Word-Wednesday for February 3, 2021

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac for Word-Wednesday, February 3, 2021, the 5th Wednesday of the year, the 7th Wednesday of winter, and the 34th day of the year, with 331 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for February 3, 2021
The Pine Martens, Wannaska's winter nomad.

Nordhem Lunch: Closed.


Earth/Moon Almanac for February 3, 2021
Sunrise: 7:51am; Sunset: 5:25pm; 3 minutes, 6 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 11:59pm; Moonset: 10:49am, waning gibbous, 64% illuminated


Temperature Almanac for February 3, 2021
                Average            Record              Today
High             17                     46                     29
Low              -7                   -52                     14


February 3 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Carrot Cake Day
• National Day the Music Died Day
• National Missing Persons Day
• National Women Physicians Day
• National Girls and Women in Sports Day
• Working Naked Day

February 3 Word Riddle 

If a sour fruit’s letters you do transpose,
a very sweet one ’twill disclose.*


February 3 Pun
Did you know that 10+10 and 11+11 are the same?
10+10=20, and 11+11=22


February 3 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1815 World's first commercial cheese factory established, in Switzerland.
• 1844 Hector Berlioz's Carnaval Romain premieres in Paris.
• 1863 Samuel Clemens first uses the pen name Mark Twain in a Virginia City newspaper, the Territorial Enterprise.
• 1870 US state of Iowa ratifies the 15th Amendment of the United States Constitution allowing suffrage for all races & color.
• 1931 Arkansas legislature passes motion to pray for soul of journalist H. L. Mencken, after he calls the state the "apex of moronia".
• 1951 Tennessee Williams' play The Rose Tattoo premieres.

February 3 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1677 Jan Santini Aichel, Czech architect.
• 1809 Felix Mendelssohn.
• 1821 Elizabeth Blackwell, English-American physician who was the first woman to receive a medical degree in the United States.
• 1874 Gertrude Stein.
• 1894 Norman Rockwell.
• 1909 Simone Weil.
• 1980 Elmo.

February 3 Word Fact
An ambigram is a word that looks the same upside down. SWIMS


February 3, 2021 Song of Myself
Verse 14 of 52
The wild gander leads his flock through the cool night,
Ya-honk he says, and sounds it down to me like an invitation,
The pert may suppose it meaningless, but I listening close,
Find its purpose and place up there toward the wintry sky.

The sharp-hoof’d moose of the north, the cat on the house-sill, the chickadee, the prairie-dog,
The litter of the grunting sow as they tug at her teats,
The brood of the turkey-hen and she with her half-spread wings,
I see in them and myself the same old law.

The press of my foot to the earth springs a hundred affections,
They scorn the best I can do to relate them.

I am enamour’d of growing out-doors,
Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or woods,
Of the builders and steerers of ships and the wielders of axes and mauls, and the drivers of horses,
I can eat and sleep with them week in and week out.

What is commonest, cheapest, nearest, easiest, is Me,
Me going in for my chances, spending for vast returns,
Adorning myself to bestow myself on the first that will take me,
Not asking the sky to come down to my good will,
Scattering it freely forever.


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

• aquabob: hanging, tapering ice formed by freezing drips of water; icicle.
• boanthropy: a type of insanity in which one believes oneself to be an ox.
• cumshaw: [KUM-shaw] n., a gift, tip or a gratuity; a bribe or payoff.
• doxing: search for and publish private or identifying information about (a particular individual) on the internet, typically with malicious intent.
• fissiparous: inclined to cause or undergo division into separate parts or groups.
• illeism: the act of referring to oneself in the third person instead of first person, like Elmo, sometimes used in literature as a stylistic device, where illeism can reflect a number of different stylistic intentions or involuntary circumstances.
• palinopsia: the persistent recurrence of a visual image after the stimulus has been removed.
• shibboleth: a custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important.
• tartarology: the study of beliefs about the underworld and punishment in the afterlife.
• yemeles: [YEEM-lis] adj., careless, heedless, or negligent.

February 3, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature

blue: blo͞o adj., of a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day. First, some facts for your left hemisphere. On our pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan described planet Earth, did you know that there is no naturally occurring true blue pigment in nature? The few plants and animals that appear blue have developed some unique features that use a variety of tricks with chemistry and the physics of light. Though so much of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey take place under the sky or upon the ocean, word blue never appears in either poem. The word for blue does not appear in the Bible, either.

Blue appeals to more that just the factual certainty needs of the left hemisphere. Iain McGilchrist puts it this way:

There is no single privileged viewpoint from which every aspect can be seen. It may be true that, to quote Patricia Churchland, ‘it is reasonable to identify the blueness of an object with its disposition to scatter...electromagnetic waves preferentially at about 0.46 m’[emphasis in the original]. That is, I suppose, a sort of truth about the colour blue. That is one way in which blue discloses itself. Most of us would think it left rather a lot out. There are also other very important truths about the colour blue that we experience, for example, when we see a canvas by Ingres, or by Yves Klein, or view the sky, or sea, which are closed off by this.

Authors, musicians and psychologists know the metaphorical connection between blue and our emotions - sometimes expansive, sometimes melancholy. In his Theory of Colors, Goethe observed:

As yellow is always accompanied with light, so it may be said that blue still brings a principle of darkness with it. This color has a peculiar and almost indescribable effect on the eye. As a hue it is powerful — but it is on the negative side, and in its highest purity is, as it were, a stimulating negation. Its appearance, then, is a kind of contradiction between excitement and repose. As the upper sky and distant mountains appear blue, so a blue surface seems to retire from us.

But as we readily follow an agreeable object that flies from us, so we love to contemplate blue — not because it advances to us, but because it draws us after it. Blue gives us an impression of cold, and thus, again, reminds us of shade… Rooms which are hung with pure blue, appear in some degree larger, but at the same time empty and cold. The appearance of objects seen through a blue glass is gloomy and melancholy.

Thoreau had his own cyanometer (pictured above) to measure the blueness of the sky. In Excursions, his 1893 anthology of essays, he wrote the following about his 1843 walk to Waschusett in a moment just after reaching a mountain summit:

We will remember within what walls we lie, and understand that this level life too has its summit, and why from the mountain-top the deepest valleys have a tinge of blue; that there is elevation in every hour, as no part of the earth is so low that the heavens may not be seen from, and we have only to stand on the summit of our hour to command an uninterrupted horizon.

And then we have the poet's perspective on blue...

A Slash of Blue
A slash of Blue—
A sweep of Gray—
Some scarlet patches on the way,
Compose an Evening Sky—
A little purple—slipped between—
Some Ruby Trousers hurried on—
A Wave of Gold—
A Bank of Day—
This just makes out the Morning Sky.
Emily Dickinson

Fragmentary Blue
Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
 
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
Robert Frost

Blue be beautiful!

 

From A Year with Rilke, February 3 Entry
It Is All About Praising, from Sonnets to Orpheus I, 7

It is all about praising.
Created to praise, his heart
is a winepress destined to break,
that makes for us an eternal wine.

His voice never chokes with dust
when words for the sacred come through.
All becomes vineyard. All becomes grape,
ripening in the southland of his being.

Nothing, not even the rot
in royal tombs, or the shadow cast by a god,
gives the lie to his praising.

He is ever the messenger,
venturing far through the doors of the dead,
bearing a bowl of fresh-picked fruit.

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.


*lemon - melon.