Word-Wednesday for June 24, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, June 24, 2020, the 26th Wednesday of the year, the first Wednesday of summer, the 176th day of the year, with 190 days remaining.

Wannaska Nature Update for June 24, 2020

We have mosquitoes!

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for June 24, 2020
Sunrise: 5:21am; Sunset: 9:31pm; 21 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 8:43apm; Moonset: tomorrow; waning crescent


Temperature Almanac for June 24, 2020
                Average            Record               Today
High             75                     91                      77
Low              54                     31                      54

June 24 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Pralines Day
• National Parchment Day
• National Onion Rings Day

June 24 Word Riddle
What six-letter word becomes its own opposite by transposing two adjacent letters?*


June 24 Pun
With great sadness, Wannaskan Almanac notes the loss of a few local businesses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A local seamstress manufacturing brassieres has gone bust; Polaris Industries’ new personal submarine division has gone under; Digi-Key’s food blender division has gone into liquidation; a Gatzke dog kennel has had to call in the retrievers; Marvin Windows and Doors practice of supplying wood scrap for paper to origami enthusiasts has folded; and the Pencer strip club has gone tits up.


June 24 The Nordly Headline:
Roseau, Warroad Start Practicing Social Distancing


June 24 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 451 10th recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.
• 1880 First performance of O Canada, the song that would become the national anthem of Canada, at the Congrès National des Canadiens-Français.
• 1901 First exhibition by Pablo Picasso, 19, opens in Paris.
• 1957 The U.S. Supreme Court rules that obscenity is not protected by the First Amendment in Roth v. United States.
• 1958 Nina Simone releases her debut jazz album, Little Girl Blue.

June 24 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1590 Samuel Ampzing, Dutch poet.
• 1762 Johann Paul Wessely, Czech composer.
• 1808 Anna Caroline Oury, German pianist and composer.
• 1842 Ambrose Bierce, American writer and satirist, Devil's Dictionary.

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

• apophenia: the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections and meaning between unrelated things.
• blateration: foolish talk; loquacious nonsense.
• dactylonomy: the act or practice of counting with one’s fingers.
• fauxhawk: a hairstyle in which a section of hair running from the front to the back of the head stands erect, intended to resemble a Mohawk haircut (in which the sides of the head are shaved).
• halatinouse: having the character of salt or saline; salty.
• malapert: impudently bold in speech or manner; saucy.
• phlizz: something apparently existing, or existing in name, but having no real substance; anything without meaning or value; a chimera.
• sardoodledom: a play with an over-written and melodramatic plot.
• toxophily: the love of, or an addiction to, archery.
• uliginous: swampy; slimy; slippery; growing in wet or swampy ground.

June 24, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
Pareidolia 
parr-i-DOH-lee-ə, derived from the Greek words para (παρά, "beside, alongside, instead [of]") and the noun eidōlon (εἴδωλον "image, form, shape"), is the tendency to misperceive an optical stimulus as an object, pattern, or meaning known to the observer, such as seeing shapes in clouds, seeing faces in inanimate objects or abstract patterns, or hearing hidden messages in music. Pareidolia can be considered a subcategory of apophenia.

Like other Renaissance artists, William Shakespeare was fond of pareidolia. In Act III, Scene 3, Hamlet points at the sky and "demonstrates" his supposed madness in this exchange with Polonius:

    HAMLET: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in the shape of a camel?
    POLONIUS: By th’Mass and ’tis, like a camel indeed.
    HAMLET: Methinks it is a weasel.
    POLONIUS: It is backed like a weasel.
    HAMLET: Or a whale.
    POLONIUS: Very like a whale.

Rocks that induce pareidolia are call mimetoliths.

In psychology, the Rorschach inkblot test uses pareidolia in an attempt to gain insight into a person's mental state. The Rorschach is a projective test, as it intentionally elicits the thoughts or feelings of respondents that are "projected" onto the ambiguous inkblot images.

But it's the first Wednesday of summer, so here's hoping that you find the time to relax and stare at a tree,

or a cloud,

or one of Wannaska's many insects,

and write about what you see.


From A Year with Rilke, June 24 Entry
David Sings Before Saul (II), from New Poems.

My king, all of this was yours.
The force of your living
oppressed and overshadowed me.
come down from your throne and break this harp
that you have wearied.

It is like a tree picked bare, and
through branches that once bore you fruit
a depth is staring as from days to come,
days I cannot know.

Let me sleep no more beside the harp.
Look at my hand, still a boy’s hand.
Do you think it could not span
the octaves of a lover’s body?



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.

*united/untied