Spooner’s Day, is named for Rev. William Archibald Spooner, b. 1844, Dean and later Warden of New College in Oxford. This article from Reader’s Digest describes Spooner :

Spooner was an albino, small, with a pink face, poor eyesight, and a head too large for his body. His reputation was that of a genial, kindly, hospitable man. He seems also to have been something of an absent-minded professor. He once invited a faculty member to tea “to welcome our new archaeology Fellow.”
“But, sir,” the man replied, “I am our new archaeology Fellow.”
“Never mind,” Spooner said, “Come all the same.”

He was most famous, however, for getting his tang tungled. Spoonerisms are words or phrases in which sounds or syllables get swapped. Some of Spooner’s spoonerisms:
fighting a liar–lighting a fire
you hissed my mystery lecture–you missed my history lecture
cattle ships and bruisers–battle ships and cruisers
nosey little cook–cosy little nook
a blushing crow–a crushing blow
tons of soil–sons of toil
our queer old Dean–our dear old Queen
we’ll have the hags flung out–we’ll have the flags hung out

GWB’s most famous spoonerism:
“If the terriers and bariffs (barriers and tariffs) are torn down, this economy will grow.” (January 7, 2001 in Rochester, New York)

Also born on this date:
Emma Lazarus, b. 1849.

The New Colossus

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,

With conquering limbs astride from land to land;

Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand

A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame

Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name

Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command

The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

“Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she

With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

Margery Williams Bianco, b. 1881. Author of the classic children’s story of The Velveteen Rabbit. Read it here.

Stephen Vincent Benet, b. 1898 Winner of two Pulitzer prizes for poetry, one for the Civil War poem John Brown’s Body, he also wrote the short story The Devil and Daniel Webster. You can read this humorous story here. I read the story to a few of my urchins today, but they said they didn’t believe it!
Young Adventure, A Book of Poems by Stephen Vincent Benet.

Kay Bailey Hutchison, b. 1943. One of my two senators. I was looking at her website, and I found a list of books for children and adults about Texas and its history. Not a bad list, but they need to add the recent book I read about the Galveston hurricane of 1900, Galveston’s Summer of the Storm by Julie Lake.

Edited and reposted from July, 2005

Joseph Addison, b. 1672. “Books are the legacies that a great genius leaves to mankind, which are delivered down from generation to generation as presents to the posterity of those who are yet unborn.”

Elizabeth Marie Pope, b. 1917. Author of the Newbery Honor book The Perilous Guard. I haven’t read this book since I was a kid of a girl, so I’m not sure how well I’d like it now. I might enjoy it very much IF the pagan, fairy elements are truly pagan and in opposition to Christianity instead of melded into some sort of vague benevolent spirituality. This book uses the legend/ballad of Tam Lin as a sort of of jumping-off place, according to reviews at Amazon. Interesting, because I read Tam Lin, a novel by Pamela Dean based on the same ballad, and I’m still not sure what I think about it. Dean’s novelization of Tam Lin is set on a modern day college campus that is “haunted” or maybe invaded by faery folk disguised as professors and students. The students themselves are rather pagan, with very little hint of even the vestiges of Christian thought to inform their decisions. And to add to the theme, I’m now reading I, Coriander by Sally Gardner, a YA book about a girl in the time of Cromwell whose mother came from fairy land and who is caught between that place outside of our world and the world of Cromwell’s London. All these faery/fairy tales with realistic human-size fairies are making me think about fairy tales and paganism and the relationship of pagan tales of evil and malicious beings to the freedom that’s found in Christ. Could today’s neo-paganism easily turn dark and savage (as those tales often are), and does contemporary Christianity have the insight and power to counter that darkness?

May 1 is also Mother Goose Day.
From last May 1st: My favorite nursery rhyme is one that Organizer Daughter altered when she was little:

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells and taco shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

The Mary in the rhyme was either Mary, Queen of Scots or Bloody Mary (Elizabeth I’s half-sister) or Mary Magdalene. And the silver bells and cockle shells are either decorations on a dress or instruments of torture. The pretty maids? Mary’s ladies in waiting or the guillotine. Take your pick. Admit it. Don’t you like our version better than the original? Taco shells are so harmless, and they have no hidden symbolic meaning as far as I know.

For more information on how to celebrate Mother Goose Day, go to the Mother Goose Society website.
For recipes, crafts and coloring pages, try mother goose.com, or go to this Nursery Rhyme page for more educational links.

Dawn just started her blog in March at By Sun and Candlelight, but she already has a plethora of posts, mostly about poetry. I thought this one, All Things Bright and Beautiful was a particularly good reminder for Earth Day. We can celebrate not just the Earth, but the Lord God who made it all. In fact, I bought this book as an Easter present for the urchins. Isn’t it beautiful?

Or if you’re not in the mood for Earth Day, warm and fuzzy, bright and beautiful, you could re-read Animal Farm by George Orwell. I just read it again for the British Literature class I’m teaching (the first time was oh-so-very-many years ago in high school), and I found it fascinating. “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. I mention this book because I just read it and also because today is the birthday of Vladimir I. Lenin, b. 1870.

Also, Kurt Wiese, b. 1887. He was the illustrator of The Five Chinese Brothers by Claire Bishop and also the Freddy the Pig books by Walter Brooks.

Jan de Hartog, b. 1914. Author of The Peaceable Kingdom and The Lamb’s War (We’re back to the animal/creatures great and small theme, sort of.) I think I read The Peaceable Kingdom back when I was in high school and had decided to become a Quaker and a pacifist. I didn’t find many (any) Quakers in West Texas to associate with, and I’m no longer a pacifist. Mothers with a brood of eight chicks tend to believe in defending the brood.

Immanuel Kant, b. 1754. As far as I know, Kant has nothing whatsoever to do with anything bright and beautiful. Nor does he write about animals. Nor was he a Quaker or a pacifist, as far as I know. I haven’t read Kant, but dense and cloudy would be more appropriate words for him, from what I’ve heard.