Word-Wednesday for January 6, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, January 6, 2021, the 53rd Wednesday of the year, the third Wednesday of winter, and the 6th day of the year, with 359 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for January 6, 2021
Rabbits do not hibernate. During cold weather, rabbits might seek shelter in a natural or man-made cavity such as a thicket, an existing burrow or a culvert. But our recent frosty days can still be a problem...

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.

Earth/Moon Almanac for January 6, 2021
Sunrise: 8:16am; Sunset: 4:43pm; 1 minutes, 30 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 12:26am; Moonset: 12:22pm, waxing gibbous, 48% illuminated


Temperature Almanac for January 6, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             14                     41                      31
Low              -5                   -49                     16


January 6 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Bean Day
• National Cuddle Up Day
• National Shortbread Day
• National Technology Day

January 6 Word Riddle
Why did the art thief’s van run out of gas as he was driving away from the museum?*


January 6 Pun
Security experts agree that “beefstew” should not be used as a password because it is not stroganoff.


January 6 The Roseau Times-Region Headline:
Argyle Lawyer Loses Case — Finds It In Her Car

January 6 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1838 Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail demonstrate their telegraph machine in New Jersey.
• 1907 Maria Montessori opens her first school in Rome.
• 1958 Bollingen Prize for poetry awarded to E. E. Cummings.

January 6 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1794 Kaspar Masek, Czech-Slovenian composer.
• 1832 Gustave Doré, French painter and sculptor.
• 1854 Sherlock Holmes.
• 1872 Alexander Scriabin, Russian composer.
• 1878 Carl Sandburg.
• 1883 Khalil Gibran.
• 1915 Alan Watts.
• 1922 Finn Einar Mortensen, Norwegian composer.
• 1924 Earl Scruggs.
• 1931 E. L. Doctorow.
• 1945 Pepé Le Pew.

January 6 Word Fact 

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis is the longest word in the English language.

January 6, 2021 Song of Myself 
Verse 10 of 52

Alone far in the wilds and mountains I hunt,
Wandering amazed at my own lightness and glee,
In the late afternoon choosing a safe spot to pass the night,
Kindling a fire and broiling the fresh-kill’d game,
Falling asleep on the gather’d leaves with my dog and gun by my side.

The Yankee clipper is under her sky-sails, she cuts the sparkle and scud,

My eyes settle the land, I bend at her prow or shout joyously from the deck.

The boatmen and clam-diggers arose early and stopt for me,
I tuck’d my trowser-ends in my boots and went and had a good time;
You should have been with us that day round the chowder-kettle.

I saw the marriage of the trapper in the open air in the far west, the bride was a red girl,
Her father and his friends sat near cross-legged and dumbly smoking, they had moccasins to their feet and large thick blankets hanging from their shoulders,
On a bank lounged the trapper, he was drest mostly in skins, his luxuriant beard and curls protected his neck, he held his bride by the hand,
She had long eyelashes, her head was bare, her coarse straight locks descended upon her voluptuous limbs and reach’d to her feet.

The runaway slave came to my house and stopt outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsy and weak,
And went where he sat on a log and led him in and assured him,
And brought water and fill’d a tub for his sweated body and bruis’d feet,
And gave him a room that enter’d from my own, and gave him some coarse clean clothes,
And remember perfectly well his revolving eyes and his awkwardness,
And remember putting plasters on the galls of his neck and ankles;
He staid with me a week before he was recuperated and pass’d north,
I had him sit next me at table, my fire-lock lean’d in the corner.

Walt Whitman

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

• anglewitch: something used as fishing bait, especially worms.
• bonce: a boys’ game played with marbles also : a large marble.
• carriwitchet: an absurd question; a quibble; a conundrum; a pun; a piece of jocularity or facetiousness.
• degust: to taste or savor appreciatively.
• fantod: a state or attack of uneasiness or unreasonableness.
• hogmanay: New Year’s Eve and its celebrations; a gift that is given on New Years’ Eve.
• kairological: adjective, relating to time in a contextual and qualitative sense as opposed to a strict and quantitative sense, which is chronological; Chronological time measures out time in a linear and absolute sense, whereas kairological time is all about the moment and the opportunity.
• novitious: having been made or come into being only a short time ago; new.
• pinny: a sleeveless dress, often similar to an apron, generally worn over other clothes. (colloquial) A simple jersey worn to denote teams or groups.
• timmygoggy: any device that saves time and labor; a gadget.

January 6, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
The Words of Sherlock Holmes
Fictionally born on this day in 1854, the Guinness Book of World Records lists Sherlock Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history. Like Nancy Drew, Don Quixote, Emma Bovary, Peter Pan, Leopold Bloom, and Sven and Ula, Sherlock Holmes is so popular that many of his numerous raving fans live in the delusional fantod that he was a real person. Created in 1887 by  Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, who used Dr. John H. Watson to narrate Holmes’ adventures from his home base at 221B Baker Street in London, Holmes referred to himself as a “consulting detective”.

In the course of four novels and fifty-six short stories, Watson recorded Holmes’ gift with words. Here are a few favorites, or as Holmes said in The Adventure of the Abbey Grange, “The game is afoot.”

Words to Live By
There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
The Boscombe Valley Mystery

I never make exceptions. An exception disproves the rule.
The Sign of Four

How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth?
The Sign of Four

Your problem, dear chap, as I have had occasion to remind you, is that you see but you do not observe; you hear but you do not listen.
The Whitechapel Horrors

Desultory readers are seldom remarkable for the exactness of their learning.
A Study in Scarlet

One should always look for a possible alternative, and provide against it.
The Adventure of Black Peter

 

On the Human Condition
Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself; but talent instantly recognizes genius.
The Valley of Fear

Violence does, in truth, recoil upon the violent, and the schemer falls into the pit which he digs for another.
The Adventures of the Speckled Band

Education never ends, Watson. It is a series of lessons, with the greatest for the last.
His Last Bow

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done.
A Study in Scarlet

The bigger the crime, the more obvious the motive.
Down the Rabbit Hole

 

On Life
Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.
A Case of Identity

It's a wicked world, and when a clever man turns his brain to crime it is the worst of all.
The Adventures of the Speckled Band

 

On Relationships
A man always finds it hard to realize that he may have finally lost a woman’s love, however badly he may have treated her.
The Musgrave Ritual

You have a grand gift for silence, Watson. It makes you quite invaluable as a companion.
The Man with the Twisted Lip

You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.
The Beekeepers Apprentice

Life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent. We would not dare to conceive the things which are really mere commonplaces of existence. If we could fly out of that window hand in hand, hover over this great city, gently remove the roofs, and and peep in at the queer things which are going on, the strange coincidences, the plannings, the cross-purposes, the wonderful chains of events, working through generations, and leading to the most outre results, it would make all fiction with its conventionalities and foreseen conclusions most stale and unprofitable.
A Case of Identity

Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant. So says the statistician.
The Sign of Four

 

For Writers
Where there is no imagination, there is no horror.
A Study in Scarlet

I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things, so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.
A Study in Scarlet

I follow my own methods, and tell as much or as little as I choose. That is the advantage of being unofficial.
The Adventure of the Silver Blaze

Do you remember what Darwin says about music? He claims that the power of producing and appreciating it existed among the human race long before the power of speech was arrived at. Perhaps that is why we are so subtly influenced by it. There are vague memories in our souls of those misty centuries when the world was in its childhood.
A Study in Scarlet

The more outré and grotesque an incident is the more carefully it deserves to be examined.
The Hound of the Baskervilles

No man burdens his mind with small matters unless he has some very good reason for doing so.
A Study in Scarlet

For strange effects and extraordinary combinations we must go to life itself, which is always far more daring than any effort of the imagination.
The Red-Headed League


From A Year with Rilke, January 6 Entry
Our Closest Friend, 

from Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouy
Epiphany, 1923

Our effort, I suggest, can be dedicated to this: to assume the unity of Life and Death and let it be progressively demonstrated to us. So long as we stand in opposition to Death we will disfigure it. Believe me, my dear Countess, Death is our Friend, our closest friend, perhaps the only friend who can never be misled by our ploys and vacillations. And I do not mean that in the sentimental, romantic sense of distrusting or renouncing life. Death is our friend precisely because it brings us into absolute and passionate presence with all that is here, that is natural, that is love. . . . Life always says Yes and No simultaneously. Death (I implore you to believe) is the true Yea-sayer. It stands before eternity and says only: Yes.

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.





*He had no Monet to buy Degas to make the Van Gogh.