Off to get culturized!

Day Twelve – June 29, 2018 – Chautauqua The first thing on today’s agenda is a lecture on codes;   but it starts at nine!!   Betsy, Roddy, and I are up early enough to have breakfast (delicious leftovers!) and Myra comes down, too, before we leave.   We decide that the advantage of staying upstairs, in the “dormitory”, is that we get first dibs on breakfast!   That done, we head to the United Methodist House for our lecture. Cool clock in the United Methodists house. The speaker, Chaz Kerschner, is a retired cryptanalysist from the NSA!   He takes offense at my NPR shirt! Apparently there was a time when the NSA and NPR were enemies!!   He’s being facetious (I think).   His lecture is entitled, “”Codes – from Caesar to the 21 st Century” and begins with Egyptian hieroglyphics, moves on to the Rosetta Stone, Caesar’s Shift and all the other stages of code development, including the Enigma Machine, the Purple Code, Jefferson’s wheel cipher, and Navajo Code Ta

Day Eleven – June 28, 2018 – Chautauqua A typical morning here at Chautauqua – everyone wanders upstairs/downstairs at their own pace and finds something for breakfast.   Nick makes coffee and there is oatmeal and leftovers and banana bread and fruit. The 10:45 lecture is a popular choice.   Kory Stamper is a lexicographer and author, and an editor for the family of the Merriam-Webster Dictionaries.   Her book is Word by Word:   The Secret Life of Dictionaries .   She is hysterical!   We could have listened to her for ever!    She told us that she is an obsessive reader.   When she’s on a train with nothing to read, she will read the receipts in her pockets!   That doesn’t mean that she retains any of what she reads!   She says she’s a lot of fun at parties!!   (But I’m certain that she really is!)   Reading is one of the prime requisites in her field. Some of her current reading.  Everything is fair game, from regional newspapers to trade