Word-Wednesday for November 11, 2020

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, November 11, 2020, the 46th Wednesday of the year, the eighth Wednesday of fall, and the 316th day of the year, with 50 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for November 11, 2020
Cardinals are at the bird feeders.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.

Earth/Moon Almanac for November 11, 2020
Sunrise: 7:27am; Sunset: 4:49pm; 2 minutes, 53 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 2:20am; Moonset: 3:32pm, waxing crescent


Temperature Almanac for November 11, 2020
                Average            Record              Today
High             36                     57                     34
Low              21                    -12                      19


November 11 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Sundae Day
• Veterans Day

November 11 Word Riddle
Emblem of majesty, which shows force of temporal power, but reorder the letters and the word become a thing which makes even monarchs cower.
What are these two words?*


November 11 Pun
I asked the handy man not to carpet the steps when he did the main floor; he gave me a blank stair.


November 11 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1634 Following pressure from Anglican bishop John Atherton, the Irish House of Commons passes "An Act for the Punishment for the Vice of Buggery".
• 1647 Massachusetts passes first compulsory school attendance law in the American colonies.
• 1675 German mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz demonstrates integral calculus for the first time to find the area under the graph of y = f(x) function.
• 1790 Chrysanthemums are introduced to England from China.
• 1807 Washington Irving's Salmagundi periodical published - first to associate the name "Gotham" with New York City.
• 1925 Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five begin their first recording session.
• 1930 Patent number US1781541 is awarded to Albert Einstein and Leó Szilárd for their invention of the Einstein refrigerator.
• 1939 Kate Smith first sings Irving Berlin's God Bless America.
• 1954 Publication of Two Towers, 2nd volume of Lord of the Rings, by J. R. R. Tolkien.
• 1961 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller is published.

November 11 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1821 Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
• 1870 Nils Kjær, Norwegian playwright (Det evige Savn).
• 1919 Kalle Päätalo, Finnish novelist (Iijoki).
• 1920 James Bond.
• 1922 Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• 1925 Jonathan Winters.
• 1928 Carlos Fuentes.

November 11 Word Fact
Scrabble Point Values

November 11, 2020 Song of Myself Verse 2 of 52

2
Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun.

Have you reckon’d a thousand acres much? have you reckon’d the earth much?
Have you practis’d so long to learn to read?
Have you felt so proud to get at the meaning of poems?

Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.


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

• ankh: äNGk, an object or design resembling a cross but having a loop instead of the top arm, used in ancient Egypt as a symbol of life. ☥
• bodach: a mysterious and malevolent spirit, often appearing as a premonition of death or disaster; a ghost or spectre.
• cinerarium: a place where the ashes of the cremated dead are kept.
• freebooter: a pirate or lawless adventurer.
• guzunder: a portable container for urine and defecation, used in bedrooms.
• nemorivagant: adj., wandering through woodland or forests.
• pleonasm: the use of more words than are necessary to convey meaning (e.g. /see with one’s eyes/ ), either as a fault of style or for emphasis. [ An army of words escorting a corporal of thought. Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary (1911)]
• skeuomorph: something that retains design elements that are no longer necessary to its function, but that are retained for ornamental purposes.
• tessera: a small block of stone, tile, glass, or other material used in the construction of a mosaic.
• waynpain: a man who has to work for his bread; a servant; a labourer.

November 11, 2020 Word-Wednesday Feature
The Words of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Word-Wednesday granfalloon here at the Wannaskan Almanac today celebrate the words of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Born in Indianapolis, Indiana. Vonnegut attended Cornell University, majoring in chemistry and biology, where he also became managing editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. In 1944, in the middle of his senior year, he enlisted in the U. S. Army. In December of 1944, Vonnegut was captured by German troops in the Battle of the Bulge, and he was placed in a detention camp in Dresden, Germany with other POWs. There he was forced to work in an underground meat locker during a devastating Allied bombing raid in early 1945. This experience and the name of the meat locker, "Schlachthof-Funf", became the grist for a novel he wrote twenty-five years later - Slaughterhouse Five.

One of America's most successful writers, Vonnegut is best known for satirical and fantastical novels that explore the darker aspects of modern humanity. In addition to Slaughterhouse Five (1969), his first New York Times best-seller, some of his other works have also become American classics, like Cat's Cradle (1963) and Breakfast of Champions (1973).

Vonnegut created his own words to suit his purpose, especially in Cat’s Cradle, where he presciently made up the following words with ideas that still haunt us today:

• foma: harmless untruths.
• granfalloon: a proud and meaningless collection of human beings.
• karass: a network or group of people who are somehow affiliated or linked spiritually.
• wampeter: an object around which the lives of many otherwise unrelated people may revolve.

Here are a few of Vonnegut's thoughts, in his own words:

• We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

• We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.

• A purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved.

• Don't be reckless with other people's hearts, and don't put up with people that are reckless with yours.

• High school is closer to the core of the American experience than anything else I can think of.

• Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

• Future generations will look back on TV as the lead in the water pipes that slowly drove the Romans mad.

• Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.

• I've got news for Mr. Santayana: We're doomed to repeat the past no matter what. That's what it is to be alive.

• Artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are supersensitive. They keel over like canaries in coal mines filled with poison gas, long before more robust types realize that any danger is there.

From A Year with Rilke, November 11 Entry
Three Sprigs of Heather, from Letter to Clara Westhoff Rilke, September 13, 1907.

Never has heather so touched and even moved me as when I found these three sprigs in your dear letter. Sine then they lie in the pages of my Book of Images and permeate them with their strong, serious fragrance, which is actually only the scent of autumnal Earth. And how marvelous is this scent. Never, it seems to me, has Earth so let herself be inhaled in one single fragrance. The ripe Earth, in one fragrance that is no less intense than that of the sea: bitter if you could taste it and more like honey if you could hear it. Such depths in it, of darkness, almost of the grave, and yet again wind, tar, and turpentine and Ceylon tea. Serious and destitute like a beggar-monk, while also like the most precious incense, hearty and resinous. And to behold it: these sprigs of heather are like most elegant embroidery—with the violet-hued silk (a violet so moist it could be the sun’s complementary color) stitching cypresses in a Persian carpet. You had to have seen that. I think that the little sprigs could not have been so lovely before you put them in your letter. You must have told them something amazing.

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.

*Scepter - specter.