English in The Chaos or Chaos in the English?

The Chaos by Rami

I love the English language, but it does have it's difficult pronunciations and spellings and rules of reading a word.  Can you read the poem below?  After looking it over it seemed to me that there should be a competition similar to a spelling bee where a student reads the poem and the one who gets the least errors in pronunciation wins.  At the national level it could be from memory!

The Chaos
Gerard Nolst Trenité

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won't it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It's a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough,
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is: give it up!

TESS-The English Spelling Society says:
The Chaos represents a virtuoso feat of composition, a mammoth catalogue of about 800 of the most notorious irregularities of traditional English orthography, skilfully versified (if with a few awkward lines) into couplets with alternating feminine and masculine rhymes. The selection of examples now appears somewhat dated, as do a few of their pronunciations, indeed a few words may even be unknown to today's readers (how many will know what a 'studding-sail' is, or that its nautical pronunciation is 'stunsail'?), and not every rhyme will immediately 'click' ('grits' for 'groats'?); but the overwhelming bulk of the poem represents as valid an indictment of the chaos of English spelling as it ever did. Who the 'dearest creature in creation' addressed in the first line, also addressed as 'Susy' in line 5, might have been is unknown, though a mimeographed version of the poem in Harry Cohen's possession is dedicated to 'Miss Susanne Delacruix, Paris'. Presumably she was one of Nolst Trenité's students.

Chaos by Robert Julian

Christmas artwork: The Madonna & Child

16 year old Belle Prosser produced this piece of artwork this year.  I think it is a beautiful piece of Mary and baby Jesus.  She used joint compound and coffee grounds in the production of it as well as other more traditional things to give it a unique coloring and texture.  I like to see great new artwork and it is a bonus that it is a teenager. 

If you would like to read more about her click here to go to a Deseret News article.

THE Book Stack, oh yeah!

While we were in Utah for my daughter's wedding we visited the art museum on BYU campus and what to our wandering eyes should appear but a stack, I mean a STACK of books.  Pretty amazing that someone would take the time to stack them up like that.  Do you suppose that these books were the ones that are out dated and they are not being used in the classes anymore?  If not then whose stack are they?  I visited special collections while at BYU and I'm for sure that Russ did not allow all those really cool books in special collections to be used this way!  (For more info on BYU library special collections click here)

This was a tremendous stack of books!  I'm glad that I have learned to get rid of some of mine through the years so I didn't have to start making works of art out of my books in the home.  Nowadays with Kindles and Nooks and other eReaders we can have a whole collection on one hand held device.  Maybe in a hundred years they will be making art of stacks of e-readers and books will be stored on hard drives connected to our brains via brain wave matching, so only we can access them.  Who knows what will be next? 

Monday Music #10: Mars Lasar: At the end of the day

Mars Lasar is a well known musician with 22 individual albums to his credit.  Mars was born in Germany and raised in Australia.  He became fascinated with music at age 11 and by 14 was confident in his music.  He and his two brothers (he is a middle child) started practicing as a band.  He played the synthesizer while his older brother played the guitar and his younger the drums.  They started playing around their neighborhood and then in shopping centers and finally started getting paid in a restaurant and at wedding receptions. 

The rest is history as they say. 

This album seems designed to provide some relaxation when you return home from work.  The song and the album are the same title.  Some relaxation music is very slow and calm, while this has some jazz components that seem to grab you at whatever level of excitement or anxiety you are at and then bring you to a more relaxed state.  I like this album a lot.  Although I am not familiar with all his albums, I have enjoyed all of the ones I have listened to.  His Christmas music is very nice as well (I consider myself a Christmas music aficionado). 

Here's the video which is a single picture allowing the music to be the star.
Mars Lasar: At the End of the Day.

In addition to being a musician he is a photographer.  You can view his photography here.  Here are a couple examples of his photography:

All lost sheep are not prodigal sons

Artist: Liz Swindle

I guess one of the unique blessings of being a substitute teaching in Sunday School is that even after the lesson is over you continue thinking about it.  There is no lesson for the next week to switch your attention to.  In my case it isn't what I coulda' shoulda' done different but rather just that the scriptures continue to be on my mind and I consider other areas of the lesson and remain aware of how the things in my daily life connect with that lesson. 

I think about some of the lost sheep that I know of in my life.  I remember one mother telling me about her son that may be called a lost sheep.  That even after he stopped coming to church for quite some time he would continue to ask, "Did anyone ask about me at church?"  Even though he may have been lost, he still wanted to be remembered.

I think of various times that I have read news reports about people who were lost, either children kidnapped, hikers lost in the mountains, snowmobilers who didn't come home as expected and runaway teenagers.  Huge efforts by law enforcement, search and rescue, churches and communities ensued to try to find the missing one.  So as a whole we do recognize the value of the lost sheep or the prodigal child.

Artist: Liz Swindle

Maybe because the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son are so closely tied in the scriptures we often think of only boys in this role.  But there are girls who travel this road too.  Still, thinking of it so narrowly that a lost sheep or prodigal will be a young person isn't the full picture either.  A parent, adult or even grandparent can be a lost sheep too.  Let's not forget them, instead attributing being lost to youth only, but lets remember to seek out the lost of all stripes. 

I ran across some videos about Liz Swindle the artist and her working on a painting entitled lost sheep.  Hope you enjoy.

This first one is about her process leading to the painting.

This second one is a brief interview of her model for the Savior.

And the last one is a about the model for the lost sheep, even briefer than the last.