Here they are at last, multiple Brunhildas

During December in other years I have blogged about St. Nicholas (Dec. 6th), St. Lucy (Dec. 13th), Beethoven's birthday (Dec. 16th), Hanukkah (date varies), and, of course, Christmas Eve, Christmas, Boxing Day, and New Year's Eve (dates do not vary). This year those are all out the window, gone with the wind as it were, and I find myself blogging instead about multiple Brunhildas.

Yes, Virginia, there are multiple Brunhildas (some with alternate spellings).

I was not aware of this phenomenon until I revealed that one of the answers I knew that no other contestant knew on Jeopardy! on November 30th was "Who is Brunhilda?"and reader Emma Springfield commented, "As far as Brunhilda, there are more than one of them, so I would like to know the clue." I replied that the clue mentioned valkyries.

I was going to include all the gory details here in one post but that made for a very long post. So I decided instead to include links and ignore the fact that I did the heavy lifting and all you have to do is tap your finger.

To read about Brunhilda the bird species, CLICK HERE .

To read about Brunhilda the valkyrie of Norse mythology and Wagnerian opera fame, CLICK HERE .

To read about Brunhilda the ship (SS Brunhilda), CLICK HERE.

To read about Brunhilda the Frankish queen, CLICK HERE .

To read about Brynhild the novel by H. G. Wells, CLICK HERE .

To read about Brunhilda the asteroid (123 Brunhilda), CLICK HERE .

There is also a comic strip character named Broom-Hilda, but I'm not going to go there. You can look her up yourself if you are interested.

If you are the type of person who never clicks on links, at least check out the bird species and maybe the asteroid. And if there are still more Brunhildas, I ask Emma Springfield to tell us about them in a comment. I'm officially exhausted.

Attention: Graham Edwards

I want to assure you, Graham, that I did not check your maths (in the U.S. we say your math) because I was aware instantly that the difference between 2023 and 1907 is 116. No calculations were necessary, either mentally or with benefit of paper and pencil, and if a mental calculation did occur it happened so rapidly and automatically that the result obtained bordered on what some might call intuitively obvious, except perhaps to children in primary school.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. I have better things to do than sit around fact-checking everything I read, and if you give me a few minutes I'm sure I will think of some of them.

P.S. - A very happy what-would-have-been-his-birthday to your father.

I can’t get to multiple Brunhildas just yet

...because something else, or rather someone else, caught my attention. Since I have never been one to leave a rabbit trail unexplored, off we will now go into the wild blue yonder (how's that for a mixed metaphor?) at least for a little while.

Although I like to think I am a fairly observant person who is fairly well-read, I have now reached the age (82 years, nine months) where every day makes me more aware of how little I really do know, the occasional Jeopardy! answer notwithstanding. This time the someone else who caught my attention, thanks to a fellow blogger named Rachel, was Umberto Eco. I had never heard of him even though he has been famous in certain circles for 40 years, ever since his book The Name Of The Rose was published.

Rachel mentioned that she was reading another of his works, How To Write A Thesis. Here is an excerpt from Rachel's blog:

"I wrote the introduction to my essay this morning between Wordle and breakfast or it may have been the other way round. I happened to read Umberto Eco's essay on How to Write a Thesis before breakfast and Wordle and the timing was good where he told me to get all the silly things out of the way in my first draft, read through, and then write the serious version. If I want to throw my chances of a good degree on to the fire, and by all means do so if I want to, then use the silly first version. If I am actually going to give it the respect it deserves then write the serious version now I've got the first out of the way. So that's what I did. And the serious introduction and outline of what I am going to write about looks much more professional and that of a serious MA poetry student. Thanks Umberto. (I wrote the silly version last night. Slept on it and morning came). Umberto Eco is an Italian writer and philosopher."

I thought Eco's advice to write your silly version first, then write your serious version was good advice indeed, advice that I wish I had encountered before writing Billy Ray Barnwell Here: The Meanderings Of A Twisted Mind that I converted into a blog at www.billyraybarnwellhere.blogspot.com (q.v.).

I decided to look Umberto up, found several articles about his How To Write A Thesis, and opened one. The first words actually written by Umberto Eco tbat I ever read besides the ones referred to in Rachel's blog hit me in the face like a wet dishcloth:

"You are not Proust. Do not write long sentences."

My alter ego Billy Ray Barnwell could have benefited from reading Umberto Eco. It is great advice, right up there with the famous "Omit Needless words" section of Strunk and White's The Elements Of Style. The fact that Eco also wrote "You are not e. e. cummings" will be left to another day to be dealt with.

Our foray into this part of the wild blue yonder is now ended. If anybody decides to check out my other blog (it's a Rolls-Royce), it will have been worth it.

Multiple Brunhildas will have to wait

...because Mrs. RWP and I watched the 1980 film Somewhere In Time the other night on the freevee (formerly IMDb) movie channel and I need to discuss something with you.

It starred Christopher Reeve (fresh from his 1978 success as Superman) and Jane Seymour (born Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg and still more than a decade away from being selected for the title role in the television series Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman).

Somewhere In Time is the unlikely story (warning; spoiler ahead) of a handsome young playwright who manages to travel back in time from 1980 to 1912 in order to pursue a romance with a beautiful and talented actress. This unlikely scenario requires complete concentration and self-hypnosis on the part of the playwright, who divests himself of all modern inventions, clothing, and accoutrements in order to achieve his not-to-be-denied desire, except, oddly enough, the cassette-tape player that plays his self-hypnosis spiel over and over. Lo and behold, wonder of wonders, he succeeds. The audience is required to suspend disbelief and go with the flow. After an all too brief but highly amorous night spent in each other's arms, the young playwright is snatched from his lover's presence and hurled back to the present (1980} when he finds a 1979 Lincoln-head penny in a pocket of his turn-of-the-century suit.

Okay, I get that it is pure fantasy and I understand how the spell was broken by the presence of a coin from the future. What I don't understand, however, and this is what I wanted to discuss with you, is why a music box playing "Eighteenth Variation on 'Rhapsody on a Theme By Paganini', Opus 43" by Sergei Rachmaninoff (and repeated by a full orchestra at several emotionally-charged moments) did not rip Mr. Reeve from Ms.Seymour's presence long before the offending penny showed up. The reason for my suspension of my suspension of disbelief in this particular instance is that Mr. Rachmaninoff did not compose that piece of music until 1934, which, unless I am sadly mistaken, was 22 years after 1912.

Do you agree or disagree? Please tell me in a comment and give reasons.

Footnote. That music by Rachmaninoff has been included in weddings all over America in the decades since the film because Somewhere In Time has been loved by so many impressionable young and not-so-young brides-to-be.

We will get to multiple Brunhildas eventually unless we are distracted by Field Of Dreams or Purple Rose Of Cairo or Big Fish or....

The eyes of Texas may or may not be upon you

One of my favorite (British, favourite) activities as a youngster in Texas seven decades ago was learning about the night sky (Northern Hemisphere version) by gazing at it with my father. He showed me Orion the Hunter's shoulders (the stars Rigel and Betelgeuse), knees, and the three stars in Orion's belt. He showed me Canis Major with Sirius (the "Dog Star") at Orion's side. He showed me red Antares in Scorpius, the constellation that actually resembles a scorpion with a curled tail, and Leo the Lion, and the Big Dipper in Ursa Major. He showed me how I could extend a line through the Big Dipper's two front stars to find Polaris, the North Star, at the end of the handle of the Little Dipper in Ursa Minor, and how if I extended the imaginary line an equal distance beyond Polaris I would see a big letter W in the night sky that is the constellation Cassiopeia.

Some of you know that I was diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD) in 2017 and that I have been receiving injections in both eyes every couple of months to try to slow or possibly even halt the degeneration of my vision and save what remains instead of slowly going blind.

About a year ago I was dismayed to realize that I could no longer see Orion's belt. My vision is currently at the point that I can see only four objects in the night sky: the moon, the planet Venus, the planet Jupiter, and Sirius, the "Dog Star", which is the brightest star of all. I can no longer see Orion at all, or any other stars or constellations, for that matter. My daytime vision is actually still pretty good.

On a happier note, I knew three answers on Jeopardy! tonight that none of the three contestants knew:

Who is Minnie Pearl?
What is a cloche?
Who is Brunhilda?

Thumb-twiddling time

It was north Georgia's coldest morning of the season this morning when I took Abby out to perform her necessaries. This morning's low temperature was 23°F (-5°C). Having put on a pea coat, a scarf, and a toboggan, I looked quite dashing, I thought, although no one was looking. After living in south Florida for several years, where the weather is always tropical, I was happy to move to Atlanta, which enjoys four actual seasons, none of them extreme in the way, say, Phoenix. Arizona and Fargo, North Dakota are extreme. Last winter we had only two hard freezss. The first occurred on Christmas Day. The second, which occurred just before the vernal equinox in March, turned 2023 into The Year Of No Gardenias.

By this afternoon it had warmed up to 53°F (11°C) with prospects of warm spell, cold spell, rinse, repeat happening with regularity over the next few weeks. Pneumonia weather, Mrs. RWP calls it.

As you have undoubtedly discerned, I have nothing of interest to share with you today.

Keep on keeping on. Things can only look up from this nadir of my blogging career.

This just in: The highest temperature ever recorded in Phoenix, Arizona was 122°F (50°C) and the lowest temperature ever recorded in Fargo, North Dakota was -39°F (-39°C).

And the caissons go rolling along

My continued apologies to everyone who reads this blog for what must surely seem to have become my new modus operandi, namely a haphazard and sporadic approach to replying to your comments. Family obligations during this Thanksgiving week certainly haven't helped. Please be assured that each person who comments here is very special to me. But since it is also true that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, I can only quote another Latin phrase seldom heard nowadays, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I shall attempt to do better (translation: answer more promptly) but I cannot promise because I may be sliding slowly into senility.

The Times They Are A-Changin' Department: My country, the good old U S of A, seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, and not so slowly either. More of a headlong rush, if you ask me. Open antisemitism, which sane people thought had disappeared or gone deeply underground with the fall of the Third Reich in 1945, is back with a vengeance. It seems especially strong among college students at elite, liberal universities, fueled by radical faculty members. Raucous public protests have occurred in major cities. When asked by reporters to comment on the situation, the president's press secretary deflected and discussed strategies to combat Islamophobia. There are several extremely pro-Palestinian members of Congress (most notably Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), the common denominator being the D for Democrat) but for now both the House of Representatives and the Senate are still overwhelmngly pro-Israel, as are 70 to 80% of the country according to recent polls. I'm glad we have a First Amendment to our Constitution that guarantees freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and freedom of peaceful assembly, but the 'woke' crowd and the 'cancel culture" folks have a radical agenda and seem determned to have things their way regardless of what anyone else thinks, callng them racist and Nazis and destroying our country in the process.

Our 2024 election season looms, so the next year will be crazy. That is all I'm going to say about that.

I really don't want this blog to change into a political blog, but my brain is rebelling today. Perhaps it is reacting to too much L-tryptophan in the Thanksgiving turkey.

Far left Democrats of an antisemitic bent should probably skip the next paragraph.

I see that Hanukkah this year begins at sunset on December 7th and ends at nightfall on December 15th, so do not wait until the week before Christmas to wish any Jewish friends and colleagues a Happy Hanukkah or they will think you are well-meaning but ill-informed (and they would be right).

Welcome back, far left Democrats. I see by the old clock on the wall that it is time to heat up some more Thanksgiving leftovers, so I will sign off for now.