Of Questionable Import

     

Tucson Weather Today

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Want to win $1,000? I don't really know anything about this contest, but...

WORK STEW, A Collection of Essays and Interviews, is hosting a July 2013 writing contest. They say: "Bring us into your world. What is something about your work (past or present) that outsiders typically don’t understand? It can be something required by the job, something that happens on the job, something you feel about the job -- but whatever it is, do not exceed 800 words."

The first prize is $1,000, second prize is $400, and third prize is $100. And that's all I know about it.

Details HERE

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Two little-known factoids:

Romance novelist Barbara Cartland wrote an incredible 723 books, which were translated into 38 languages. She is reported to have dictated all her novels from a chaise lounge, with a rug at her feet and her pet Pekinese curled up next to her. It took her an average of one week to complete a novel. By the time she died in 2000 at the age of 98, she had sold more than 1 billion books.



The worst Romance Novel metaphor and simile ever written is: "His finger, weathered and rough from years on the ranch, danced in and out of his nose like a slimy ballerina."

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TRIVIA

A female ferret will die if it goes into heat and cannot find a mate.
(Of course, a ferret will also eventually die if it does find a mate.)

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HISTORICAL EVENT

On July 10, 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee, the so-called "Monkey Trial" began with John Thomas Scopes, a young high school science teacher, accused of teaching evolution in violation of a Tennessee state law.

Hearing of the coordinated attack on Christian fundamentalism, William Jennings Bryan, the three-time Democratic presidential candidate and a fundamentalist hero, volunteered to assist the prosecution. Soon after, the great attorney Clarence Darrow agreed to join the ACLU in the defense, and the stage was set for one of the most famous trials in U.S. history.

After eight minutes of deliberation, the jury returned with a guilty verdict, and Judge Raulston ordered Scopes to pay a fine of $100, the minimum the law allowed.

In 1927, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned the Monkey Trial verdict on a technicality but left the constitutional issues unresolved until 1968, when the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a similar Arkansas law on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment.

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WORD FOR TODAY

concatenation [kahn-kat-uh-nay-shun]
noun
1.  a series of interconnected events, concepts, etc.
2.  the act of linking together or the state of being joined
3.  (Logic) a function that forms a single string of symbols from two given strings by placing the second after the first

Concatenation refers to a series of things - ideas, events, animals - that are somehow interconnected, individual parts that are linked to form a single unit, like the links in a chain.

If you think about a chain, you can imagine the individual links - they move separately, yet are linked so they always move together as well. This aptly describes concatenation, the state of several things being bound together.

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CELEBRITY BIRTHDAYS

Frederick Hubbard "Fred" Gwynne

(July 10, 1926 - July 2, 1993) 

Fred Gwynne was an American actor. Gwynne was best known for his roles in the 1960s sitcoms Car 54, Where Are You? and The Munsters, as well as his later roles in Pet Sematary, Cotton Club and My Cousin Vinny. He was recognized for his distinctive baritone voice.

Fiona Mary Shaw

(born 10 July 1958)

Fiona Shaw is an Irish actress and theater director. Although to international audiences she is primarily known for her role as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter films or her role portraying Marnie Stonebrook in the HBO series True Blood.

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Ronald E. "Ron" Glass

(born July 10, 1945)

Ron Glass is an American actor. He is best known for his roles as the witty detective Ron Harris in the television sitcom Barney Miller (1975–1982), and as the spiritual Shepherd Derrial Book in the short-lived 2002 science fiction series Firefly and its sequel film Serenity.

David McClure Brinkley

(July 10, 1920 - June 11, 2003)

David Brinkley was an American newscaster for NBC and ABC in a career lasting from 1943 to 1997. From 1956 through 1970, he co-anchored NBC's top-rated nightly news program, The Huntley–Brinkley Report, with Chet Huntley and thereafter appeared as commentator on its successor, NBC Nightly News, through the 1970s. In the 1980s and 1990s, Brinkley was host of the popular Sunday This Week with David Brinkley program and a top commentator on election-night coverage for ABC News.

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The best scientist is open to experience and begins with romance - the idea that anything is possible.
--Ray Bradbury

NASA TV
   

Pursuit Of The Trivial

Tucson Weather Today


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While walking past the Emeritus Assisted Living and Retirement Home on Speedway Boulevard near Pantano, I couldn't help noticing how young, vibrant, and alive was the greenery surrounding the facility. All except for one tree, way to the back of the building. It stood alone, as close to death as could be but somehow still clinging to a shred of life.

It's weird, isn't it, how an ancient leafless tree, bent, gnarled, and dry, reaching for the lifegiving light of the limitless sky outside an Old Folks Home can be a visual metaphor picturing the last days of a human life.

And how one old man, observing such a thing, can feel a kind of kinship -- with an ugly old tree.

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I have been watching the television show Jeopardy ever since it began. And while playing along I have demonstrated again and again, both to myself and to whomsoever watched with me, that I possessed a nearly eidetic memory. But as I have aged, I find myself unable to retrieve the answers swiftly enough to beat the contestants. And it's getting worse as the years fly by. It won't be long, I fear, before I will have to stop watching that show. For the sake of my ever failing self-image, my fading feelings of self-worth.

Slowly dying is a sorrowful thing to experience.

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Why Is Trivia Good For You?

Your brain is like a muscle. If you don't use it, you lose it. Taking tests, especially those on topics with which you are unfamiliar, forces you to use your brain. The television show, Jeopardy is a good example of trivia tests. It's a fact that people who remain mentally active are less likely to have dementia and will have better memory into old age, Searching for answers is more active than simply reading a book

Here is an easy trivia question:

In which year did Japan attack the United States, leading to American entry into World War II?

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HISTORICAL EVENT

On this day, May 15 in 1942, gasoline rationing began in 17 Eastern states as an attempt to help the American war effort during World War II. By the end of the year, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had ensured that mandatory gasoline rationing was in effect in all 50 states.

Ration stamps for gasoline were issued by local boards and pasted to the windshield of a family or individual's automobile. The type of stamp determined the gasoline allotment for that automobile. Black stamps, for example, signified non-essential travel and mandated no more than three gallons per week, while red stamps were for workers who needed more gas, including policemen and mail carriers. As a result of the restrictions, gasoline became a hot commodity on the black market, while legal measures of conserving gas--such as carpooling--also flourished. In a separate attempt to reduce gas consumption, the government passed a mandatory wartime speed limit of 35 mph, known as the "Victory Speed."

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WORD FOR TODAY

eidetic
adjective
of, pertaining to, or constituting visual imagery vividly experienced and readily reproducible with great accuracy and in great detail.

Eidetic memory, commonly but erroneously referred to as photographic memory or total recall, is a psychological or medical term, popularly defined as the ability to recall images, sounds or objects in memory with extreme precision. The distinction between photographic memory and eidetic memory is simple. Perfect visual recall is photographic memory such as reading a newspaper once and remembering it 10 years later as mentioned above, while eidetic memory is recalling more than just the visual information.

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CELEBRITY BIRTHDAYS


James Neville Mason 

(15 May 1909 - 27 July 1984)

James Mason was an English actor. After achieving stardom in his native Great Britain, he made the transition to the United States and became one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, starring in iconic films such as A Star Is Born, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Lolita, North by Northwest, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Bigger Than Life and Julius Caesar.

Jamie-Lynn Sigler
(born May 15, 1981)

Jamie-Lynn Sigler is an American actress and singer. She is best known for her role as young Meadow Soprano on the HBO television series The Sopranos.

Joseph Cheshire Cotten
(May 15, 1905 - February 6, 1994)

Joseph Cotten was an American film, stage and television actor. Cotten achieved prominence on Broadway, starring in the original stage productions of The Philadelphia Story and Sabrina Fair. He first gained worldwide fame in the Orson Welles films Citizen Kane (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), and Journey into Fear (1943), for which Cotten was also credited with the screenplay. He went on to star in such popular films as Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Duel in the Sun (which remains one of the top 100 highest grossing films of all time when adjusted for inflation), Love Letters (1945), Portrait of Jennie (1948) and The Third Man (1949).

Madeleine Korbelová Albright
(born May 15, 1937)

Madeleine Albright was the first woman to become the United States Secretary of State. She was nominated by US President Bill Clinton on December 5, 1996, and was unanimously confirmed by a U.S. Senate vote of 99–0. She was sworn in on January 23, 1997.

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Why is it trivia? People call it trivia because they know nothing and they are embarrassed about it.
--Robbie Coltrane

Answer to Trivia Question:
The year was 1941

Who Cares About The Appendix?

The Big Bang Theory in my opinion is one of the funniest shows on TV and is one I can watch again and again, each time discovering something I had missed in previous viewings. And this happens often, which says a LOT about how my attention tends to wander.

In one episode Sheldon asked, "Do you know what the appendix is for?" (or something like that) and when the answer he received was, "No" he said, "I do." And the scene ended there.

Hilarious!

Later, it occurred to me that I did not know (or had forgotten if I once knew) what the appendix actually does in the human body.

Wikipedia informed me:

The human appendix is a vestigial structure. A vestigial structure is a structure that has lost all or most of its original function through the process of evolution. The vermiform appendage is the shrunken remainder of the cecum that was found in a remote ancestor of humans. Ceca, which are found in the digestive tracts of many extant herbivores, house mutualistic bacteria which help animals digest the cellulose molecules that are found in plants. As the human appendix no longer houses a significant amount of these bacteria, and humans are no longer capable of digesting more than a minimal amount of cellulose per day, the human appendix is considered a vestigial structure.


Aha! So that's why I can't survive by only eating wood.

Wikipedia goes on to say that the appendix may have some other uses not known at this time.

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Geez Louise! Surely I can find something more interesting than human biology to write about.

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On this morning's TV news the reporter on location spoke of receiving credentials that admitted her into the room wherein the Republican candidates were to be interviewed. She said that she had been credentialized. I'd never heard that term before, and thought she must have meant she had been credentialed, or given credentials.

I did a bit of Google research and found that the word credentialized does exist, but its meaning is not synonymous with credentialed. According to the Urban Dictionary, the meaning of credentialized is:

credentialized -- the artificial self-enhancement that people seem to precive themselves to have while they are wearing an official laminated credential on a sponsored lanyard. Such as, for example: She got all credentialized when she went back stage at the concert with her all access pass, living in the fictional world that she is actually apart of the group in concert.

Note: the incorrect spelling of perceive and the use of the word apart instead of a part in the above passage are not my mistakes -- the definition was cut and pasted from the Urban Dictionary.

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While reading a compendium of supposedly humorous sentences lifted from published novels I paused at the following figure of speech describing copulation:

"And then he was fully socketed to her, like a pipe wrench in a crock of warm chili."

I paused because, to me, this seemed to be a metaphor ("socketed to her") enhanced by a following simile ("like a pipe wrench...") -- That's not really why I paused... I did so because I thought the figure of speech was funny as hell. I thought about it being a curious figure of speech a little later.

In that same blog entry I read: "How does a kid from Huntington beach wind up castrating cows in South Texas?" and I wondered about that, since castrating means cutting off the testicles of bulls, not cows which are of course, female.

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I have never read a novel written by Danielle Steel (and I probably never will) but several of her sentences were included in a blog dedicated to revealing horrible sentences taken from published books written by famous authors. Here is one of those sentences:

"You look very pretty today," he said casually, and she stiffened imperceptibly, but he didn't see it.
---Danielle Steel,
(Malice)

A Figure Of Speech

Tucson Weather Today

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While reading from Atlas Shrugged (by Ayn Rand) a certain simile caught my attention. It was -- "...the street beyond his window was like a congested throat coughing with the horns of pre-Christmas traffic..."

I put aside the book and thought about it; I thought about how aptly descriptive was that short phrase... and then I thought that it could just as easily have been written as a metaphor -- "...the street beyond his window was a congested throat coughing with the horns of pre-Christmas traffic..." -- and I wondered how the author had decided on which of the two of them to use. I prefer it as a metaphor.

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