Uncle Garabed’s Notebook (July 30, 2016)

Holy Cow!

Tennyson had the British Empire for God, and Queen Victoria for Virgin Mary.

… Lady Gregory

Let’s Face It

Everybody feels sorry for the blind man; no one can tolerate the deaf man.

Daffy-nition

American: A man drinking Brazilian coffee from an English cup, while sitting on Danish furniture after coming home in a German car from an Italian movie, who picks up a Japanese ball point pen and writes a letter to his congressman demanding that something be done about spending the country’s diminishing dollar reserves on inferior Chinese merchandise.

Nostalgia

Back in the old days when the Dikranagerdtsi old-timers would sit around playing pinochle, and one side had the other at its mercy, one of the victors would call out to an imaginary person in the background, “Khacho, baltan pir.” In other words, “Khacho, bring the cleaver.” Evidently there was a noted butcher in Dikranagerd named Khachadour.

Off the Deep End

Edo: Do you find Haiganoush to be temperamental?

Bedo: Oh, yes! 95% temper, 5% mental.

What’s in a Name?

The noted cellist Gregor Piatigorsky got his name from a city in Russia.

The name Pyatigorsk is derived from two fused Russian words which mean five mountains and the city is so called because of the five peaks of the Beshtau (which also means five mountains in Turkic) of the Caucasian mountain range overlooking the city.

Gregor, however, was born in Ekaterinburg, so a forebear may have originally hailed from Pyatigorsk.

Appraisal

It has been reported that the great violin pedagogue Ivan Galamian once described Gregor Piatigorsky as the greatest string player of all time.

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CK Garabed

Weekly Columnist

C.K. Garabed (a.k.a. Charles Kasbarian) has been active in the Armenian Church and Armenian community organizations all his life. As a writer and editor, he has been a keen observer of, and outspoken commentator on, political and social matters affecting Armenian Americans. He has been a regular contributor to the Armenian Reporter and the AGBU Literary Quarterly, “ARARAT.” For the last 30 years, Garabed has been a regular contributor to the Armenian Weekly. He produces a weekly column called “Uncle Garabed's Notebook,” in which he presents an assortment of tales, anecdotes, poems, riddles, and trivia; for the past 10 years, each column has contained a deconstruction of an Armenian surname. He believes his greatest accomplishment in life, and his contribution to the Armenian nation, has been the espousing of Aghavni, and the begetting of Antranig and Lucine.

Latest posts by CK Garabed (see all)

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