Loose Leaf Notes

1. It just means “girl” in Irish Gaelic.

2. Joe had been away for three weeks and is now back home and getting in the swing of things, aka as playing golf at the Country Club.

3. I’ve been calling him a Sultan of Swing because he regularly plays golf.

4. Word Search: We are a crossword puzzle/ When I go down / you go across / but we meet at some point / to make sense of each other / Every word counts / Every blank space / is a mirror to see / ourselves better

5. I’ve been studying John Mellencamp, watching video interviews, re-watching his old music videos and listening to songs I had missed. It takes me back to an innocent time and is more fun than reading a memoir.

6. He also paints and I love his work. Two Eves with an Apple is one of my favorites. Also, 1976, A Little Ditty Bout Jack and Diane and Faces in the Crowd.

7. I now understand my father’s late life nostalgia. He made tapes and listened to songs from the 30s and 40s every night as he fell asleep.

8. Colleen is an Irish language name and is of Irish origin and a generic term for women or girls, from the Irish cailín ‘girl/woman’, the diminutive of caile ‘woman, countrywoman’. Although it originates in the Irish language, Colleen as a given name is rare in the Republic of Ireland, but far more popular in Irish-descended communities in the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. – Wikipedia

9. I think it’s fitting that the word golf spells flog (to beat with a stick) backwards.

10. “Telescopes can be time machines. Looking out in space is like looking back in time… Besides looking farther across space than any observatory before it, the James Webb Space Telescope has another trick up its mirrors: It can look further back in time than any other telescope, observing distant stars and galaxies as they appeared 13.5 billion years ago, not long after the beginning of the universe as we know it… All of the light you see — from the twinkling of distant stars to the glow from your desk lamp a few feet away — takes time to reach your eyes. you’ll never notice it traveling from, say, the desk lamp to your eyes. However, when you’re looking at objects that are millions or billions of miles away — as most objects in the night sky are — you’re seeing light that has traveled a long, long way to reach you.” More from Can the James Webb Space Telescope really see the past?

11. “Solidity is a function of magnification. We know that anything we experience as solid is actually a structure of atoms packed closely enough that to our eyes they appear to be a single solid thing. If we were small enough, we’d see the spaces between them; if we were even smaller, those spaces might seem vast.”

12. Yesterday one of my pool crosswords was “Ted” that came with the puzzle clue “Lasso sitcom,” which was the most current clue in the whole book so far.

13: I won a poetry slam at a pub in 2005 with a poem called Scrabble Lover that ended with: My husband and I see other people / while I play scrabble he plays golf / when I’m on the verge of a triple word score / he’s looking for partners to make up a foursome…

_______Thirteen Thursday