Word-Wednesday for July 7, 2019

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, for August 7, 2019, the 32nd Wednesday of the year,  the 219th day of the year, with 146 days remaining. This day marks the approximate midpoint of summer in the Northern Hemisphere and of winter in the Southern Hemisphere.

Nordhem Lunch: Meatloaf Dinner


Earth/Moon Almanac for August 7, 2019
Sunrise: 6:05am; Sunset: 8:54pm; 3 minutes, 0 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 2:16pm; Moonset: 12:05am, waxing gibbous


Temperature Almanac for August 7, 2019
                Average           Record          Today
High             78                   98                71
Low              55                   37                49


August 7 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• Purple Heart Day
• National Lighthouse Day
• National Raspberries N’ Cream Day

August 7 Riddle
What grows less tired the more it works?*


August 7 Pun
Homonyms can be a waist of thyme.


August 7 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1606 First performance of Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth, performed in the Great Hall at Hampton Court Palace for King James I.
• 1934 US Court of Appeals upheld lower court ruling striking down government's attempt to ban controversial James Joyce novel, Ulysses.

August 7 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1598 Georg Stiernhielm, father of Swedish poetry.
• 1852 Dr. John H. Watson, companion of Sherlock Holmes.
• 1921 Karel Husa, Czech composer.
• 1942 Masa Saito, Japanese wrestler, AWA/WWF/NJPW/CWFI.
• 1942 Garrison Keillor.

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

• callid: of a horse, having a star-shaped spot or patch of white hair on the forehead.
• cockchafer: a large brown European beetle that flies at dusk and often crashes into lighted windows. The adults are damaging to foliage and flowers, and the larvae are a pest of cereal and grass roots.
• fey: giving an impression of vague unworldliness.
• geomancy: divination by means of signs derived from the earth, esp. the pattern formed by a handful of earth thrown down upon a surface.
• grandeval: of a great age, old, ancient.
• paruresis: inability to urinate in the presence of others.
• puck: an evil spirit or mischievous sprite; a vulcanized rubber disk used in ice hockey; also known as Robin Goodfellow, is a character in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream, based on the ancient figure of Puck found in English mythology.
• skinder: gossip; tittle-tattle.
• teleiotic: complete, perfect; consummative.
• tribology: a study that deals with the design, friction, wear, and lubrication of interacting surfaces in relative motion.

August 7, 2019 Word-Wednesday Feature
Midsummer
Names are so often some of the most important words in a story. How can a play go wrong with a cast of characters like Oberon, Titania, Puck, Bottom, Quince, Flute, Snug, Snout, Starveling, Reynolds, Peaseblossom, and Cobweb? May Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspire your own dreams tonight on this 2019 astronomical midsummer’s night for your writing tomorrow.

I have had a most rare vision. I had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was… The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.
(Bottom, Act 4 Scene 1)


From A Year with Rilke, August 7 Entry
The Island (I), from New Poems

The tide erases the path through the mud flats
and makes things on all sides look the same.
But the little island out there has closed its eyes.
The dike around it wall its people in.

They are born into a sleep
that silently blurs all destinations.
They seldom speak,
and every utterance is like an epitaph

for something case ashore, some foreign object
that comes unexplained, and just stays.
So is everything their gaze encounters from childhood on:

not intended for them, random, unwieldy,
sent from somewhere else
to underscore their loneliness.

Be better than yesterday, dream well tonight, try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow, and write when you have the time.

*An automobile wheel.