Word-Wednesday for March 30, 2022

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday, March 30, 2022, the thirteenth Wednesday of the year, the second Wednesday of spring, and the 89th day of the year, with 276 days remaining.


Wannaska Nature Update for March 30, 2022
Winter Attempts a Feeble, but Stinging Comeback
Stand strong, Wannaskans!

To the Thawing Wind
Robert Frost

Come with rain, O loud Southwester!
Bring the singer, bring the nester;
Give the buried flower a dream;
Make the settled snowbank steam;
Find the brown beneath the white;
But whate’er you do tonight,
Bathe my window, make it flow,
Melt it as the ice will go;
Melt the glass and leave the sticks
Like a hermit’s crucifix;
Burst into my narrow stall;
Swing the picture on the wall;
Run the rattling pages o’er;
Scatter poems on the floor;
Turn the poet out of door.


March 30 Nordhem Lunch: Updated daily.


Earth/Moon Almanac for March 30, 2022
Sunrise: 87:06am; Sunset: 7:51pm; 3 minutes, 35 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 6:57am; Moonset: 6:05pm, waning crescent, 2% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for March 30, 2022
                Average            Record              Today
High             40                     73                     35
Low               17                    -31                     19


March 30 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National I Am in Control Day
• National Pencil Day
• National Take a Walk in the Park Day
• National Turkey Neck Soup Day
• National Virtual Vacation Day
• National Little Red Wagon Day
• Manatee Appreciation Day
• National Doctors Day

March 30 Word Riddle
How do people wait in the doctor’s waiting room?*


March 30 Word Pun
Three of my favorite things are eating my children and not using commas.


March 30 Etymology Word of the Week
ambulate
/ˈam-byəˌ-lāt/ v., to walk; move about, 1620s, from Latin ambulatus, past participle of ambulare "to walk, go about", from amble, "to move easily and gently without hard shocks," as a horse does when it first lifts the two legs on one side and then the two on the other, early 14c., from Old French ambler, of a horse or other quadruped, "go at a steady, easy pace" (12c.), from Latin ambulare "to walk, to go about, take a walk," perhaps a compound of ambi- "around" (from Proto-Indo-European root *ambhi- "around") and -ulare, from Proto-Indo-European root *el- "to go" (source also of Greek ale "wandering," alaomai "wander about;" Latvian aluot "go around or astray"). Until 1590s used only of horses or persons on horseback.


March 30 Notable Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 240 BC 1st recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.
• 1778 Playwright Voltaire crowned with laurel wreath.
• 1842 Ether used as an anesthetic for first time.
• 1858 Pencil with attached eraser patented.
• 1894 George Bernard Shaw's comedy play Candida premieres.
• 1953 Albert Einstein announces revised unified field theory.
• 1959 Dalai Lama flees China and is granted political asylum in India.
• 1987 Vincent van Gogh's Sunflowers sells for a record 22.5 million pounds ($39.7 million).

March 30 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1135 Moses Maimonedes, philosopher, jurist, and physician.
• 1674 Jethro Tull, English agricultural writer.
• 1697 John-Baptist Xavery, Flemish sculptor.
• 1746 Francisco Goya, Spanish court painter and etcher.
• 1816 Moritz Steinschneider, Czech bibliographer.
• 1820 Anna Sewell, English author of Black Beauty.
• 1844 Paul Verlaine, French lyric poet.
• 1853 Vincent van Gogh.
• 1872 Sergey Vasilenko, Russian composer.
• 1880 Sean O'Casey, Irish playwright.
• 1923 Milton Acorn, Canadian poet.
• 1947 Marilyn Crispell, American jazz pianist and composer.

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

• argosy: /AHR-guh-see/ n., a large merchant ship carrying a rich cargo; a fleet of cargo-carrying ships, an opulent supply.
• boggart: /ˈbäg-ə(r)t/ n., a spector, ghost, or goblin.
• disprefer: /ˌdis-prəˈfər/ v., to favor or prefer (something) less than the alternatives.
• frequentative: /frē-ˈkwən-(t)ə-div/ adj., (of a verb or verbal form) expressing frequent repetition or intensity of action, n., a frequentative verb or verbal form, e.g., /chatter/ in English.
• garniture: /ˈɡär-nə-CHər/ n., a set of decorative accessories, in particular vases.
• interoceptive: /ˌin-tə-rō-ˈsep-tiv/ adj., of, relating to, or being stimuli arising within the body and especially in the viscera.
• rumspringa: ˈro͝om-spriNG-ə/ n., (in some Amish communities) a period of adolescence in which boys and girls are given greater personal freedom and allowed to form romantic relationships, usually ending with the choice of baptism into the church or leaving the community.
• snoker: /SNOKE-uhr/ n., one who sniffs and smells at objects like a dog.
• todger: /ˈtɒd-ʒər/ n., a man’s sex organ.
• whelk: /(h)welk/ n., a predatory marine mollusk with a heavy pointed spiral shell, some kinds of which are edible.

March 30, 2021 Word-Wednesday Feature
Writing and Walking
We’re entering a season in Wannaska where one doesn’t have to expend every ounce of concentration on walking safely. We will soon be able to amble freely about, letting our feet do the thinking, and our imaginations to wander. Walking can be an inspirational pastime for writers.

In her book wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit refers to walking as “a state in which the mind, the body, and the world are aligned”. In his novella, Walking, Thomas Bernhard notes that “there is nothing more revealing than to see a thinking person walking, just as there is nothing more revealing than to see a walking person thinking”. In Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame insists that solitary walks “set the mind jogging… make it garrulous, exalted, a little mad maybe — certainly creative and suprasensitive”. Then there's Thoreau, who wrote his own book called Walking, where he observed that “every walk is a sort of crusade”. In his book, A Philosophy of Walking, Frédéric Gros writes:

When one has walked a long way to reach the turning in the path that discloses an anticipated view, and that view appears, there is always a vibration of the landscape. It is repeated in the walker’s body. The harmony of the two presences, like two strings in tune, each feeding off the vibration of the other, is like an endless relaunch. Eternal Recurrence is the unfolding in a continuous circle of the repetition of those two affirmations, the circular transformation of the vibration of the presences. The walker’s immobility facing that of the landscape… it is the very intensity of that co-presence that gives birth to an indefinite circularity of exchanges: I have always been here, tomorrow, contemplating this landscape.

Perhaps no writer wrote more about the ameliorative and creative advantages of walking than Friedrich Nietzsche, who suffered from increasingly difficult episodes of migraine headaches and spells of intense nausea, confining himself to dark rooms for days at a time. Long, solitary walks were one of his most effective remedies, often walking the same route in loops an hour every morning and three hours every afternoon. In The Wanderer and His Shadow, he observed: "I am walking a lot, through the forest, and having tremendous conversations with myself. I would walk for six or eight hours a day, composing thoughts that I would later jot down on paper."

By his mid-thirties, when he was most productive, Nietzsche set about "ten hours a day of hermit's walking", which lead to such accomplishments as Beyond Good and Evil and On the Genealogy of Morality, where he wrote: 

We do not belong to those who have ideas only among books, when stimulated by books. It is our habit to think outdoors — walking, leaping, climbing, dancing, preferably on lonely mountains or near the sea where even the trails become thoughtful...Our first questions about the value of a book, of a human being, or a musical composition are: Can they walk? Even more, can they dance? What my foot demands in the first place from music is that ecstasy which lies in good walking.

Happy walking, Wannaskans!


From A Year with Rilke, March 30 Entry
The Last Supper, from Book of Images

 
They are assembled around him, troubled and confused.
He seems withdrawn,
as if, strangely, he were flowing past
those to whom he had belonged.
The old aloneness comes over him.
It had prepared him for his deep work.
Now once again he will go out to the olive groves.
Now those who love him will flee from him.

He had bid them come to this last meal.
Their hands on the bread
tremble now at the words he speaks,
tremble in sudden silence
as a forest does when a gun is fired.
They long to leave, and they will.
But they will find him everywhere.

Olive Trees with the Alpilles in the Background

Van van Gogh

Be better than yesterday,
talk a walk today,
try to stay out of trouble - at least until tomorrow,
and write when you have the time.

*patiently.