Word-Wednesday for October 9, 2024

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday for October 9, 2024, the forty-first Wednesday of the year, the third Wednesday of fall, the second Wednesday of October, and the two-hundred-eighty-third day of the year, with eighty-three days remaining.
 
Wannaska Phenology Update for October 9, 2024
Wild Cranberries
Two species of cranberries grow northern Minnesota: Large Cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon) and Small Cranberry (Vaccinium oxycoccos), which grow in sphagnum bogs, tamarack swamps, fens, and other wetlands. You can begin to prepare for Thanksgiving festivities by starting to gather now, because they are both ripening. State and national forests as well as Wildlife Management Areas permit picking, but Scientific and Natural Areas do not. 

Your wild cranberries should last in the refrigerator only for several days, which gives you time to experiment with your cranberry sauce recipe. If you need a recipe, here's one from Saveur:

Ingredients

• 1 lb. whole cranberries, fresh or frozen
• 3⁄4 cup sugar
• 1⁄2 cup fresh orange juice
• 1⁄2 cup fresh grapefruit juice
• 1 tbsp. fresh lemon juice
• 1⁄2 tsp. salt
• Generous pinch freshly grated nutmeg
• Zest of one orange, cut into fine strips
• Zest of half a grapefruit, cut into fine strips
• Zest of 1 lemon, cut into fine strips

Instructions
Step 1

Put cranberries, sugar, orange juice, grapefruit juice, lemon juice, salt, nutmeg, and zests into a medium pot and bring just to a boil over medium-high heat. Reduce heat to medium-low and stir well. Cook, covered, without stirring, until liquid has thickened and about half of the berries have collapsed, about 15 minutes.

Step 2

Transfer cranberry sauce to a wide, shallow bowl and let cool. Serve at room temperature or chilled, if you like.

October 9 Fickle Pickle Wednesday Menu Special: Potato Dumpling


October 9 Nordhem Wednesday Lunch: Updated daily, occasionally.


Earth/Moon Almanac for October 9, 2024
Sunrise: 7:36am; Sunset: 6:46pm; 3 minutes, 30 seconds less daylight today
Moonrise: 3:08pm; Moonset: 10:15pm, waxing crescent, 41% illuminated.


Temperature Almanac for October 9, 2024
                Average            Record              Today
High             54                     82                     72
Low              33                      8                      47

October's Bright Blue Weather
by Helen Hunt Jackson

O suns and skies and clouds of June,
And flowers of June together,
Ye cannot rival for one hour
October's bright blue weather;

When loud the bumblebee makes haste,
Belated, thriftless vagrant,
And goldenrod is dying fast,
And lanes with grapes are fragrant;

When gentians roll their fingers tight
To save them for the morning,
And chestnuts fall from satin burrs
Without a sound of warning;

When on the ground red apples lie
In piles like jewels shining,
And redder still on old stone walls
Are leaves of woodbine twining;

When all the lovely wayside things
Their white-winged seeds are sowing,
And in the fields still green and fair,
Late aftermaths are growing;

When springs run low, and on the brooks,
In idle golden freighting,
Bright leaves sink noiseless in the hush
Of woods, for winter waiting;

When comrades seek sweet country haunts,
By twos and twos together,
And count like misers, hour by hour,
October's bright blue weather.

O sun and skies and flowers of June,
Count all your boasts together,
Love loveth best of all the year
October's bright blue weather.

October 9 Celebrations from National Day Calendar

• National Moldy Cheese Day
• Pans/Pandas Awareness Day
• National Curves Day
• National Take Your Parents to Lunch Day
• National Bring Your Teddy Bear to Work Day
• National Stop Bullying Day
• National Emergency Nurses Day
• World Post Day

October 9 Word Pun
In his college days, all the other poets wanted to bunk in Rumi’s dorm.

(a Chairman Joe original)

October 9 Word Riddle
Why did the ram run off the cliff?*


October 9 The Devil’s Dictionary Word-Pram
LAW, n.

    Once Law was sitting on the bench,
    And Mercy knelt a-weeping.
    "Clear out!" he cried, "disordered wench!
    Nor come before me creeping.
    Upon your knees if you appear,
    'Tis plain you have no standing here."

    Then Justice came. His Honor cried:
    "Your status?—devil seize you!"
    "Amica curiæ," she replied—
    "Friend of the court, so please you."
    "Begone!" he shouted—"there's the door—
    I never saw your face before!"
                    —G.J.


October 9 Etymology Word of the Week
cookie (not pumpkin flavored)
/Ko͝oK-ē/ n., a small sweet cake, typically round and flat and having a crisp or chewy texture; a person of a specified kind, from 1730, Scottish, but the sense is "plain bun," and it is debatable whether it is the same word; in the sense of "small, flat, sweet cake" by 1808 (American English); this use is from Dutch koekje "little cake," diminutive of koek "cake," from Middle Dutch koke (see cake (n.)). "Dutch influence is no doubt responsible also for the parallel use of the word in South African English" [Ayto, "Diner's Dictionary"]. Slang application to persons (especially an attractive woman) attested since 1920. Phrase that's the way the cookie crumbles "that's the way things happen" is attested by 1955.


October 9 Historic Events, Literary or Otherwise, from On This Day

• 768 Charlemagne and his brother Carloman I are crowned Kings of The Franks; Svenomagne is not mentioned.
• 1410 Earliest mention of Prague's astronomical clock, the world's oldest still in operation, built by Mikuláš of Kadaň and Jan Šindel.
• 1446 The Hangul (Korean) alphabet is first published in Korea by King Sejong the Great.
• 1701 Collegiate School of Ct (Yale U), chartered in New Haven.
• 1824 Slavery is abolished in Costa Rica.
• 1855 Joshua Stoddard of Worcester, Massachusetts, patents first calliope (steam powered musical instrument).
• 1946 Eugene O'Neill's play The Iceman Cometh premieres.
• 1980 Nobel prize for literature awarded to Czesław Miłosz.

Love
by Czesław Miłosz

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

October 9 Author/Artist/Character Birthdays, from On This Day

• 1581 Claude Gaspard Bachet de Meziriac, French poet.
• 1585 Heinrich Schütz, German composer.
• 1586 Jan III van Foreest, Dutch poet.
• 1760 Pierre Gaveaux, French composer.
• 1766 Bedrich Divis Weber, Bohemian composer.
• 1772 Mary Tighe, Irish poet.
• 1823 Mry Ann Shadd Cary, American-Canadian anti-slavery campaigner, suffragist, and first African American newspaper publisher.
• 1830 Harriet Hosmer, American neoclassical sculptor.
• 1852 Camille Sait-Saëns, French composer.
• 1856 Sylvain Dupuis, Belgian composer.
• 1863 Alexander Siloti, Ukranian composer.
• 1874 Nicholas Roerich, Russian painter.
• 1876 Solomon Tshkisho Plaatje, South African writer.
• 1888 Julie Reisserová, Czech composer.
• 1890 Jānis Mediņš, Latvian composer.
• 1892 Ivo Andric, Yugoslavian novelist.
• 1892 Marina Tsvetaeva, Russian poet.
• 1893 Mário de Andrade, Brazilian writer,.
• 1899 Mary Jarred, British mezzo-soprano and contralto singer.
• 1899 Karol Piegza, Czech artist.
• 1904 Carl Parrish, American composer.
• 1906 Léopold Sédar Senghor, Senegalese poet.
• 1906 Jānis Ivanovs, Latvian composer.
• 1908 Harry Hooton, Australian poet.
• 1912 Henri Dillon, French composer.
• 1919 Rezső Sugár, Hungarian composer.
• 1920 Jens Bjørneboe, Norwegian poet and writer.
• 1928 Einojuhani Rautavaara, Finnish composer.
• 1930 Fjölnir Stefánsson, Icelandic composer.
• 1934 Jill Ker Conway, Australian-American author.
• 1940 John Lennon, British musician.
• 1948 Ciaran Carson, Irish poet.
  
• 1972 The Count, Sesame Street character, author of The Count's Poem.
  

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

• brog: /bräg/ n., a pointed instrument; awl; v., to goad, prod.
• coof: /küf/ n., a stupid fellow; dolt, lout.
• dashiki: /də-SHĒ-kē/ n., a loose brightly colored shirt or tunic, originally from West Africa.
• earnful: /əRN-fəl/ adj., yearning.
• flimbo: /FLIM-bō/ n., the time between when someone farts and when another person can smell it.
• halok: /ha-LOK/ v., to kiss; to touch with the lips or press the lips against, usually to express love or affection or passion, or as part of a greeting.
• pongelo: / PAHNG-guh-loh/ n., beer, spec. pale ale or a mixture of pale ale and another beer; a drink of this.
• santoku: /sahn-TOH-koo/ n., a lightweight, multi-purpose kitchen knife originating in Japan, having a short, flat blade that curves down at the tip.
• untoward: /ən-TÔRD/ adj., unexpected and inappropriate or inconvenient.
• winkle-pinker: /WING-kəl pik-ər/ n., a shoe with a long pointed toe, popular in the 1950s.

October 9, 2024 Word-Wednesday Feature
beauty
/BYo͞o-dē/ 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."

We here at Word-Wednesday Headquarters just finished reading On Beauty, by Zadie Smith — a must-read for any fans of E.M. Forster's Howards End — where Smith features the following pram by Nick Laird:

On Beauty

No, we could not itemize the list
of sins they can't forgive us.
The beautiful don't lack the wound.
It is always beginning to snow.

Of sins they can't forgive us
speech is beautifully useless.
It is always beginning to snow.
The beautiful know this.

Speech is beautifully useless.
They are the damned.
The beautiful know this.
They stand around unnatural as statuary.

They are the damned.
and so their sadness is perfect,
delicate as an egg placed in your palm.
Hard, it is decorated with their face

and so their sadness is perfect.
The beautiful don't lack the wound.
Hard, it is decorated with their face.
No, we could not itemize the list.

Fall is a time of beauty, and Wannaska is a land of beautiful people. Interestingly, beauty is a right-hemisphere phenomenon for which any definition falls far short. Writers being writers, however, they continue their attempts to capture the essence of this word with other words. Here are a few examples:

BEAUTY, n. The power by which a woman charms a lover and terrifies a husband.

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

Beauty itself doth of itself persuade
The eyes of men without an orator.

William Shakespeare

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

W. Somerset Maugham

I am waylaid by beauty.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

There is nothing that makes its way more directly to the soul than beauty.

Joseph Addison

When a beautiful soul harmonizes with a beautiful form, and the two are cast in one mold, that will be the fairest of sights to one who has the eyes to contemplate the vision.

Plato

Call it enchantment, the difference between the time-bound and the timeless, between us and the otherworldly. All beauty and art evoke harmonies that transport us to a place where, for only seconds, time stops and we are one with the world. It is the best life has to offer. Under the spell of beauty, we experience a rare condition called plenitude, where we want for nothing.

André Aciman

For even the humblest person, a day spent without the sight or sound of beauty, the contemplation of mystery, or the search for truth and perfection is a poverty-stricken day; and a succession of such days is fatal to human life.

Lewis Mumford

If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.

Frank Lloyd Wright

In every person's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty.

Christopher Morley

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

John Muir

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

Edward Abbey

The world appears beautiful so that the living may love being alive in it.

Carl Safina

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

Franz Kafka

Beauty is simply Reality seen with the eyes of love.

Evelyn Underhill

From A Year with Rilke, October 9
We Stand in Your Garden, from Book of Hours III; 8

Lord, we are more wretched than the animals
who do their deaths once and for all,
for we are never finished with our not dying.

Dying is strange and hard
if it is not our death, but a death
that takes us by storm, when we've ripened none within us.

We stand in your garden year after year.
We are trees for yielding a sweet death.
But fearful, we wither before the harvest.

Bend in the Forest Road
by Paul Cézanne

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 didn’t see the ewe turn.