Sunday Sundries, 258

1. HBOTW saves life of AOTW! Last night, returning from the Books-a-Million out near Chapel Hill Mall (RIP?), we were rolling along, dealing with snow and rain and ice and with low visibility. I watching watching close ahead because the painted lines on the road were very hard to see--lanes, turns, etc. Then Joyce (HBOTW) cried out, "Dan ... stop!" I braked and saw, just ahead of us, the AOTW, a young man dressed all in black, wheeling his bicycle across the road right in front of us in the middle of a block. Joyce saved his life. I had not seen him at all ...

2. I finished two books this week.

     - The first was Nathaniel Philbrick's 2006 Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. (I've been picking away at this one, ten pages or so a night, for a couple of months.) The title is a bit misleading. Yes, it deals with the Pilgrims and the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock (not at all what most people think) and the arrival in North America, and the first Thanksgiving (not at all what most people think). But the vast majority of the book deals with the settlement, the relationships with the Native Americans, King Philip's War (1675-78)--a conflict that brought many deaths and much suffering.

Philbrick knows his stuff--no question--and I have seen his knowledge and research on display in a number of his other titles I've read--his most recent are about the American Revolution.

He visited the Hudson Library and Historical Society for a talk on November 7, 2018, and Joyce and I got to meet and talk with him briefly. We passed along greetings from my former Hiram College classmate James K. Martin, now a noted American historian, who is friends with Philbrick. Pic shows me in line getting some books signed!

     - Lately, I've been reading some of Ian McEwan's novels--books I'd bought but not yet read. The most recent I finished was Saturday (2005), a powerful novel that has echoes from 9/11 reverberating around.

As the title implies, the novel takes place on a single day in London and follows Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon, on what is normally a day off. Early in the morning he sees a plane on fire heading for Heathrow (an event that we follow throughout the book), and as he heads off for his wonted Saturday-morning game of squash with a friend, he encounters a massive anti-war demonstration in the streets.

Things happen.

Later, there's a home invasion (related to something that occurred at the demonstration), and Perowne ends up at the hospital doing emergency surgery.

Saturday is a powerful dawn-to-dark novel (in more ways than one), and it has triggered my plan to read all the other McEwans I've never gotten around to ... Watch This Space!

3. We'd never watched any of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel until last week--until we finished Fleabag and decided we needed another series to watch. We've seen only the first episode of Season 1 (on Amazon Prime), but we are enjoying the energy of the production--and of the principal character, Rachel Brosnahan, who plays Miriam Maisel, a traditional 50s NYC housewife who ends up (through a variety of circumstances) becoming a stand-up comedian.

So ... we'll keep going with it for a while ... lots of talent evident in this one.

4. We're excited that some of our favorite shows are about to launch new seasons: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Brokenwood, Vera. We may start going to bed at 4 p.m. so we can watch everything! Still loving Upstart Crow and Shakespeare and Hathaway (the latter is sometimes excessively weird).

5. Last Word: A word I liked this week from one of my online word-of-the-day providers ...

     - from dictionary.com

hibernaculum [ hahy-ber-NAK-yuh-luhm ]

noun: winter quarters, as of a hibernating animal.

Hibernaculum comes directly from Latin hībernāculum, a derivative of the adjective hībernus “wintry,” itself a derivative of hiems “winter.” Nowadays hibernaculum is restricted pretty much to zoology, especially referring to the winter quarters of a hibernating animal (some students of Latin may recall reading about Julius Caesar leading his troops to safety, if not comfort, into their hībernācula “winter quarters”). The inflectional stem of hiems is hiem-, which is close to Sanskrit hima– in himālaya “abode of snow,” a compound of himá– “snow” and ālaya “dwelling, abode.” Hibernaculum entered English in the late 17th century.

EXAMPLE: It retires to its hibernaculum when the cold weather has fairly set in, and comes generally out in early Spring. J. DUNS, "HIBERNATION OF MAMMALS," FRANK LESLIE'S POPULAR MONTHLY, JANUARY 1885