What’s your superpower?

Tilting at Windmills

My superpower is tilting at windmills.  From Wikipedia –

Tilting at windmills is an English idiom which means attacking imaginary enemies, or fighting unwinnable or futile battles. The word “tilt”, in this context, comes from jousting. (emphasis mine … for … well … emphasis).

I can’t decide if I should pick my battles better, or carry on knowing that I am simply planting the seeds for future winnable battles.  I’m still pondering that …

I got this from Kievas at Sharing a Journey … it’s too good to not pass on.  My only quibble is that there’s only one African-American book on this list.  These books are come from an overwhelmingly Northern European Caucasian perspective.  Still … worth review at some level.

This is from something called “The Big Read” from the NEA. They came up with a list of their top 100 books, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these books. I will highlight the ones I’ve read. Cut and paste into your blog and let us know which you’ve read.   Just for kicks … also mark the three you’d most like to read next. Mine are in italics. And then maybe hop over to Amazon or take a trip to Barnes and Noble for some summer reading material.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (note – 3 big fat books!)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (note 7 big fat books!)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks1
8 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell (and it’s sequel)
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (all 5 books in the series)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (read all of the Dune books …)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

So, there big NEA people, I beat your system.  Hah!  Here’s my recommendation.  Don’t go to B&N or Amazon … go to your local library.  Get a library card.  Borrow the book(s) from your library.  Read them and return them.  It’s reduce, reuse and recycle at it’s finest!!

Happy May Day … this is my birth month and so I am always happy when May Day rolls around. It gives me an extra bounce. I love May. My lily-of-the-valley is blooming which seems appropriate. The lilac my dad gave me six years ago finally bloomed this year. It came to me in a half-pint milk carton and I had to put a little fence around it so that LightHusband wouldn’t mow it; that’s how little it was. Now it’s a full blown bush with lots of blooms.

Here’s the riddle that led to a discussion: What’s red and invisible? (answer at the bottom)

So the discussion is … there’s no word for the action that happens when you have a mouthful of something, and you are presented with something very hilarious. It takes you by surprise and, bam, the stuff in your mouth comes shooting out your nose. Here’s what my friend AleFifer had to say about it:

Ya know there’s no term for that… for having a beverage or food come out of your nose. Well maybe there is a word for it but I’m unaware of it. There definitely should be something in the mainstream vocabulary for it though as people do this often.

Hmmm…. what to call it. Nostriling? Susie nostriled her coke all over her shirt when Steve told that joke. Nyah, gotta be something better than ‘nostril’. Inhale Exhale In Out. hmmm you sip a drink sip backwards is ‘pis’ Susie pissed her coke all over her shirt… nyah. drink backwards is knird can’t use that ’cause ‘knird’ sounds too much like ‘nerd’ and we don’t want folks to be labeled as a nerd when they squirt stuff out their nose while laughing. Okay squirt, I said squirt. some word like squirt, spew, spray, pour, irrigate, drip, dribble but with a nasal flair to it. Hmmm maybe a nasal ‘flare’ …i don’t know which flair/flare to use with nostrils do you? Ya know, when you try to make your face look like an aroused bunny? What?? You don’t do that. Nevermindthen… where was I? Oh yeah putting a nostrilly tone on a squirty word. Maybe don’t need to. Maybe thinking of other words that mean nose. Well let’s see there’s … nose, honker, …um … nose …yeah I said nose already but I’m just stuck. Ah…. a term just came to me. Something related to vomiting. “Nosechuck”. Susie nosechucked her coke all over her shirt when Steve… Yeah, that’s better but not perfect.

I’ll have my subconscious mind work on it today and if it comes up with anything decent I’ll keep you informed so you can assist me in adding this needed new term to our vocabulary.

Me? I kinda like the idea of nosehurling, which he turned into “nurling.” So … what about you? What do you think? What’s a good word for it? With the onset of computer jokes and reading funny things on the screen (where we all know we should not be drinking and/or eating, but we do anyway) spewing stuff out our noses has become the symbol for something really funny, but we need a word for that.

Speaking of funny here’s a YouTube video about the Miley Cyrus who-haw that is not to be missed (ht bob carlton). Apparently she (of Hannah Montana fame) posed for some suggestive photographs for Vanity Fair and now a lot of people have their knickers in a wad. Here’s a choice that people forget they have. If a magazine is publishing photographs you don’t like, um … don’t buy it. It’s simple. And easy.

Some of you will remember this, others will just look on in wonder … but here are the 1970’s in full glorious color. I remember. Do you?

Here’s an incredible font resource that I have spent entirely too much time at lately (thanks to Jonathan Brink), but it’s all free!!

Here’s a really cool dinosaur museum and I want to go. PeregrineMan … we’re comin’ your way.

Courtesy of Scriber Thom Stark is Revolution in JesusLand, a blog by a former leftist organizer turned Christian progressive. I wish I’d known about this when I found faith, it might have saved me a lot of pain and anger now. Ce va. These two posts in particular are not to be missed, they are the first two in a series on how to save the world … the right way this time. I like this guy. The Next Step For Christian Big Thinkers – Part 1 and intro/translation for non-Christians before I get to part 2.

This last (and I’ve saved the very best for last) is rapidly becoming part of my life canon … and more on that in another post … is a powerful set of readings? poems? devotionals? I don’t know what to call these. But they are powerful and it’s quite possible that you will find them embracing you as you read them and my everlasting thanks to Bobbie at Emerging Sideways for pointing them out. Abre la puerta! (Open the door!) by Clarissa Pinkola Estes.

Riddle answer? No tomatoes …

Ahhh … the fresh scent. Breath in deep. You only get it out in the country; that distinct aroma of freshly spread “fertilizer.” When the south wind blows up the “Point,” we get it from the farms down the lake. Manu-Aire … we decided to give it it’s own name. The LightChildren +OneFriend don’t quite understand and roll their eyes. LightHusband and I think it’s perhaps too funny. We chortle with glee at our own joke as our eyes water and our noses clear out.

The minor joys of vacation.