TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee")
"Things You Wouldn't Know If We Didn't Blog Intermittently."
11 November 2026
"Trigger words" vs. "algospeak"
10 November 2026
"Feeling Good" (Nina Simone, 1965)
"Feeling Good" (also known as "Feelin' Good") is a song written by English composers Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse for the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – The Smell of the Crowd. It was first performed on stage in 1964 by Cy Grant on the UK tour.Nina Simone recorded "Feeling Good" for her 1965 album I Put a Spell on You. The song has also been covered by other famous artists [list at the link is extensive]... In 2022, American Songwriter ranked "Feeling Good" number one on their list of the 10 greatest Nina Simone songs.
07 November 2026
06 November 2026
Final exam for that 1966 American literature college exam
Several days ago I posted a reading list from 1968 for a college course on Twentieth Century [American] Southern Writers. The course required reading 16 works from 9 authors. The final exam begins by asking the source for eight excerpted extended quotations, followed by writing an essay comparing the approaches of three of these authors on the subject of love relationships, followed by a second essay comparing/contrasting three of these authors with regard to the style and tone of "southern writers." The final embedded page has some notes I scribbled down while trying to organize my thoughts.
The exam booklets were not returned to us, so I have no record (or memory) of what my answers were. My transcript shows a B- for the course, which was quite satisfactory for my pre-med needs. I wonder how I would do today were I to re-read the same books and re-take the exam (an interesting thought experiment which I don't plan to implement). (But I may still re-read some of the books, many of which have left vague pleasant memories in my head).
"Feather letters" (Fjäderbrev) were forerunners of express mail
When your home is on a wooded lot...
The night sky over rural New Zealand
To create his spectacular image – now viewed millions of times online – Brendan Larsen spent two hours in September snapping hundreds of photographs of the night sky over Mount Taranaki in the North Island.Larsen, 51, says he set his camera up to take an unlimited number of eight-second-long shots, with a two-second gap in between each photo. “I left her running for two hours and captured 578 photos … That was the easy part.”The hard part came next. Larsen spent about 45 hours layering the individual photos – each of which contained about 25 satellites – over one another, using Adobe Photoshop. Much of the time was spent painstakingly erasing stars, to reveal the satellites...The resulting image shows the sky inundated with about 1,400 satellites and 14,000 trails forming a dense crisscrossing pattern above the mountain.
04 November 2026
A college reading list from 1966
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover...Twenty years ago, Dames’s classes had no problem engaging in sophisticated discussions of Pride and Prejudice one week and Crime and Punishment the next. Now his students tell him up front that the reading load feels impossible. It’s not just the frenetic pace; they struggle to attend to small details while keeping track of the overall plot...In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn’t read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped...Carol Jago, a literacy expert who crisscrosses the country helping teachers design curricula, says that educators tell her they’ve stopped teaching the novels they’ve long revered, such as My Ántonia and Great Expectations. The pandemic, which scrambled syllabi and moved coursework online, accelerated the shift away from teaching complete works... At the prep school that I graduated from five years ago, I took a Jane Austen course my senior year. I read only a single Austen novel...Some experts I spoke with attributed the decline of book reading to a shift in values rather than in skill sets. Students can still read books, they argue—they’re just choosing not to. Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past. Every year, they tell Howley that, despite enjoying what they learned in Lit Hum, they plan to instead get a degree in something more useful for their career...For years, Dames has asked his first-years [university] about their favorite book. In the past, they cited books such as Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Now, he says, almost half of them cite young-adult books. Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series seems to be a particular favorite...
The staff [leaps] to Mrs. Turpin’s aid and [pulls] Mary Grace away. The girl, “held down on one side by the nurse and on the other by her mother, [wrenches and turns]. The doctor [kneels] astride her, trying to hold her arm down[, before finally managing to] sink a long needle into it.”“The girls’ eyes [focus on Mrs. Turpin]. [Those eyes seem now] a much lighter blue than before, as if a door that had been tightly closed behind them [is] now open to admit light and air.“Mrs. Turpin’s head [clears, as well,] and her power of motion [returns]. She [leans] forward until she [looks] directly into [those] fierce brilliant eyes. There [is] no doubt in her mind that the girl [knows] her, [knows] her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition. ‘What you got to say to me?’ [Mrs. Turpin asks] hoarsely and [holding] her breath [and] waiting, as for a revelation.“The girl [raises] her head. Her gaze [locks] with Mrs. Turpin’s. ‘Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog,’ she [whispers]. Her voice [is] low but clear … [and] Mrs. Turpin [sinks] back in her chair.”
02 November 2026
"Audio, video, disco"
The unofficial "motto" of TYWKIWDBI is "you learn something every day." The phrase is not incorporated into the template title page, but I use it often as a closing statement when posting interesting stuff that's new to me.
Earlier this week I encountered somewhere on Facebook the observation that the phrase "I hear, I see, I learn" is properly translated into Latin as "Audio, video, disco."
I'm 60+ years away from my last Latin class, but I suspect there are some scholarly readers out there who can confirm or clarify this quite interesting discovery.
30 October 2026
28 October 2026
A jumping spider (with pollen)
Animation of NASA's Perseverance Rover path on Mars
How to win at Monopoly
With a second monopoly completed, your next task is to improve those properties to three houses each, then all of your properties to four houses each. Six properties with three houses will give you more than half of the houses in the game, and four houses each will give you 75% of the total supply. This will make it nearly impossible for your opponents to improve their own property in a meaningful way. Keep the rulebook nearby once the supply gets low, as you will undoubtedly be questioned on it. At this point, you will be asked repeatedly to build some friggin’ hotels already so that other people can build houses. Don’t.At this point, you more or less have the game sewn up. If losing a normal game of monopoly is frustrating, losing to this strategy is excruciating, as a losing opponent essentially has no path to victory, even with lucky rolls. Your goal is to play conservatively, lock up more resources, and let the other players lose by attrition.













