"Seeking a chalk artist..."

"I'm hoping to find a sidewalk chalk artist (or two) in our neighborhood.

We recently needed one piece of white chalk for a household project, and wound up with 47 extras in a rainbow of colors.

We would like to commission the drawing on our driveway of a large, colorful (and totally imaginary) flower, perhaps with several equally exotic butterflies hovering over it, and maybe a caterpillar on the stem.  

Two artists (siblings, best friends) can work together if they can amicably share the box of chalk prize.  No tryouts or portfolio review necessary - first response gets the commission."

I posted the above in a neighborhood Facebook page.  Here is the completed magnum opus -

In addition to the flowers there are seven butterflies, a spider, and a rabbit.  My sincere thanks to Louisa and Maddy.

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

I've been doing crossword puzzles every day for mental exercise for as long as I can remember, but this week was the first time I've ever encountered supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as a crossword clue.  

Everybody who is my age knows the word, but to be honest I didn't realize it had a definition, so I had to look that up for the blog.  Apparently its history goes back to the 1930s:

"The word is a compound word, and said by Richard Lederer in his book Crazy English to be made up of these words: super- "above", cali- "beauty", fragilistic- "delicate", expiali- "to atone", and -docious "educable", with all of these parts combined meaning "Atoning for being educable through delicate beauty." 

The Oxford English Dictionary first records the word (with a spelling of "supercaliflawjalisticexpialadoshus") in the column titled "A-muse-ings" by Helen Herman in the Syracuse University Daily Orange, dated March 10, 1931. In the column, Herman states that the word "implies all that is grand, great, glorious, splendid, superb, wonderful".

The word was popularized in the 1964 film Mary Poppins, in which it is used as the title of a song and defined as "something to say when you don't know what to say".

The Sherman Brothers, who wrote the Mary Poppins song, have given several conflicting explanations for the word's origin, in one instance claiming to have coined it themselves, based on their memories of having created double-talk words as children. In another instance, they wrote:

When we were little boys in the mid-1930s, we went to a summer camp in the Adirondack Mountains, where we were introduced to a very long word that had been passed down in many variations through many generations of kids. ... The word as we first heard it was super-cadja-flawjalistic-espealedojus."

There are additional "things you wouldn't know" at the link, including information about the backwards version, a Mahatma Gandhi pun ("super calloused fragile mystic hexed by halitosis") and an old Randy Rainbow parody.

Why Moses has been depicted as a man with horns

"It all goes back to Ancient Hebrew, which, like a lot of ancient languages, didn’t have quite enough words for all of the things the writers of the Bible wanted to talk about... Specifically, it didn’t have a word for a ray of light, so most biblical authors used the Hebrew word for horn... So, in Exodus chapter 34, after spending several days on Mt. Sinai, taking down God’s dictation of the Ten Commandments, Moses’ face is described as being “horned.” The writers of the third-century–B.C. Septuagint, the Ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament, got the gist and rendered the word as glorified...

Jerome translated the Old Testament directly from Hebrew into Latin, bypassing the Septuagint entirely—and because the Hebrew said “horns,” “horns” was what went into the Vulgate... And so, for the next dozen centuries, Moses had horns...

You might be wondering how depicting one of the Bible’s key figures as having horns—a feature commonly associated with the devil—could have become so popular. The answer is that horns weren’t actually associated with the devil until fairly recently. Scripture itself offers few, if any, visual descriptions of Satan, and what is there rarely mentions horns

[B]y the time Michelangelo was working on Julius II’s tomb, it was pretty widely known that the idea of a horned Moses stemmed from an overly literal translation. Which, of course, raises the question of why Michelangelo chose to portray his Moses with horns anyway...

Discussion continues at Christ and Pop Culture.

Doom and gloom in the world of art

Excerpts from an article at artnet:

"The art world is in a precarious state as it heads into the second half of 2025. Not a week goes by, it seems, without a major gallery closing: Blum, Venus Over Manhattan, and Kasmin are other prominent summer casualties. Smaller galleries are exiting and downsizing discreetly. Each case is different, but many voice the same laments: Overheads are killing businesses. Sales are down. It’s no longer fun. Primary pricing is untenable. Major collectors have stopped buying art or significantly reduced their spending. The next generation isn’t there to take over from the old guard. The art world has become bloated, and there isn’t an easy way to cure the malaise.

“I don’t believe for one second that it’s cyclical,” Belgian collector and art market commentator Alain Servais told me. “It’s structural. The infrastructure is too big. There are too many advisors, too many galleries, too many artists, too many fairs. Everything will need to downsize. In my blunt opinion, blood will flow in the streets before the art market finds a new balance.”...

Another revealing indicator: Soho Art Materials, a popular art-supplies company in New York that works with artists and galleries, traces the sector’s decline to the summer of 2022. The firm’s sales began falling gradually and then in June 2023 dropped 20 percent from the previous month, according to Jonathan Siegel, a co-owner. The company was stretching 700 to 1,000 canvases annually for three years, starting in 2020; it now does about 200 a year, he said.

“The industry is in a free fall,” Siegel said. “Galleries are closing left and right. They have overextended. Everyone thought the light would never stop shining. The ramifications of the past two years have been dramatic. It’s been a disaster, basically.”

In the U.K., firms must file financial disclosures, which reveal razor-thin profit margins for galleries big and small, as falling turnover collides with stubbornly high fixed costs...

I have covered the art market since 2006, and I have never heard people as down as they have been this summer. Suddenly, they are openly talking doom and gloom, instead of fighting against that narrative..."

A "gigantic jet" is a "transient luminous event"

As reported on the NASA website:

Did you see that gorgeous photo NASA astronaut Nichole Ayers took on July 3, 2025? Originally thought to be a sprite, Ayers confirmed catching an even rarer form of a Transient Luminous Events (TLEs) — a gigantic jet...

Gigantic jets are a powerful type of electrical discharge that extends from the top of a thunderstorm into the upper atmosphere. They are typically observed by chance — often spotted by airline passengers or captured unintentionally by ground-based cameras aimed at other phenomena. Gigantic jets appear when the turbulent conditions at towering thunderstorm tops allow for lightning to escape the thunderstorm, propagating upwards toward space...

Sprites, on the other hand, are one of the most commonly observed types of TLEs — brief, colorful flashes of light that occur high above thunderstorms in the mesosphere, around 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. Unlike gigantic jets, which burst upward directly from thundercloud tops, sprites form independently, much higher in the atmosphere, following powerful lightning strikes. They usually appear as a reddish glow with intricate shapes resembling jellyfish, columns, or carrots and can span tens of kilometers across.

More details about the image at the APOD site.

Related: "Jet lightning" and "ELVES in the sky"

Zodiac signs change over time

I trust most readers here regard horoscopes derived from zodiac signs as curiosities from the history of science.  For those interested in the subject, there is an article in the New York Times detailing how the precessional "wobble" of the earth's axis results in changes in the zodiac constellations associated with calendar dates. 

My embedded image is a composite created by combining several of the excellent illustrations at the link.

A teacher expresses doubts about her career

"I start school tomorrow with 150 new students. Although I don’t know them yet, I’ll protect them with my life if/when a shooter decides we’re the target.

I decided to be an English teacher when I was in seventh grade. I’ve never really wavered in my vocation. I started volunteering in schools as a seventeen-year-old college freshman. I student-taught at twenty-one, the same semester in which I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from my elite liberal arts college. (There were only four of us teachers in my class at Macalester, and the school has since stopped offering teacher training because no one wants to do this job anymore.)

In my career, I’ve switched positions more than teachers usually do, I think because I keep hoping that there’s a utopian school community that embodies what I feel is possible in K-12 education. Maybe I can find the right grade level, I tell myself, the right school policies, the right leaders, that will make me feel at home. A parent of a student once told me I was born to be a teacher. It was a compliment — I’d done well for her kids. I do think I’m born for it, but I don’t really want to do it this year.

It’s my twenty-fourth year. Because I’ve taken three years off along the way, the math works out like this:

The Columbine shooting happened while I was student teaching at Tartan High School in 1999. The school had been designed in the 1960s progressive era, and the classrooms were situated in circles with a common space in the middle of each loop. The classrooms didn’t have doors.

The teachers sat in the auditorium on the afternoon of the first school massacre. Was it even safe to go to the auditorium, all together like sitting ducks? We teachers wondered this that day. We discussed how shooters in our school could just stand in the middle of our department areas and hit people in each room around the circle without even moving their feet.

The very next year, or soon after that, I started practicing active shooter drills with students. In the beginning, we all did the same things — turn off the lights, pull the shades, hide in the corner. At one school, they wouldn’t tell us if the drill was a drill because they didn’t think we’d try hard enough to enact the protocols if we knew we weren’t actually going to get shot. Kids would always ask, “Is this real?”

“Probably not,” I told them. “Listen for the sirens. If we don’t hear them, it’s not real.” And then, we’d go back to talking about characters or commas, or whatever we were doing before the alarm sounded.

There was a big kerfuffle the year I was teaching third grade (I had decided maybe elementary was the utopia I sought) because the school moved to a run-hide-fight model where you trained children to throw scissors and staplers at the shooters who came to their classroom doors. Some of us thought that it was inappropriate to teach them to expect to be shot.

At my next school, we started table-top drills during which we discussed shooting scenarios. It was a Catholic high school (also not the utopia I imagined), and the kids were empowered to make their own decisions during attacks. I imagine this is because of liability? Like, if I, the teacher, decided to go out the window, and we all got obliterated that way, then at least the girls had had the choice to run down the hallway instead?

Anyway, you get the idea. My new school does the I Love U Guys model. We teach with our doors locked and closed all the time. We stay and barricade. We practice the system a bunch of times per year and assure the children that we’ll protect them with our lives if necessary.

Last week, my brother’s and my sister’s kids’ school was the latest site of a school shooting. My brother was there, as was my sister’s husband. They all saw it. They were all there at Mass, not a location we normally practice in, by the way. We don’t practice escaping shooters at lunch or recess or in the auditorium because it’s super logistically hard to do. I think today’s shooters know that. All of today’s madmen and women have been through the same drills I just described for the last twenty-six years themselves.

So… in addition to being in a job where, despite my talents and qualifications and dedication to the craft, my earnings are capped in the five figures…

… in addition to being in a job where all/most/some parents think they know more than I do about how to teach…

…in addition to being in a job that suffers the whims of public opinion about our lack of quality and suitability as professionals…

…in addition to being in a job where successfully writing and publishing four novels makes me LESS employable (thanks to the snobbery of high school English departments??)…

I also have to be ready to die at work.

I already thought about it a lot, and now that six of my family members have actually been shot at in school, I’ll think about it more. I’ll go back tomorrow because I have to (I need a full-time income, I have a life and family), and also because it’s my vocation. I’ve always wanted to be a teacher.

But I don’t want to do it tomorrow."

The author is Kathleen West, a daughter-in-law of one of my high school classmates; she is currently teaching at a public middle school in northeast Minneapolis.  The essay has been published in her Substack.

Bohemian Rhapsody in isiZulu

There are approximately 10,000 covers, variations, and adaptations of Bohemian Rhapsody.  Over the years, all of them have been posted at Neatorama.

The Ndlovu Youth Choir was formed in 2009 at a childcare facility in Elandsdoorn, Limpopo, South Africa. They are all grown up now, but are not about to change the name. They released their first album in 2019 after appearing on the TV competition show America's Got Talent, when they made it to the final round. 

The Ndlovu Youth Choir got authorization from Queen to cover "Bohemian Rhapsody" in the isiZulu language of the Zulu people of South Africa. Or partially, because some of the song is in English. It is also partially a cappella, with a band joining in halfway through. The singing is sublime, the staging is sumptuous, and the video is pure eye candy. You can see more from the Ndlovu Youth Choir at their YouTube channel. -via Damn Interesting 

Medieval mindset in Afghanistan

"Women and children on Monday in Mazar Dara, Kunar Province, where male rescuers would not pull women from under rubble or tend their wounds, witnesses said".Credit...Wakil Kohsar/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Excerpts from a report in the New York Times:

The first rescue workers reached Bibi Aysha’s village more than 36 hours after an earthquake devastated settlements across eastern Afghanistan’s mountainous areas on Sunday. But instead of bringing relief, the sight of them heightened her fears; not a single woman was among them.

Afghan cultural norms, enforced even in emergencies by the ruling Taliban, forbid physical contact between men and women who are not family members. In the village of Andarluckak, in Kunar Province, the emergency team hurriedly carried out wounded men and children, and treated their wounds, said Ms. Aysha, 19. But she and other women and adolescent girls, some of them bleeding, were pushed aside, she said.

“They gathered us in one corner and forgot about us,” she said. No one offered the women help, asked what they needed or even approached them.

Tahzeebullah Muhazeb, a male volunteer who traveled to Mazar Dara, also in Kunar Province, said that members of the all-male medical team there were hesitant to pull women out from under the rubble of collapsed buildings. Trapped and injured women were left under stones, waiting for women from other villages to reach the site and dig them out...

More at the link.

Medieval mindset in Florida

(I'll append a fulltext when I find one)

"A woman reacts as she stands at the site of an apartment building that was hit during Russian drone and missile strikes in Kyiv..."  Photo credit Reuters, via The Guardian.

My heart just ached when I came across this photo of a young woman viewing damage to an apartment building in Ukraine.   My first thought was that she probably has all her "stuff" up there - clothes, books, memorabilia, perhaps some valuables.  Perhaps now she has to find a new place to live.  And none of this is her fault.  She's just trying to live her best life, and then this happens.  It is heartbreaking.  Wish I could help her.

The evolution of Boston Dynamics robots

YouTube link.

Awesome.

Related:

Big Dog (2009)

The Sand Flea (2012)

Atlas (2016)

Spot Mini (2016)

Reposted from 2017 to add this new video (via Nag on the Lake):

Reposted from 2021 to add the latest - a robot with gymnastic skills.

Via Neatorama, where there is some explanatory text.

Awkward

I encountered this phrase in a newspaper story about a mid-size town (population 45,000) that has only one high school.  The phrase I've embedded above was used several times in the text and is quite comprehensible, but seems to me maddingly awkward.  As I scan the text, my mind seems to linger over the meaning of "one-high" that gets clalrified immeditely, but leaves an unpleasant aftertaste for an English major.

My first thought was that it should have been "one-highschool town", but of course high school is not conventionally used as one word.  A search reveals usages like that (or as HighSchool), but all the grammar guides emphasize that the term should only be written as two words.

The headline and text could have been revised to "a town with one high school," of course, but as written it is reminiscent of "one-horse town" or "one-trick pony" and has a certain charm.  I've tried to think of other awkwardness where a pair of words is thought of as one word, but then fail as such when modified.

I'm too busy to think this morning.  Someone think for me...

Chief complaint

 Excerpts from a reading in the July 2025 issue of Harper's Magazine:

"On multiple occasions, the chief has exited the bathroom in his office and exposed himself to others in the room, making inappropriate comments such as, “Hey, look, it’s bigger than you thought, right?” The chief has pulled his pants down and defecated on the floor in front of his entire staff. During a cleanup of his former office, the chief defecated in a trash can. Only after persistent urging did the chief eventually agree to clean it up days later. He also deliberately damaged officers’ personal property by breaking pens and smearing ink on uniforms, vehicle door handles, and office equipment, leaving officers with ruined clothes and ink-stained faces. He has placed spray-paint cans under officers’ vehicles, causing paint explosions when driven over. The chief has gone into rages where he smashes items in the office. These outbursts include ripping a television off the wall and smashing it on the ground, throwing staplers across the room, smashing picture frames on the walls, and breaking glass that scatters across the office. On several occasions, he has thrown eggs. The chief also has a habit of placing hot peppers in officers’ food and heating them in the microwave. The chief also tampered with office coffee by adding prescription medications such as Adderall and Viagra, causing staff to experience the effects without their consent...' 

--- from a complaint filed by a New Jersey lieutenant against his department chief.

"We used to have a chancre for supper of a Saturday night..."

...when we came home from Town.  It was cooked on the Friday in the copper in the wash-house.  It gave a scream when it was dropped in the hot water..."

To anyone with a medical background or a general familiarity with infectious diseases, the first phrase of that sentence would give a shudder.  I found it in Chapter 3 of G. B. Edwards' The Book of Ebenezer Le Page.  My dictionaries - including the O.E.D. - offer nothing but venereal disease definitions for "chancre."

The book is set on the island of Guernsey, off the French coast, and the narrative is peppered with French terms.  When I type "chancre" into Google translate, however, all it offers is canker/chancroid/plague.

From the context, the "chancre" should be a shellfish, and I'm betting that the etymology is related to the Latin "cancer" for "crab" and that the chancre is a crab of some type.  But why can't I find the connection?  Is it perhaps a local dialect of the Guernsey region?

Perhaps one of my Francophile readers can help out on this one.

Update - Once again, no question on this blog goes unsolved.  First someone found this - "The edible crab is also sometimes referred to as the Cromer crab, because it is commonly caught around the Norfolk coastal town of Cromer. In the Channel Islands languages of Dgèrnésiais and Jerriais, it is called a chancre."

And then Dominique found -
Crabe chancre - Callinectes bocourti at this link, and
Crabe verruqueux - Eriphia verrucosa at this link, which provided the photo above, and offered the photo below re etymology (from the DMF, Dictionnaire du Moyen Français)

Now I won't be afraid to order a chancre if I ever get to Guernsey.  Merci.

Reposted from 2010 (!!) because tonight I rewatched The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society movie, and when I checked TYWKIWDBI to see if I had blogged it before, this was the first post that popped up.  I think it's worth the repost.

FWIW, this post from 16 years ago is an example of how readers of this blog help me polish and improve the posts.

More re the movie later in the week.