What I’m Blogging

…I never Saw a Purple Cow…

It’s the birthday of humorist and novelist (Frank) Gelett Burgess, born in Boston, Massachusetts (1866). He wrote more than 35 books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as several plays, including the satirical book Are You a Bromide? (1897). But he is best known for a short poem he published in the first issue of a humor magazine called Lark. It reads, “I never Saw a Purple Cow; / I never Hope to See One; / But I can Tell you, Anyhow, / I’d rather See than Be One.” The fame of the poem followed him for a long time, and years later he wrote, “Ah, yes, I wrote the Purple Cow; / I’m sorry now I wrote it; / But I can tell you, Anyhow, / I’ll Kill you if you Quote it.”

Gelett Burgess said, “If in the last few years you haven’t discarded a major opinion or acquired a new one, check your pulse. You may be dead”.

Supper Down the Pub

There’s nothing better that “Supper down the pub”. It’s happy, cheery, and harkens back to a time when even urban dwellers were social. Friends, pints and a scotch egg served over chips. What’s better than that?

It’s the birthday of Robert Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland (1759). Today, he is Scotland’s national poet, although he started writing poetry to impress women. He later said, “My heart was completely tinder, and eternally lighted up by some Goddess or other.”

…writing poems about the daily struggles of ordinary people…

As he got older, he watched how hard his father struggled to make a living as a farmer, suffering through bad weather and bad seed. Some years, his father had almost nothing to show for an entire year of backbreaking effort, and he died when Burns was 25 years old.

So Burns began to branch out from love poems to writing poems about the daily struggles of ordinary people. He was inspired by the traditional Scottish folk ballades his mother had sung him as a child, and he wrote in Scottish dialect rather than formal English.

And those poems made his name when he published them in his collection Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which came out on the last day in July 1786. Word spread that he had written in the language of common people about common people, and farmers and maids began to save up their money to buy copies.

Burns spent much of the rest of his life traveling around the countryside collecting and rewriting the lyrics of folk songs for an anthology called The Scots Musical Museum. Because he considered the songs to be the property of all people, he refused to be paid for his work, and even for some of the most famous songs attributed to him, such as “Auld Lang Syne,” he claimed only to have made corrections and additions.

It’s the birthday of the physician and lexicographer, Peter Mark Roget, born in London, England (1779). He was a working doctor for most of his life, but he was also a member of various scientific, literary, and philosophical societies. In his spare time, he invented a slide rule for performing difficult mathematical calculations, and a method of water filtration that is still in use today. He wrote papers on a variety of topics, including the kaleidoscope and Dante, and he was one of the contributors to the early Encylopædia Britannica.

…one of the great lexicographical achievements in the history of the English language…

He was 61 years old when he decided to devote his retirement to publishing a system of classifying words into groups based on their meanings. Other scholars had published books of synonyms before, but Roget wanted to assemble something more comprehensive. He said, “[The book will be] a collection of the words it contains and of the idiomatic combinations peculiar to it, arranged, not in alphabetical order as they are in a dictionary, but according to the ideas which they express.”

He organized all the words into six categories: Abstract Relations, Space, Matter, Intellect, Volition, Sentient and Moral Powers, and within each category there were many subcategories. The project took him more than 10 years, but he finally published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases in 1852. He chose the word “thesaurus” because it means “treasury” in Greek.

Roget’s Thesaurus might have been considered an intellectual curiosity, except that at the last minute Roget decided to include an index. That index, which helped readers find synonyms, made the book into one of the most popular reference books of all time. It is considered one of the great lexicographical achievements in the history of the English language, and it has been helping English students pad their vocabularies for more than 150 years.

There are days when you want to jump out of bed and eagerly dive into the task at hand. Sure they are few and far between, Christmas Morning comes to mind, but they are there nonetheless. There are other days, more frequent in number and going by the name Legion for they are both many and possessed by demons, when the best course of action is to stay in ones bed.

…completely loose our ability to drive once the snow arrives…

In Canada the only thing more sure than a snowy winter, is the fact that many of us completely loose our ability to drive once the snow arrives. In more politically incorrect times, the tendency would be to blame the immigrants. The “others” from foreign lands not familiar with the ways of our frosty traffic, with elderly Chinese women shouldering most of this misplaced burden of blame. I have to reject this explanation, because the sheer number of observed roadside absurdities during this recent spat of winter is quite arguably more than could be sustained by even the most liberal immigration policy. It has to be some kind of collective, frost induced, national amnesia affecting us all that prevents winter driving in excess of 10 Km per hour. Get over it people… we’re Canadians after all!

Needless to say, a journey that normally takes me forty minutes this morning took over two hours, and I’m a little bit grumpy.

Red Van in Ice Storm

When you lay down the gauntlet to Mother Nature, you had best be prepared to suffer the consequences. This morning Ontario, and much of eastern North America are in the grips of a winter ice storm. Freezing rain, snow, ice, hail; the four outriders of Jack Frost’s posse.

Freezing rain and snowfall warnings covered much of southern Ontario, with most areas expected to receive one or the other - or a combination of both - throughout the day.

The poor weather was giving thousands of school children a day off because of school buses being kept off the roads on southwestern, central and eastern Ontario.

From http://theGlobeandmail.com

Roads are a mess and the police are advising us to stay inside unless we absolutely have to be somewhere. I sit at my kitchen table, enjoying a freshly brewed cup of coffee. Guess I won’t be going anywhere work like today… You win Mother Nature.

It’s the birthday of the novelist Horatio Alger Jr., born in Chelsea, Massachusetts (1832). He was one of the most influential writers in American history. He wrote more than a hundred novels, almost every single one of which tells the same story: a young boy, living in poverty, manages to find success and happiness by working hard and never giving up. But even though Alger’s books were all the same, and none was a literary masterpiece, they were read by thousands of young Americans all across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It has been argued that Horatio Alger, more than any other person, was responsible for creating the idea of the American Dream.

…if you worked hard at your trade, the big chance would eventually come…

For more than a hundred years after his death, almost nothing was known about the life of Alger, because when he died, his sister destroyed all of his personal papers. It’s only been recently that scholars have been able to uncover the bare bones of Alger’s life. He was the son of a Unitarian minister. He studied literature at Harvard, and then went into the ministry. But 15 months after his ordination, he was expelled from his parish for apparently molesting boys in his congregation. He wrote a poem at the time that suggests he considered suicide, but instead he decided to devote the rest of his life to improving the lives of the poor.

So Alger moved to New York City, and got involved in helping the homeless street kids who worked as bootblacks and newsboys. And he wrote his first book about one of those street kids. It was called Ragged Dick; or, Street Life in New York with the Boot-Blacks (1868), and it was a huge success.

Many of the successful men of the early 20th century claimed that they had been inspired by reading Horatio Alger books when they were kids. Groucho Marx once said, “Horatio Alger’s books conveyed a powerful message to me and many of my young friends - that if you worked hard at your trade, the big chance would eventually come. As a child I didn’t regard it as a myth, and as an old man I think of it as the story of my life.”