MORE BUGS: If you’ve sent an e-mail to Round the Square in the
past couple weeks, it may be lost in cyber-space.

As our online readers know, The Era has been in the process of
moving to a new website and we are still encountering some bugs. We
are working on the problems and hope to have them rectified fairly
soon.

Our hope today is to let our online readers know that we are,
indeed, aware of the difficulties – provided this column is
properly unloaded onto our website!

With some luck, we’ll have everything back on track within the
next couple of weeks, so please be patient.

40 DAYS: Ever wish you could escape the rat race and explore a
more spiritual approach to life?

That’s the question we got from a casting company looking for
participants in a future Learning Channel documentary, “The
Monastery.”

Participants will agree to live in a monastery for 40 days as
they search for meaning and understanding in their lives, according
to representative Mary Ann Black. “I would appreciate your help in
publicizing our search.”

The nationwide search calls for men to live in a monastery and
for women to live in a convent for six weeks, to conduct their own
search for meaning and understanding. You do not need to have a
religious background, but you should be willing to engage in the
process.

More details can be found at www.heerycasting.com .

RHYME TIME: In looking through the papers 100 years ago to read
accounts of the first McKean County Fair, we noticed this little
piece that caught our attention. What we noted was how many of
these words are no longer in “circulation” – in fact, how many do
you know?

Also, in the 100 years since, many since-coined words would
rhyme with some of these, e.g., “squirt” with “peart,” or “musk”
with “brusque.” We challenge our readers to think of others:

“There are about 60 words in English that have no rhyme. Among
them are the following: aitch, alb, amongst, avenge, bilge,
breadth, brusque, bulb, colf, counch, eulm, eusp, depth, doth,
eighth, fifth, film, forge, forth, fugue, gulf, hemp, lounge,
mauve, month, morgue, mourned, ninth, oblige, of, peart, pint,
porch, pork, poulp, prestige, puss, recumb, sauce, scarce, scarf,
sixth, spoilt, swolm, sylph, tenth, torsk, twelfth, unplagued,
volt, warmth, wasp, wharves, width, with, wolf, wolves.”