They required of us mirth.

Zion, Illinois, was founded in 1901 by a faith healer named Dowie as a place for his followers to live. He ran the only church in town. After he died, a guy named Voliva took over as General Overseer. These guys taught that the Earth is flat, which if you think about it, it might as well be. Anyway, there's a bakery in Zion that makes delicious fig sandwich cookies, indistinguishable from the more well-known Newtons. And I thought maybe Newtons were so named to highlight how physics could prove the Earth was round. But that wasn't it at all.

With glowing hearts we see thee rise.

There are only 478 people in Glendon, Alberta. Yet this tiny village is home to the world's largest pierogi, which for some reason they spell perogy. It was the brainchild of the local mayor/school bus driver. It's 27 feet tall, and next to the only restaurant in town, which serves pierogies. My point is, this is not a big community and their achievement is disproportionate with their population. The rest of us should feel humbled, chastened, and yes, inspired by this accomplishment. And I don't mean in some vague aspirational way. I mean big pierogies. Dubai, I'm talkin' to you.

Slippage

They say you shouldn't judge a man till you've walked a mile in his shoes but don't say how you're supposed to get them. Certainly, I wouldn't give you mine; they are new chukka boots which I haven't had a pair of these since the seventies. When I look down at my feet I feel like I'm about to start 7^th grade. My sense of myself hasn't changed all that much since then, just creakier and a little less hopeful. Also, the freckles on my cheeks seem to have slid all the way down to the backs of my hands.

Ruminate on this

To clarify: The North American white-tailed deer is to be distinguished from the red deer, which looks like a smaller wapiti. The wapiti is named for its white tail; in the Shawnee language waapiti means white tail. When Europeans arrived in North America, they thought the wapiti looked like a moose, so they called it elk, because elk was their word for moose. Then, when they saw some actual moose, they had already used up their word for it (elk) and so adopted the Narragansett word for moose, which is moose. Back in Europe, a moose is still an elk.

I have no idea why...

...I woke up this morning thinking I would write a rant about Grover Cleveland, about whom I know nothing except that he was not from my hometown, Cleveland. I've tried to talk myself out of it, but it looks like my choice of topics is to write about Grover Cleveland or to keep writing about my compulsion to write about Grover Cleveland. Oh. Here's something. Both True Grit movies get Rooster's physical appearance wrong. For one thing, there's no indication that he wears an eyepatch, just that he's missing an eye. And, he resembles Grover Cleveland. Except with one eye.

I had a hunch something like this would happen.

Captain Sir Geoffrey de Havilland, the designer of the Gipsy Moth aircraft flown nonstop from England to Australia in 1930 by Amy Johnson, was so far as is known to this correspondent not a relative of the American cartoonist Fontaine Fox, he of the justly celebrated Toonerville Trolley. I simply cannot imagine from whence this confusion arises. While the two men were indeed contemporaries (Sir Geoffrey, 1882 - 1965; Mr. Fox, 1884 -1964), there is no evidence that they ever met, much less that there was some longstanding rivalry between them. I suspect neither was aware of the other's existence.

Oscar Hammerstein, too

There's a crisis looming in the English language that demands our attention. I mean the coming word shortage. There's probably not a million words in the language, yet there are way more than a million things. And that's just nouns. Add in all the actions nouns can perpetrate and you'll need a lot more, plus adjectives and adverbs and the little words that fill in the gaps, sentence grout I call them. Just how bad is the shortage? We've already had to assign numbers to things that should get their own unique terms, like “World War” or “Sonny Boy Williamson.”