Author: awelky - Starting with B

By the time you read this, we here at the CALS Encyclopedia of Arkansas (EOA) will have posted our annual April Fools’ Day entry, and while everyone seems to appreciate them, you should know that I’m not just making stuff up. Or that I’m not making everything up in these entries. I undertake a lot of hard work to make things funny. You may have guessed at that level of effort, given that I did do a spoof version of the whole of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” for our entry, “The Possum” (2017). But that’s by no means the whole of it. When I was writing our 2020 entry, “Breeches Panic (1910s),” I scoured the 2008 Historical Report to …

Some years back, my wife read about the Icelandic tradition of Jolabokaflod, which translates literally as “Christmas book flood” and entails giving and receiving new books on Christmas Eve. She liked the idea of this, and so each year we go to our local independently owned bookstore a few days before Christmas and try to find a book for each other. This past year, with Christmas occurring on a Monday, we would have the whole weekend before us for potential reading, and so she said, “We could get each other two books, just to make sure we have enough.” It does not take much to talk me into buying even more books. My two this time around were Robert Sapolsky’s …