Alice's Adventures in Algebra

There was an fascinating article at New Scientist last month about the influence of Charles Dodgson's mathematics interests on his writing of Alice in Wonderland.

What would Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess's baby or the Mad Hatter's tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you'll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text...

...in 1984 Helena Pycior of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had linked the trial of the Knave of Hearts with a Victorian book on algebra... [Victorian] scholars had started routinely using seemingly nonsensical concepts such as imaginary numbers - the square root of a negative number... To Dodgson, though, the new mathematics was absurd, and while he accepted it might be interesting to an advanced mathematician, he believed it would be impossible to teach to an undergraduate.

Outgunned in the specialist press, Dodgson took his mathematics to his fiction. Using a technique familiar from Euclid's proofs, reductio ad absurdum, he picked apart the "semi-logic" of the new abstract mathematics, mocking its weakness by taking these premises to their logical conclusions, with mad results. The outcome is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. 

The article then goes on to discuss the relationship of the Cheshire cat scene, the tea party, and the other non-original scenes to Dodgson's conservative view of mathematics.

What, then, would remain of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland without these analogies? Nothing but Dodgson's original nursery tale, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, charming but short on characteristic nonsense.

Full details at the link, via NAACAL.  The embedded photos are selections from a wonderful gallery of film stills from Alice in Wonderland ( Clyde Geronomi and Wilfred Jackson, 1951)

Tim Burton has begun filming Alice in Wonderland

Scheduled for release in 2010, this will be about the 20th film version of Alice in Wonderland, but this time the story will be reworked to have Alice "return" to Wonderland as an older girl, so it will not adhere to the traditional plot.

An "unknown actress" (Mia Wasikowska) has been selected as Alice; the remainer of the characters are represented by an all-star cast: Helena Bonham Carter as the Red Queen, Anne Hathaway as the White Queen, Stephen Fry as the Cheshire Cat, Alan Rickman as the Caterpillar, and Christopher Lee as the Jabberwock. Oh yes, and some guy named Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter. Considering the director's previous work, this should be a fascinating movie.

Photos found here.

Alice Liddell portrayed as a beggar-maid

She is lazing coquettishly against a much eroded garden wall of limestone and sandstone, standing in a corner in her bare feet. She looks with a calm directness right into the camera lens, her face bearing an expression quite unutterably different from those in all the previous images. It is an expression of impish, secret knowledge, a winsome look that manages to be both confident and disturbing. Many who view it find it vaguely unsettling to return the young girl's gaze, and not a few move on to other pages, or close the book and return it to the shelves.  Yet, for most, even after the book is finally shut and put back, the memory of the image proves hauntingly and lingeringly distracting, and for a long while...

The girl stands, leaning very slightly back, though not  apparently touching the garden wall, in a seductive pose.  Her left arm is crooked and the hand placed on her waist, the fist half-closed.  Her right arm is bent in front of her at waist level, her hand cupped in a posture of a person hoping to receive alms, or else a benison of some kind.  Her hair is newly washed and gleaming, cut in page-boy style, bobbed and with a fringe, parted in a line directly above her slightly retrousse nose...

The shift is folded and tucked above her waist so that it falls double, but has been shortened to reveal her calves and, of course, her slender ankles and her surprisngly large feet.  There is sufficient shoulder, ankle, and skin revealed about Miss Liddell to excite and, these days, to infuriate...

Text from pp 5-9 of Simon Winchester's The Alice Behind Wonderland.  Every book of his I've read has been a delight to read.  I've previously blogged reviews of his Krakatoa; the Day the World Exploded and his The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary. I can also highly recommend The Man Who Loved China.

This book focuses on the photograph above, offering as background a biographical sketch of Charles Dodgson (his uncle, for example was "Commissioner of Lunacy" with responsibility of oversight of the country's asylums, which might be relevant to certain stories Dodgson was later to pen...), detailing what is known about Dodgson's relationship with Alice, her siblings, and the Liddell family, providing a rather detailed explanation of the new science of photography and why serious amateur photographers of the time came to prefer the collodion process rather than the daguerrotype (Stan B and other photographers who read this blog will be interested in this part of the book), explaining how Alice prompted Dodgson to write Alice in Wonderland, and detailing some of Alice's later life as a housewife and a celebrity.  All this in only 100 pages, which allows the book to be consumed in a single pleasant evening.

Today (10/6) is Mad Hatter Day

Explained here:

Mad Hatter Day is 10/6. The date was chosen from the illustrations by John Tenniel in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, wherein the Mad Hatter is always seen wearing a hat bearing a slip of paper with the notation "In this style 10/6". We take this as inspiration to behave in the style of the Mad Hatter on 10/6 (which is October 6 here, although in Britain Mad  Hatter Day occurs on June 10...but I digress...)

Mad Hatter Day began in Boulder, CO, in 1986, among some computer folk who had nothing better to do. It was immediately recognized as valuable because they caused less damage than if they'd been doing their jobs.

As I searched this topic on the 'net today, it was interesting to see how many observers misinterpret the 10/6 on his hat as being either a style number ("The Mad Hatter’s top hat, according to Lewis Carroll, was of the 10/6 style") or worse ("my birthdate (10/6) is on his hat although I think that is his hat size!"). The correct interpretation, of course, is that "the paper in the Mad Hatter's Hat was really an order to make a hat in the style shown, to cost ten shillings sixpence."

Reposted every several years.

50 books every child should read

Whenever I post lists like this, I feel obliged to anticipate commens by offering the disclaimer that these lists are totally matters of opinion.  Still, I find it interesting to see what other people's opinions are.  The Independent asked three children's authors and two staff critics to provide lists of 10 books each that they thought an 11-year-old child should read.  Here's the list they came up with (details and comments at the link):

* Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

* Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi.

* Emil and the Detectives by Erich Kastner.

* Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome.

* Black Hearts in Battersea by Joan Aiken.

* The Owl Service by Alan Garner.

* The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.

* Moominsummer Madness by Tove Jansson.

* A Hundred Million Francs by Paul Berna.

* The Castafiore Emerald by Hergé.

* The Star of Kazan by Eva Ibbotson.

* A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

* Just William books by Richmal Crompton.

* The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde.

* The Elephant's Child From The Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling.

* Treasure Island by R.L. Stevenson.

* The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway.

* The Man Who Planted Trees by Jean Giono.

* The Singing Tree by Kate Seredy.

* The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson-Burnett.

* Refugee Boy by Benjamin Zephaniah.

* Finn Family Moomintroll (and the other Moomin books) by Tove Jansson.

* Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney.

* I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith.

* The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein.

* The Tygrine Cat (and The Tygrine Cat on the Run) by Inbali Iserles.

* Carry On, Jeeves by PG Wodehouse.

* When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit by Judith Kerr.

* Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett.

* The Story of Tracy Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson.

* The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon.

* Mistress Masham's Repose by TH White.

* Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

* How to be Topp by Geoffrey Willams and Ronald Searle.

* Stormbreaker by Anthony Horowitz.

* Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo.

* Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer.

* The Silver Sword by Ian Serraillier.

* Animal Farm by George Orwell.

* Skellig by David Almond.

* Red Cherry Red by Jackie Kay.

* Talkin Turkeys by Benjamin Zephaniah.

* Greek myths by Geraldine McCaughrean.

* People Might Hear You by Robin Klein.

* Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman.

* Einstein's Underpants and How They Saved the World by Anthony McGowan.

* After the First Death by Robert Cormier.

* The London Eye Mystery by Siobhan Dowd.

* Beano Annual. 

Your comments re other books that should be on the list?

Anagrams

I haven't checked the equivalence of the two statements, but anagrams of long passages are not difficult to create.

Here are two examples from my files (credit unknown):

"To be or not to be: that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune..."

Anagrams as: "In one of the Bard's best-thought-of tragedies, our insistent hero, Hamlet, queries on two fronts about how life turns rotten."

And -

"That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind --Neil Armstrong"

anagrammed: "A thin man ran; makes a large stride, left planet, pins flag on moon. On to mars."

And finally, this famous coupling -

"This is my story of Jack the Ripper, the man behind Britain's worst unsolved murders. It is a story that points to the unlikeliest of suspects: a man who wrote children's stories. That man is Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, author of such beloved books as Alice in Wonderland."

- which anagrams as...

"The truth is this: I, Richard Wallace, stabbed and killed a muted Nicole Brown in cold blood, severing her throat with my trusty shiv's strokes. I set up Orenthal James Simpson, who is utterly innocent of this murder. P.S. I also wrote Shakespeare's sonnets, and a lot of Francis Bacon's works too."

Credit for the last one to Harper's Magazine (February 1997, letters to editor).

Photo credit.

Divertimento

GIF of a baby who gets glasses and sees clearly for the first time.

Wikipedia has a page for non-human electoral candidates.

There is a line of clothing styled especially for children with autism.  "...some common features on clothing — things like buttons, zippers, tags, and lace — can make it difficult for children with autism to get dressed by themselves... and without a clear front or back so that kids can put them on whichever way they please... includes tracking technology in several of its items..."

John Oliver asks why the American public keeps paying for lavish sports stadiums to benefit the wealthy owners of the teams.

"A newly discovered bound collection of All the Year Round, a magazine edited by Dickens, shows the Great Expectations author’s own handwriting. His annotations indicate that previously anonymous short stories, poems and articles were written by North and South author Elizabeth Gaskell, Alice in Wonderland creator Lewis Carroll and The Woman in White author Wilkie Collins."

How politicians artificially inflate the sales of their books.

Dog escapes from an enclosure.

An essay in the Economics column of The Guardian argues that capitalism has ended and we are now entering the postcapitalist period:

Postcapitalism is possible because of three major changes information technology has brought about in the past 25 years... information is corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly. That is because markets are based on scarcity while information is abundant. The system’s defence mechanism is to form monopolies – the giant tech companies – on a scale not seen in the past 200 years, yet they cannot last... we’re seeing the spontaneous rise of collaborative production: goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy...

Someone has developed a drone that fires a handgun.  The FAA says it's illegal.

A Facebook image of a Filipino boy doing his homework by the light of a McDonald's window [cropped at right] went viral.  "Nine-year-old Daniel Cabrera will now be able to fulfil his dream of becoming a policeman after donations of cash, school supplies and a college scholarship poured in."

Some startling facts about income inequality.

The really, REALLY big earthquake fault that will destroy cities and kill millions is not the San Andreas one.  It's the one in the Pacific Northwest.

An argument that Germany (not Greece) should exit the Euro.

While people were standing by at a Chevron gas station in Beaverton, taking video of a woman trapped inside of her burning car, a 19-year-old came to her rescue...  what surprised Bittar wasn't the flames, it was the crowd of people he said standing around, taking video of what he found to be a woman trapped in her burning car. "There was like six bystanders just videotaping like oh man she needs to get some help." That's when Bittar took the situation into his own hands. "I told her, hey I'm going to pull you out, get away from the window because I have to break it and she's like okay," he described.  The woman was taken by medic crews to a nearby hospital.

Krebs on Security analyzes the hack of AshleyMadison, which has some 37 million users.  Some have speculated that the hack threatens national security because of the high probability that people in the upper echelon of the American political establishment have made use of the service. "Washington, D.C., had the highest rate of membership for the site of any city."

Suggestions for those who would like to start reading contemporary comic books.

"Hollywood actor George Clooney launched an initiative on Monday to track down and help bring to justice those funding and profiting from Africa’s deadliest conflicts, in a bid to fight corruption in war zones.  Clooney joined forces with US human rights activist John Prendergast in a project called The Sentry that aims to investigate the flow of money in and out of conflict zones and give policymakers the tools to take effective action.  Using data collection, field research and analysis technology, the initiative plans to expose how conflict is financed and profits laundered, with a website encouraging people to anonymously submit leaks and tips."

A Kiwi has won the French-language Scrabble world championship, reportedly without speaking a word of French.

"An anti-gay political party in Kenya plans to protest against U.S. President Barack Obama by greeting him with 5,000 "totally naked" protesters for his "open and aggressive support for homosexuality."  The Republican Liberty Party's "main objective is for him to see and understand the difference between a man and woman," according to a party statement..."

A video explains how to repair a broken wing on a butterfly.

Charles Darwin and his friends terraformed Ascension Island.

"In his speech in Tallahassee, Florida, on Monday denouncing the influence of lobbyists, Jeb Bush neglected to mention one critical detail: The event was organized by a powerful corporate lobbying group that has helped financially support his White House bid."

A local news anchor spontaneously offers his personal opinion as to why Amazon has surpassed Walmart in market cap.  LOL.

An extended article about Ursula Le Guin and her views of contemporary literature, speaking truth to power:

“I think she’s gotten more daring, more feminist, more political,” says the Portland novelist Molly Gloss, a onetime student of Le Guin’s who has been her friend since the 1980s. “She’s more willing to rattle cages. At the National Book Awards, there’s a whole table full of Amazon folks, and she looks right at them and tells them what she thinks of how they’re trying to take over publishing. And then she looks right at her own publishing house and says their policies are making it impossible for libraries to lend e-books. These aren’t the kinds of things you imagine other writers being willing to say out loud.”

George McGovern did father a "secret child."  It could have affected his national campaign against Nixon:

“Somehow, the material ended up with President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign – possibly leaked by the bureau’s longtime director, J. Edgar Hoover – but it was never disclosed during the campaign.”... Nixon didn’t need the Fort Wayne story to beat McGovern. After Thomas Eagleton, McGovern’s running mate, revealed he had been treated for depression and left the ticket, defeat was already in the air.

Ophidiomyces ophiodiicola, a fungus that normally affects dead snakes, is now attacking the scales of live snakes.

"On Monday’s edition of “Fox & Friends,” Elisabeth Hasselbeck speculated that an “irritated” Sandra Bland could have “attacked” Officer Brian Encinia with her cigarette, because the co-host is “sure someone has, in the history of this land, used a cigarette against a police officer.”... “What if, I mean, there are times, I’m sure, someone has, in the history of this land, used a cigarette against a police officer,” Hasselbeck said. “Maybe chucked it at him — pushed it at him?” “Absolutely,” former New York Police Department officer John Rafferty replied."

The top image is a coneflower - a favorite nectar source for butterflies in our garden.

Recent posts at Neatorama

A video by a staff member at the Walker Art Center explains how they distinguish art from trash. (They put labels on the art).

Booksellers who buy books find unusual - and sometimes valuable - things inside them.

A coffin that screws into the ground.  Theoretically.

The world's largest book is an atlas.  Surprisingly, it's 350 years old.

A pair of very unusual 18th century baby rattles/teething toys.

A color video of the streets of London -- in 1927!

An optical illusion.

An earthquake centered in Illinois last month demonstrates that not all fault lines are in California.

It is now theoretically possible to clone Neanderthals.  Genetic material is available, and technology can probably accomplish the task.  The question is... should it be done?

Links to galleries of the decorative art of Mehndi.

A video of kids diving at a rocky swimming hole in Duluth.

"The Sign of the Horns" and what it means.

Before there was Express Mail, there were "feather letters."

A young woman has just beaten the world's best male bowlers in the world's most prestigious bowling tournament.

"Facilitated communication" is a bogus technique.

There are "Indians" in Russia who appear very similar to "American" Indians.

When Elizabethans went to the theater to watch plays by DeVere and Marlowe, the nobility ate crabs and the commoners ate oysters.

Braille is dying, replaced by electronic media, and some educators are worried about this turn of events.

The first movie of Alice in Wonderland was made in 1903.  Here it is - in its entirety.

Young chimpanzees do better on tests of short-term memory than college students.

"Alphabet Shoot" is another physics-based flash game.  I've solved all the levels except 24, 29, 30, and 3 of the custom levels.  Update - finally got 24 and one more of the customs.  Second update - FINALLY got 29; you have to load all three cannons first, then fire D, S, and F in succession.  And got 30 with the recommended combination shots.

As with all my smorgasbord-type posts, the photos above are unrelated.  These come from a National Geographic's International Photography Contest last year, and they all biggify quite nicely.

Creative dog grooming

Meet Duchess, one of many dogs included in the annual Pet Stylist Super Show in Knoxville, Tenn. The highlight of the event is the Creative Grooming competition, where owners use nontoxic dyes to "design" their pets. Duchess will be transformed into a member of the Queens Court from "Alice in Wonderland."

 

Sami Stanley works on her standard poodle, which has a dragon sculptured on one side and a jumping gold fish on the other. She calls it a Zen poodle.

When i create posts about dog grooming (Aug 2009, Oct 2011), I have to restrain myself from offering disparaging comments.  I am reminded by a variety of readers that these people love their dogs, and the dogs love the attention.

So I'll just post the pix and let the res loquitur for ipse.

There are additional examples of artistically enhanced dogs in a photoessay at ABC News.  Both of the above photos credit Meredith Frost/ABC News, via the always interesting Rue The Day.

Children's classic literature

The Guardian is reporting that "Walkers have put together some of the world's greatest children's literature with the best contemporary illustrators to create a beautiful and accessible collection of classics for a new generation." The first five titles published in this series are The Wind in the Willows, The Jungle Book, The Secret Garden, Alice in Wonderland, and Don Quixote.

A collection of 18 images from these books are at this link.

Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) and Alice Liddell

In 1856, Dodgson took up the new art form of photography, first under the influence of his uncle Skeffington Lutwidge, and later his Oxford friend Reginald Southey.  He soon excelled at the art and became a well-known gentleman-photographer, and he seems even to have toyed with the idea of making a living out of it in his very early years.  A recent study by Roger Taylor and Edward Wakeling exhaustively lists every surviving print, and Taylor calculates that just over fifty percent of his surviving work depicts young girls. He would later use many of his photographs of children in conjunction with his writings to add illustration to his work. Alexandra Kitchin, known as "Xie" (pronounced "Ecksy"), was his favourite photographic subject. From 1869 until he gave up photography in 1880, Dodgson photographed her at least fifty times, ending just before her sixteenth birthday. Less than a third of his original portfolio has survived, however; Dodgson also made many studies of men, women, male children and landscapes; his subjects also include skeletons, dolls, dogs, statues and paintings, trees, scholars, scientists, old men and little girls. His studies of nude children were long presumed lost, but six have since surfaced, five of which have been published...

In his diary for the year 1880 Dodgson recorded experiencing his first episode of migraine with aura, describing very accurately the process of 'moving fortifications' that are a manifestation of the aura stage of the syndrome. Several people have suggested the odd experiences Alice undergoes in the stories may have been inspired by migraine-like symptoms. Indeed a condition, Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, has been named after it. Also known as micropsia and macropsia, it is a brain condition affecting the way objects are perceived by the mind. For example, an afflicted person may look at a larger object, like a basketball, and perceive it as if it were the size of a mouse...

Lebailly has endeavoured to set Dodgson's child-photography within the "Victorian Child Cult", which perceived child-nudity as essentially an expression of innocence. Lebailly claims that studies of child nudes were mainstream and fashionable in Dodgson's time and that most photographers, including Oscar Gustave Rejlander and Julia Margaret Cameron, made them as a matter of course. Lebailly continues that child nudes even appeared on Victorian Christmas cards — implying a very different social and aesthetic assessment of such material. Lebailly concludes that it has been an error of Dodgson's biographers to view his child-photography with 20th or 21st century eyes, and to have presented it as some form of personal idiosyncrasy, when it was in fact a response to a prevalent aesthetic and philosophical movement of the time...

More at the link for those interested.

Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland - the trailer

I have not yet found a version that can be embedded*, but the official trailer is now posted at The Guardian. More re Alice and the movie here.

* Update - hat tip to Boliyou, who found one at Trailer Addict...

Teaser trailer for Jane Eyre (2011)

That's Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland) in the title role of what I believe is the sixth major movie version of Jane Eyre.  It appears to be beautifully filmed and acted.  Due to be released on March 11.

Found at Camille Reads...

Edible dormice

When I mentioned dormice in a post several weeks ago, Nolandda noted in a comment that dormice are edible.  Not only edible, but a recognized delicacy.  And not in China - in Slovenia:

A notorious delicacy of the Roman Empire mentioned in Petronius’ Satyricon (served dipped in honey), the dormouse remains a traditional food in Slovenia—particularly in the southern regions of Dolenska, Bela Krajina, and Notranska. Dormouse hunting season lasts from late September until the first snow, and each hunt is a ritualized event that involves setting traps and staying up all night. (Part of the appeal of this practice is the companionship of lying in wait and keeping warm with fortifying spirits; but there is a mythical significance, too: Local legend has it that the devil himself is a shepherd of dormice, so killing the rodents may historically have been seen as a way of battling evil.)

The article at Gourmet explains how to stew the cute little fellows in red wine with vegetables.

The edible dormouse actually has "edible" as a standard part of its name.   The "dormouse" "comes from Anglo-Norman dormeus, which means "sleepy (one)"; the word was later altered by folk etymology to resemble the word "mouse". The sleepy behaviour of the Dormouse character in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland also attests to this trait... Dormouse fat was used by the Elizabethans to induce sleep."

Presumably it is the fat stored for hibernation that makes them such a culinary delight.

Left photograph by Borut Peterlin; Right photograph by Robert Spoenlein/zefa/corbis.

Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit

With the impending release of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, we probably will be hearing this classic Jeffeerson Airplane piece more frequently. I've embedded a video from 1967; I suspect it was a lip-synched performance, since the audio is exactly like the famous recording, but it's still good to see a young Grace Slick again.

For an immense collection of non-Tenniel Alice illustrations (including many that are NSFW), see the ofellabuta blog's Alice category. There's amazing art stored there, and lots of Alice links.

Addendum: ritwik found the Woodstock performance two years later, in which Grace displays the power of her voice.

Ca'n't, wo'n't, and sha'n't

This week I was doing one final reread of Alice in Wonderland (a 1962 paperback version) and was struck by some archaic spelling:

"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone; "so I ca'n't take more."
"You mean you ca'n't take less," said the Hatter: "it's very easy to take more than nothing."

Elsewhere the same style was applied to wo'n't and sha'n't.

Just out of curiosity I ran ca'n't through Google's Ngram viewer (result above), which shows that double-apostrophe'd contractions have not disappeared (though I can't tell whether the modern usages are simply new editions of older books).

A quick web search yielded these comments by Lewis Carroll in his Preface to Sylvie and Bruno Concluded:

Other critics have objected to certain innovations in spelling, such as “ca’n’t”, “wo’n’t”, “traveler”. In reply, I can only plead my firm conviction that the popular usage is wrong. As to “ca’n’t”, it will not be disputed that, in all other words ending in “n’t”, these letters are an abbreviation of “not”; and it is surely absurd to suppose that, in this solitary instance, “not” is represented by " ‘t”! In fact “can’t” is the proper abbreviation for “can it”, just as “is’t” is for “is it”. Again, in “wo’n’t”, the first apostrophe is needed, because the word “would” is here abridged into “wo”: but I hold it proper to spell “don’t” with only one apostrophe, because the word “do” is here complete.

Wordsmiths, grammar Nazis, copyeditors - any thoughts?

"Rabbit, rabbit, rabbit"

It's the first of the month, and I need some good luck.   

As a child I believed that saying "rabbit, rabbit, white rabbit" as the first words spoken out loud on the first day of the month would bring good luck.  I think at the time I surmised a connection to Alice in Wonderland, but according to Wikipedia, the origin is unknown.

The exact origin of the superstition is unknown, though it was recorded in Notes and Queries as being said by children in 1909... 

"When I was a very little boy I was advised to always murmur 'White rabbits' on the first of every month if I wanted to be lucky. From sheer force of unreasoning habit I do it still—when I think of it. I know it to be preposterously ludicrous, but that does not deter me." – Sir Herbert Russell, 1925.

"Even Mr. Roosevelt, the President of the United States, has confessed to a friend that he says 'Rabbits' on the first of every month—and, what is more, he would not think of omitting the utterance on any account." – newspaper article, 1935.

Addendum:  Isolated track of Grace Slick's vocal ("What a voice. As noted, the reverb is from recording in an empty room, but the vibrato is pure Grace.") 

Hat tip to reader xoxoxoBruce for providing the link.

And an interesting interview with a very outspoken 70-year-old Grace Slick (worth a couple minutes' listen for those who remember the 60s).

Alice with her flamingo

The chief difficulty Alice found at first was in managing her flamingo: she succeeded in getting its body tucked away, comfortably enough, under her arm, with its legs hanging down, but generally, just as she had got its neck nicely straightened out, and was going to give the hedgehog a blow with its head, it would twist itself round and look up in her face, with such a puzzled expression that she could not help bursting out laughing: and when she had got its head down, and was going to begin again, it was very provoking to find that the hedgehog had unrolled itself, and was in the act of crawling away: besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.

Image credit to ofellabuta's Alice section, which specializes in Alice in Wonderland illustrations.

It's true that there's no prize when you die... (updated)

... but I do keep track of all the books I've read.   I rate them on a scale of 0-4+, so that when I get old(er) and (more) demented, I'll know which ones to re-read.

For the past 25 years, here are the 92 books I've rated 4+ (to be honest, it also includes a fair number of 3.5s), out of a total of 700+.

Year	Author	Title
1990 ( of 26)	Ludlum	The Bourne Identity
	Ludlum	The Parsifal Mosaic
1991 (52)	Colin Watson	Hopjoy was Here
	Gerrold	The Man Who Folded Himself
	Marquez	One Hundred Years of Solitude
1992 (63)	Boyer&Nissenbaum	Salem Possessed
	Weisman	Witchcraft, Magic and Religion in 17th century Massachusetts.
	Frederic	The Damnation of Theron Ware
	LeCarre	The Secret Pilgrim
	Warren	Brother to Dragons
	Clarke	Childhood's End
1993 (39)	None
1994 (44)	None
1995 (38)	Dickson	And So To Murder
	Paulson	Winterdance
	Kersten	The Jesus Conspiracy
	Huyghe	Columbus Was Last
	Holand	Norse Discoveries & Explorations in America 982-1362
1996 (28)	Bester	The Stars My Destination
	Fowles	A Maggot
	Guthrie	The Big Sky
1997 (8)	None
1998 (13)	Krakauer	Into Thin Air
	Wahlgren	The Vikings and America
1999 (16)	Jewett	The country of the Pointed Firs
	Faulkner	Absalom Absalom (turgid and gloomy)
	Hardy and Shaffer	The Wicker Man
2000 (4)	Teale, Edwin Way	A Naturalist Buys an Old Farm
2001 (8)	Ryan & Pittman	Noah's Flood
	Lansing	Endurance
	Mowat	The Alban Quest
2002 (19)	None
2003 (36)	Brown	Angels and Demons
	Hosseini	The Kite Runner
	Warren	All the Kings Men
2004 (49)	Menzies	1421 The Year China Discovered America
	Wodehouse	Bertie Wooster Sees It Through
	Brown	Da Vinci Code
	Hoffer	The True Believer
2005 (45)	Whitaker	The Mapmaker’s Wife
	Woodham-Smith	The Reason Why [Crimea, Light Brigade]
	Ferguson	Naked to Mine Enemies, Volumes 1 and 2
	Lapham	Gag Rule.  On the suppression of dissent
	Powell	Bring Out Your Dead
2006 (35)	Grogan	Marley and Me
	Hanson	Confident Hope of a Miracle
	Bamford	A Pretext for War
	Needham	Science and Civilisation in China, Vol IV: 3
	Wright	The Looming Tower; Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
	Ryan	The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
2007 (29)	Harris	Letter to a Christian Nation
	Setterfield	The Thirteenth Tale
	Kinzer	Overthrow. America’s Century of Regime Change (skimmed)
	Fothergill	Planet Earth
	Shorto	The Island at the Center of the World [Manhattan]
	McCarthy	The Road
	Smith	When the Cheering Stopped
	McCarthy	No Country for Old Men
2008 (30)	Hitchens	God is Not Great
	Nouvian	The Deep
	Ballesta & Deschamp	Planet Ocean
	Corrie	Let Me Stand Alone
	Marent	Butterfly
	McCarthy	Blood Meridian
	Weiner	Legacy of Ashes
	Winchester	Krakatoa; the Day the World Exploded
	Schooler	Last Shot
2009 (31)	Wilson	How Jesus Became Christian
	Ehrman	Misquoting Jesus
	Keys	Catastrophe
	Zuckerman	Society without God
	Nasrecki	The Smaller Majority (nature photos)
2010 (49)	Pears	An Instance of the Fingerpost
	Nicholls	Paradise Found: Nature in America at the time of discovery
	Van Allsburg	The Mysteries of Harris Burdick
	Ludlum	The Bourne Identity
	Lester	The Fourth Part of the World
	Gilder	Heavenly Intrigue [Kepler and Brahe]
	Grann	The Lost City of Z
	Holmes	The Age of Wonder
	Bergreen	Over the Edge of the World [Magellan]
2011 (21)	Meldahl	Hard Road West
	Gaiman	Coraline
	Winchester, Simon	The Alice Behind Wonderland
	Severin	The Brendan Voyage
	Seuss	The Bippolo Seed and Other Stories
	Bryson	The Mother Tongue: English and how it got that way
	Cohen	The Tree Army; a pictorial history of the CCC, 1933-1942
2012 (18)	Mann	1491
	Millard	Destiny of the Republic [bio James Garfield]
	Menzies	1434; The Year a Magnificent Chinese Fleet Sailed to Italy…
	Moon	Blue Highways
	Feldman	When the Mississippi Ran Backwards
2013 (21)	Peskov	Lost in the Taiga
	Mitchell	Cloud Atlas
	Mitchell	The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet
2014 (21)	Faulkner	As I Lay Dying

Sometimes I post reviews in the recommended books category of this blog.

Please feel free to chime in with a comment about your favorite books.

Addendum 2015 - 2020:

(can't remember how I created a table in the post 7 years ago, so I'll just copy/paste the updated info)

Addendum 2021 - 2024: