Prayers and good wishes on their way!
What do you get when you divide the circumference of your Jack O'Lantern by its diameter?
Pumpkin pi.
xeger @ 268: You were right, the Dick and Jane books were stupid. I remember in first grade being scolded by the teacher for reading ahead in the books -- I was trying to find something that was Not Boring.
I too learned to read at three... at least, that's when Mom discovered I could read. It was a Sunday afternoon and she gathered my sister (a year younger than me) and I to read the "funnies" from the Sunday paper to us, and I started reading them to her. (The paper was probably the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph.) I don't remember ever learning to read; as far as I remember, I always knew. Mom was helpful about words I didn't know (until I learned to use the dictionary, at least), but always insisted that she never taught me to read. I think I largely learned from TV. We got our first TV the Christmas after I was born; I grew up watching commercials. Some of the first words I remember are brand names: "Joy," "Cheer," "Frigidaire," "Chevrolet" -- and yes, I still drive a Chevy and wash my clothes in Tide.
And Mom read all the time. There's a snapshot my dad took when I was about two months old, a few weeks after that first Christmas. You can't see me, I'm in the bassinet. It's late at night; the TV -- a very small screen in the background -- is off. Mom is sitting in her nightgown next to the bassinet. Her right hand (she was left-handed) is reaching into the bassinet -- she's holding my bottle, though you can't quite see that -- but she's looking at the book on her lap that she's holding with the other hand. Or was, because she's just glancing up to see what Dad's up to. Dad thought this pose was so typical of her that he'd grabbed the Brownie to catch it for posterity.
We lived in an area rural enough that, in the mid-1950s, there was no kindergarten nearby, but by the time I started first grade I was reading at about a fourth- or fifth-grade level at least, and by second grade at least, I was sneaking into my brother's room to read *his* stuff. He's about nine years older than I am, and so was in high school by then, and had interesting stuff like Boys' Life magazine and Classics Illustrated comic books. (The latter he brought home from his after-school job at the local drug store.) I also remember puzzling over his Algebra and French textbooks, but not making much sense of them at the time.
The local library wasn't much help. They had some very strict rules that are (fortunately) very old-fashioned now: you had to be over six years old and be able to write your name in order to get a library card, and you could only borrow books from the proper age group, and only borrow no more than 10 at a time. (I'd have half of those read in the car on the way home.) So when I finally could get a card, I could only borrow books from the "first and second grade" section, a lot of which were not much less boring than Dick and Jane. "Little Black Sambo" -- I didn't know the word yet, but I somehow had the concept of "racist" already, and that book was it. (Not to mention the tiger turning into butter. There's fantasy and there's silly, but that was neither; it was just dumb.) Dr. Seuss was good, but there weren't that many of his books (this was about the time he would have been writing "The Cat in the Hat"; I had to wait until my sisters had kids to catch "Green Eggs and Ham") and once I got through the ones they had, I was bored with the library. I swear it's a miracle I ever became a librarian in a public library after that! But as I said, libraries have changed a lot since 1957.
We didn't get any phonics to speak of until second grade, and on some level it confused me. If we needed this to learn to read, I wondered, why did I already know how to read? And so many exceptions! The rhyme about "i before e except after c" should give people a clue about how un-phonetic English can be, but people like to think there are rules, I guess. I was too oversocialized at age seven to complain out loud about it -- I had other issues with the teacher as it was -- but it seemed a waste of time. At least I became a pretty good speller; some of the "phonics" (like "i before e") seemed to be more about spelling than reading anyway, but even so a lot of it's just memorization.
Epacris and Joel Polowin at 110 and 111: thanks for clarifying my statement about temperature. Google says 57 degrees F, i.e. 25 degrees above freezing, equals 13.888889 degrees Celsius, so yes, 14 is probably a better equivalent than 13, which is what I said.
And I may also have been wrong when I guessed which kind of tree is producing that gorgeous pinkish-red-orange leaf color. I noticed that color today on one of the *oak* trees in front of our public library. (Sorry, I'm not sure exactly which species of oak.) So it may not be maples, or at least not just maples. But it sure is pretty.
It was a wettish rain here. (Here = northern panhandle of West Virginia, about 35 miles west of Pittsburgh.) Showers & drizzle for a good part of the day, and the temperature in the 40s Fahrenheit (high single digits Celsius), which the TV weatherguy said was 25 degrees (F; that seems to translate to about 13 degrees C) cooler than normal for mid-October. I dug out my winter jacket to wear to work, but the rain was so mild I didn't bother using the hood on it, or the umbrella I also took.
But the leaves are getting near the peak of color, and I mean all colors in the range of still-green to yellow to orange to a pinkish-red-orange (I believe those are maples) to red to almost purple.
Stevey-boy@36 and 37: It's OK. The "it's" that you used, and that I just used, is a contraction for "It is" and is perfectly legitimate. The problem is when people write "it's" for the possessive of "it"; that's considered bad grammar these days. It wasn't always; once I was reading a collection of writings by Thomas Jefferson and was amused that he apparently always used those two the "wrong" way around by our 20th and 21st Century standards. I then realized that those standards hadn't been set in stone yet in TJ's era.
Thanks for the context of the Biblical quotation.
I would go on about how the animal imagery and cloisonne remind me of the Chi-Rho page of the Book of Kells, which I did a term paper on in college. Very fascinating stuff, 8th Century art. But it's too cloee to bedtime for me to drudge up facts from research I did 41 years ago. I'm looking forward to whatever new understanding of the era and its culture come from this find.
I've always thought the best sign to counter the WBC folks would read "God loves EVERYONE ... even Fred Phelps".
As for lawyers in Heaven: St. Thomas More. One could probably scrape up a few others. Moses, anyone?
Paula @128 wrote: and that one of Robert Kennedy's continues to be in the US Congress as a Representative (as oppose to Joe Kennedy, son of Ted Kennedy, who served and then stepped down deciding to focus on other endeavors).
This is actually backwards. Patrick Kennedy, the congressman from Rhode Island, is Teddy's younger son. Joe Kennedy, who was a congressman from Massachusetts and now heads an organization that works to provide low-cost energy (especially winter heating fuel) to low-income people, is Bobby's eldest son -- but not his eldest child as a commentator on a TV network claimed tonight; Joe has an older sister Rosemary, who has been active in politics in Maryland.
Another good cartoon remembering Teddy Kennedy, via About.com's Political Humor website. Although it may be a misattribution: when I heard him say that on one of the TV networks' memorial programs the other night, he said it was something his brother had said shortly before being elected President.
Meanwhile, all the images of him in his sailboat have issued me a new earworm, not a song, but a poem: Tennyson's "Crossing the Bar."
At #18, Andrew Plotkin wrote, "You "tow" a train by driving another train up behind it, colliding *very* slowly, and then shoving it along."
True. But some engines can be attached to the train just as the cars are attached.
When I was a kid I used to watch the Pennsylvania Railroad (PRR) trains go past our house -- it was not much more than the length of a football field from our front windows to the tracks -- and saw trains with engines in the rear, or more than one engine in front, or even both, more than once. These were always or nearly always frieght trains; I don't remember seeing these on passenger trains. Once I asked my dad, who was a yardmaster for the PRR, why the extra engines, and he said they did that if the train was especially long and/or heavily laden, and/or to help it get up the grades in the mountains. (We lived about 15 miles east of Pittsburgh, about two miles east of the rail yard where Daddy worked (Pitcairn), and just a few miles west of the "foothills" of the Allegheny Mountains, where those steeper grades would start.)
Back to the main topic: I've used the slidewalks at the Pittsburgh airport. They're fun, but I'm not sure I'd want to use them for very fast speeds or for very long distances. Definitely not at 70 MPH or so *unless* I were sitting down and enclosed, and probably wearing seat belts just in case of an accidental sudden stop. In which case it becomes, effectively, a train with a different system than rails and engines, not a big jump from the tech available in Wells's day, except it would still have to stop and start to let people on and off.
John L. at #35: Well WV did illegally secede from the Confederate States;
Define "illegally." It wasn't as illegal than the Confederates' secessions were in the first place. In a way we didn't secede at all: we chose to stay in the Union when Virginia (illegally) did. Congress and President Lincoln pretty much said as much when West Virginia was admitted as the 35th State (June 20, 1863, one hundred forty-six years and one month ago). Besides after the war, and as a result of a legal suit, West Virginia paid Virginia several million good Yankee dollars for what they claimed was our share of the state's debt. It wasn't until well into the 20th century that that got paid off.
-- Lois in Weirton, West Virginia
And, for whatever it's worth, I put some memories of my own on my LiveJournal page. They're a bit mixed with family stuff, but as I mentioned we'd just been to my cousin's wedding. (Her anniversary is hard to forget now.)
If Mark Sanford thinks his situation is comparable to King David's, he needs to think harder.
1./ He should remember that the Governor of South Carolina is *not* an anointed king, presumably for life, and for the duration of the lives of his sons and their sons' sons for generations to come... one of whom, it is prophesied, will be the messiah.
2./ He should read farther into 2 Samuel 11 than verse 13, where David says "I have sinned against the LORD.". He should read the next several verses. Here they are, from the King James Version, via the Bible Gateway website:
13 And David said unto Nathan, I have sinned against the LORD. And Nathan said unto David, The LORD also hath put away thy sin; thou shalt not die.
14 Howbeit, because by this deed thou hast given great occasion to the enemies of the LORD to blaspheme, the child also that is born unto thee shall surely die.
15 And Nathan departed unto his house. And the LORD struck the child that Uriah's wife bare unto David, and it was very sick.
16 David therefore besought God for the child; and David fasted, and went in, and lay all night upon the earth.
17 And the elders of his house arose, and went to him, to raise him up from the earth: but he would not, neither did he eat bread with them.
18 And it came to pass on the seventh day, that the child died. ...
Even after David repented, his sin had serious consequences! He didn't die, but other people suffered. It was only after that first baby died that
24 And David comforted Bathsheba his wife, and went in unto her, and lay with her: and she bare a son, and he called his name Solomon: and the LORD loved him.
Both Harry Thaw and Evelyn Nesbit were originally from Pittsburgh -- my Pittsburgh, that is, the one in Pennsylvania, the one that kept its H when burghs all around the U.S. were losing theirs, like the Pittsburg near Colebrook. (Simplified spelling be danged.) So everything about this whole sordid story is local to me.
Here's a series of facts tying these things -- my tenuous ties to the Thaws and Jim's narrative -- together, with some science (though not science fiction) being part of it:
My alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh, has a building called Thaw Hall, named for Benjamin Thaw, Sr., who was Harry's grandfather. When I was an undergrad, it was home to the Engineering Dept., but now it's the home of the Physics and Astronomy departments. This is fitting since Benjamin Thaw was an alumnus of the Western University of Pennsylvania, and in his memory his son William (Harry's father) gave the Allegheny Observatory, owned by the University -- by then renamed the University of Pittsburgh -- money for improved instruments including, in 1914, a then-huge 30-inch telescope, still "the third largest refractor in the United States".
The Thaw family made a lot of its fortune from the Pennsylvania Railroad ("William Thaw was the majority stockholder in the Pennsylvania"), for which at the time my Great-grandfather Fundis worked. (Later *his* son William [my grandfather], and still later my dad and my aunt, also worked for the Pennsy.) But -- appropriately for the last bit in Jim's story -- the Thaws were also involved in banking!
No evidence I can find that they had anything to do with baked goods, though, except presumably eating them.
Break the puppy biscuit into smaller bits for Aggie Maggie. It should last her several days, I guess.
Re "Mid-Atlantic" accents: where Pennsylvania was mentioned, note that the southwestern part of the state (shading into northern West Virginia and eastern Ohio for cultural purposes) has its own idiolect, generally called "Pittsburghese." Somayinz might have trouble unerstannin me when I slip into my native dialect. Otherwise the general Mid-Atlantic accent goes from New York State to Maryland and shades into Ohio where it begins to become the Midwestern accent which is the general "non-accented" American accent.
For the other sense of "mid-Atlantic" (note the difference in punctuation here) I always think of Cary Grant as the "original" speaker of that accent, although I think I first actually heard the term applied to Tony Blair.
Re multiplication tables: Two things have always helped me remember them, or at least work my way through when I forgot something. One is the actual tables, which used to be common inside notebooks, composition books, etc., i.e. a spreadsheet-like listing with all the numbers 1 to 12 (it usually was) going across and then down, and as you went along all the possible results were in the table. For example, to find 6 times 8 you could go across the row starting from 6 and then down the column from 8 and where the two met would be "48," and you'd go, "OK."
The other was the realization -- actually stated in our arithmetic book in third or fourth grade -- that mulltiplication is just a quick version of addition. Two times three equals two plus two plus two. Four times three equals four plus four plus four. Etc. So if I can't remember what seven times eight is, I remember 7 squared is 49, and I add 8 to that and get 56. (It tends to be the six-, seven-, and eight-times tables that confuse me, especially the answers in the 40s and 50s. Maybe I was sick the week we first learned that in school.* Is 54 six times nine or seven times eight; I often have to stop and think that one out.)
* It may have been around the time I had measles, which was about this time of year, over Easter weekend. I think that was fourth grade. (Or was it third?) That would be fifty years ago.
Did you know measles is now rare enough to be newsworthy, as in on TV and in newspapers?
Terry Karney @15: My library science, and copyediting, instructors told me, repeatedly, "It's not what you know, it's what you know how to look up."
Or as Dr. Johnson said back in 1775 (almost 200 years before I went to library school):Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it. When we enquire into any subject, the first thing we have to do is to know what books have treated of it. This leads us to look at catalogues, and at the backs of books in libraries.
I have a poster with the first two sentences of that quotation, which was distributed (back in the Eighties) by the U.S. Government Printing Office to promote the Depository Library System, in which our library participates.
Johnson himself apparently did not write that, though. We know that quotation because his friend Boswell wrote it in his "Life of Johnson."
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