Wilco

Wilco is an American alternative rock band based in Chicago, Illinois. The band was formed in 1994.

Tweedy

Wilco's lineup has changed frequently, with only singer Jeff Tweedy and bassist John Stirratt remaining from the original incarnation. The current lineup is guitarist Nels Cline, multi-instrumentalists Pat Sansone and Mikael Jorgensen, and drummer Glenn Kotche.

Wilco has released nine albums: eight studio albums and a live double album. They also have four collaborations, 3 with Billy Bragg, and one with The Minus 5.

Wilco was formed following the breakup of the alternative country music group Uncle Tupelo after singer Jay Farrar quit the band in 1994 because of issues with co-singer Jeff Tweedy. Tweedy was able to keep the remaining Uncle Tupelo lineup (bassist John Stirratt, drummer Ken Coomer, and multi-instrumentalist Max Johnston and sometime guitarist Brian Henneman)

They considered keeping the Uncle Tupelo name. They decided to rename the band based on a military slang term. WILCO is a portmanteau abbreviation of will comply. The term came into usage during World War II. Combined with the term "roger" (meaning that a radio message was received) "roger wilco" means "message received and we will comply." Will Comply is, as Tweedy has said, a fairly ironic name for a rock band that often does not comply.

Wilco got a lot of media attention for the circumstances of its fourth album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot . After it was recorded, Reprise Records rejected the album and dismissed Wilco from the label.

Wilco maintained the rights to the album, streamed it on its website, and then sold the album to Nonesuch Records for a 2002 release. It became their most successful release.

They won two Grammy Awards for their next studio album, A Ghost Is Born, including Best Alternative Music Album.

Wilco's The Whole Love was released in 2011.

Good Friday

Good Friday is the Friday before Easter, the day on which Christians annually observe the commemoration of the Crucifixion of Jesus Christ. It doesn't seem to be a day that would be considered "good."  That is because it probably was never intended to be "good" or even a Friday.

Good Friday is called "good" only in English. We don't really know the origin of the day's name but some say it is from "Gottes Freitag" meaning "God's Friday" or from the the German Gute Freitag. However, the Gute Freitag explanation seems weak because Germans call this day Karfreitag meaning Sorrowful or Suffering Friday.

The Anglo-Saxons called it Long Friday. In other countries, it is known not as "good" but as Holy Friday, Black Friday, Great Friday, Long Friday, and Silent Friday.

The phrase "Good Friday" does not appear in the Bible. The word Friday isn't in the Bible. Actually, the days are called by numbers. The seventh day is the Sabbath and the other days are first, second, third and so on.

According to the Jewish calendar, Jesus died on 15 Nisan, the first day of Passover and translated to the Gregorian (Western) calendar, that would be April 7. But Christians determined not to commemorate it on a fixed date and followed the varying date of the Jewish Passover which conforms to the Jewish lunisolar calendar (rather than the Gregorian solar calendar).

That connected Jesus' Last Supper with his disciples on the evening before his Crucifixion to the Passover seder.  Despite this "inaccuracy," this dating has continued making Good Friday (and so, Easter) fall between March 20 (the first possible date for Passover) and April 23.

Catholic and Protestant churches say that Jesus was killed on Friday and resurrected Sunday morning, the year given as 33 A.D. The Early New Testament church did not observe an Easter holiday, but to move people away from celebrating the Biblical Christian Passover, the Catholic Church appropriated a pagan holiday of the goddess Ishtar (Astarte) who was worshiped by Babylonians and Assyrians who was celebrated around the spring equinox. 

Other Biblical scholars interpret Jesus' crucifixion at being 3 p.m. on a third day (Wednesday not Friday) in 30 A.D. After 3 days and nights in a tomb, he was resurrected on our modern day Easter.

cross-posted from Weekends in Paradelle

Head Over Heels

Head over heels is a rather disorienting phrase that began as the now-obsolete heels over head.

Head over heels made its debut in English in the early 15th century. It had the more literal meaning of taking a bad fall where you flipped or somersaulted and your head went forward over your heels.

It wasn't until the mid-1800s that we began to figuratively fall head over heels. Rather than describing tumbling over, it took on the metaphorical sense of being so infatuated with someone that you feel like you're somersaulting or falling. This popular idiom is closely related to our use of falling for someone and falling in love with someone.

Head over Heels is the title of films from 1922, 1937, 2001 and a 1979 film (AKA Chilly Scenes of Winter).

It is the title of albums by the Cocteau Twins, Cornerstone, Paula Abdul and Poco, and is the title of songs by ABBA, The Go-Go's, Switchfoot, and (my personal favorite) "Head Over Heels" by Tears for Fears.

Baltimore Orioles

The Baltimore Orioles are a professional baseball team based in Baltimore, Maryland and are a member of the Eastern Division of Major League Baseball's American League.

In its first year, it was a team in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, as the Milwaukee Brewers, The team was next moved to St. Louis and became the St. Louis Browns where it remained for 52 years. The Browns moved to Baltimore in 1954.

They adopted the name from the Baltimore Oriole (Icterus galbula), a small blackbird of the passerine family. The bird got its name in 1808 because the male's colors resembled those on the coat of arms of George Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who was part of the Calvert family that established the Maryland colony in the 17th century. The Baltimore Oriole is also the state bird of Maryland.

Earlier short-lived Baltimore teams, in the early 1870s, were called "Lord Baltimore" and "Maryland" respectively. The first club to be called the Baltimore Orioles was a charter member of the American Association in 1882. When the AA folded after the 1891 season, four of its teams were brought into the expanded National League, including the Orioles.


The newly-formed American League wanted to compete directly with the National League's New York Giants, but the Giants used their political clout to block the American League from placing a club there. Instead, a team was placed in Baltimore in 1901.

So, in 1954, when the St. Louis Browns moved to Baltimore, they adopted the city's old traditional baseball nickname.

Many fans, and the team itself, also refer to the team as the "O's" or the "Birds".

Primrose

Because it blooms so early in the springtime ) throughout much of Europe), the common primrose is given its name.  The word"primrose" is from Old French primerose through medieval Latin prima rosa, meaning "first rose." The plant is actually not closely related to the rose family, though that may not have been known when it entered English in the first half of the fifteenth century.

Primula vulgaris is a species native to western and southern Europe and east to Germany, Ukraine, the Crimea, and the Balkans and into northwest Africa and southwest Asia.

It is an edible plant and its flowers can be made into wine.

The Evening Primrose (Oenothera) is a genus of about 125 species of herbaceous flowering plants, native to North and South America. It is also known as suncups and sundrops. Although they share the name, they are not closely related to the true primroses and not really related to early spring.

This was a plant we had in our home garden and as a child I loved the fact that unlike all the other flowers, they opened within minutes of  "evening."

Most of the species have yellow flowers but there are white (especially desert plants), purple, pink and red. a few.

Primrose has become a more popular baby name recently because of the books and movies of the Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins. Primrose Everdeen is the name of the main character's beloved kid sister who follows in the herbal healing ways of her mother.

Primrose is also the name of some American towns including ones in Alaska, Nebraska, Rhode Island
and Wisconsin.