Wannaskan Almanac

What do Salvatore Garau and Yves Klein have in common?  Or perhaps a better question might be...who are Salvatore Garau and Yves Klein?  The picture below gives a hint. Nothing to see here, folks! Salvatore Garau and Yves Klein are both artists.  Salvatore Garau was born in Santa Giusta, Italy in 1953.  He achieved notoriety last summer for selling a sculpture for almost 20 thousand dollars.  While this might not sound like a big achievement (Wannaskan Almanac writers often spend far more than that on sculptures) it is newsworthy because the sculpture was conceptual art.  His latest invisible sculpture is a work titled "I Am."  The art does not exist except in the mind of the artist. Garau says the sculpture may be displayed in any light (even imaginary light). The buyer gets a stamped receipt in exchange for payment of $18,000, assuming they can't just imagine they paid. In 1958, artist Yves Klein (1928-1962) opened an exhibition called...

ANOTHER KIND OF BATTLE The events in the poem take place over most of the sixth century and feature no English characters. Some suggest that Beowulf was first composed in the 7th century and shows close connections with Scandinavia, and the East Anglian royal dynasty. who may have been descendants of the Getese. Others have associated this poem with the court of King Alfred the Great or with the court of King Cnut the Great .  The poem blends fictional, legendary, and historic elements. Although Beowulf himself is not mentioned in any other Anglo-Saxon manuscript, many of the other figures named in Beowulf appear in Scandinavian sources. This concerns not only individuals but also clans and certain events such as the battle between Eadgils and Onela. The raid by King Hygelac is mentioned into Frisia is mentioned in History of the Franks and can be dated to around 521. And now . . . Help arrives . . .  They heard the sound of Hygelac’s horn, His trumpet calling as he came t...

      In a cartoon I saw recently, a dad is feeding his infant child in a high chair. The dad says, "When you get a little older I'd like you to help me with a couple of problems I’m having with my computer." There's some truth in that, but on the other hand, I read once about a teenager who was given a Sony Walkman and was told there were sixteen songs available on the device. He could only listen to half of them because he didn't know he had to flip the cassette over.    There was no good reason for the teen to spend time figuring out the machine because he had an infinite number of songs available on his phone. If he took the time, he would eventually have figured out how to get the last eight songs on the cassette, but the payoff was not there.    It seems ridiculous when people say such and such a device or program is intuitive. A spear is intuitive. If you and your clan need to take down a wooly mammoth, a spear is just the thing. A bow and ...

Hello and welcome to an Easter Saturday here at the Wannaskan Almanac. Today is April 16th. How did Easter sneak up on us so fast? If you're an active Christian family like ours, you know the challenge of getting the meaning of the religious holiday to sink in and resonate with kids. I teach 4th-grade church school, and even after spending an entire lesson on the big deal about Easter, if you ask them what Easter is about, they'll still shout, "The Easter Bunny!" or "Candy!" Over the years, I've come across two activities that do the best job I know of (so far) to make the whole Easter thing stick. Resurrection Eggs: Telling the Easter Story - This craft consists of a dozen plastic eggs stored in an egg carton. Each egg holds an item that symbolizes aspects of the Easter story. Just yesterday, the 4th Grader pulled out the egg set her older sister assembled when she was 10 years old, and asked, "Tell me the story of Jesus." Now, the ladies from...

  To the go-getter, the future is a to-do list.  To the procrastinator, the future is a doodle pad. Our minds are so small  We can’t know all that is great.  A good friend of God’s May be someone we hate. If an object is not where you left it, view that not as an annoyance, but as the beginning of a voyage of discovery.  New love blinds a couple to each other’s faults. For happiness to continue, the rose-colored  glasses of toleration must be donned. What the Bible offers as comfort, the devil converts to complacency. 

   Raymond L. Palm (1911-2003) and Steven Reynolds / Wannaskawriter     Raymond L. Palm of Roseau was buried in the Palmville Cemetery on April 15th , 2003 with a great number of his friends and family present at his graveside. This is a personal tribute to my Uncle Ray, a truly special human being.     The sun shown dull through a opaque sky above the Palmville Cemetery the morning after his funeral. The rope on the aluminum flagpole ‘clunged’ in the wind against the metal mast, near-center of the small township cemetery off the northeast corner of our farm. The leafless oak trees along the creek bank swayed in the wind; their fallen leaves fluttering from their winter nests along the woven wire fence of the cemetery. A Canadian goose rested on the ground at the head of Raymond’s grave, its head nestled against its back, asleep; the gander stood nearby facing east watching for danger among the headstones surrounding this newest grave.      A...

And here is the Wannaskan Almanac with Word-Wednesday, April 13, 2022, the fifteenth Wednesday of the year, the fourth Wednesday of spring, and the 103rd day of the year, with 262 days remaining. Wannaska Nature Update for April 13, 2022 The Robins have arrived! And they are not happy. I dislike those Rogue April days that feel like the following winter. Chairman Joe squib April 13 Nordhem Lunch : Closed due to weather. Earth/Moon Almanac for April 13, 2022 Sunrise: 6:37am; Sunset: 8:12pm; 3 minutes, 28 seconds more daylight today Moonrise: 4:31pm; Moonset: 5:50am, waxing gibbous, 85% illuminated. Temperature Almanac for April 13, 2022                 Average            Record              Today High             47       ...