254. Abscond

Excerpt from, "Venus and Serena Against the World," by John Jeremy Sullivan, The New York Times, 8/23/12:

 And from her father. In the latter case, at least, she had been successful. His energy was nowhere in that apartment. This was what I was seeing, I realized, in meeting both Venus and Serena. They have quietly absconded from his shadow.

Abscond:  flee; escape

253. Cant

Excerpt from, "Just Think No," by Maureen Dowd, The New York Times, 8/21/12:


But, for all the Republican cant about how they want to keep government out of the lives of others, the ultraconservatives are panting to meddle in the lives of others.


Cant: hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious, or political nature.

252. Acquiesce

Excerpt from, "Social Justice and Ryan the Heretic," by William McGurn, The Wall Street Journal, 8/21/12:

In retrospect, the turning point is easy to spot: liberal Catholicism's acquiescence in the Deocratic Party's drift toward supporting abortion at a time when church lead3rs had the influence to stop it.

Ac·qui·esce: accept something reluctantly but without protest

251. Meretricious

Excerpt from, "India's Olympic Achievement: Indiffference," by Theodore Dalrymple, The Wall Street Journal, 8/18/12:

 Woe betide the British person who dares to suggest that his country's excellent performance at the Games wasn't a sign of national regeneration but of national frivolity and meretriciousness to which its population and its leaders now turn as naturally as some flowers turn to sun.


Meretricious:  apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity

250. Omics

Excerpt from "Here's an Omical Tale: Scientists Discover Spreading Suffix," by Robert Lee Hotz, The Wall Street Journal, 8/14/12:


In the beginning, there was the genome.
Then came the foldome, the phenome and the connectome, quickly followed by the secretome, the otherome and the unknome.

Over the past decade, a linguistic trickle swelled into a flood of buzzwords tagged with the curiously resonant suffix "ome." Today, hundreds of "omic" terms have worked their way into the lexicon, coined mostly by scientists intent on creating new sub-specialties.

"It sounds futuristic. It sounds computational," said medical geneticist Robert C. Green at Harvard Medical School, who studies what he and his colleagues call the incidentalome—the realm of all incidental medical findings. "When you use the term "omics," it signals you are a new paradigm guy."

Generally, the new terms in scientific literature are meant to highlight the study of a comprehensive collection of data—such as all proteins in a cell (the proteome), all patent law rulings (the patentome) or all human culture (the culturome). Researchers hope to attract attention—and perhaps funding—by giving their topic a name brand that echoes the broader scientific advances of genomics.

249. Polemical

Excerpt from, "The Two Halves of a Neighborhood's Soul Bared for All to See," by Stephen Holden, The New York Times, 8/9/12:


Spike Lee's messy, meandering, bluntly polemical "Red Hook Summer" has one crucial ingredient: a new vitality.  This celebration of African-American resilience in a struggling New York neighborhood envisions two cultures coexisting uneasily in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn. It is on the side of hope.


Polemical: of or involving dispute or controversy

248. Celebrate

                                                                                               photo by JHM

Nightblooming Cereus from my garden on 8/4/12                         

Celebrate the wonder of nature.
This plant blooms only one night each year and the bloom lasts only a few hours.

247. Joy

                                              Minneapolis Sculpture Garden,     Photo by JHM

From, Interview with Matt Olson, ROLU, Minneapolis, MN.

Public art is something that teaches; something that asks a lot of questions, but doesn't necessarily point towards any answer.
Public art should not get too literal. It should be approachable and yet complicated - yet simple. It should be spectacular - loud and big. It should be joy.

Joy: a feeling of great pleasure and happiness