Uncle Garabed’s Notebook (May 13, 2017)

Spanish Proverb

An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.

Success or Failure?

The nineteenth-century naturalist, John Muir, the planet’s first ecoactivist, hiked through thousands of miles of American back country, lobbied feverishly for wilderness preservation, and published classic descriptions of Yosemite Valley and the national parks. His contemporary, railroad baron E.H. Harriman helped to subdue Muir’s verdant paradise with networks of steel and in the process accumulated one of the greatest personal fortunes of the Gilded Age. He could have bought and sold Muir twenty times before breakfast, but to Muir this was a sign of failure, not success. In true Thoreauvian fashion, Muir once grinned, “I am richer than E.H. Harriman. I have all the money I want and he doesn’t.”

Narcissistic Palindrome

I LOVE ME, VOL.I

Natural History

Teacher (pointing at a deer in the zoo); Aram, what is that?
Aram: I don’t know.
Teacher: What does your mother call your father?
Aram: Don’t tell me that’s a louse!

A Fitting Toast

Here’s to our brand new graduate—may he always remain in a class by himself.

Virtue Unrewarded

Edo: I won a prize in a recent contest for bashfulness.
Bedo: What was the prize?
Edo: I don’t know—I was too bashful to go up and get it.

What’s in a Name?

Selimian; Turkish in derivation, borrowed from Arabic, salim, and identified
as a descriptive term, selim is defined as safe, sound, while salim is defined
as immaculate, spotless, pure, free

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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)

• A Reminiscence: John Najarian - February 19, 2020
• Uncle Garabed’s Notebook (Aug. 5, 2017) - August 7, 2017
• Uncle Garabed’s Notebook (July 22, 2017) - July 22, 2017