Early Journals

Be better than yesterday, learn a new word today, and to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow.

*The same as the number of angels that can dance on the head of a pin: 8.6766×1049.

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