Word-Wednesday for May 27, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, May 27, 2020, the 22nd Wednesday of the year, the 148th day of the year, with 218 days remaining.

Deer Ticks are Out

Nordhem Lunch: Closed


Earth/Moon Almanac for May 27, 2020
Sunrise: 5:29am; Sunset: 9:14pm; 1 minutes, 56 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 9:42am; Moonset: 1:06am, waxing crescent


Temperature Almanac for May 27, 2020
                Average           Record           Today
High             68                   91                  78
Low              46                   29                  57


May 27 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Cellophane Tape Day
• National Grape Popsicle Day
• National Senior Health & Fitness Day

May 27 Word Riddle
What's that in the Fire, and not in the Flame?
What's that in the Master, and not in the Dame?
What's that in the Courtier, and not in the Clown?
What's that in the Country, and not in the Town?*


May 27 Pun

Topless chicks in short skirts

May 27 The Nordly Headline:
Graduating Roseau Senior Streaks Across Living Room During Virtual Graduation


May 27 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1927 Tomáš Masaryk re-elected President of Czechoslovakia for a second time.
• 1944 Jean-Paul Sartres' Huis Clos premieres in Paris.
• 1950 Bollingen Prize for poetry awarded to Wallace Stevens.
• 1994 Writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returns to Russia after 20 years in exile.

May 27 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1332 Ibn Khaldūn, North African Islamic scholar, philosopher and historian (Muqaddimah), born in Tunis.
• 1819 Julia Ward Howe.
• 1822 Henry Wylde.
• 1874 Richard von Schaukal.
• 1884 Max Brod.
• 1894 Dashiell Hammett.
• 1907 Rachel Carson.
• 1912 John Cheever.
• 1915 Herman Wouk.
• 1923 Ingeborg Morath.
• 1934 Harlan Ellison.
• 1957 Siouxsie Sioux.

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

• apotropaic: having the power to avert evil influences or bad luck.
• coronial: a child of the generation soon to be born as the result of enforced stay-at-home policies.
• cruciverbalist: a person skillful in creating or solving crossword puzzles.
• farthingale: a hooped petticoat or circular pad of fabric around the hips, formerly worn under women’s skirts to extend and shape them.
• hendecad: a group, set, or series of eleven things.
• jackanapes: a saucy, mischievous child; a cheeky, impertinent person.
• Morris: a vigorous English dance traditionally performed by men wearing costumes and bells.
• pantoffle: a slipper.
• sardanapalian: decadently luxurious or sensual.
• vecordious: full of folly; senseless; crazy; mad.

May 27, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Rachel Carson
What do Nicolaus Copernicus, Charles Darwin, and Rachel Carson have in common? Each was a person who saw and wrote about something new that changed our entire understanding of planet Earth. Copernicus formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at the center; Darwin painstakingly observed how animals develop new traits suited to the circumstances of their unique, changing natural environments such that all life forms descended from common ancestors; Carson unseated the human as the center of our planet's ecological universe by demonstrating our interconnectedness.

Born on this day in 1907, Carson grew up in a Pennsylvania amidst an impoverished family, where she retreated to her village's natural surroundings for peace and solitude. She became an avid reader and a talented writer at a young age, publishing her first story when she was 10 years old in a children's literary magazine. After entering college to become a writer, she fell in love with biology, followed by a Master's degree in zoology and genetics at John Hopkins University, until she was forced to leave - without having earned her doctorate - when her already poor family fell on harder times during the Great Depression.

She found temporary work as a laboratory assistant, and she began writing for the Baltimore Sun before being hired as a junior aquatic biologist for what is now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Carson's peers admired her ability to edit the field reports of other scientists, and she was soon became Editor-in-Chief for the entire agency. In 1935, after writing a brochure for the Fisheries Bureau, she submitted the same manuscript to The Atlantic Monthly, and Undersea was published in 1937. Readers of that era had never learned about the ocean floor from a nonhuman perspective. Carson later expanded this article into her first book, Under the Sea-Wind.

Carson's position as editor and curator of ecoscience (then known as geoscience), gave her early access to the ways that atomic testing, ocean waste disposal, agricultural pesticides, and other human endeavors were damaging local ecologies on wider and wider scales. Her 1952 acceptance speech for the John Burroughs Medal carried a message that made her increasingly unpopular to such industries:

"It seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction."

Carson was diagnosed with cancer in 1960, but she managed to complete and publish Silent Spring by 1962. President Kennedy summoned a congressional hearing to investigate and regulate the use of pesticides in 1963, but the book also triggered an all too familiar campaign to discredit Carson as a "Communist" and as a "spinster". Ever the writer, standing by her science, and always taking the high road in response to these bullies, Carson invoked other writers to help us see what she was able to see.

"We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth."

From A Year with Rilke, May 27 Entry
Patience Is All, from Letters to a Young Poet.

Do not measure in terms of time: one year or ten years means nothing. For the artist there is no counting or tallying up; just ripening like the tree that does not force its sap and endures the storms of spring without fearing that summer will not come. But it will come. It comes, however, only to the patient ones who stand there as if all eternity lay before them—vast, still, untroubled. I learn this every day of my life, I learn it from hardships I am grateful for: patience is all.

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.

*the letter R.