[This, of course, refers to Dr. Seuss’s 1937 book, which refers to Mulberry Street in Springfield, Massachusetts, which was the good doctor’s home, rather than the famous street in Little Italy in Manhattan.]
“…too different from other juveniles on the market to warrant its selling.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
“[Remark the day after the guillotining of the great chemist Antoine Lavoisier on 8 May 1794]: ‘Il ne leur a fallu qu’un moment pour faire tomber cette tete, et cent annees, peut-etre, ne suffiront pas pour en reproduire une semblable.’
It took them only an instant to cut off that head, but it is unlikely that a hundred years will suffice to reproduce a similar one.”
Quoted int J.B. Delambre, “Eloge de Lagrange,” Memoires de l’Institut (1812)
Excerpted from: Shapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged literary oddities, science literacy
“Flail * Crook
The Flail and Crook of Osiris symbolize the two harvests achieved by the farmer and the shepherd and are one of the root sources for all symbols of power, notably the medieval orb and sceptre favored by European royalty. In southern Asia, this is mirrored by the ritual sceptre (the Rodge) held in the right hand and a bell (the Drilbu) in the left of Indian statues. In Buddhist depictions the left hand my hold a Buddhist jewel, whilst the right hand is open in a gesture of sending blessings to the earth.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
“…there crops up in parts a certain rawness of absurdity that’s very displeasing, and makes it read like some clever lad’s dream: the thing hangs too loosely together…half worthy of Balzac.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“…too long, too static, too repetitious, too ponderous and a long list of other negative ‘toos’…he has no novelistic sense whatever; he just tells you every blessed thing the characters said and did and thought in the the order in which it occurred…most of the time it is solidly, monumentally boring.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“A scene in one of his numerous movie shorts required Benchley to be strung up in a mass of telephone wires above a city street. While waiting for the final camera, he called to his wife Gertrude, who was on location: ‘Remember how good in Latin I was in school?’
‘I do,’ she replied.
‘Well, look where it got me.’”
Excerpted from: Drennan, Robert E., ed. The Algonquin Wits. New York: Kensington, 1985.
Posted in English Language Arts, New York City, Quotes, Reference
Tagged humor, literary oddities
“365 Days of Haab: The Mayan solar calendar was divided into eighteen twenty-day months (vigesimal notation). This produced 360 days, or one tun. In common with many religious calendars of the world, the shortfall of five extra days added on to make the 365 days of the solar year was a spirit-haunted period of ill omen, the five nameless Wayab days.
The habit of multiplying by 20 continued beyond the year, so that twenty tun (almost a solar year) is a katun, which was a great unit of time commemorated with inscribed standing stones and pyramid temples. Twenty katuns produced a baktun and twenty baktuns produce a piktun of 7,885 solar years. We have not quite got to a piktun, though quite recently, at the winter solstice of 2012, we celebrated the completion of thirteen baktuns which some observers too to be a possible date for the end of the world. The thirteen-baktun date (21-12-2012), which was safely achieved, begins by starting the calendar back at Year One in 3113 BC.”
Excerpted from: Rogerson, Barnaby. Rogerson’s Book of Numbers: The Culture of Numbers–from 1,001 Nights to the Seven Wonders of the World. New York: Picador, 2013.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged hispanic history, literary oddities, numeracy
“The occasional principal. An occasional principal feels called upon to exercise his authority at every turn, and is satisfied with his accomplishment only when teachers fear him. The principal hews exactly to the line. If his curriculum calls for compositions of three paragraphs in the sixth grade, then three it must be or the teacher will receive a demerit mark.
Such principals are rapidly giving place to a new type of educational director who rules by virtue of a scientific understanding of his work, and by personal qualities of leadership, rather than by authority which has been delegated to him. Such a principal deals with facts and with personalities; gives directions, rather than orders; leads, rather than drives; and expects his teachers to think for themselves.”
Excerpted from: Sears, J.B. Classroom Organization and Control. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
Posted in Essays/Readings, Quotes, Reference
“…the form of the story is most unexpected.”
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Systematic living. What is needed by teachers is the application of a bit of system and common sense in their daily lives. Teaching cannot be sedulously followed by young people without sedulously offsetting its inactivity with outside exercise and pleasure. Every teacher should set aside a definite time for exercise, and a definite sum of money of recreation and pleasure. A regular time for a walk, a tennis game, a horseback ride; and a regular monthly allowance for theater, opera, travel, of the entertaining of one’s friends, will take one out into the open air where acquaintance with nature may be renewed, furnish a host of new thrills, and establish new interests and new companionships, which will drive away care, renew one’s mental and physical vigor, and provide a saner perspective for the serious tasks of the days to come.”
Excerpted from: Sears, J.B. Classroom Organization and Control. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918.
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