[This entry is cross posted at ordinary-times.com]

Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday. Cool is turning into hot, but humidity is still a few weeks away. This is prime seer-sucker time. Parks where ice cream vendors hang out are calling. Edwardian style military bands don’t play in gazebos anymore like they’re supposed to, but cell phones are everywhere and Amnesty International says cobalt used to manufacture yours may have been mined by children, but the chances will drop considerably by 2025 if the Democratic Republic of the Congo keeps their word and ends the practice by 2025. I’m just messing with you. Nobody thinks about that anymore.

Fire up your music app and stream something you’d think Sgt. Pepper’s would play if they weren’t The Beatles. Oompa band stuff. Fly a kite. Get a hotdog and wish you had one of those hats that feel like they’re made out of rice cakes and have a red, white, and blue band; the ones old politicians pretended they always wore.

Howsoever you spend your POETS Day afternoon, take a minute for a little verse. It’s good for you.

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Matthew Arnold’s father, Dr. Thomas Arnold, stood as headmaster at Rugby School and took it as his mission to “change the face of education ‘all through the Public Schools of England,’” according to the anonymous biographer at poetryfoundation.org. He was a moralist and a strict Christian who was so identified with his school that when Thomas Hughes wrote his classic novel set at Rugby, Tom Brown’s School Days, he didn’t bother to fictionalize the headmaster. The Doctor was an unavoidable presence at the school during his time and as much a part of the institution as the Old Quad Buildings. That means that in Hughes’s telling, it was Matthew Arnold’s father who expelled the bully Harry Paget Flashman, OBE, Victoria’s Cross, Knight Commander of Bath, Knight Commander Indian Empire, Congressional Medal of Honor (USA), Southern Cross of Honor (Confederate States of America), etc.