Word-Wednesday for May 13, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, May 13, 2020, the 20th Wednesday of the year, the 134th day of the year, with 232 days remaining.

by Bethany Bickley

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.

Earth/Moon Almanac for May 13, 2020
Sunrise: 5:44am; Sunset: 8:56pm; 2 minutes, 42 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 2:31am; Moonset: 11:21am, waning gibbous


Temperature Almanac for May 13, 2020
                Average           Record           Today
High             63                   88                   48
Low              40                   22                   42


May 13 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Crouton Day
• National Frog Jumping Day
• National Apple Pie Day
• National Fruit Cocktail Day
• National Receptionists’ Day
• National Third Shift Workers Day
• International Hummus Day

May 13 Word Riddle
What’s made of leather and sounds like a sneeze?*


May 13 Pun
Push the envelope all you like, it will still be stationery.


May 13 The Nordly Headline:
Pencer Baby Ingests Scrabble Tiles While Visiting Wannaska Home: Next Diaper Could Spell Disaster!


May 13 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1767 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's first opera Apollo et Hyacinthus, written when he was 11 years old, premieres in Salzburg.
• 1923 Pulitzer prize awarded to Willa Carter for One of Ours.

May 13 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1756 Wojciech Żywny.
• 1840 Alphonse Daudet.
• 1842 Arthur Sullivan.
• 1866 Ottokar Eugen Novacek.
• 1904 Alfred Earle Birney.
• 1907 Daphne du Maurier.
• 1924 Theodore Mann.
• 1927 Clive Barnes.
• 1944 Armistead Maupin.
• 1950 Stevie Wonder [Stevland Hardaway Morris].
• 1962 Kathleen Jamie.
• 1964 The Rev. Sir Dr. Stephen T. Mos Def Colbert, D.F.A.

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

• afreet: a powerful jinn or demon.
• begrutten: showing the effects upon the face from much weeping.
• chirotonsor: a barber.
• deterge: to cleanse thoroughly.
• gamomania: an obsession with issuing odd marriage proposals.
• macrosmatic: having an abnormally keen sense of smell.
• phlogiston: a substance supposed by 18th-century chemists to exist in all combustible bodies, and to be released in combustion.
• rowel: the small, spiked wheel at the end of a spur.
• thimblerig: (n.) a deceptive and evasive action or ploy, especially a political one; (v.) to cheat or swindle.
• vomitory: a large opening permitting large numbers of people to enter or leave, such as a cathedral, stadium, or theater.

May 13, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Spheres
sphere /sfir/: a round solid figure, or its surface, with every point on its surface equidistant from its center; an area of activity, interest, or expertise; a section of society or an aspect of life distinguished and unified by a particular characteristic.

While Earth is not a perfect geometrical sphere, it contains many spheres of activity, interest, expertise, societies, and distinct life themes—

• atmosphere: the envelope of gases surrounding the earth or another planet.
• cryosphere: those portions of Earth's surface where water is in solid form, including sea ice, lake ice, river ice, snow cover, glaciers, ice caps, ice sheets, and frozen ground.
• ecosphere: the biosphere of the earth or another planet, especially when the interaction between the living and nonliving components is emphasized.
• hydrosphere: all the waters on the earth's surface, such as lakes and seas, and sometimes including water over the earth's surface, such as clouds.
• proxemosphere: one's personal space.
  
• stratosphere: the layer of the earth's atmosphere above the troposphere, extending to about 32 miles (50 km) above the earth's surface (the lower boundary of the mesosphere).
• troposphere: the lowest region of the atmosphere, extending from the earth's surface to a height of about 3.7–6.2 miles (6–10 km), which is the lower boundary of the stratosphere.
• Wannaskosphere: an unincorporated community in Roseau County, Minnesota, United States located 13 miles south of Roseau on State Highway 89within Grimstad Township and Mickinock Townshipwith a post office with ZIP code 56761.

Writers of many genres are journaling their experiences of isolation during the pandemic. Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein, set pen to a futuristic novel set in the year 2092 after losing her two children to infectious diseases and the love of her life—Percy Bysshe Shelley—in a boating accident. The Last Man recounts the experiences of Lionel Verney, who travels home from abroad during the pandemic becoming the world’s sole survivor. Lionel takes up a two questions throughout the novel: Why live; what makes life worth living?

Lionel reaches home at the height of the pandemic just as spring arrives in a rushing delirium of bursting beauty without apparent regard for human suffering. Lionel surrenders to the beauty and finds an answer to his questions in nature:

How unwise had the wanderers been, who had deserted its shelter, entangled themselves in the web of society, and entered on what men of the world call "life,"—that labyrinth of evil, that scheme of mutual torture. To live, according to this sense of the word, we must not only observe and learn, we must also feel; we must not be mere spectators of action, we must act; we must not describe, but be subjects of description. Deep sorrow must have been the inmate of our bosoms; fraud must have lain in wait for us; the artful must have deceived us; sickening doubt and false hope must have chequered our days; hilarity and joy, that lap the soul in ecstasy, must at times have possessed us. Who that knows what "life" is, would pine for this feverish species of existence? I have lived. I have spent days and nights of festivity; I have joined in ambitious hopes, and exulted in victory: now,—shut the door on the world, and build high the wall that is to separate me from the troubled scene enacted within its precincts. Let us live for each other and for happiness; let us seek peace in our dear home, near the inland murmur of streams, and the gracious waving of trees, the beauteous vesture of earth, and sublime pageantry of the skies. Let us leave "life," that we may live.

From:Wonderworldmotion

From A Year with Rilke, May 13 Entry
Things Intimate and Indifferent, from Letter to Witold Hulewicz, November 13, 1925.

For our ancestors, a house, a fountain, even clothing, a coat, was much more intimate. Each thing, almost, was a vessel in which what was human found and defined itself.

Now, from America, empty, indifferent things sweep in—pretend things, life-raps…A house, in the American sense, an American apple, a grapevine, bears no relation to the hope and contemplation with which our ancestors informed and beheld them.



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.

*a SHOE!