Valadilenne

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What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind.
"Intimations of Immortality," William Wordsworth

I have had an ongoing blood feud with Wordsworth for some time. He was the most prominent of the lake poets and was the most guilty of their crime--thinking that poetry could somehow lift up the impoverished unskilled laborers who were forced to move from the country to the city during the Industrial Revolution. They believed that poetry could save their souls and inspire them to return to their roots. This was before he became a tax collector and was happy to make money off the poor. Arrogant asshattery, in other words.

But this passage does something to me. It seems to say that even though the brilliance and beauty of youth leave us all at some point, we still have our memories of what was once great, and no one can take that away from us. It moves away from what his central message originally was. It's such a beautiful and honest sentiment that I'm really looking forward to visiting the Lakes this summer.

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I used to work customer returns at a chain discount store (think red bullseye). This woman came in and had purchased a seasonal item and wanted to return it.

It was a large bottle of Tide we'd sold the summer before and it had a hole in the bottom where detergent had leaked out all over her basement floor. The problem was that the item was no longer listed in our system because it had been sold a good 6 months previous.

How she had failed to realize there was laundry detergent on her floor for six months escapes me.

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OH OH OH I know this one!

Holiday for Strings, by the Voices of Walter Schumann. It's really meant to be done on violins and with people going DOOT-DOOT DOOT-DOOT, but what can I say. The original recording doesn't exist for your listening pleasure on the 'Tube, so you get a handbell choir instead. It's a very staccato busy song.

If you saw Madagascar, it's the song the zoo handlers sing in the beginning. It's on several Ultra-Lounge CDs.