October 5 Lab Assignments pt. 1 of 3

Find the following online and post source(s) + a brief description to your blog.

1. Audio of William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. You must include one correct, accurate quote from Faulkner in your post.

Faulkner's acceptance speech

I found this audio clip from www.hark.com

This is apparently a very neat archive of sound files. I would love to look up movie lines and poetry readings some time.

You can listen and read the transcript here: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/williamfaulknernobelprizeaddress.htm

I was struck by this line:

"He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed -- love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion."

It reminds me of the dignity of writing. Lately I've been telling myself that I really need to write, and just to write, so that I might someday be considered a writer and therefore fulfill what is expected of me and what small ability I might have. But writing is more than just typing one's thoughts, after all. Writing is not thinking, chattering, or bleeding. As Faulkner tells us, it's to support the human spirit.

2. January 1, 1644, fell on which day of the week? What was the weather like that day in Philadelphia/Pennsylvania?

January 1, 1644 fell on a Friday.

According to "www.searchforancestors.com" --> Tools --> Day of the Week Calculator:
Search for Ancestors looks like a very handy and interesting tool for genealogical research.

To discover the weather of the first day of 1644, I found: Nothing

I'm sorry, but I spent a significant amount of time querying search engines, and I came up with bubkes. USATODAY.com told me it's not my fault: "No real weather data was kept in the 18th century except for a few observations by people such as Thomas Jefferson. For that period, you'd have to relay on various kinds of accounts, such as journals, to see what people were saying about the weather." (citation) I'm sure other people found the answer to the riddle, but I have too many things to do. I have to move on.

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This was the point I reached at the end of class. I swear I didn't waste time, I was trying to be thorough, and I hadn't done this kind of activity before. I will resume later tonight.