181. I can do a back-turning kick in tae kwon do, as well as a screw-turning kick. I believe that means I kick butt!

182. "You know how this is:

if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me." (from If You Forget Me, by Pablo Neruda)

183. There is a ginkgo biloba tree in the Kew Gardens in London that is several hundred years old and was stolen as a sapling, then returned.

184. Ginkgo biloba trees have been around since the Jurassic period. They are so hardy that six trees, growing within 2 kilometers of the Hiroshima blast site, still survive.

185. Delight in Disorder by Robert Herrick

A sweet disorder in the dress

Kindles in clothes a wantonness:

A lawn about the shoulders thrown

Into a fine distraction--

An erring lace, which here and there

Enthrals the crimson stomacher--

A cuff neglectful, and thereby

Ribbands to flow confusedly--

A winning wave, deserving note,

In the tempestuous petticoat--

A careless shoe-string, in whose tie

I see a wild civility--

Do more bewitch me than when art

Is too precise in every part.

186. Oscar Wilde's mother, whose pen name was Sperenza ("hope" in Italian), may have outlasted creditors by reciting Aeschylus to them.

187. Wilde's father, William, was both a leading ear-and-eye doctor and a student of archaeology and folklore.

188. Wilde was a Master Mason.

189. One of my great-grandmothers saved the trees on her street in LA from being cut down by threatening the city officers with her own ax; another great-grandmother threw a minister out of the house on one of his Sunday visits (his last?), telling him, "Apparently, Sir, your God is not the same as my God."

190. "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go." Oscar Wilde, not long before his death.