Megabytes

I thought that Lollapalooza was a just a cool name for a music festival, so when I heard my mother use the word in a context having nothing to do with music or a festival, I had to look it up.
I thought the spelling was lalapalooza and to be sure, that is a variant spelling of it. Webster’s New World Dictionary points me to the correct spelling and defines this term as a noun, meaning something or someone very striking or exceptional.

You may have noticed the bright new image at the top of my blog page. This magnificent cerulean-hued flower is Ceanothus Dark Star. Each April, our backyard is dominated by the striking color of this tall bush from its position in the southeast corner of the yard.
According to “Pigments through the Ages” website, the name “Cerulean blue” comes from Latin caelum = sky. At the Las Pilitas website, I learned that another name for this ceanothus is Small Leaf Mountain Lilac. Dark star is a showy Ceanothus with tiny leaves and round flower clusters; and grows 6 ft tall and eight ft wide.
As an astronomer, I appreciate its name, Dark Star. Though, if the stars of the night sky were truly dark, they wouldn’t be seen. On the other hand, there are many areas of the sky that are dark and worth looking at. The dark rifts of the Milky Way, for example, are enjoyable to gaze upon.
But I am off on too many tangents. Back to the image in my blog header – After experiencing how simple it was to change the image and manipulate the text, I intend to do so on a regular basis. Watch for a new header image in June. Will it be a glimpse of our cherry tree or one of our many roses?

I wrote a report on Civil Rights when I was a freshman in high school. The year was 1972. The Civil Rights Act had been passed less than a decade before. New Hampshire College’s commencement speaker that year was Julian Bond, founding member of SNCC, founder of Southern Poverty Law Center, and elected member of the Georgia House of Representatives.
Wouldn’t it be cool if I could interview Mr. Bond for my school report? Luckily, my father was the Academic Dean at NHC (now Southern NH University) and was able to arrange for me to talk with Mr. Bond after the graduation ceremony!
It was exciting to meet him. I don’t remember what questions I asked, but I did quote him heavily in my report. All of my other footnotes referenced books, magazines and encyclopedia articles. Then there was this footnote: Interview with Mr. Julian Bond, at New Hampshire College, May, 1972.
This is a fond and special memory from my youth. Now I will have the opportunity to hear him speak again.
Reed College is promoting a series of events in celebration of Black History Month. This Friday, Feb. 2, Julian Bond will be speaking. His topic is “Civil Rights: In the Day, Today, and Tomorrow.” It’s free and open to the public.

Technorati Tags: Julian Bond

Looking for a bit of escapism in my reading, I perused the graphic novel section of my branch library and found this book. It has been many years since I picked up a comic book. They sure have changed since the 60s! And it’s definitely for the better.

While many comic books in the last few years are filled with more and more graphic violence, this particular 4-issue series is much more thoughtful and insightful. You could say it’s the ‘chick flick’ series of the Superman comics.

The concept for the series comes from DC Comics Presents #87, circa 1985. In this story, a young man named Clark Kent lives on one of DC’s alternate Earths - an Earth that is supposed to be the ‘real world’ where superheroes exist only in the comics books. Unfortunately, this story is one issue long and never picked up again by other DC writers and artists.

Kurt Busiek takes this idea and creates an instrospective and contemplative 4-parter: Clark as a young teen, Clark in his late twenties, Clark as a family man, and senior citizen Clark. Instead of the alien attacks on Metropolis, the reader is presented with what is it like to grow up with a famous name and suddenly (at puberty) find you can fly. Can you tell anyone about this? no, probably not. So, our protagonist deals with isolation, confusion, anger; the usual teenage identify crisis, but with a twist.

I enjoyed this graphic novel immensely and wished there were more stories of this character. Here’s a book you can re-read a few times and enjoy a different layer with each read. I’m reminded of how much I appreciated the first Spiderman movie with Tobey Maguire. The scene in which Peter Parker’s hand becomes stuck to his lunch tray (web-making goo is oozing out of his hand!) is both touching and hilarious. And isn’t that a quintessential teenage moment? “Everyone’s looking at me!” “I’m different from everybody else.”

Written by Kurt Busiek. Drawn by Stuart Immonen.

Today, I learned a new definition of the word ‘wick’. Matey looked out the window into our garden and said, “That plant looks wick on one side and dead on the other.” As you might guess, wick used in this context means ‘with life’ or ‘alive’.

This prompted me to rethink the words ‘wicca’, ‘wicked’, and ‘witch’. Matey learned this usage of wick when reading The Secret Garden many years ago. Dickson shows Mary how to determine if a plant has made it through the winter. Scraping a bit of bark off a tree or plant to reveal the green or lack thereof underneath tells you if it is wick.

No dictionary I consulted around the house included a definition to support this usage; until I went to The British Library website. There, I read “wick with means alive with, full of”

Then I got to thinking, does this usage of the word wick derive from Wiccan and/or witch? The Old English word wicca, referring to a spiritual practice celebrating life; traces its etymology to the Germanic wixa meaning consecrated, sacred. Ok, this makes sense.

So in the 1960s, when usage of the word wicked came to mean something cool, the word was actually being reclaimed and reverting to its original meaning!

Then, there is this interesting tidbit from Randomhouse.com:
Villain has some interesting cognates, all deriving from the Indo-European root *weik. The word wick, which is now obsolete except in local dialects in Britain, originally meant ‘house, village, or estate’ and appears in the form -wich in such place names as Greenwich and Norwich. The earlier form of Latin villa was *veixla from vicus ‘quarter or district of a town’ which comes from this root and gives us vicinity. Another form of the root developed into Greek oikos ‘house’, and from that we get diocese from dioikein ‘to keep house’ and economy from oikonomia ‘household management’.