My theme: something about books, something about poetry, and something about tech – QA in specific. And Y is Youthful: Y is for The Yearling, Ya-Du and Yoda

 

Yoga begins right where I am – not where I was yesterday or where I long to be.  – Linda Sparrowe

Entertainment Corner

Y is Youthful: Y is for The Yearling

The Yearling is a novel by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings published in March 1938. This was the Pulitzer prize winner for 1939. It was the main selection of the Book of the Month Club in April 1938 and was the number one best seller for twenty-three consecutive weeks in 1938.

This book is a coming-of-age story; the main protagonist is a young boy named Jody who adopts an orphaned fawn and bonds with it. But as time progresses, and life in the Florida backwoods where Jody lives with his parents continues to be hard, Jody has to make a tough decision.

The Book:

I am currently reading this book so I will hold my vote and my judgement for later but will give you my first impressions of the book here. I started reading this book a little later than planned since my initial plan was to feature ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’ but I never got around to reading that one as well. Later, I figured this one might be a better read based on the reviews; and this book won the author the Pulitzer. And the writing does justify that, at least so far considering I finished reading it before I wrote this post. Granted, the prose is a bit wordier than today’s books and I might have skipped a bit of this rather huge book, but ‘scout’s honor’, I did read most of it from the beginning to the end – I am a fast reader!

The lyrically lovely descriptions of sights and scenes seem to contrast with the coarse language of the dialog. But that contrast makes the book and the story even more starkly real. Human nature(with all its ups and downs), the beauty and beast sides of nature and wildlife, the harsh realities and the sweetness of growing-up, love, family, friendships, humor – all of these find their way into this classic in simply gorgeous prose that mingles with the coarser language of the spoken dialect of the characters (true to the region, the era it is set in, and the people who are portrayed) to create book(and movie) magic.

The Movie(s):

I just found the TV movie made based on this book on Amazon Prime and am finished watching it – and since I was doing them in parallel, I could see that it was quite true to the book. The dialog used in the movie seem to be taken directly from the book very often. As always, there are changes – some secondary characters and scenes related to them don’t appear in the movie at all but I did not feel it impacted the central theme of the story. I definitely enjoyed the movie.

There is an older Gregory Peck 1947 version that has won a couple of Oscars which I am looking forward to watch as well.

The Question: The Book or the Movie(s)

Many of you might not have read this book or watched the movie(s) (unless it was required reading in school growing up) but if you have, go ahead and vote.

[yop_poll id="25"]

• The NY Times review of the 1947 movie based on the book

“Yoga teaches us to cure what need not be endured and endure what cannot be cured.”  -B.K.S. Iyengar

Poetry Corner

Y is Youthful: Y is for Ya-Du

What is the Ya-Du poetic form and how to write it?

The Ya-Du is a Burmese verse form, which is used to write about the emotions evoked by the seasons. This form came from Thailand during the Thai occupation of Burma in the 14th century.

This form uses climbing rhymes and thus helps exercise our poetic muscles. The ya-du has no more than three stanzas of five lines each. The first four lines of the ya-du have four syllables each; while the last line can have either five, seven, nine or eleven syllables. The last two lines rhyme in the conventional way – last syllables rhyming. The climbing rhyme is between syllables four, three and two of the first three, and the last three lines of each stanza. And don’t forget, the theme, as with haiku, is seasons – specifically the emotions evoked by seasons.

So the Ya-Du’s features are:

• Stanzaic – no more than 3 stanzas of 5 lines each.
• Syllabic – Lines 1,2, 3, 4 have 4 syllables each; line 5 can have either 5, 7, 9 or 11 syllables.
• Has a climbing rhyme structure as shown below, where ‘a’ is the climbing rhyme between lines 1 – 3, ‘b’ is the climbing rhyme between lines 3-5, and ‘c’ is the conventional rhyme between lines 4 and 5:
  • xxxa
    xxax
    xaxb
    xxbc
    xbxxc

and so on with similar or different rhyme schemes for each stanza (abc, def, ghi OR abc, abc, abc OR other combinations)

h/t and additional reading for more examples:

• Bob Newman’s VoleCentral
• PoetryMagnumOpus

My Example Ya-Du:

Summer, Winter or Spring?

Summer in spring;
days that bring a
chilling cold breeze;
others please us
with lease of newness.

– ©2019 Vidya Tiru/LadyInRead@LadyInReadWrites

“Yoga is the journey of the self, through the self, to the self.” – The Bhagavat Gita

QA(Tech) Corner

Y is Youthful: Y is for Yoda

What is a Yoda Condition?

This is not really a QA term, but still an interesting software term. I initially thought I would write about the Y2K bug but that is so dated now, and makes me realize how that time flies fast and makes me remember that other number – age! Oh the number of tests we tested and the hours we put in to ensure the world does not collapse as the clock turned to that dreaded number. Would Nostradamus have predicted a more dire prophecy than those Y2K pundits did? I wonder…..

Anyway, back to the Y I do want to talk about – Yoda conditions. The name does spring from the Yoda we all know and love… and his tendency to flip things around when he talks. As in – “Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future..” – Yoda

Wrapping up the Y Post

“Yoga is not about touching your toes, it is what you learn on the way down.” ~ Jigar Gor

What are your comments or questions about today’s post? I would love to hear from you. Check out previous posts in this challenge using the links below.

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