Good grief, 180 Goldens in one place?! I cannot imagine it either. Woody is back with his master now and I must admit that a wee part of me misses him.
Speaking of smart doggies....
Sherman, set the wayback machine for the mid nineteen fifties. ( Please tell me Carolyn, that you've met Rocky and Bullwinkle and their time travelling friends Sherman and Mr. Peabody! )
Here's what we'll see when we arrive.
Where you live, Ike contemplates his re-election and agonizes about keeping his effective but occasionally virulent VP, Richard Nixon, on for a second go-round. Up where I live Louis St. Laurent, ( a.k.a. " Uncle Louis" ) is closing out a long, bucolic stint at the Prime Ministerial helm. My LSM ( long suffering mother ) is heartily engaged in the process of enlightening a pre-school me, rote-learning style, as to why I am the "luckiest boy on earth" to be living in North America.
We have freedom immaculate , tolerance aplenty, land in abundance and we speak the best language on earth - English.
Now, my mom wasn't scholarly by any imaginable stretch. Hell! She actually flunked grade 1 and threw in the academic towel half way through high school in order to get out and " make a living ". But she did click into the fact that pretty well the whole planet around her carried on internationally in the language that we were born into. Turns out she was more prescient than she may have realized.
What tossed me off onto this particular tangent is an item in the news this week about the O.E.D.
The ultimate argument settler and lexicological bible ( sorry, Mr. Webster ) is contemplating its future direction, or directions. This would seem like ho-hum academic prattle were it not for the fact that English has managed to become, for almost all intents and purposes, the lingua franca of this dirtball we all inhabit.
So, does the Oxford English Dictionary become the starch collar repository of all things inherently English/British or does it become the authoritative catalogue of a dynamic language that is common parlance in over 75 counties worldwide? Will it be a linguistic Rosetta stone or a crystal ball or a rear-view mirror ?
Regardless, it's cool to have Anglais as my native tongue. If I had to learn it from scratch I think I'd have to cop out and settle for something more logical, manageable, syntactical and approachable - like Latin or Mandarin!
Okay, having had the week off it's back into the riddle-diculousness.
My last item was blue jeans. Not the cheapo Wal-Mart crapola but the original heavy duty copper-riveted variety. Mr. Dean and Mr. Springsteen especially have helped keep the image out front for half a century or more. I have spent some quality time with your last item and the best I can do is something that grows in a pot. It sorta sounds like the orchids that my better half is so fond of and has in a couple of places around our home. It's either orchids, roses or ornamental grasses, for my money. I'm not betting the farm on any of those guesses, though.
Here's my rejoinder for this week:
Take a seat
Hands and wheels become feet
Helping hands guide from behind
Enjoy the rest of the summer. Got to see some of the meteor action before the clouds set in. It was pretty frickin awesome ! It sure makes ya feel small for some reason.
Don
All images sourced from Google Images.
Fig. 1 - organizedremains.com
Fig. 2 - oup.com
Fig. 3 - totakethetrain.wordpress.com
Fig. 4 - huffingtonpost.com
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