Friday, January 21, 2005
The Latin instructor assigned a vocabulary quiz, which I mistook for a declension quiz. I declined approximately five nouns in the following fashion:
magisterI realized everyone else had finished, but I yet had four more nouns and a couple of verbs to decline. Aa soo... thought I, This is the vocabulary exam, which requires only the first two principal parts, the gender, and the meaning of each noun, plus the declension, gender, and the four principal parts of each verb. Scheisse. I wrote the final two words in the correct manner before handing in the sheet; the instructor drops the five most unfavorable quizzes, thus I worry not.
magistri
magistro
magistrum
magistro
magistri
magistrorum
magistris
magistros
magistris
In ancient technology class we viewed a Nova video about a group of people attempting to reconstruct theoretical methods by which Stonehenge was built. It involved many ropes, a British engineer, a British archaeologist, an American granite-worker, approximately one hundred amateur volunteers, and a yappy little dog. The American thought the engineer's methods too grandiose (they did involve constructing a giant wooden A-frame, as well as another trial using greased wooden planks set into the ground as tracks... to transport forty-ton stone blocks over twenty hilled and wooded miles). He complained, everyone else ignored him, and the cameras caught him playing with the dog whilst the manual laborers and the engineers performed their experiments.
As the workers hauled one of the blocks, a man stood on top of it, waving a yellow flag, jumping up-and-down, and screaming ecstatically. They probably slaughtered him afterward and buried him at the circle's epicenter.
[Lauree Frances Keith concluded this diatribe at 1:15 PM]