A Tribute to abra a collection of her comments

[hrossa]

"To remind a man of the good turns you have done him is very much like a reproach." — Demosthenes

Eureka
December 17, 2020, 7:27 pm
Remember that time I drove you to the airport, Demosthenes, during rush hour In a blizzard?

universalmom
August 30, 2021, 3:56 pm
that's usually exactly what it is

Fudi
October 24, 2021, 12:13 pm
Demosthenes: I do, Eureka. There was that one hairpin turn that you took kind of fast. That was a good turn. Exciting. Made me feel alive. Thanks!

abra
November 18, 2021, 2:09 am
Oh, sure, Demo, you remember Eureka driving you to the airport, but who was it who loaded up the truck and helped you to move across Athens? You didn't even spring for McGyros.

[Eureka]

"She is a peacock in everything but beauty." — Oscar Wilde

abra
July 1, 2014, 3:44 pm
It all goes well, until you get to PEACOCK.

abra
February 21, 2015, 3:05 pm
A few months later, I had absolutely no memory of PEACOCK.

abra
June 8, 2015, 9:48 am
Again, when I mentally tried all the letters and got to P, THEN I remembered it was PEACOCK. Sheesh.

abra
June 29, 2018, 10:25 am
I have done this one a few times over the years, and I NEVER remember peacock.

abra
June 3, 2020, 10:58 pm
My last comment was two years ago, and I didn't have an inkling what that word was.

Jrdad
October 18, 2020, 3:29 pm
Abra, you are a beauty in everything but 'peacock'.

[LLapp]

"Where there is much desire to learn, there of necessity will be much arguing, much writing, many opinions; for opinions in good men is but knowledge in the making." — John Milton

abra
June 1, 2017, 11:59 am
Wow, we must be having a lot of "learning" going on around here this evening.

abra
July 7, 2019, 2:18 am
* Must have been one of those nights.

[Deanna48]

"A God without dominion, providence, and final causes, is nothing else but fate and nature."
— Alexander Pope

abra
April 20, 2019, 2:19 am
Did he speak in prose? Or am I just missing the poetry?

kb83
October 9, 2023, 11:41 am
abra (of blessed memory) , apparently he waxed prosaic occasionally! In your honor, here's my poor attempt to iambically pentameterize it. A God who does not carry any weight / Is just a name for nature or for fate.

[LLapp]

Thank you, Eureka! I had not seen that quote since abra responded. Nice to see it now, in early January.

[Eureka]

(I have included this exchange to illustrate abra's kind interest in other players and their families, as well as to let you (LLapp) know that she saw your response, in case you don't make it back to this quote.)

"She had fortunately always her appetite for news. The pure flame of the disinterested burned in her cave of treasures as a lamp in a Byzantine vault." — Henry James

LLapp
September 25, 2014, 2:20 pm
My mother used to say about Henry James' writing, "I get an image of someone carrying too many grocery bags, with one of them tearing open and dropping all over the ground." This quote is just like that.

abra
December 19, 2014, 3:34 pm
LLapp, I just read that you're an editor. It sounds like your mom is very literary. Is she or was she an editor too?

LLapp
December 24, 2016, 3:39 pm
abra, two years later, I finally got this quote again. My mom was a writer at first -- she wrote short stories, attempted a novel, and even got a few feature articles published in the Sunday paper. Then she discovered music, and she found she preferred the community of ensemble playing to the solitary writing life -- that change happened in the late 1960s, when I was 9 or 10, and she remained a musician and then a respected music teacher, till she died in 2012. All along, though, she was a voracious reader, and she was so happy to see me pick up that thread of writing that she had left behind. I do miss her . . . thank you for asking!

wvwoman
March 3, 2017, 2:04 pm
thanks for sharing, llapp--quite interesting! and thanks for asking her, abra.

abra
January 29, 2022, 2:20 am
I've waited a really long time for that answer. ) Thank you, LLapp.

[LLapp]

"Youth fades; love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all." — Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

abra
May 10, 2021, 2:50 am
Nice quote for Mothers' Day. Thankfully, I still have love.

[LLapp]

"Offended vanity is the great separator in social life." — Sir Arthur Helps

abra
December 28, 2016, 7:01 pm
His name is a lovely complete sentence. I'd like to think when he married they hyphenated. He'd be Sir Arthur Helps-Withdishes.

[LLapp]

"We cannot really love anybody with whom we never laugh." — Agnes Repplier

abra
January 3, 2019, 1:26 pm
I see couples in restaurants, that are about the same age as my husband and me. They sit and eat a meal without speaking to each other. How can you stay married to someone you don't even talk to let alone laugh with. I'm so glad that after 50 years we still have things to talk about and LAUGH about.

[LLapp]

"God put me on this earth to accomplish a certain number of things. Right now I am so far behind that I will never die." — Bill Watterson

abra
May 5, 2013, 12:04 am
My 10 year old grandson has claimed the Calvin and Hobbes books that we bought for my son when he was a teenager. This weekend he carried one around reading aloud from it.

zenith
March 19, 2014, 3:57 pm
Funniest strip ever? (Farside, Peanuts in the running)

maradnu
February 26, 2015, 8:45 am
One of the all time best

LLapp
April 11, 2015, 7:26 pm
abra, that is so great how the most-loved humor gets passed down.

pj48
January 13, 2017, 6:58 am
I used to like Dilbert.

maradnu
August 4, 2017, 2:30 pm
I currently like Non-Sequitur

MadDoctor
September 26, 2018, 1:57 pm
Nobody's mentioned Bloom County yet.

318WOZ
January 25, 2019, 1:40 am
I remember Calvin and Hobbes being good. The only ones I pay any attention to in my paper are Pickles and Dilbert. The other stuff never seems to be funny or even particularly interesting. Pickles would have to be my favorite.

badbob
September 29, 2019, 7:26 am
Pogo

LLapp
May 12, 2020, 4:43 am
Pogo?! We have met the oldest one in the comment thread, and he is badbob.

oddcouple
January 8, 2023, 3:56 pm
RIP, abra. Your comment about your grandson is emblematic of how proud you were of your family.

[Synonymous]

Montyb, that is beautiful. You have sight beyond the visual. Be well.

[LLapp]

"The possession of knowledge does not kill the sense of wonder and mystery. There is always more mystery." — Anais Nin

montyb
June 24, 2021, 9:52 pm
For myself I find this to be true. just because I know how light and water droplets interact to create rainbows in no way diminishes the wonder I get actually seeing one in the sky. Likewise, even with knowing how differences in gravitational forces between the moon and different parts of the earth generate high and low tides, I was fascinated to sit on a beach and watch it happen.

abra
October 19, 2022, 2:25 am
Monty, what does the rainbow look like when you see it?

montyb
March 15, 2023, 7:58 am
Abra, even though my chromatically-challenged vision causes me to not perceive the subtle nuances, I can still see the bright colors and the wondrous spectacle. (Unfortunately, Abra passed away late last year* and will never see my reply to her question. I answer it in her honor.)


*Actually early this year -- January 2, 2023.

[LLapp]

"Gentleman-rankers out on the spree, damned from here to Eternity." — Rudyard Kipling

kat
December 27, 2009, 3:08 pm
gentleman-rankers?

kat
October 16, 2010, 6:23 pm
Once again, I say, "Gentleman-rankers"?

matarisa
April 27, 2011, 4:06 am
Yep, that's what it is: Gentlemen-rankers.

abra
August 22, 2011, 6:58 pm
Lord, have mercy on such as we, Baa-Baa-Baa..

abra
April 20, 2012, 2:38 am
I knew this from the Whiffenpoof Song. I didn't know it came from a Kippling poem.

matarisa
October 31, 2012, 1:01 am
The Whiffenpoofs sing "Gentlemen songsters".

abra
February 18, 2013, 12:41 am
Ah! not "rankers".

gryhnd51
October 10, 2013, 7:32 pm
Matarisa is correct that the "whiffenpoof" song uses the words "gentlemen songsters". My father sang with a barber-shop quartet and they used those words. That made it doubly difficult for me to solve, unfortunately.

wvwoman
November 9, 2014, 1:12 pm
"A Gentleman ranker is an enlisted soldier who may have been a former officer or a gentleman qualified through education and background to be a commissioned officer.[1] This suggests that the signer was born to wealth and privilege but he disgraced himself, and has enlisted as a common soldier (perhaps at the lowest rank, as a private or corporal) serving far from the society that now scorns him." (Wikipedia)

abra
October 7, 2015, 12:05 pm
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs. Back then one of the radio stations, can't remember which, probably WLS or WCFL, would play some version of the Whiffenpoof Song, every night at 1:30 or 2:00 a.m. I can remember one of the DJs, maybe either Larry the Legend Johnson, or Larry Lujack hated it. It was amazing how many recordings of it there were. I googled, it was WIND. The station had over 100 recordings, they played the song from the 40s until 1985, when they changed owners and became a Spanish language station.

SwampySox
April 27, 2016, 9:24 am
Great history abra.

jimdgar
May 23, 2017, 9:38 am
Gentleman-wankers out on the spwee, damned fwom hewe to Etewnity.

zengard
November 25, 2017, 5:30 am
Gee Abra, you bring back a memory. I grew up in central Illinois, and we all listened to WLS for the best current music (for teenagers).

KittyKatMeow
June 4, 2020, 11:46 am
And 10 years down the road, still I say - gentleman-rankers?? (I was Kat in my past incarnation)

abra
October 25, 2020, 2:16 am
Hi, Kat. I have done this one so many times. If I had looked at the source, I'd have been here sooner.

bigudave
December 6, 2022, 5:32 pm
Nice Porky PIg, jimdgar!

jimdgar
December 11, 2022, 2:50 pm
I have no idea why I said that, and no memory of it either.

Descifrador
May 30, 2023, 6:51 pm
bigudave: I think you mean "Elmer Fudd".

[LLapp]

This is quintessential abra: self-effacing, wise, witty and kind. It's that kind spirit that still lives.
----------------

"Of all the possessions of this life fame is the noblest; when the body has sunk into the dust the great name still lives." — Johann Friedrich von Schiller

CCCookie
March 3, 2016, 9:17 am
Apparently Schiller never understood the concept of 15 minutes of fame -- which, almost inevitably, is followed by a life time of obscurity. LOL

abra
March 5, 2017, 5:53 pm
I'll gladly donate my fifteen to someone else. I haven't used them yet. They could only start with "Old lady...". You may have them, maybe 30 minutes would be helpful.

phthelen
September 2, 2017, 6:07 am
Abra, LOL.

abra
October 27, 2017, 10:48 am
Makes me think of the song Fame. I'm gonna live forever...

hisashiburi
June 3, 2018, 2:44 pm
From Schiller's poem "The Feast of Victory" set in the aftermath of the Trojan War; spoken by Neoptolemus to his father Achilles in praise of him. Many other opinions are voiced by the victorious Greeks as the wine is passed around.

Eureka
November 24, 2021, 11:07 am
I think he'd be pleased that, 200 years after his death, his quotes live on and have become part of an online game.

abra
June 9, 2022, 1:07 am
Eureka, your comments are always so nice.

[Deanna48]

"Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water-bath is to the body. "
— Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.

judy100
September 26, 2014, 6:55 am
I'm taking a bath in Puccini's Tosca and playing Cryto:-)
LLapp
November 1, 2015, 4:53 pm
I am bathing in World Series game 5 -- Mets 2, Royals 2, 11th inning.
abra
March 24, 2017, 2:44 pm
I guess I'm bathing in quiet. When LLapp wrote her comment, I was probably still bathing in sulk.