Christmas song word clouds

(As I typed that title, I thought: English is fun. You can put four nouns in a row and the first three can modify the fourth.)

Here are some word clouds I made at wordle.net by pasting in the lyrics to Christmas songs. The size of each word corresponds to how frequently it's used in the song. See if you can guess them. (Most are easy this year, but one or two might challenge you.) You can click on the images to enlarge them. Merry Christmas!

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Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya.

Here's one of my favorite quizzes on sporcle.com: Can you complete the Princess Bride quotes? I was in high school when the movie came out. I saw it several times in theaters, then many times on video. Still, it's been a while since I watched it, so I was surprised to find that my brain is still finding space to store the dialogue from whole scenes. (This may explain why there seems to be so little space in there for other things these days, like people's names or the location of important papers. Or why I accidentally leave things in the microwave and find them there the next day. "Now I remember! We were going to have peas with dinner!")

"Other Verses" Game

A few years ago I put together this game for a choir party. The phrases are from Christmas songs, but not from the first verse. Each phrase has been broken in half. Can you match the two parts of each phrase and then decide which carol each phrase is from?


No more will sin and sorrow grow

All meanly wrapped in swathing bands

When I was a seeker, I sought both night and day

Born a babe on Bethlehem's plain

What the gladsome tidings be

Page and monarch forth they went, forth they went together

We are not daily beggars that beg from door to door

Mary was the mother there

Sing, choirs of angels, sing in exultation

I sought the Lord to help me, and He showed me the way

And the Christ that baby fair

And still is sung in ev'ry tongue

Nor thorns infest the ground

Sing, all ye citizens of heav'n above

Mild he lays his glory by

Which inspire your heav'nly song

For lo! the days are hast'ning on, by prophets seen of old

Lived on earth our Savior holy

When with the ever-circling years shall come the time foretold

Proclaim the holy birth

Born that man no more may die

With the poor, and mean, and lowly

The angels' song of glory

And in a manger laid

Gold we bring to crown Him again

Through the rude wind's wild lament, and the bitter weather

O morning stars, together

But we are neighbors' children, whom you have seen before

Back from NaNoWriMo Land

November is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and this was my second year participating. The goal is to write 50,000 words minimum during the month of November, and my story wrapped up at 50,191 words yesterday. Whew!

They have a T-shirt that says "Camp NaNoWriMo: An idyllic writers retreat, smack-dab in the middle of your crazy life." It's true! It's like a mini-vacation without going anywhere. Normal life goes on, but the things I would otherwise do with my spare time (like posting on this blog) give way to the effort of getting that next 1000 words written, and then the next, and so on.

Last year I finished a novel too, but frankly, it stunk. I haven't even looked at it since then and probably never will. I like this year's novel much better. It's definitely a rough first draft, but this time I think it's worth revising and improving. The great thing about NaNoWriMo is that it motivates you to finish a first draft, even if it's rough, so that you actually have something to work with and not just an idea in your head.

One of the ways I stayed motivated was to go on the NaNoWriMo forums after each 1000 words or so and play some of the creative word games I found there. My kids enjoyed the games too and helped me come up with ideas. We found that some of the games are fun to play with each other in the car or while waiting in line, although they sometimes get us laughing hysterically and people give us strange looks. Here are a few of our favorites:

The Useless Super Power Game
One person thinks of a useless super power to grant another person, like "You can fly, but only for 2 seconds on alternate Thursdays," or "You can read the minds of earthworms." Then the next person grants a useless super power to the first person, and so on.

Good Idea/Bad Idea
One person gives a good idea, like "Good idea: brushing your teeth every day." The next person might say, "Bad idea: brushing your teeth with corn syrup every day." Then that person gives a good idea of their own which the next person will turn into a bad idea.

Corrupt a Wish
One person states a wish, like "I wish I had a pizza." The next person gets to corrupt that wish by saying something like "All right, but it's covered with anchovies." (Assuming you don't like anchovies.) Then that person makes a wish and the next person gets to corrupt it. We make a rule that you can't be mean, only funny. It's also fun to try to come up with a wish that can't be corrupted, like "I wish I had a pizza with only the toppings I like, that tastes good, isn't poisonous or harmful in any way, won't choke me when I eat it, and has nothing else wrong with it." (Then the next person might say, "Okay, but an angry dragon is holding it.")

First sentences quiz

The other day I read an author's blog post about getting the first words of a book right. Now I'm noticing the first words of every book I read. Here are the first sentences of 14 classic books that I grabbed off my shelves. See if you can guess the titles and authors. All were written before 1965. I've skipped any introductions or prefaces and gone straight to Chapter 1.


1. As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a den, and laid me down in that place to sleep; and as I slept, I dreamed a dream.

2. I never really knew Father very well till we moved to the ranch on the Fort Logan-Morrison road, not far from Denver.

3. In the year 1866 the whole maritime population of Europe and America was excited by a mysterious and inexplicable phenomenon.

4. After an unequivocal experience of the inefficacy of the subsisting Federal Government, you are called upon to deliberate on a new Constitution for the United States of America.

5. Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show.

6. Taran wanted to make a sword; but Coll, charged with the practical side of his education, decided on horseshoes.

7. In 1815 Monsieur Charles-Francois-Bienvenu Myriel was Bishop of Digne.

8. Dog.

9. O, for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention!

10. Rose sat all alone in the big best parlor, with her little handkerchief laid ready to catch the first tear, for she was thinking of her troubles, and a shower was expected.

11. The Western American Explorers’ Club, in the city of San Francisco, was honored as it had never been honored before in the first week of October 1883 by being promised to be first to hear the details of an unexplained, extraordinary adventure; the biggest news story of the year, the story the whole world was waiting impatiently to hear – the tale of Professor William Waterman Sherman’s singular voyage.

12. In the ancient city of London, on a certain autumn day in the second quarter of the sixteenth century, a boy was born to a poor family of the name of Canty, who did not want him.

13. Once upon a time there was a very beautiful doll’s-house; it was red brick with white windows, and it had real muslin curtains and a front door and a chimney.

14. A throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments, and gray, steeple-crowned hats, intermixed with women, some wearing hoods and others bareheaded, was assembled in front of a wooden edifice, the door of which was heavily timbered with oak, and studded with iron spikes.

How to Improve at Geography

Step 1: Get a nasty cold.

Step 2: Keep the cold for at least a week, long enough to be frantic for any distraction you can find that involves sitting still so you're less likely to cough your lungs out.

(Steps 1 and 2 can be left out if for some reason you'd rather proceed directly to step 3.)

Step 3: While dawdling away time on the computer, play the geography game at FreeRice. (The default game is English Vocabulary, but click on "Change Subjects" and you can choose "Identify Countries on the Map." Thanks to Harmony for telling me about this great web site!)

Step 4: Discover that your geographical knowledge is not so great. Luckily, this is a multiple-choice game, and your guesses are often pretty good. But you are not satisfied with this. No, you want to know where those countries are instead of getting the same ones wrong all the time and dropping back down to the lowest level of play.

Step 5: By chance, discover some more geography games listed on another web site.

Step 6: Try the fill-in-the-map games at JetPunk.

Step 7: Download the free software for the simple but helpful game Seterra and marvel at what a great resource it will be for the kids. When you're done with it, that is. Play it numerous times to work on your weak areas. (Oceania and Africa and Asia . . . and Europe . . . and Central America . . . oh, just work on everything like I had to do.)

Step 8: Now you can reign supreme over at FreeRice. That wimpy little multiple-choice game doesn't have a chance against you. But wait -- what is this? You find The Traveler IQ Challenge. Scroll down and look condescendingly at the world map. You know those countries now, or most of them, anyway. With a confident click, start the challenge.

Step 9: Quickly realize that this is a whole different level of geography game. It's timed, and you have to answer fast or lose your chance. It asks you to pinpoint cities and landmarks rather than just countries. It measures the distance between your answer and the correct location. It gives you a "Traveler IQ" score at the end. It's awesome.

Step 10: Spend the next week obsessively trying to improve your score. Revisit the other geography games, but for serious training this time. Try to get all those tiny countries that start with "B" straight. (Bhutan, Bahrain, Burundi, Benin...)

Step 11: As your cold finally starts to go away, notice the blank Africa map on your homeschool bulletin board. Realize that you now know the names of ALL of those countries (except maybe those little "B"s), and the rough locations of major cities in a few of them. Look at the world map on the wall. Recognize countries that until a week ago, you had heard about on the news but weren't even sure which continent they were on.

Step 12: Like a total-nerd-and-proud-of-it, put your Traveler IQ score on your blog (in the right-hand sidebar).

Step 13: Play some more. Every time you get even 1 point higher, update your blog badge. You must be feeling good about this new knowledge or something.

Step 14: When the kids beg to have a turn playing the geography games too, graciously allow them to do so, in moderation. Notice how they start to comment on the Africa map during meals. Tell them some of the islands you're still working on learning, and watch them run to the world map to find them for you. Realize that your guilt over not doing much geography this year in home school is melting right away.

Step 15: Very important: Don't forget to keep practicing so your score can stay ahead of the kids'!

Christmas carol quiz

Merry Christmas Eve! Can you guess these carols from their Wordle images? (The bigger the word, the more frequently it appears in the song.)

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Word clouds

I've seen word clouds before, but today I saw a link to a site where you can make your own: wordle.net. It takes your text and creates a picture where the size of the words indicates their frequency. I wanted to try it out with something fairly long, so I pasted in the text of a talk I gave in church last year on citizenship. Here's the result. (Click to see it larger.)

I also tried it with a talk I gave a few months later on tolerance. (Last year was a busy one for giving talks. They've let me rest this year.)

Pretty fun!

More quizzes

The "100 most common English words" quiz has been redesigned. (I notice some of the words have changed too, so they're working from a different list now.) On the same site are a bunch of new quizzes. Try the punctuation symbols quiz, the musical symbols quiz, the 50 largest countries quiz, or go here if you have a whole evening to fritter away.

Link to a very fun quiz

You have 5 minutes to guess the 100 most common words in English. When you get one right it appears in the list. I went like gangbusters for about 90 seconds and then really had to think. The 5 minutes ended, I got my score (54 out of 100), and then there was a little bit of head-slapping when I saw the ones I missed. Try it! (But go easy on the slapping.)

Bookopoly

Last Christmas my brother gave us a "Make Your Own Opoly" game. You pick a theme and decide what the different spaces on the board will be, what the money will look like, and what will be on the good news/bad news cards. After brainstorming off and on for months, the kids and I finally got everything decided. Not surprisingly, we made a "Bookopoly" game. Everyone got to put in some of their favorites. Some of the properties for sale are Mr. McGregor's garden, 221B Baker Street, the "great grey-green, greasy Limpopo River," and Narnia. (Narnia is the most expensive property, of course.) The "jail" space is Mordor. But the most fun was making the good news and bad news cards. We intend to make more, but here are some of our favorites.

Good news:
You exhibit your giant brother at a circus all afternoon. Collect $200.
You open a repair shop next door to Mr. Fixit's. All his unsatisfied customers come to you right away. Collect $1000.
You sell your horse to a bunch of hobbits and a Ranger who look like they're in a hurry to get somewhere. Collect $500.
Sam-I-Am runs out of ham. He comes to your door to ask for more. "How much?" he hollers. "A hundred dollars."

Bad news:
You got carried away, you bad mouse. Pay $500 for dollhouse damages.
Your school bus got stuck in the time of the dinosaurs and you locked yourself out. Pay $100 for a locksmith, quick!
Basilisks in the plumbing AGAIN. Pay $200 for drain cleaner.
You lost your library card. Go to Mordor.