November 22: Another Association

I'm two days --or 47 years--late on this one, but I think I'll pass it on anyway: November 22, whatever its other associations, is also St. Ceclia's Day, honoring the patron saint of music, and the source of one of the grandest pieces of formal poetry in the English language, and a highly agreeable pieces of music. Here's the first verse of John Dryden's "Ode for Saint Cecilia's Day:"

From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
          This universal frame began.
     When Nature underneath a heap
          Of jarring atoms lay,
     And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
          Arise ye more than dead.
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
     In order to their stations leap,
          And music’s pow’r obey.
From harmony, from Heav’nly harmony
          This universal frame began:
          From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
     The diapason closing full in man.

And here, a sample of the Handel:

Obama's Hasselhoff Moment

So many bloggers are busy remembering how John F. Kennedy at the Berlin Wall said "I am a jelly doughnut" (link). Ich bin ein Berliner? Berliner= Jelly doughnut? Well, maybe you had to have been there.

In fact, Kennedy knew he was having trouble with the language. What he really said was "Ich bin ein Berlitzer."

And years later, Richard Nixon went to the Great Wall of China and said "I am a Pekinese."

Well, maybe you had to have been there.

Note: The headline is nothing more than a cheap-shot homage to the man who, by his own account, personally brought down the Berlin Wall. So far as I can tell, no candidate has made any such claim in this campaign. Yet.