Strange but true, scout’s honor/honour

North Carolina and South Carolina both have towns named Beaufort. The one in North Carolina is pronounced BOH-furt and the one in South Carolina is pronounced BEW-furt.

Time Flies When You're Having Fun Department: Dick Van Dyke is 98 years old. Nancy Sinatra, Frank's daughter, is 82. Jerry Mathers of Leave It To Beaver fame is 75.

Despite her popularity, I have never heard Taylor Swift sing nor do I know what she looks like. I have not studiously avoided her career but neither have I made any effort to follow it either.

The city of Reno, Nevada is farther west than Los Angeles, California. It's true. The former is at 119°49'19" West longitude; the latter is at 118°15' West longitude.

Even though (a) the Atlantic Ocean is east of North and South America and (b) the Pacific Ocean is west of North and South America, the Pacific end of the Panama Canal is actually east of the Atlantic (okay, Caribbean) end. Look it up on a map.

When a well-known person dies, one would think that newscasters would know how to pronounce his or her name. But noooo. Rosalynn Carter, wife of President Jimmy Carter, died this afternoon and many of the people reporting her death over the telly said RAHZA-lynn (as in Rosalind Russell) but as all Georgians know, it's ROHZA-lynn (as in Rosa Parks).

Maybe I'm being overly sensitive because I lived in Boca Raton, Florida for seven years. People who weren't residents mispronounce it all the time. It's not Boca Ra-TAHN, people, it's Boca Ra-TOHN.

Today is the 160th anniversary of the day in 1863 when Abraham Lincoln went to an address in Gettysburg.

Keep those cards and letters coming.

Miscellany

Solomon Grundy,
Born on Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end
Of Solomon Grundy.

Two recent answers on Jeopardy! that I knew but none of the contestants did include Albrecht Dürer and James Fenimore Cooper. The clues mentioned Praying Hands and the Leatherstocking Tales.

Rachel used the word "toff" in her post today. Since I had never encountered the word before, I did the following search:

toff definition

Below, verbatim, is the answer I received from a dictionary website that shall remain nameless:

toff meaning: 1. a rich person from a high social class. 2. a rich person from a high social class.

I am confused as to which meaning Rachel meant.

Unless I am mistaken, this Wednesday is the 60th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It was a cataclysmic event in our nation's histoey. I remember it like it happened yesterday.

The Ides of November

Do you remember the song "Scarborough Fair" that Simon and Garfunkel sang several decades ago? When it runs through my head, as it sometimes does, I usually get the second line wrong. For some strange reason, instead of singing:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme

my brain remembers it as:

Are you going to Scarborough Fair?
Parsley, cheese, rosemary, and thyme

This glimpse into my daily life is not a lead-in to anything. I'm not going anywhere with it. I just felt like sharing it with you today. If you detect some deep psychological meaning or flaw in my make-up, please share the details with all of us in a comment.

Gene Simmons and all the members of Kiss, or Heath Ledger as The Joker in the Batman movie, now there are guys with the possibility of flaws in their make-up.

Sorry, I couldn't resist.

Moving right along....

Since many or even most of you don't seem to care for geography or quizzes, and especially geographical quizzes, today's Geographical Momennt (yes, we're going to have one) is not a quiz but a simple, straightforward presentation I call Obscure Countries And Their Obscure Capitals. The format is Country (Capital):

Uzbekistan (Tashkent)
Turkmenistan (Ashgabat)
Kyrgyzstan (Bishkek)
Tajikistan (Dushanbe)
Eswatini (Mbabane, Lobamba)
Azerbaijan (Baku)
Lesotho (Maseru)
The Gambia (Banjul)
Malawi (Lilongwe)
Tuvalu (Funafuti)

An alternate name for the preceding list might be Places I Never Heard Of or, a little more eruditely, Places With Which I Was Heretofore Unfamiliar.

If you haven't yet found something to be thankful for this Thanksgiving, be thankful I didn't ask you to match capitals to all 195 countries recognized by the United Nations.

Yea, verily.

I can't believe that the month is half over already and this is only my second post. There are just 40 days until Christmas, which fact should not give you merely pause but yet another reason besides the existence of this post to fear, as did Julius Caesar of old, the Ides of November.

Or something like that.

As Tigger always said, Ta Ta For Now.

The power of suggestibility

Instead of our regular geography lesson today, class, we're going to have a pop quiz. Let's begin.

1. Ougadoudou, Bobo-Dioulasso, Kougoudou, and Ouahigouya are:

a. Four people groups in Papua New Guinea
b. Four cities in Burkina Faso
c. Four languages spoken in Ghana
d. Four islands in the Malay/Indonesian archipelago

2. Sekpele, Lelemi, Siwu, and Tumulung are:

a. Four people groups in Papua New Guinea
b. Four cities in Burkina Faso
c. Four languages spoken in Ghana
d. Four islands in the Malay/Indonesian archipelago

3. Buka Buka, Legundi, Sebesi, and Sebuku are:

a. Four people groups in Papua New Guinea
b. Four cities in Burkina Faso
c. Four languages spoken in Ghana
d. Four islands in the Malay/Indonesian archipelago

Before proceeding, let's review your answers to the three questions posed above. There is still time to change your answers if you are unsure of them.

I'll wait.

The correct answers are 1-b, 2-c, and 3-d. Let me now ask you a final question.

4. What are Bonete, Tupungato, Sajama, and Palcaraju?

If, thinking logically, you said to yourself "Okay, if 1 is b and 2 is c and 3 is d, the answer to 4 is "a. Four people groups in Papua New Guinea" you would be wrong.

Actually, question 4 is not related in any way to questions 1, 2, and 3. Notice that I didn't repeat choices a, b, c, or d.

Bonete, Tupungato, Sajama, and Palcaraju are mountain peaks in the Andes range of South America.

"No fair," some of you are saying, "you led us astray." I did not lead you astray. You were led astray by falling into a pattern and being susceptible to suggestion.

I learned about this all-too-human tendency of ours in the eighth grade when our teacher, Mrs. Mary Lillard, asked the whole class to answer in unison out loud the principal parts of various verbs in English class.

"Be" said Mrs. Lillard and we said "Am, was, been."

"Go" said Mrs. Lillard and we said "Go, went, gone."

We went through quite a few verbs that day, both regular and irregular, when Mrs. Lillard must have had a twinkle in her eye.

"Only three more," she said. "Sink."

"Sink, sank, sunk," we said.

"Drink" said Mrs.Lillard and we said "Drink, drank, drunk."

"Think" said Mrs. Lillard and the whole class, warming to the task and brimmng with confidence, called out in unison "Think, thank, thunk."

The absurdity of it hit us almost immediately and we burst into laughter. From that day until now I have always tried to stay alert for pitfalls when answering a question.

Zounds! Gadzooks! and other expressions of surprise and delight

...such as Glory be! and Ye gods and little fishes!

I find that I am once again able to create blogposts using my computer screen and QWERTY keyboard! Not only that, but I can once again reply to comments from you, my vast reading public (yeah, right) on my my own blog!

Enough already with what my son-in-law would call a plethora of exclamation points. Let us continue in a more sedate fashion.

The sea-change occurred when I humbled myself and decided to take Tasker's and Rachel's suggestions and sign on to Google via Chrome. Shortly after resetting my Google password, what to my wondering eyes should appear but a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer the world the way it used to be before I was so rudely interrupted.

I really prefer to use Mozilla Firefox and DuckDuckGo and will continue to do so for all activities except blogging, as Google and Microsoft and who knows what else have long-since fallen into the nasty habit of tracing one's every step. This doesn't happen, I am assured, with Mozilla Firefox and DuckDuckGo. I'm just saying. If you prefer to keep doing things your way, be my guest. More power to you.

Any hoo, I am back in harness and hope to blog more frequently now that my fingers can move at their accustomed speed, something they could not do on an iPhone screen.

That's all for now. Keep your powder dry. Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition.

Trust me, my giddiness will pass. It always does.

P.S. I saw a meme on Facebook the other day that I want to pass along to you. It said "I do not celebrate Halloween for the same reason that Satanists do not celebrate Easter. Light has no fellowship with darkness."

Three completely unrelated paragraphs

My thanks to reader Terra for suggesting that the names P.G. Wodehouse and G.K. Chesterton be added to the list of people known by their initials. I thought also of W.E.B. Du Bois (American Socialist), who didn't occur to me earlier.

My thanks to reader Jenny The Pirate for her own very interesting blog that for some unknown reason I can no longer access. Did she remove the blog altogether? Did she change it into a private blog? I want you to know, Jenny, that I thoroughly enjoyed listening to and watching the video clip of your son performing Piano Concerto No. 3 in C Major, Opus 26 by Sergei Prokofiev at the Cleveland Institute of Music. It was brilliant, mesmerising, a virtuoso performance. I'm sure you must be very proud of that young man's musical accomplishments, and you have every right to be.

Senator John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana (no relation to John Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who went on to occupy the highest office in the land), is proof positive that freedom of speech is alive and well in the United States of America. I know this because with my own eyes and ears I saw and heard Senaror Kennedy say on television yesterday, "President Biden is older than the Adirondack Mountains" and he went on to say that the president's nominee to become U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, is absolutely the wrong man for the job and that if Lew had been alive when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor he would have recommended creation of a commission to determine what the U.S. had done that offended the Japanese.

My initial reaction

Some people are known by their names and some are known by their initials only. I have known several individuals over the years who used their initials, including:

O.M. Nessler (a classmate's older brother)
D.K. Ward (a classmate)
L.W. West (a classmate)
C.B. Gilstrap (my childhood barber)
H.O. Watkins (my daughter-in-law's grandmother's husband)
F.B. Griffis (our church organist's husband)
F.M. Moore, Jr. (choir director and friend for 45 years)

F.M.'s long-dead father was not called F.M. Moore, Sr., however. He was called Frank, which led me some 35 years into my friendship with F.M. to ask him if his name might possibly be Francis Marion. He admitted that it was. My hunch was right. Francis Marion was an American Brigadier General during the Revolutionary War that George III inspired. Marion was nicknamed "The Swamp Fox" for introducing guerilla-like tactics into modern warfare in, of all places, South Carolina.

Lots of people in all walks of life go by their initials. Here are some of them:

J.R.R. Tolkein (author)
K.D. Lang (singer)
A.E. Houseman (poet)
A.A. Milne (creator of Winnie the Pooh)
e.e. cummings (poet)
Y.A. Tittle (professional football player)
J.K. Rowling (author)
N.T. Wright (theologian)
I.M. Pei (architect)
C.S. Lewis (author)
T.S. Eliot (poet)
S.I. Hayakawa (author, academic, politician)

Consider also P.D.Q. Bach, R.E.O. Speedwagon, T.J. Hooker. That last one is a fictional police sergeant played by William Shatner in a television series of the same name. When Agatha Christie created fictional characters she gave them names. Jane Marple. Hercule Poirot. If names work for Agatha Christie, they ought also to work for writers of television scripts.

On second thought, if my parents had named me Clive Staples or Yelberton Abraham, I might prefer to use my initials too.