1. Ten days ago, or so, I ordered a couple of acrostic puzzle books and the second one arrived today. In the past, my acrostic puzzle book purchases have been limited to New York Times books, edited by Will Shortz. The book that arrived today is different. It's written by Cynthia Morris. It's a book of American-themed puzzles -- with clues, mostly involving American culture, leading to quotations having to do with the U.S.A. I completed two of them today and I'm happy to say that I did so without once consulting the World Wide Web. It's been a long time since it mattered that I know things like who wrote the Twice-Told Tales or that The Enormous Room was e e cummings' first published book. Ha! For once,outside of playing trivia in Spokane, some of that useless trivial knowledge wasn't so useless after all!
2. I also spent a lot of time relishing the episodes that Charles Dickens unfolds in Bleak House. If you've read much Dickens, I wonder if you also marvel at the oddball (and sometimes menacing) characters Dickens develops as his main characters venture out into the world. I met several such characters today as the story of the unworldly Esther Summerson continues. I don't always quite know what some of Esther's little adventures both within and outside the walls of Bleak House are contributing to the larger plot of the novel, nor do I really care. I love reading Dickens describe these characters who just pop up and love reading the words and speech patterns Dickens endows them with. I admit that I am always anxious as Esther encounters these characters. She's sweet. She's tender. She's charitable, trusting, and open. I keep worrying she's going to get hurt or taken advantage of or have her heart broken. I don't want anything bad to happen to her. But, my anxiety doesn't stop me from reading on.
3. Debbie roasted eggplant disks and made an awesome green salad and I made a pot of brown rice and each of us piled this food into a single bowl and it made a great dinner. I especially enjoyed flavoring my rice and eggplant with Bragg's Liquid Amminos.
Debbie and I settled into an evening of some television news programming and then listened to podcasts. We started by listening to the last episode about Watergate on Slow Burn which ended with R. M. Nixon firing Archibald Cox, the ensuing resignations at the Justice Dept., the appointment of a new Special Prosecutor, and, eventually, the Nixon administration releasing select tapes of secretly recorded White House conversations. The tapes doomed Richard Nixon.
For no good reason, I then played a podcast episode from Shakespeare Unlimited, a project of the Folger Shakespeare Library. It featured a very learned professor from Roehampton University in London, Jane Kingsley-Smith. She discussed the history of the reception over the centuries of Shakespeare's sonnets. It's Episode 142 of the Shakespeare Unlimited series.
Debbie and I have been listening for years to bits by Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie and especially enjoy one of them in which Fry plays a self-consumed stereotypical British professor of language and linguistics appearing on a talk show that Laurie's character hosts. Almost immediately, even though Professor Kingsley-Smith's content was learned and insightful, Debbie and I seized on how much she sounded like a Stephen Fry creation. I alternated between being absorbed in what she had to say and laughing out loud at how she bordered, at times, on being a parody of her profession.
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