In today’s Times Herald-Record is a story i must hide from my husband, to avert his early death from apoplexy. It says a local barber could soon get “another kudo” from the Guinness Book of World Records.

You and i hate mosquitoes; Tim hates back-formations from Greek words.

To Tim, saying a man deserves “a kudo” for something is exactly like saying he deserves “a pray,” on the grounds that “praise” is more than one “pray.”

We’ve all said,  ”Kudos to you!” to someone who done good, meaning “Congratulations!” and so, whenever we’ve been forced to think about it (which is, mercifully, quite rarely), we figure one instance of them there kudos is a kudo.  So, like, if you win a martial-arts match, that would be a judo kudo. (Sorry.)

Actually, as Tim has been all too happy to remind me over and over and over and over and over again, “kudos” is a singular Greek noun meaning  ”honor,” “glory,” or “acclaim” — recognition for something positive.  But that “s” sound at the end (Tim insists it should be pronounced like the “s” in “son,” by the way, not like the “s” in “nose”) throws everybody off. We assume it’s a plural, and that there must be a “kudo” around here somewhere. My Webster’s College Dictionary lists “kudo” as a synonym for “compliment,” adding: “Back-formation from kudos.” But as Tim would say: That doesn’t make it right.

On the gay marriage issue, let’s pray that the Methodists live up to their ideals.

Copying the short link below will take you to today’s NY Times story about how the Methodists are about to prosecute a pastor for officiating at his son’s wedding to a man … which, thank G-d, is legal in New York, where the ceremony was performed. The problem is, the denomination has a rule that forbids its pastors from performing same-sex weddings. Copying the longer link takes you to the response from a some devout Methodists who are trying to fix that rule.

I’m with them.

Doesn’t Galatians say there is neither “Greek nor Jew,” and neither “male nor female,” but that all are one in the eyes of Jesus? Isn’t the Methodist slogan “Open Minds, Open Hearts, Open Doors”? Didn’t G-d say “It is not good for man to be alone”? Why, then, prosecute a pastor for joining his own son in holy matrimony to a man who sweetly swore to support him in sickness and health ’til death parts them?

In this case, human ethics and understanding have evolved faster than the Methodist Book of Discipline. It’s a civil-rights case, yes, but more importantly, it’s about love.

Come on, Methodists: This is a good time to remember who you are, and who G-d wants you to be. Drop the charges against Tom Ogletree.

http://ow.ly/kKxDJ

http://www.mindny.org/mind-initiatives/umc-on-trial/

Discerning readers, please decide: Who was the more important woman who died this week?

Margaret Thatcher: Best known for: making millions of people miserable. 2 greatest achievements: Being Great Britain’s first female prime minister and abolishing the nation’s free-milk-in-schools program. Best friend: US President Ronald Reagan, promulgator of the failed “trickle-down” theory of economics. Friendship began in 1981, when he was 70 and she, 66. Quote: “I stand before you … the Iron Lady of the Western World.”

Annette Funicello: Best known for: making millions of people happy. 2 greatest achievements: Being a Mouseketeer in the first year of the “Mickey Mouse Club” and starring in the carefree “Beach Blanket” movies with Frankie Avalon. Best friend: Shelley Fabares, singer of “Johnny Angel.” Friendship began in 1955 in catechism class, when they were both 13. Quote: “Beauty is as beauty does; that’s what wise men say.”

A lot of ink was spilled praising Margaret Thatcher this week, to which I say: Rest in peace, Annette.

The Internet Hall of Fame has to have the coolest advisory board on the planet. The folks listed in the link at the end of this graf will be helping to choose the next group of inductees into the Hall. The ceremony’s in June, in Istanbul. Who would YOU choose? (And don’t say, the guy who comes to your house to hook you back up again, after your computer crashes!)  http://ow.ly/ixAEr

Don’t know why, but a lovely, tiny winter wren has come to my feeder.  As i understand it from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, they usually hop around on the ground looking for insects and avoid the black-oil sunflower seeds. Maybe he just flew in to see what everybody else was having: Dozens of sparrows, titmice, cardinals, chickadees and woodpeckers call my yard their winter home. Anyway, I’m very honored. to be hosting this new guy, and i hope he stays.

I love the way his little tail constantly bobs, as if he’s writing something with a quill pen.

I shall now try to append a photo of your typical winter wren, filched from the Cornell site, to this blog. Wish me luck! And if that doesn’t work, you can just go to the Lab’s winter-wren page: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Winter_Wren/id

“We were never sent here to be perfect; we were sent here to make what difference we can.”

– Barack Obama, 2/12/13

That should be written on all of our mirrors and walls.

http://www.ct.com/news/advocates/wtxx-former-hartford-advocate-writer-brews-unemployed-reporter-porter-20130201,0,4560877.story

Fifty years on, my apologies go out to my 9th-grade math teacher for my tearful outburst in 1963 that left him speechless.

Mr. Allen, early yesterday morning, contrary to my passionate prediction that had held true for all the intervening years up until then, i did indeed use math! What happened was, a pipe going into my radiator had sprung a leak. Now, why that should require the performance of  math on anyone’s part, much less mine, may seem like a mystery. So i shall solve it here: To fix the pipe (a few days ago), the plumber had had to cut a slightly wider circle out of my wooden living room floor than had been there before, for the pipe to come up from. After he fixed the pipe ($620: Don’t ask), you could look down through my living room floor, into the basement! That was because the diameter of the hole he’d made was, oh, a half-inch or so larger than the diameter of the pipe. If i wanted to cover up that gap, he said, i’d need to buy a little object called a “pipe collar” at the hardware store. But, what SIZE pipe collar? As the plumber was looking at the leaky pipe, i remember him saying aloud, “Hmm … Is that a one and a quarter-inch pipe, or a one and a half-inch pipe?” And he had to give it some thought, but after closely inspecting and carefully eyeballing it, he guessed right, and went out to his truck and came back with the pipe he needed.  But i’d forgotten — or, more likely, never asked — which size the pipe was, and now i wanted one of those little, hinged “pipe collars” to  go around it.  And they’re sold, he’d said, by “diameter of the pipe.”

I swear to G-d, the answer came to me in a dream! Two nights ago, i woke up with the distinct memory that there is a formula for the diameter of a circle, if you know its circumference. And in my head i was already using the word “diameter” like a rocket scientist, instead of just saying the “distance across!” G-d must want me to do this.

“Pi-r-squared” equals something. i remembered that. Was that the formula i needed? No; if i knew the “r” (radius), i’d already know the diameter, because it’s always twice that. But wait: What the hell was “Pi-r-squared” the formula for? At 2 a.m., i ran to my computer and googled around for a minute. The area! Pi-r-squared is the area of a circle! But that’s not what i wanted. Out of the black of night, i then also remembered what “pi” equals: 3.14159 and then an infinite number of digits after that. It has no end, that “Pi.” i actually remembered that! Then i drew a few circles on a pad and realized that the circumference is always about three times bigger than the diameter.

Gold! I googled around for another minute and found out that, sure enough, the diameter of a circle (or pipe, in my case)  is its circumference divided by Pi. Whew! But i have no cloth tape-measure, only the bendy, metal kind, so wrapping my tape measure around my pipe wouldn’t give me an accurate measurement. So i went to the kitchen, cut off about six inches of twine, wrapped it once around my pipe, held it tight between two fingernails where the “answer-spot” was, laid it on my metal tape measure and found that my pipe is four and a quarter inches around. Back upstairs i ran to my pocket calculator, and: It’s a one-and-a-quarter-inch-diameter pipe! (The inside of the pipe, that is: the outside measurement, which i made, yielded the result of 1.32 inches, but they can’t fool me. I knew that would count as a one-and-a-quarter-inch pipe.)

The one-and-a-quarter-inch pipe collar i bought fit beautifully. Sorry, Mr. Allen: I did, indeed, need to use math in my “real life.” And now i’m wondering if Stephen Hawking started this way.

It occurred to me today that life is like the Spin-Art Tent at the county fair.

When you’re young, it’s like when you first come into the tent and you see all the examples of finished “artwork” they have hanging there, and you can’t wait to try it and you plan for where you’re going to put your reds and your blues and your greens and your yellows on those shiny little white cardboard rectangles, and you can’t wait for your turn, but everybody in line ahead of you seems to be taking so long; it’s taking like 20 minutes for each person! What’s taking them so long?

And then finally you’re grown up and it is your turn, and you line up those plastic ketchup-bottles of paint, each one upside-down in its own little holder, and you pay your money and hit the start button. And then 10 seconds later the spinning stops and you’re old and it’s somebody else’s turn, but the payoff is that only now, at last, do you get to lift it up and see what a mess you made.

When you let the wrong side grab the right language, you’re sunk.

Two huge cases in point: Americans long ago yielded the “Right to Life” title to anti-abortion zealots — hardly any news media call them the “anti-abortion” group, which is all they are — while anti-labor zealots are universally referred to as favoring the ”Right to Work.” Abrams Predicts: It won’t be long before the anti-labor gang forms its own political party, as the anti-abortion folks did years ago. Hey, the “Right to Work Party”? Who wouldn’t vote for them? Who doesn’t think all decent Americans have the Right to Work?

George Orwell would be proud.

We cede political power to special interests whenever we start calling them by the name they give themselves (this usually involves “the Right” to do or have something, even when their goal is to limit the rights of the majority).

We have the right to life, yet we stand in reverence before the so-called Right to Bear Arms, which results in the taking of 30,000 American lives each year.

We have the right to decide whether and when to bear children, yet we let the “Right to Life” gang force women to bear unwanted children.

And now we have, in far too many states, the so-called “Right to Work,” which forces employees at organized workplaces to bear the costs of union representation for those who enjoy the benefits of that representation but refuse to bear their share of the costs of it. (Some of those benefits: raises, sick pay, vacation pay, bereavement pay, overtime pay, holidays and personal time off, job security, enforcing of contracts, and educational, charitable and social opportunities.) In other words, so-called “Right to Work” laws force union members to support freeloaders.

Agency-shop clauses (the ones so offensive to the “Right to Work” gang) do not require anyone to join a union; they simply require everyone who benefits from a union contract to pay to the union, an amount equivalent to dues. So if you don’t believe in unions, don’t worry! You don’t have to join! You also won’t be able to go to union meetings, speak your mind about working conditions, or vote on the contracts it negotiates for you. But you WILL get all the benefits of those contracts. That’s the law. That’s the way it is now. But that’s what the anti-labor forces in Indiana, Wisconsin and other states are taking away from working people: fair play and a stronger voice.

Rarely mentioned in discussions of the so-called “Right to Work” laws that are metastasizing now, is the fact that agency-shop clauses (the ones requiring nonmembers who benefit from a union’s contract, to pay the equivalent of dues to the union that negotiated it for them) are not imposed by unions on the workers, but are themselves negotiated during the bargaining sessions, by a bargaining team elected by the workers.

Not bearing your share of the cost of union representation is simply saying that the price of democracy is too high for you. But the enforced imposition of such freeloading is what Through-the-Looking-Glass Republicans today are calling “Right to Work laws.” And by accepting that name for their evil schemes, the news media — and all of us — are just as culpable as they are.