Word-Wednesday for March 27, 2024

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for March 27, 2024, the thirteenth Wednesday of the year, the second Wednesday of spring and the eighty-seventh day of the year, with two-hundred seventy-nine days remaining.

 
Wannaska Phenology Update for March 27, 2024
Let the Nesting Begin
Enjoy these longer, warmer days to seek out the first signs of birdspring. The first eastern bluebirds and wood ducks return in March to look for nest boxes, and most waterfowl migration occurs from mid-March through mid-April. Great horned owls are already nesting and raising their young and Canada geese and bald eagles begin incubating eggs by early April. Minnesota is among the best states in the U.S. to see bald eagles, and with all the bare trees, March is perhaps the best month to see eagles in Wannaska. Also arrive to nest in the coming weeks: Eastern bluebirds, horned larks, tree swallows, meadowlarks, blackbirds, and Eastern phoebes.

Spot the Space Station:
Time: Wednesday, Mar 27 8:50 PM, Visible: 6 min, Max Height: 67°, Appears: 10° above WNW, Disappears: 19° above SE.

March 27 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


March 27 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily, occasionally.


Earth/Moon Almanac for March 27, 2024
Sunrise: 7:11am; Sunset: 7:47pm; 3 minutes, 36 seconds more daylight today
Moonrise: 10:46pm; Moonset: 7:53am, waning gibbous, 96% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for March 27, 2024
                Average            Record              Today
High            38                     72                     23
Low             16                    -22                     11

Spring
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots.
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

March 27 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Scribble Day
• National Little Red Wagon Day
• National Spanish Paella Day
• National Joe Day
• World Theater Day
• Feast Day of Gelasius, Archbishop of Armagh

March 27 Word Pun

To lock up a thief
Some cheeses are better
The policemen of Greece
Always use feta

                            Joe McDonnell


March 27 Word Riddle
Who was the roundest knight at King Arthur’s table?*


March 27 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
BATH, n. A kind of mystic ceremony substituted for religious worship, with what spiritual efficacy has not been determined.

    The man who taketh a steam bath
    He loseth all the skin he hath,
    And, for he's boiled a brilliant red,
    Thinketh to cleanliness he's wed,
    Forgetting that his lungs he's soiling
    With dirty vapors of the boiling.
    —Richard Gwow


March 27 Etymology Word of the Week
nest
/nest/ n., a structure or place made or chosen by a bird for laying eggs and sheltering its young; a place filled with or frequented by undesirable people or things, from "structure built by a bird or domestic fowl for the insulation and rearing of its young," Old English nest "bird's nest; snug retreat," also "young bird, brood," from Proto-Germanic nistaz (source also of Middle Low German, Middle Dutch nest, German Nest; not found in Scandinavian or Gothic), from Proto-Indo-European nizdo- (source also of Sanskrit nidah "resting place, nest," Latin nidus "nest," Old Church Slavonic gnezdo, Old Irish net, Welsh nyth, Breton nez "nest"), probably from ni "down" + from Proto-Indo-European root sed- (1) "to sit."

From circa 1200 of an animal or insect. Used since Middle English in reference to various accumulations of things, especially of diminishing sizes, each fitting within the next (such as a nest of drawers, early 18th century). Nest egg "retirement savings" is from 1700; it was originally "a real or artificial egg left in a nest to induce the hen to go on laying there" (nest ei, early 14th century), hence "something laid up as the beginning of a continued growth."


March 27 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 1808 Joseph Haydn's oratorio Die Schopfung premieres.
• 1866 American Andrew Rankin patents the urinal.
• 1906 Founding of the Alpine Club of Canada in Winnipeg, Manitoba.
• 1945 Ella Fitzgerald and Delta Rhythm Boys record the Harold Arlen-Yip Harburg-Billy Rose song It's Only a Paper Moon.
• 1948 Just 11 days after being released from prison, Billie Holiday plays in front of a sold-out crowd at Carnegie Hall.
• 1952 Singin' in the Rain, musical comedy directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, starring Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds, premieres.
• 1969 Black Academy of Arts & Letters forms in Boston.
• 1983 Neil Simon's Brighton Beach Memoirs premieres.
• 2023 World's oldest tartan confirmed as up to 500 years old, after testing on material found 40 years earlier in Glen Affric bog, by experts at National Museums Scotland.

March 27 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1416 Antonio Squarcialupi [Giovanni], Italian composer.
• 1665 Benjamin Neukirch, German poet.
• 1702 Johann Ernst Eberlin, German composer.
• 1746 Michael Bruce, Scottish poet.
• 1760 Ishmail Spicer, American composer.
• 1760 Marie-Jean Auguste Vestris, French ballet dancer.
• 1784 Alexander Csoma de Kőrös, Hungarian Tibetan scholar, author of first Tibetan-English Dictionary.
• 1810 Adolf Glassbrenner, German satirical writer.
• 1813 Nathaniel Currier, American lithographer.
• 1818 Jacob Axel Josephson, Swedish composer.
• 1867 Edyth Walker, American opera singer.
• 1868 Patty Smith Hill, American compose.
• 1871 Heinrich Mann, German novelist.
• 1883 Jan Kunc, Czech composer.
• 1883 Marie Under, Estonian author and poet.
• 1886 Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, German-American architect.
• 1889 Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu, Turkish writer.
• 1891 Máirín Cregan, Irish writer.
• 1892 Ferde Grofé, American pianist, composer.
• 1892 Thorne Smith, American science fiction author.
• 1902 Mary Armour, Scottish painter.
• 1906 Charles "Pee Wee" Russell, American jazz clarinet and saxophone player.
• 1910 Ai Qing, Chinese poet.
• 1914 Budd Schulberg, American novelist.
• 1922 Stefan Wul, French science fiction author.
• 1923 Louis Simpson, Jamaican-American poet.
• 1923 Shūsaku Endō, Japanese writer.
• 1926 Frank O'Hara, American writer and poet.
• 1927 Mstislav Rostropovich, Russian cellist.
• 1928 Antonín Tučapský, Czech composer.
• 1934 Arthur Mitchell, African-American choreographer.
• 1935 Abelardo Castillo, Argentine novelist.
• 1955 Patrick McCabe, Irish novelist.

Words-I-Looked-Up-This-Week Writer's Challenge
Write a story or pram from the following words:

• awdl: / OW-duhl/ n., In Welsh poetry: (originally) a stanza in which all the lines have the same rhyme; (later) a long form poem using at least two of the 24 canonical metres of Welsh poetry, each of which uses cynghanedd.
• bockery: /BOCK-uh-ree/ n., IRISH, to nonsense, foolishness, or something that is ridiculous or silly.
• capisce: /kə-PĒSH/ v., US SLANG, used to ask if a message, warning, etc., has been understood.
• cynghanedd: / kəŋ-HÄ-(ˌ)net͟h/ n.,  (literally "harmony"), in Welsh language poetry, the basic concept of sound-arrangement within one line, using stress, alliteration and rhyme.
• gallah: /GAL-uh/ n., a Christian minister or cleric, especially a Roman Catholic priest or monk.
• lairy: /LAIR-ee/ adj., behaving in a loud, excited manner, especially when you are enjoying yourself or drinking alcohol.
• mafeesh: /muh-FEESH/ interjec., adj., chiefly expressing rejection: ‘nothing’; ‘finished’; ‘done for’.
• mammonist: /MA-mə-nist/ n.,  one devoted to the ideal or pursuit of wealth.
• moue: /mo͞o/ n., a pouting expression used to convey annoyance or distaste.
• reticule: /RE-də-kyo͞ol/ n., a woman's small handbag, originally netted and typically having a drawstring and decorated with embroidery or beading.

March 27, 2024 Word-Wednesday Feature
beauty
/ˈbyo͞odē/ n., a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight, from early 14th century, bealte, "physical attractiveness," also "goodness, courtesy," from Anglo-French beute, Old French biauté "beauty, seductiveness, beautiful person" (12th century, Modern French beauté), earlier beltet, from Vulgar Latin bellitatem (nominative bellitas) "state of being pleasing to the senses" (source also of Spanish beldad, Italian belta), from Latin bellus "pretty, handsome, charming," in classical Latin used especially of women and children, or ironically or insultingly of men, perhaps (Watkins) from Proto-Indo-European dw-en-elo-, diminutive of root deu- "to do, perform; show favor, revere." Famously defined by Stendhal as la promesse de bonheur "the promise of happiness."

Replaced Old English wlite. The concrete meaning "a beautiful woman" in English is recorded from late the 14th century. Beauty-sleep "sleep before midnight" (popularly regarded as the most refreshing) is attested by 1850. Beauty-spot "dark spot placed on the face formerly by women to heighten beauty" is from 1650s. Beauty-contest is from 1885; beauty-queen is from 1922 (earlier it was a show-name of cattle and hogs). Beauté du diable (literally "devil's beauty") is used as a French phrase in English from 1825.

This word occupies a difficult location in the languages and grammars of cultures dominated by men, but expressed differently in the hearts of artists and those immersed in our natural world — sometimes a universal, often specific to an admirer’s peculiar tastes or proclivities — for some eternal, for others but fleeting — both a source of our greatest joys and greatest longings — and inevitably, tied to love in its many manifestations. Beauty is a word that each person must define personally. Here are the words used by some famous writers to describe their own understandings:


Beauty is the melody of the features.

Josh Billings

Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.

Kahlil Gibran

Beauty is only skin deep, and the world is full of thin skinned people.

Richard Armour

Beauty is as summer fruits, which are easy to corrupt, and cannot last.

Francis Bacon

Beauty is the sole ambition, the exclusive goal of Taste.

Charles Baudelaire

Beauty itself is but the sensible image of the infinite.

George Bancroft

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.

David Hume

Beauty may be said to be God’s trademark in creation.

Henry Ward Beecher

Personal beauty is a greater recommendation than any letter of reference.

Aristotle

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its loveliness increases;
it will never
Pass into nothingness.

John Keats

The ideal has many names, and beauty is but one of them.

W. Somerset Maugham

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.

Maya Angelou

The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.

D. H. Lawrence

There are some places so beautiful they can make a grown man break down and weep.

Edward Abbey

By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.

Hannah Arendt

If you want a golden rule that will fit everything, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

William Morris

Isn’t it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?

Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

If you go through life trading on your good looks, there’ll come a time when no one wants to trade.

Lynne Alpern

It has been said that a pretty face is a passport. But it’s not, it’s a visa, and it runs out fast.

Julie Burchill

The problem with beauty is that it’s like being born rich and getting poorer.

Joan Collins

The beauty of stature is the only beauty of men.

Michel de Montaigne

Do I love you because you’re beautiful? Or are you beautiful because I love you?

Oscar Hammerstein II

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish.

George Eliot

Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.

Albert Camus

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Francis Bacon

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

Franz Kafka

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

Edgar Allan Poe

Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.

John Muir

Why are we reading, if not in hope of beauty laid bare, life heightened and its deepest mystery probed?

Annie Dillard

Unexpected intrusions of beauty. That is what life is.

Saul Bellow

Bait, n. A preparation that renders the hook more palatable. The best kind is beauty.

Ambrose Bierce, in The Devil’s Dictionary

You agree—I'm sure you agree, that beauty is the only thing worth living for.

Agatha Christie

To the sightless, beauty bursts forth in sound, touch, fragrance, and taste.

William A. Cummins

There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.

Rachel Carson

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us, or we find it not.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

From A Year with Rilke, March 27 Entry
Remembering, from Book of Images

And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.

In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.

And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.

Rodin drawing a Cambodian dancer
Marseille, 1906

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.





*Sir Cumference; he was too fond of pi.