Word-Wednesday for March 18, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, March 18, 2020, the 12th Wednesday of the year,  the 77 day of the year, with 288 days remaining, but only 14 days until April 1st.

Nordhem Lunch: Hot Pork Sandwich

Earth/Moon Almanac for March 18, 2020
Sunrise: 7:30am; Sunset: 7:34pm; 3 minutes, 37 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 5:12am; Moonset: 1:37pm, waning crescent


Temperature Almanac for March 18, 2020
                Average          Record           Today
High             35                   74                 29
Low               17                 -23                 17


March 18 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Awkward Moments Day
• National Biodiesel Day
• National Lacy Oatmeal Cookie Day
• National SBDC Day
• National Sloppy Joe Day
• National Supreme Sacrifice Day
• Forgive Mom and Dad Day

March 18 Literature Title Riddle
My first is a color;
my second is an agreeable exercise;
my third is an article of clothing;
my whole is a celebrated character.*


March 18 Pun
From the Roseau Times-Region
Tongue-Twister Champion Arrested: D.A. Seeking Tough Sentence


March 18 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1662 First public bus service begins, promoted by Blaise Pascal, operates in Paris as the Carosses a Cinq Sous until 1675.
• 1773 Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer premieres in London.
• 1877 US President Rutherford B. Hayes appoints Frederick Douglass Marshal of Washington, D.C.

March 18 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1842 Stéphane Mallarmé.
• 1844 Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
• 1932 John Updike.

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

• accubation: the act or posture of reclining on a couch, as practiced by the ancients at meals.
• birl: spin; whirl.
• dreich: bleak, miserable, dismal, cheerless, dreary.
• feck: worth, value.
• grubble: to feel or grope in the dark.
• haver: talk foolishly; babble.
• kinnikinnik: a smoking mixture used my North American Indians as a substitute for tobacco.
• mulligrubs: a state or fit of depression; low spirits; a bad temper or mood.
• pooching: to look around in an attempt to find information about someone else’s affair; to snoop.
• somniloquy: the action or habit of talking or singing in one’s sleep.

March 18, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Antimetabole
antimetabole (An-tee-muh-tAb-buh-lee) is defined as the repetition of words, in successive clauses, in reverse grammatical order. Writers use antimetabole to emphasize key elements of rhetorical messages or narrative elements, planting memorable seeds in the reader's mind, as in the following familiar examples: 

ALL WITCHES:
Fair is foul, and foul is fair
Hover through the fog and filthy air.
William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 1

FESTE:
Two faults, madonna, that drink and good counsel
will amend: for give the dry fool drink, then is
the fool not dry: bid the dishonest man mend
himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest; if
he cannot, let the botcher mend him. Any thing
that's mended is but patched: virtue that
transgresses is but patched with sin; and sin that
amends is but patched with virtue. If that this
simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not,
what remedy? As there is no true cuckold but
calamity, so beauty's a flower. The lady bade take
away the fool; therefore, I say again, take her away.
William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5

When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’
Ode to a Grecian Urn, John Keats

It is not even the beginning of the end but is perhaps, the end of the beginning.
Winston Churchill

Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country.
John F. Kennedy

Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Women forget all those things they don't want to remember, and remember everything they don't want to forget.
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

I am stuck on band-aid, because band-aid's stuck on me.


From A Year with Rilke, March 18 Entry
The Interior Castle, from Seventh Duino Elegy.

Nowhere, Beloved, will the world exist, but within us.
Our lives are constant transformations. The external
grows ever smaller. Where a solid house once stood,
now a mental image takes its place,
almost as if it were all in the imagination.
Our era has created vast reservoirs of power,
as formless as the currents of energy they transmit.
Temples are no longer known. In our hears
these can be secretly saved. Where one survives —
a Thing once prayed to, worshipped, knelt before—
its tru nature seems already to have passed
into the Invisible. Many no longer take it for real,
and do not seize the chance to build it
inwardly, and yet more vividly, with all its pillars and statues.


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.


*Red Riding Hood.