Let’s start with the item I forgot last month…
- A hautboy is an archaic form of oboe.
2. Bison calves are orange.
3. An unpublished sequel to The Westing Game has been discovered.
4. Netflix is making a new Pride & Prejudice miniseries.
5. Meryl Streep is in talks to play Aslan in a new Narnia movie. (?!)
6. Spanish architect Antoni Gaudà may (eventually) become a saint. (I loved this picture book about him.)
7. Saint Patrick wrote two letters, which are pretty much the only documents about him that we have from his time period. One of them is a scathing indictment of a supposedly Christian warlord who kidnapped and murdered some Irish converts that Patrick had just baptized.
8. The haiku poet Basho was born Matsuo Kinsaku, but he was renamed Basho after a banana tree that his disciples planted for him.
9. A waltz and a mazurka are both dances in 3/4 time, but in a waltz the stress is on the first beat and in a mazurka it is on the second beat. (Demonstration here.)
10. The Hays Code was an industry standard for content in motion pictures between 1934 and 1968, self-censoring things like profanity and nudity.
11. The Pratfall Effect is the phenomenon that a highly competent person becomes more likeable after making a clumsy mistake, but an average person comes across as less likeable after committing the same blunder.
12. The Longest Ballot Committee is a Canadian group protesting the voting system. (The most candidates on one ballot has been 91.)
13. You can mix your own organic plant fertilizer with ingredients like bloodmeal, bonemeal, soft rock phosphate, greensand, and azomite.
14. You can make self-watering pots out of 5-gallon buckets. (I used the instructions in this book.)
15. “Precarity” means the state of being precarious. I can’t wait to use it in a sentence.
I learned that those lengths of wood framing the panes of glass in a many-paned window are called muntins. Nowadays I think most windows have fake muntins.