Almost forgot

Maybe this month will get me out of solitary and into a more sociable mood. In addition to reunion and ASPS meeting, on October 24 (Thursday) the Leeds poetry group will host The Birmingham Arts Journal's quarterly meeting at the Leeds Arts Center. For this I have threatened to "dress up" in the latest new dress that I've never worn. Everybody else will probably be in jeans and tee shirts, and I'll wind up feeling like a fool. But that's OK; it has happened before.

Hypercritical Me

On the Amazon Soapbox, in a discussion of the Darwinius masillae primate skeleton, I found another priceless example of someone's taking a cliche that they didn't understand in the first place, and twisting it into something hysterical: "While all the clock and dagger?"

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Every day I promise myself that tomorrow, I'm going to hop out of bed and into the shower and get ready to do wonders--whether in literature, home maintenance, landscape architecture or fine art. Then next day I find myself at 3:30 p.m. hovering over the danged computer. Whoever invented it ought to get at least a couple upside the head. It all started with Lord Byron's daughter Ada and a male friend of hers--they invented the first computer, if you don't count the abacus. Called it a "difference engine." Those cussed Byrons were too smart for their own good. Lord Byron had the biggest brain ever recorded, and, I've read, about the (estimated) second highest IQ (next to Einstein)--and look where it got him! For that matter, look where it got Einstein.

Which reminds me that Dr. Britt Anderson, while I worked at UAB, read that Harvard Med. was going to dispose of its samples of Einstein's brain, and any medical center could have it that would ask. Britt called up Harvard and got them to send him a jarful. Looked exactly like pickled cauliflower.

This is the Difference Engine. Don't know why it won't load right-side up.

This is Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace.

The Things People Say...

I've noticed that people use/mangle cliches or old sayings lots of times without having the least idea what they mean. That becomes especially noticeable online, where they have to write what they're saying. Here are some Malaprops I've noted on the Amazon soapbox:

"...the sorted details."
"...waiting on pens and needles."
"...dividing the wheat from the shaft."
"...beyond the pail."
"Taxation is running rapid..."
"...not too gun ho on either side."
"wreck havoc"

I know it sounds a bit snide, but at least I posted it here instead of on the Soapbox.

Here's another unquilted quilt top: