Emily Quinlan

Tidbit Week One
"The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read."
                 ~Abraham Lincoln

Tidbit Week Two
"Books are like truth serum-if you don't read, you can't figure out what is real."
               ~Freak from Freak the Mighty

Tidbit Week Three
     The Hunger Games is partly influenced by the Theseus and the Minotaur story, and by the historical figure of Spartacus. As part of her research, Collins read numerous books on wilderness survival and books about Roman gladiators, such as: The Life of Crassus by Plutarch.


Tidbit Week Four
     Dahl loved eating chocolate, though he didn’t much care for chocolate ice cream or chocolate cake. It is said that when he was a young man, Roald Dahl’s hair was the color of milk chocolate.

Tidbit Week Five
     Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss) was a children's author extraordinaire, but were you aware that he was also briefly a political cartoonist? He drew for the left-leaning PM daily newspaper from 1941 to 1943 -- a two-year period that came after Geisel (1904-1991) started writing children's books, but before he created iconic works such as "One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish" and "The Cat in the Hat." Some say Geisel's cartoon "Uncle Sam" was a prototype for the hatted cat's physical appearance.

Tidbit Week Six

This is a SATOR Square. It is the oldest palindrome in the world. A palindrome is a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward. Except with this palindrome it is not only read the same way read backwards and forwards, but it is read the same up and down. There are many interpretations for what the square means and there is not a consensus. For example, some think it stand for seeder or sower. What is more interesting, is that some thought that it had healing powers because it was a palindrome. Now those are some powerful words!



Tidbit Week Seven
      Believe it or not, there is a book written in response to the book Goodnight Moon. It is called Goodnight iPad. This is a parody on the book, but it actually relates to the times.

Tidbit Week Seven
   Sometimes even schools can make mistakes when spelling....
School Spelling Mistakes


Tidbit Week Eight
     This is how Mo Willems came up for his idea for Pigeon,

Willems says Pigeon is the only one of his characters that he didn't create himself. As an aspiring picture book author, he spent a month in Oxford, England, hoping to improve his craft. It didn't work. "And I made all these really terrible books," he says, "and in the margins, I started drawing this pigeon who was complaining about the other books.

The fowl-tempered pigeon commanded Willems to stop working on his other books and pay attention: " 'Don't write about them. Write about me. I'm funnier,' " he recalls the pigeon telling him.

Tidbit Week Nine

We'll Begin with a Box
We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes, 
But the plural of ox becomes oxen, not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice,
Yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
Why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I speak of my foot and show you my feet,
And I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those,
Yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
And the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine: she, shis and shim!
Let's face it - English is a crazy language.
There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger;
Neither apple nor pine in pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England.
We take English for granted, but if we explore its paradoxes,
We find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square,
And a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing,
Grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?
Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and
get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
Sometimes I think all the folks who grew up speaking English
should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane.
In what other language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
We ship by truck but send cargo by ship.
We have noses that run and feet that smell.
We park in a driveway and drive in a parkway.
And how can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same,
While a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language
In which your house can burn up as it burns down,
In which you fill in a form by filling it out, and
In which an alarm goes off by going on.
And in closing, if Father is Pop, how come Mother's not Mop?