I Read Good

At the request of an English teacher friend I’ve signed up on Goodreads. There’s a link over there in my sidebar to my “currently-reading” list. I recently finished Letter Perfect [which I mentioned back here].

Letter Perfect: The Marvelous History of Our Alphabet From A to Z by David Sacks

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I like this book a lot. It’s a bit repetitive, but that let’s each chapter stand on its own. (You wouldn’t read them out of order though, would you?) So much of why English words are spelled and pronounced the way they are just makes more sense to me in light of how our alphabet developed. This was a good companion to The Adventure of English.


View all my reviews.

Childhood was Big

Call it one of those cosmic coincidences [if you believe in such stuff]. While driving home yesterday I listened for a time to a local college radio station and heard [former U.S. Poet Laureate] Billy Collins reading his poem Nostalgia. The title fits nicely with the post about my first crush and I like the humor of the piece.

Here it is:

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What do you think?

Shiny Objects

Over at The Collective they’ve been posting about their crushes [and inviting us to do so too]. I’ve heard that no one forgets their first crush. You may have many others throughout your years — your memories of them blur and fade. But that first one….

Her name was [I suppose it still is] Elizabeth — a blue-eyed blonde. I was in first grade and she was in second [an older woman!]. I was [and am] very shy and [given my age, understandably] immature. [My immaturity is less understandable now....] So naturally I never told her that I liked her [LIKED her liked her]. But I still remember vividly that that was the first time I was so aware of another person. I can’t explain why I would care what she wore, what she said, what she thought, whether she noticed me. I only know that I did. Attraction is a strange and wonderful force. [I'm strange. She's wonderful.]

I don’t know how long I pined after her. [Pine, punishment, and pain all come from common linguistic roots. Does this surprise anyone?] Her family moved away the next year and my crushes rarely survive long distances [unless, like celebrity crushes, they started out that way]. Crushes, infatuations, unrequited [or imaginary] love — I have a much different perspective these days. I’m not immune, but I know they are transitory and they are anything but romantic.

Archi-Torture

Lately this exchange has been happening a lot in my classroom:

Student: “Mr. V.”
Me: “Yes?”
Student: “I have a question.”
Me: “I assumed that’s why you called my name.”
Student: “Huh?”
Me: “What’s your question?”

Today they were working on identifying the parts of a house. Some of them were on WebMD when looking up shingles.

Some of them thought they should look on WebMD for flue too.

I’m afraid to look at what they found for stud.

Meanwhile, Back at the Pearly Gates

As the result of a tragic, but otherwise irrelevant, accident three married couples arrived at heaven’s gate.

St. Peter greeted the wife of the first couple, “Welcome! Please come in and enjoy your eternal reward.” Then he blocked her husband’s path and told him, “You are obsessed with money. You are a tyrant and a terrible miser. Your obsession is so complete that you married a woman named Penny. You go to hell.” And with that the man tumbled into an abyss of fire and brimstone.

St. Peter then greeted the wife of the second couple, “Welcome! Please come in and enjoy your eternal reward.” Then he blocked her husband’s path and told him, “You are a complete lush. Worse than that you are a mean and abusive drunk. Your obsession is so complete that you married a woman named Brandy. You go to hell.” And with that the man tumbled into an abyss of despair and suffering.

The third couple approached and the husband said, “Well, Fanny, I guess this is goodbye.”

Talk a Little, Sing a Little

I’ve seen two “talk” shows recently that put a similar slant on the format: The Chris Isaak Hour on the Biography channel and Spectacle: Elvis Costello With… on the Sundance channel. In both shows the host spends an hour talking with a single guest with musical performances mixed in. Spectacle has a live audience; Chris Isaak does not, but they often mix in stock footage of an audience that looks straight out of the 1950s applauding at the end of songs.

I’ve seen recent episodes of Spectacle with Smokey Robinson, James Taylor, and Tony Bennett. And I’ve seen Chris Isaak with Stevie Nicks, Glen Campbell, and Yusuf Islam. All of those are artists I find interesting and entertaining and both hosts do a fair job with the interviews.

God’s Handiwork

I find stories like this inspiring because there are people so much smarter than I am that are doing such interesting and useful work. [On the other hand, I find stories like this depressing because there are people so much smarter than I am that are doing such interesting and useful work. If only I were just starting my career... and if only I were smarter....] Anyway, the young men and women that have been injured in service to our country are heroes. The work by engineers to restore some mobility to them is, if not heroic as well, at least highly commendable.

Read the story here.

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No Stew for You

I’m trying to be a little more outgoing. Now when I talk to someone I look at their feet instead of my own….

Economic times are tough. I was going to take a mind-reading class, but I don’t have the intuition.

I was going to post a recipe for Easter Bunny stew, but apparently you people don’t like hare in your blogs.

Playing in Traffic

The other day I noticed the license plate on the car in front of me was a vanity plate that said,

HLY MLY

I quickly surmised that was Holy Moly. And then I noticed the type of plate. [Florida has about a gajillion different types of auto tags that you can see here if you're really bored interested.] It was a

Golf Tag

Florida Golf Capital of the World tag.

That made me wonder if it was intended to be Holey Moly, referring to the holes on the golf course. It was a sort of riddle. And a riddle is also a lot of holes — as in being riddled by bullets, for example, not that that’s the kind of riddle we are likely to enjoy. The coarse screen or sieve [lots of little holes] used when sand casting metals is also called a riddle.

And then my mind circled back to holy and thought that divine mysteries might also be holy riddles. God might be the ultimate holy riddle.

And then the light turned green. That car went straight through the intersection and I turned. If we had been stopped longer, I wonder what my brain would have made of “moly”….

Tired Analogy

I’m so sleepy I think this is funny:

Life is like an iPhone. Whatever you need, there’s a nap for that.

Time for me to snooze….