Marlon Brando and Carnivorous Marsupials

ProetryPlace Blog 12

Marlon Brando and Carnivorous Marsupials

Or, What I Learned from Today’s Crossword

        Besides reminding me that I am not the best speller in my age group, crossword puzzles often challenge my general knowledge of a wide variety of subjects—e.g. sports, history, mythology, language, geography, mathematics—a sort of trivia with hints. Completing an interesting puzzle, I sometimes dig further into some of the less obvious clues. Following my nose, I may end up far afield from the original subject on a page in Wikipedia where few have gone before.

    Take today’s 25-down: New Zealand Discoverer, 6 letters.

    I surmised the answer was Tasman after filling two of the letters with horizontal clues and associating New Zealand with nearby Tasmania and its well-known Devils. Abel Janszoon Tasman was the Dutch merchant/seafarer who discovered New Zealand in 1642 as well as Fiji and the island-state of Australia that is now called Tasmania. I expect he is the only historic figure to have an island, a sea and a devil named for him.

    The living devil is a dog-sized carnivorous marsupial that apparently eats everything in sight or out of sight. The cartoon version, Taz, adorns a banner my wife hangs on my office door each Christmas. He stands, arms akimbo, wearing a snarl and a Santa hat. The caption states Bah Humbug.

    Jump to 11-across: Second Largest Nation, 6 letters and 16-across: Third Largest Nation, 5 letters.

    The answers are Canada with 10 MMSKM (10 million square kilometers) and China with 9.7, just larger than the good old USA with 9.6. Russia is far in the lead with 17 MMSKM. Antarctica would come in second, way larger than Canada, with 14 MMSKM except it is not a nation. (What is it then? Another interesting piece of research.)

    Then I wonder: How do the populations of these large nations compare? Surprising to me, the US, 4th in size, is 3rd in population with 316 MM in residence. Number one in size, Russia, is 9th in population. Remember that old Custer joke about “look at all them fornicating Indians”? We might make a similar observation now about China with the largest population of 1.36 billion, even though they are limited by law to two offspring or fewer. India sports almost a billion and a quarter citizens, while second-in-size Canada comes in 36th with a population of 35 MM.

    Don’t worry, there will not be a test on a future blog, but this may come in as handy as an extra bag of nachos at your next trivia party.

    But what is the smallest population? The Pitcairn Islands, a nation of the British Commonwealth, takes the low-ball prize with a population of 66. No, not 66 million. Just 66. At one time the Anglo-Tahitian population had actually dropped to zero when the entire nation moved to Norfolk Island (where those nice, little trees come from?). They are back up to 66 after a handful returned, but finding them isn’t easy. The island, in the mid-Pacific, is one of the least accessible places on earth—a perfect place to hide out. Some did just that in the past. The inhabitants include the great, great, great grandson of Fletcher Christian. Remember the Marlon Brando role in the movie Mutiny on the Bounty?

    Then there was 32-across: Waring God and 21-across: Angers.

    The answers are Ares and ires, but let’s not start down those paths today.

Richard Allen Anderson      < : - \     ProetryPlace at http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

from Asner to Zen

ProetryPlace Blog 11 from Asner to Zen

    There is in our town a small piece of Nature that lies between apartments on one side, a hospital on another. Major thoroughfares border other extremes. It was created by the hospital as a walking trail to promote cardiac health. Nature abounds in this small sanctuary, and it somehow excludes the urban surroundings that remain in such close proximity.

    On spring days the sweet scent from flowering honeysuckle vines flavor the warm air. Bluebirds enjoy the atmosphere of one sparsely wooded section,  flying from one small tree to the next, displaying their beautiful coloring. Cardinals, sparrows, hawks and owls are the most common aviary inhabitants of the more heavily wooded areas.

    The large grassy lawn behind a retirement home abuts the one-acre pond at one end of the park. Canada Geese come in large numbers to hatch their furry yellow goslings and introduce them to swimming in the calm water. They parade, goose stepping, from lawn to pond unabashed by any walker or runner who may intrude on their territory.

    On sunny days, dozens of Frisbee-sized turtles bask atop semi-sunken fallen trees at the edge of the pond. Toward the center, a fountain shoots up a 12-foot circle of sprays to aerate the water.

    Most of the trees, shrubs and weeds are indigenous to the south—tall pines, a variety of oaks, a few wild cherry trees and dogwoods, many Southern Magnolias with boles of 12 inches or more in diameter. Some are too vine-covered to identify.

    In July I like an early morning walk before the Georgia heat becomes oppressive. Today I drove to the walking trail through dense morning mist—particulate humidity that saturated the heavy air. I carried my Walkman tape player and began my walk listening to a short story read by Ed Asner. A good story and a good read, but before a second story began something compelled me to switch off the player.

    

    I am alone. No other human shares the path with me. No bluebirds fly from tree to tree. Not even one pair of geese is present at the pond. From the relative absence of droppings on the trail, I surmise they must have abandoned this site several weeks ago.

    In the woods, no birds sing. I watch bubbles rising between ripples at a section of the pond where green algae has skimmed the surface. I think of Basho’s frog. Then there is silence, except for a faint breeze whistling past my ear buds.

    No turtles have emerged into the condensation fog. At a turn where thick vegetation does not obstruct my view, I spy a heron perched on a snag. It appears as though he is standing on the water’s surface.  I stop.  Enthralled, my mind aware of nothing more, absorbed into a profound silence, as one with my surroundings, time suspended in one moment. I bow slightly and whisper, “Namaste, heron.”

    The heron blinks a round eye but remains tranquil and motionless. Thus we stand, yards apart, frozen in time. At last, I continue to the trails end.

    Minutes later I drive back into our subdivision of manicured lawns, knockout roses and crepe myrtles in full, glorious bloom.

Richard Allen Anderson       < : - | http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

Parlez-vous Chinese?

ProetryPlace Blog 10 Parlez-vous Chinese?

    What’s the big deal if half or more of the earth’s 6000 or 7000 spoken languages are no longer heard or spoken by the middle of this century as I reported in an earlier blog? “Why not just one universal language?” as a friend recently asked, referring to that assertion, “Wouldn’t that be a lot more efficient?”

    It seems highly unlikely that the world’s population could ever agree on one common language. It might be logical to select the most commonly used language, Mandarin, with over one billion users, as our universal base. Are you ready for that? English and Spanish tie for a distant second with about one third as many speakers in the Americas. But note that there are more English speakers in China than in the United States.

    More to the point is the question of desirability of one common language or the flip side, why are languages disappearing at such a high rate. The Ethnologue group lists 377 languages know to have gone extinct since 1950. How did they disappear? What happened to those few remaining speakers of these languages? Did they just fade away? Were their offspring simply absorbed into some larger society or was some more traumatic sociological/cultural event responsible? How will the thousands of additional languages disappear in coming decades?

    I recently stumbled into the website of Dr. George J. Leonard, a longstanding professor in the Humanities Department at San Francisco State University. Dr. Leonard has published many articles and books, often relating to multicultural and interdisciplinary studies. He is an erudite scholar and skilled writer, presenting complex cultural analyses in common, understandable language. One of his articles, Japanese Haiku and Matsuo Basho,  relates to the question of the value of diverse world languages.

    I found Dr. Leonard after Googling a question about haiku and the Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho. Basho is probably the best known and appreciated haiku poet. He is credited for having developed and perfected the form in the mid seventeenth century. I was curious why and how this non-rhyming poetic form with its 17 syllables arranged in three lines came to be. It seems that Japanese, with a proliferation of words that end in vowels is almost more difficult not to rhyme than it is to rhyme. The 17 syllables (Japanese on) derives from a still earlier form, but I can’t tell you why 17 and not 16 or 18 or 21.

    Translations of Japanese haiku to English often do not retain 17 syllables but the beauty and simplicity of the original poem is retained as well as possible in translation. Take Basho’s most famous:

old pond

frog jumps in

sound of water

    The opening line creates a setting in nature, an aura, a tranquil atmosphere—in two words. Line two presents some action and suggests a time of year (when ponds are not frozen and frogs like to jump into them). The third line wraps up the moment as it occurred, leaving the reader not only with a visual image but the faint sound that briefly disrupted the peace and quiet of the old pond. Well, that is my simple interpretation after many readings and after venturing into Dr. Leonard’s discussion.

    Shakespeare never experienced Basho who wrote a century after he did. Shakespeare wrote beautiful rhymes and consistent meters in his sonnets and in his plays, setting the standard for centuries. For fun, I arranged several of his quotations in the form of haiku (though lacking essential imagery qualities of the poetry).

love all

trust few

wrong none

and a fool thinks

himself wise—a wise man knows

himself a fool

    According to George Leonard, a group of American poets, the imagists, took inspiration from Basho and his haiku to break away from what they considered the constraints imposed by rhyme and meter. As their name implies, they did not want to tell a story in verse; they wanted to present an image. They shunned rhyme and invented new meters. They embraced Whitman’s free verse. One of them, Amy Lowell, listed seven rules for imagist poets (thus weakly fettering their new-found freedom) that established imagery and brevity as essential elements of their work.

    Carl Sandburg, contemporary to the imagists if not always considered one of their company, has been a favorite of mine since I encountered his imagist poem, Fog, some 65 years ago.

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches [love that line]

and then moves on.

    So, the question is: would we ever have seen this poem without the influence of a strange (to English, European, and American poets) Japanese form of verse called haiku? Reason enough, I think, for humans to seek to preserve diversity in cultures and languages just as nature provides diverse life forms as a means to survival.

    Besides, it keeps Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone in business.

Richard Allen Anderson  < : - , ProetryPlace Blog 10 http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

ProetryPlace Blog 9: Of Rules, Tools and Fools

what you know can’t hurt

but it sure can inhibit—

conventional  truths

    My wife thinks I ask too many questions. Sometimes after she has passed on a bit of news she has just learned she will add, “Don’t ask me any questions. That’s all I know,” attempting to ward off the inevitable query. She sees it as a threat or a challenge, I suppose.

    If it is a challenge it is to the veracity of the news item, not hers personally. Usually, I am merely induced by curiosity to learn more, though that may include questioning the truth, background or motivations underlying the story.

    Or she may complain of another, perhaps related, tiny fault—her view, not mine. Maybe just a sideways glance or shrug, or she may say something like, “You think the rules are made just for others, don’t you!”

    I do not really. I don’t mess with the rules of nature. Can’t of course. They are immutable. Never tried to fly off the rim of the Grand Canyon, for example, by furiously flapping my arms.  Gravity trumps kinetic energy. But when it comes to the edicts and laws of mankind, I will admit to taking occasional liberties.

    Our regulations do not have the universal applicability that Mother Nature’s do. Being man-made, they are not exempt from being, at times, completely foolish and at other times quite useful. Following them strictly may save one from the trouble of exercising one’s judgment or possibly a $200 ticket for speeding happily along on an open highway. Still, I am often compelled to both question and challenge the logic, truth or applicability of some “laws.”

    Invention, progress and development do not occur without such challenge, whatever the field of human endeavor. As a research scientist, my discoveries and inventions always started with a question, e.g. What if? Then followed one or more experiments to test alternatives to the conventional wisdom. And in the end, new knowledge, new understanding or a new way of manipulating natural law built on the skill and understanding of those who had gone before.

    I have a similar view of writing prose and poetry. Someone, sometime wrote the first villanelle or sonnet, haiku or free verse, breaking existing rules, creating something new—the product of inexhaustible human ingenuity. After studying such forms for basic conventions of rhyme and tools of construction and considering how they might enhance poetic expression, I invariably feel a need to bend the rules and experiment on my own.

    It is not unusual to find that others have beaten me to the punch, written haiku in a single line or two instead of the usual three, or rhymed a line of blank verse or scrambled the meter from iambic pentameter. I can enjoy these infractions only because I recognize that they are deviations and innovations and the poetry police have let them pass with just a warning ticket or even a pat on the back.

conventional truths

dogma, science or writing—

now leap off the rim

Richard Allen Anderson     < ; - )     http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com

Sousa, Tchaikovsky and Independence Day

ProetryPlace Blog 8:

Sousa, Tchaikovsky and Independence Day

    The only time I regret not having a surround sound system for our television is on July 4th when the Boston Pops lets loose with Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever and Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.

    I used to play the 1812 on an old stereo system with a 33 1/3 rpm turntable and 12-inch speakers. I’d crank up the volume until the needle jumped tracks and the walls vibrated. Once, I saw a performance using real cannons and carillon as originally orchestrated. Rousing music, though I still thrill more to America’s own bandmaster ‘s Stars and Stripes with that hair raising piccolo run and blood-thumping build up to the “three cheers for the red, white and blue” musical phrase.

    Tchaikovsky wrote the 1812 (in 1880) to commemorate Russia’s improbable victory over French invaders that year.  It may seem an unlikely choice to celebrate America’s independence that might not have been gained without help from the French. Our war for independence began in 1776 and ended with the victory of American and French forces over the British at Yorktown 5 ½ years later.

    Of course, we had our own problems with the British in 1812 when the young United States declared war to prove our independence again. Coincidentally, British invaders occupied our soil and burned our capitol, Washington D.C., in action reminiscent of the burning of Moscow in 1812. It was the Russians themselves, though, who torched their capitol to deny the invaders shelter and sustenance in winter.

    Important as it was to securing our nation’s independence and allowing for our expansion west of the Alleghenies, it’s not a war that gets equal billing with America’s other great wars fought in the name of freedom—The Revolution, The Civil War (The War of Northern Aggression in the South), WWI and WWII. It also produced our national anthem, “The Star Spangled Banner,” but didn't even get a decent name, just a year. At least no one should be confused about when it occurred.

    

Libertas, gift of the French People, 1886

    This July 4th we may watch our small town parade once again. My friend Tom, a WWII vet, will be riding on the Sons of the Revolution float. I’ll clean up the grill to char a few burgers and hot dogs for the grandkids and us adults. Later we will all go to watch the fireworks from our favorite spot at the Baptist Church parking lot if we don’t get rained out.

    And for a few moments as I flip a burger, swat a mosquito, discuss the sorry state of American politics or “ooh” or “aah” at the fireworks, I will give thanks for our amazing founding fathers and the American heroes who sacrificed all in all our wars for our freedom to enjoy this day.

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - )     ProetryPlace Blog     https://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com