"I never had the least notion that I could fall with such emotion..."

Name that singer!

Today is Boys' Club Day and National Ride Your Bike to Work Day. Not very exciting I think. Actually to be honest, there are very few cool ones left in May. Sorry everyone. It's not my fault though. Write some letters to your government officials, and get some cool holidays going down. Perhaps Four Square Day, or Chase Snakes Around Town With Metal Objects Day, or Join an Obscure Cult Day, or something cool like that. It's up to the people to get this ball rolling, Congress will never pass new holiday acts unless we show them that there is a demand for them.

I got a package in the mail yesterday, but really it was just Sister Reeves (my mom for the last year) sending back the picture that I turned in to the helaman halls art display (which was actually cooler and had more "real art" than the Boise art museum. Last time I went there, they had this creepy carnival thing and it was covered in some kind of yellowish ooze, and there was a stuffed deer head on a man's body standing guard with a rifle over a music stand with pictures of Indians taped onto it, and then there was a little video of this stewardess looking out a plane window and every once in a while it would cut to these insane women dancing around on a football field. If it was supposed to mean something, I must have missed it. The only cool thing in the whole building is the metal wall downstairs where you can play with magnets and make your own poetry. The whole experience was rather frightening and it cost me four dollars. I miss Provo!) So getting my package wasn't terribly exciting, but at least now I have my picture back.

Happy Birthday to:
Innocent XI, 1611 (Benedetto Odescalchi, 240th Pope)
Sven Thofelt, 1904 (pentathlete who bears the name of my future child. Just look at those fricatives!)
Florence Chadwick, 1918 (first to swim English Channel in both directions. I think when she turned around it became La Manche...)
Pol Pot, 1915
Peter Townshend, 1945 <--- NAME THAT BAND FOR A PRIZE!!
Phillip Rudd, 1946 <--- DRUMMER FOR WHICH BAND?? (PRIZE)
Mark Janssens, 1968

Happy Deathday to:
Alcuin of York, 1804
Sebastian Vrancx, 1647
Josiah Bartlett, 1795 (I remember The Blaze talking about him once, but I don't remember much)
Thomas E Lawrence (OF ARABIA!!! 8^) died in a motorcycle crash. thats how the movie starts)
The Tortoise supposedly given to the king of Tonga in 1773 by Captain Cook, 1966

Today in History:
English queen Elizabeth I arrests Scottish queen Mary, 1568
About midday, near-total darkness descends on much of New England, 1780 (no one knows why still)
First department store opens, 1848
Mexico gives Texas to US, 1848
Ringling Brothers circus premieres, 1884
First mass production of shoes, 1885
Heavy rain wash "quick clay" into a deep valley, kills 111 (Norway), 1893
Patricia R Harris named 1st US black female ambassador (Luxembourg), 1965
USSR ratifies treaty with Engl & US banning nuclear weapons in space, 1967
Weird Al Yankovic gives live performance at Wax Museum in Wash DC, 1983
"King Of Suede" by Weird Al Yankovic hits #62, 1984
Pat LaFontaine scores 2 goals within 22 sec in an NHL playoff game, 1984 (hehe, friggin awesome!)
World's youngest doctor, Balamurali Ambati, 17, graduates Mount Sinai, 1995
Syzygy, 2161 (8 of 9 planets aligned all on one side of the sun)

I'm going to ramble a little about yesterday. So I got really bored and fed up with Boise not having any culture, etc. so I went to the Garden City library (roughly the size of a small classroom) and I wandered around for a bit and didnt find anything, and then I looked on the catalog, and nothing was checked in or else it was in another library (not even the Boise library, they were all in flippin' Nampa or Caldwell or something) and then I gave one last effort to find von Goethe's Faust and it was actually there, and so I got something and now I won't go mad and kill everyone! Probably. So I got Faust and it came with Egmont and Christopher Marlowe's Dr. Faustus. And I also found next to it Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, Thomas More's Utopia, and Martin Luther's 95 Theses, Address To The German Nobility, and Concerning Christian Liberty, so I got those too. These should keep me occupied for at least 4 days. If you've read anything by these guys, I would like to talk about them with you. I was pleased with how many of you knew the O Fortuna reference, and I know that I have a lot of cultured friends, so I hope someone has read up on Faust particularly. It's intriguing.

If anyone knows how to turn an mp3 file into something that my cd player can recognize, please email me or catch me online or something. I already got 28 cds burned, but then my free trial version of MusicMatch Plus ran out, so now I'm lost and confused like a little sheep. So I've gotten rid of roughly 325 files, but i have 583 left, and I need to get them off my computer so that it will keep running and not die. It's getting pretty slow lately...

Person of the Day: (there are two today!)
1. Het'um The Armenian, (c.1245 - c.1315)
Historian of Armenia, Georgia and the Tartars, documented the history between the reigns of Chingiz-Khan (1st Tartar Emperor) and Monge-Khan (4th Emperor) Can you imagine being a historian and writing down everything you find out? He undoubtedly knew a lot more than he wrote down, and he wrote a TON! Het'um was definitely a genius. I want to be a historian I think. I can't decide. I'll probably want to do history and philosophy and music and linguistics all at once, but I can't see how that would work.
2. Procopius of Caesarea, (c.490/507 - c.560s)
Historian of Byzantium and the reign of Emperor Justinian I. Procopius was an advisor to Belisarius, the greatest military leader of his day, and helped in Belisarius' first Persian offensive, and helped to defend Italy against the Goths. (sorry I can't help but think of the mesh-wearing black faced punk kids invading Rome, haha) Procopius actively hated Emperor Justinian and Empress Theodora and wrote his Secret History in 550 AD. This is his most well known work. I've read bits of it, and I think he probably exxagerated, but who's to say? I also read a lot about Justinian I and he seems to be a cool enough guy. I'm not saying that Procopius was wrong to dislike Justinian or that it's wrong for writers to say what they think. Writers are famous for being biased. It's their job. Persuasion is one of the basic purposes of language, and Procopius was very gifted with languages. He was fluent in several (granted, bilingualism was more common then) Justinian was definitely a jerk, but there was some good that came out of him too. So they are both on my Stud List, for different reasons.

Insalubrious: not condusive to good health; unwholesome
Objurgation: a harsh rebuke
Doyen: The senior member of a body or group; One who is knowledgable or uniquely skilled as a result of long experience in some field of endeavor.

Irish Word of The Day (Focal an Lae)
Word: óg
Meaning: young
Usage: bean óg (BAN OHG) = a young woman
Tá mé óg. (TAW may OHG) = I'm young.
óg can also be a noun meaning "young person", as in the famous Gaelic otherworld, Tír na nóg
(CHEER nuh NOHG), The Land of the Young
History: óg comes from Old Irish "oac", which comes from a Common Celtic word reconstructed as "yuwankos". Modern Welsh "ieuanc, ifanc" and Breton "yaouank" more closely resemble the ancestral word, which comes ultimately from the Indo-European root *yeu- (vital force, youthful vigour). English cognates include "young" and "juvenile".


Quotes of the Day:

"I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven" Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784) (in the preface to the American Heritage Dictionary, written in 1775)

"Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them." <--- NAME THAT AUTHOR/BOOK FOR A PRIZE!!

"Never despair; but if you do, work on in despair." Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797)

"Words are the physicians of the mind deceased." Aeschylus (525 - 456 BC)

"High thoughts must have high language." Aristophones (450 - 388 BC)

"Grasp the subject, words will follow." Cato the Elder (234 - 149 BC)

"When ideas fail, words come in very handy." Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 - 1832)

"Words have a longer life than deeds." Pindar (522 - 433 BC)

"No one has a finer command of language than the person who keeps his mouth shut." Sam Reyburn (1882 - 1961)

"Broadly speaking, the short words are the best, and the old words best of all." Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965)

"The end of speech is not ostentation, but to be understood." William Penn (1644 - 1718)

Well there I go destroying all my resources without any thought for the future. You'll probably not get another quote from me about language, because, well... I don't really have any more. I have one, I didn't feel right about using them all at once, so I saved it...

Oh, hey I got the results back from my little surgery and I'm not going to die of cancer after all, but they did find a ... some big word... trying to remember... di- something.... AHA! displastic nevis. So that's kind of a problem, and I'll most likely have cancer later on at some point. Meh. I'm still all right. I just have to have periodic skin cancer/melanoma/Basil cell checks all the time for the rest of my life. *cry* so thats my report.

And I'm out now. I just spent three hours today doing this email, with some slight distraction (e.g. chocolate chips, Instant Messenger, singing along to Postal Service and The Notwist, etc.)
Go raibh tú sona inniu (May you be happy today)
Brian Fricative Harris