The stump sobs for its pinecone babies unborn, Seeds in their prisons a blasphemous broken promise. Each ring on the tabled trunk now a year of defeat, Spring frozen by death and circumstance. Beneath the sawdust of nature’s hopes The sap congeals, anger in amber. The wound blots out proud heights and soaring sky Leaving …
Author Archives: mysterious6030
Friday Vocabulary
1. knobkerrie (also knobkerry) — short wooden club with heavy knob at its head used by South African tribes The similarities between the knobkerrie and the shillelagh go further than the merely physical, however, as both were banned by the ‘powers-that-were’. 2. futtock shroud — [nautical] lines securing platform attached to mast by running …
Friday Vocabulary
1. bittacle — [obsolete] binnacle, box on ship’s deck for the compass Be sure to use wooden pegs or the like in constructing the bittacle, for metal nails can attract the compass. 2. barney — [British] fight, quarrel, brawl Terence spent the night in jail after getting into a barney with some other drunken …
Friday Vocabulary
1. remise — second fencing thrust made after failure of the first; coach house Well, in for a dollar in for a pound, as they say, and since my lunge had left me in an exposed position I essayed a remise under the decorative spaulder of the sneering French lord, changing his expression in a …
Analysis: The 6th Hundred Books
Many months have now passed since I promised some sort of data analysis of the most recent hundred books read, and that promise itself was in a listing of those selfsame books, posted more than a month after my initial notification that I had passed the self-imposed milestone of having finished 600 books. What can …
Friday Vocabulary
1. allotropic — existing (of an element) in multiple physical forms Carbon is rightfully known for both the multitude and the variety of its allotropic forms, which include diamonds, graphite, charcoal, glassy carbon, and even such modern derivations as buckyballs and nanotubes. 2. exiguous — scanty, meager The physician’s actual treatment was so exiguous …
Friday Vocabulary
1. incorporeity — quality of being incorporeal, lack of material existence Proofs of the incorporeity of his supposed evidence only seem to have confirmed in him an almost mystical credence in the tyrant’s lies. 2. circumverbalistic — of the design or creation of crossword puzzles; of the solving of crossword puzzles Braithwaithe proved the …
Friday Vocabulary
1. paleography — study of writing and the evolution of writing systems You should not be led by the failure of paleography to divine an unanswerable argument for Hand D in the Sir Thomas More manuscript as Shakepeare’s to conclude that the science has no basis in fact, as it has shown many and storied …
Friday Vocabulary
1. spathe — large bract enclosing the flower bundle or spadix of some plants The beautiful white flower of the peace lily is actually the spathe of the plant, which encloses the yellow spadix of the true flowers. 2. purdah — curtain screening women from sight of men or strangers; system of secluding women …
700 Books (not really)
As I have said many times before, when counting the number of books I have read since I started tracking in a foolish though somewhat satisfying project I’ve maintained since 2015, I do not include in my ‘official’ count items classified (by me) as comics or graphic novels. This includes, by the way, books about …