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Pastimes : Books, Movies, Food, Wine, and Whatever -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (4588)	4/20/2004 9:15:45 PM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 51713

I like the idea of a book. We're going to scan them all on to the computer- so they will be safe, but I would love to make a book for each of my kids. I think I will do that.

To: Rambi who wrote (4588)	4/25/2004 10:18:55 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 51713

900 miles driving in one day, with 4 hours of chores and moving furniture in the middle, is not something I am going to recommend. On the other hand I am done. So that's a Good Thing. Now I feel able to contemplate decadent and irrationally exuberant celebratory activities, to commemorate my state of doneness. Am reading a very fun book on the history of flattery called "You're Too Kind." It's fun to read, but it's made me think about everything I say, and everything everyone else says. It's fascinating. One of the funny things in the beginning of the book just SO reminded me of our discussions- people with high self esteem, and important jobs, are much more likely to be taken in by flattery, because they will see it as "the truth", rather than for what it is. People with low self esteem are very suspicious of flattery, and honest compliments. Flattery as defined in the book is "praise with a purpose"- in other words, praise designed to garner something for the praiser. Praise on it's own, for the sake of simply being honest, and not getting anything, isn't defined as flattery for the sake of the book. I really do recommend it. Enjoyable and intelligent- that's a comfortable thing in a book. Am also reading The Untouchable- a superb book by an Irish writer, who actually mentions Queen Boudicea, and I don't remember seeing her name in a novel before- although I guess I might just have blipped over it before I knew who she was. We were just talking in my class about how one sometimes just jumps over something like that- because there was a word "sockdolager" in the book Golden Apples of the Sun, and I had read the book, but when my student put that word up on the board for Words of the Day- I had NO idea what it was, and I know I must have seen it (but obviously didn't really take it in.) Anyway the happy student who found that got a candy bar. dictionary.reference.com I brought in the Oxford unabridged dictionary to find some of the pesky words that don't turn up in our regular dictionary. Mine is in two volumes and comes with it's own magnifying glass- and I have to say the kids were very impressed by the sheer mass of the dictionary. Pitchpoled was not in our high school dictionary but was in the unabridged. I managed to guess the meaning of that one :-) so I didn't have to pay for it- also got gunwhales, ambivalent, emblazoned, platitudinous, oligarchic, cathode, neuroleptic, execrable, and xeroform- which wasn't in the dictionary, but which we could figure out from prefix and root. I know I'm forgetting some words- but some of the words were easy ones, like maim, for example.

To: Rambi who wrote (4588)	4/25/2004 10:50:27 AM
From: epicure	Respond to of 51713

oh, I forgot- B and I made up this joke about 200 miles in to the first leg of our journey, because there were so many ravens. ok: Why can't they show the film The Birds, by Alfred Hitchcock, in Muslim countries? . . . . . . . . . ' ' ' ' ' ' . . . . . . Because Islam prohibits raven images :-) I told B I thought it was important to share this joke in order to champion the caws of the ravens. It doesn't look quite as funny to me as it did at 5am yesterday morning when we were in the middle of nowhere...