Marvell's Home
But at my back I alwaies hear
Times winged Charriot hurrying near
General Quotation of the Day
May 2, 2008
This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
—Dorothy Parker, from her review of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged
Literary Quotation
May 10, 2008
The nearest dream recedes, unrealized.
The heaven we chase
Like the June bee
Before the school-boy
Invites the race;
Stoops to an easy clover –
Dips — evades — teases — deploys;
Then to the royal clouds
Lifts his light pinnace
Heedless of the boy
Staring, bewildered, at the mocking sky.
Homesick for steadfast honey,
Ah! the bee flies not
That brews that rare variety.
—Emily Dickinson
Pictorial Selection
May 9, 2008
At the Tennessee Aquarium
Suspended above the escalator in the main floor of the River Journey, boats with interesting wooden details. Click on picture for full-size image.
Word of the Day
Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Day
The Word of the Day for May 17, 2008 is:
incandescent • \in-kun-DESS-unt\ • adjective
1 a : white, glowing, or luminous with intense heat
*b : marked by brilliance especially of expression
c : characterized by glowing zeal : ardent
2 a : of, relating to, or being light produced by incandescence
b : producing light by incandescence
Felix’s Example Sentence:
After each night of exposure to the blasted lives and the banal, fragmentary testimony of society’s human detritus, the young man vented his fury and despair by pouring out incandescent rants on his computer.
Did you know?
“Incandescent” came into the English language toward the end of the 18th century, at a time when scientific experiments involving heat and light were being conducted on an increasingly frequent basis. An object that glowed at a high temperature (such as a piece of coal) was “incandescent.” By the mid-1800s, the incandescent lamp — a.k.a. the “lightbulb” — had been invented; it contains a filament which gives off light when heated by an electric current. “Incandescent” is the modern offspring of a much older parent, the Latin verb “candēre,” meaning “to glow.” Centuries earlier, the word for another source of light, “candle,” was also derived from “candēre.”
*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.
Music Pick
April 25, 2008
On March 28, my Beloved and I attended the Chattanooga Symphony Orchestra concert featuring this work. Stellar evening. We enjoyed the music and the evening very much. The program provided German versions of the Biblical texts incorporated into the music. Wonderful. Below is an image of a page from the Brahms manuscript of the piece.
Source for image: w3.rz-berlin.mpg.de/cmp/brahms_pic.html
Funny Joke From a Beautiful Woman
May 2, 2008
Esquire’s Funny Joke
from a beautiful woman
From Esquire
Noemie Lenoir
John Shearer/WireImage.com
A guy goes to the supermarket, and a beautiful woman smiles at him and says hello. He’s rather taken aback because he can’t place how he knows her. So he asks, “Do you know me?” The woman says, “I think you’re the father of one of my kids.” His mind travels back to the only time he has ever been unfaithful to his wife, and he says, “My God! Are you the stripper from my bachelor party that I made love to on the pool table with all my buddies watching while your partner whipped my butt with wet celery!?” She looks into his eyes and calmly says, “No, I’m your son’s math teacher.”
