I’ll get back to that story idea some other time. For today, I’ll just throw a bunch of unrelated tripe into this little space and call it good. For starters, the word of the day is fetial, which means, “Concerned with declarations of war and treaties of peace.” Can I use the word in a sentence? Of course I can.
George W. Bush will go down in history not only as a buffoon, but also as a virtual fetial priest.
Not bad, huh? It should also give an idea of my political leanings to those of you who haven’t spent the last 7 years hanging on my every word. I’m not completely liberal, but I’ve found that I’m growing ever more so – no doubt because of the absurdity of Bush and his minions coming into power so soon after that caricature of a human, Newton Leroy Gingrich, did everything he could to take the civility out of civil service.
Moving on.
On this day in 1896, Utah became the 45th state. That fact alone should be enough to set me off on a tangent about Mormonism, but it won’t. For the record, I don’t have much of a beef with the LDS church. My family fed and hung out with numerous “elders” on their church missions in my youth, and my favorite uncle was a member of the church for several years, which resulted in me getting to see a well-designed genealogy on my father’s side. It’s true that that same uncle later cut ties with the LDS after they basically ignored him when he was in the hospital; and it’s true that the LDS is incredibly homophobic and Salt Lake City has a horrendous teen suicide rate at least in part because Mormon kids get their heads screwed up young, but I’m not going to go off on that tangent.
Instead, I’ll go off on the tangent of trigonometry. For the last few weeks, I’ve been hanging out at a website called KahnAcademy.org. The site has a few thousand instructional videos, including many on algebra, calculus and trig. One of the videos that I viewed today gave me a great way to remember how to determine sines, cosines, and tangents of angles in a right triangle: SOH CAH TOA. Simply put, the sine is the opposite side over the hypotenuse. The cosine is the adjacent side over the hypotenuse. The tangent (hence my being on this tangent) is the opposite side over the adjacent side.
I’d never heard that mnemonic device before. It was all theta to me (ha! Trig humor).
Had I decided to go with the story idea that I mentioned in the last post, today’s Post-A-Day topic is this:
Maybe its tying your shoelaces, or parallel parking cars, but we all have something very simple that we just don’t do very well. Write about yours.
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| One of my feral feline friends, Fleck, snacks on a plate of cheese in his custom-built cat house |
Well. For now, we’ll just leave aside the fact that a blog devoted to inspiring writers by coming up with Post-A-Day topics just screwed up the word “it’s” and we’ll concentrate on what was being asked. There are numerous things at which I suck, but trying to come up with one of them that’s considered “simple” is not so much difficult as it is depressing. The first one to come to mind, however, was “ironing.” I gave up on trying to iron clothes – particularly shirts – years ago. Sure, if I’ve got an Easter gig and my only black shirt bears a striking resemblance to a shar-pei puppy, I might smack it with a hot iron a few times, but I won’t fool anybody. A far more likely solution for me would be to throw the shirt into a dryer for 20 minutes and call it good. Don’t even talk to me about tux shirts.
One thing that I like to do is build things out of wood. I’m not particularly good at that, either, but carpentry isn’t something that I’d consider to be “simple.” Also, I don’t have a wide assortment of tools or workspace. I do the best I can, however, and I have a good time. In the last couple of weeks, I built a little house for the (ironically) feral cats in my yard, and I also threw together an insulated cover for my fireplace (it was getting increasingly cold in my living room).
I think I’m drawn to “strange” carpentry because it’s just so damned imaginative. I like coming up with a mental picture of what I want and then seeing if I can put it together. Chairs, camp kitchens, cat houses…it’s just fun to build things.
And now I have a router table. Watch out, world.