Word-Wednesday for July 10, 2019

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, for July 10, 2019, the 28th Wednesday of the year,  the 191st day of the year, with 174 days remaining.


Nordhem Lunch: Hot Beef

Earth/Moon Almanac for July 10, 2019
Sunrise: 5:31am; Sunset: 9:27pm; 1 minutes, 35 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 3:13pm; Moonset: 1:36am, waxing gibbous


Temperature Almanac for July 10, 2019
                Average          Record         Today
High             78                  102                71
Low              56                   42                53


July 10 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Clerihew Day
• National Pina Colada Day

July 10 Riddle
Why can’t you hear a pterodactyl go to the bathroom?*

July 10 Pun

July 10 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 988 The city of Dublin is founded on the banks of the river Liffey.
• 1040 Lady Godiva rides naked on horseback through Coventry, according to legend, to force her husband, the Earl of Mercia, to lower taxes.
• 1873 French poet Paul Verlaine wounds Arthur Rimbaud with pistol.

July 10 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1834 James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
• 1856 Nikola Tesla.
• 1871 Marcel Proust.
• 1904 Iša Krejčí, Czech composer.
• 1924 Bobo Brazil [Houston Harris], American professional wrestler.
• 1931 Alice Munro.
• 1939 Mavis Staples.
• 1947 Arlo Guthrie.
• 1958 Béla Fleck.

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Make a single sentence (or poem) from the following words:

• aubade: a poem or piece of music appropriate to the dawn or early morning.
• bealach: a narrow mountain pass.
• bibliolatry: an excessive adherence to the literal interpretation of the Bible; an excessive love of books.
• clerihew: a short comic or nonsensical verse, typically in two rhyming couplets with lines of unequal length and referring to a famous person.
• cockerel: a young rooster.
• cresset: a metal container of oil, grease, wood, or coal burned as a torch and typically mounted on a pole.
• doggo: adv., to lie (also play) doggo: to lie flat, remain hidden; to lie quietly. Also in extended use: to keep a low profile, lie low.
• gloopy: glutinous, viscous; gluey or sticky; sloppy or gooey.
• himposium: a conference or meeting to discuss a particular subject where the participants are predominantly or exclusively male; see also manference and manel.
• hummock: a hillock, knoll, or mound; a hump or ridge in an ice field; a section of forested ground rising above a marsh.

July 10 Word-Wednesday Feature
The Clerihew
A method of rhyming doggerel invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956), the clerihew is sure please many squib-minded Wannaskan Almanac readers. Traditionally, the clerihew is a four-line verse made up of two rhyming couplets [AABB], with meter intentionally  irregular, but clerihew structuralism is notoriously lax. Clerihews typically feature the satiric or absurd biography of a famous person. Here are three of Bentley's own clerihews, followed by other notable authors:

Sir Humphrey Davy
Detested gravy.
He lived in the odium
Of having discovered sodium.

George the Third
Ought never to have occurred.
One can only wonder
At so grotesque a blunder.

By W.H. Auden:
Sir Henry Rider Haggard
Was completely staggered
When his bride-to-be
Announced, "I am She!"

John Milton
Never stayed in a Hilton
Hotel,
Which was just as well.

When Karl Marx
Found the phrase ‘financial sharks,’
He sang a Te Deum
In the British Museum.

And Auden writing to the Poetry Editor of The New Yorker, Howard Moss:
Is Robert Lowell
Better than Noel
Coward,
Howard?

By G. K. Chesterton: 

The Spanish people think Cervantes
Equal to half a dozen Dantes;
An opinion resented most bitterly
By the people of Italy.

Saul
Was tall.
David cut off the end of his cloak
For a joke.

Of the prophet Ezekiel
I do not wish to speak ill;
But he himself owns
He saw a valley of Dry Bones.

Solomon
You can scarcely write less than a column on.
His very song
Was long.

By George Szirtes:
e e cummings’
unpublished hummings
will shortly be published in a book –
just l(oo)k

Claude Monet
resisted all forms of donné.
When someone suggested he should paint the cathedral at Rheims,
he replied, “In your dreams!”

Fra Filippo Lippi
was kinda dippy
but succeeded in laying tons
of nuns.


From A Year with Rilke, July 10 Entry
Tanagra, from New Poems.

A small piece of earth, burned,
as if burned by the sun’s fire.
The touch of a girl’s hand
seems somehow still upon it.
Feel how it remained there,
not longing for anything other,
just resting into itself
like fingers on a chin.

We take up this figure, then that,
turning them in the light.
We can almost understand
how they managed to survive.
We need only smile
and accept more fully
what it offers to our eyes.


Be better than yesterday, learn a new word today, try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow, and write when you have the time.

*Because the P is silent.