Bit o' Nifty

Woo woo. The software behind Bit o' Nifty has been updated, which fact accounts for the different appearance of this blog, the restoration of Commenting, and the loss of all the old links. Sometimes to move forward you gotta jettison the past, or some such platitude.

After I get some instruction from the site admin -- AJ, who makes me feel like Shaw's Jack Tanner in my ignorance of how these things work -- , I'll monkey around with the look of the site, and maybe even get in one of those whatever-the-hell-you-call-them link sections a blog roll.

Update: Good lord! While I was writing this entry, AJ restored all the old links. So much for a fresh start. ... I really do feel like Jack Tanner.

Early Sunday morning. The child is still asleep, and even the cats are recumbent, building energy for another day of stalking each other. The coffee machine gently burbles, and my tongue glides across freshly minted teeth. My students hate Gertrude Stein, but she is right, it's repetition, repetition, repetition with slight variation. The child will be a day older, the cats more scarred, the coffee machine older, the teeth more worn out. When the child, the cats, and I act and react today, it will be with one more day of experience, one less day to experience. One day closer to completed understanding, one day less to complete understanding. A winding up and a winding down. One more and one less Sunday morning.

After watching the Biden/Palin debate, I got online to see what the media were reporting because, you know, what we think matters far less than the narrative the media promulgates. But I got sidetracked by a cool little program at Wordle. You paste a bunch of words into a field and out pops a "word cloud," such as the one I posted using Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Naturally people had pasted in the words of Biden and Palin to see what each emphasized, and the results were interesting, and I suppose if you have a mind to, you can search and find those word clouds, or you can make your own, because this post isn't about the vice presidential debate.

Wordle takes the words you paste in and sizes them according to their frequency. It turns out that Biden's most-used words were "John McCain." Palin has great love for "also." (Common words such as "the" and "an" are deleted.) And not surprisingly, Stevens' favorite word in his blackbird poem is "blackbird," with "blackbirds" a bit further down the list.

You can cheat, too. Instead of using actual sentences, you can simply type in random words, repeating the ones you want larger. But that gives me moral qualms; it's the behavior of a cad, a rogue, of someone you nod at as you pat your wallet.

In 1983, my friend Jerry Boulware started up Street Level News, a small newspaper in Denton, Texas. I wrote some articles and editorials and helped, sometimes, with laying it out, but it was Jerry's baby. Printed on news stock, it was a pony tab with 16 to 24 pages and featured articles on local bands, politics, and community events.

The Street Level News cover shown here is my favorite. The vantage point is the porch of the big white house on Fry Street where I lived in the late '80s; shown are Jim's Diner and Secondhand Rose. And shuffling on the sidewalk is Richard Earnhart. Joseph Kent, the artist, captured him perfectly -- the slouch, the shuffle, the beard and glasses. Anyone familiar with Richard instantly recognized him in the illustration.

Jim's Diner is gone, the Secondhand Rose is gone -- both went out of business years ago. But now the very buildings are gone, razed by a developer wanting to get some franchises in. Richard, of course, died in 2001.

After learning from Joe Messerl (see previous entry) that Richard won the National Spelling Bee in 1942, I did a little online research. It's difficult researching a name like "Richard Earnhart" because it's not that uncommon. However, with the information from Joe, I found numerous mentions of Earnhart's performance at the spelling bee. Here's a brief article from the June 6, 1942, edition of Time.

For winning the national grade-school spelling bee in Washington last week, eleven-year-old Richard Earnhart of El Paso, Tex. got $500 and a two-day trip to New York City. There he had his first brush with the metropolitan press, came off winner, hands down, over a flabbergasted World-Telegram reporter.

Richard had won his championship, over 25 other young spell-wells from as many cities, by romping through sacrilegious after his closest rival had stumbled on acquiesced. The reporter thought Richard might be interested to know that one paper, publishing this fact, had misspelled sacrilegious in its own headline. But Richard just smiled, "like a man who had been there before."

"Yes," he said. "They spelled it with an i, I take it." Other quotes from Champ Richard:

On his trip to Washington: "The space we took up in the hotel might better have been released to people who needed it more for national defense."

On learning Spanish in El Paso schools: "They don't teach us very much. We're really a bunch of parrots. ... I have a hunch the way they're doing it is not very good. . . . Speaking of school, it may surprise you to know that it comes from a Greek word meaning, of all things, leisure."

Ah, said the reporter, a little weakly, then Richard was interested in the derivation of words? "Yes," said Richard, "Etymology, it's called." Certainly, he enjoyed reading the dictionary: "It changes the subject often."

Was he enjoying Manhattan? "Yes, this is swell. But I would kinda like to get back to normal life sometimes."

The 11-year-old Richard was correct about "school." Here's the etymology:

"place of instruction," O.E. scol, from L. schola, from Gk. skhole "school, lecture, discussion," also "leisure, spare time," originally "a holding back, a keeping clear," from skhein "to get" + -ole by analogy with bole "a throw," stole "outfit," etc. The original notion is "leisure," which passed to "otiose discussion," then "place for such." The PIE base is *segh- "to hold, hold in one's power, to have" (see scheme). The L. word was widely borrowed, cf. O.Fr. escole, Fr. école, Sp. escuela, It. scuola, O.H.G. scuola, Ger. Schule, Swed. skola, Gael. sgiol, Welsh ysgol, Rus. shkola. Replaced O.E. larhus "lore house." Meaning "students attending a school" is attested from c.1300; sense of "school building" is first recorded c.1590. Sense of "people united by a general similarity of principles and methods" is from 1612; hence school of thought (1864). The verb is attested from 1573. School of hard knocks "rough experience in life" is recorded from 1912 (in George Ade); to tell tales out of school "betray damaging secrets" is from 1546. Schoolmarm is attested from 1831, U.S. colloquial; used figuratively for "patronizingly and priggishly instructing" from 1887.

I've created a Crazy Richard category and added to it all Nifty entries mentioning Richard Earnhart.