Special boxed sets, once they started appearing, were more wondrous still.
It makes you think of Shakespeare's Hamlet: "Oh day and night," Horatio says after the ghost appears, "but this is wondrous strange!" Hamlet's reply says it all: "And therefore as a stranger give it welcome".
As Russell Shorto points out in his new history of Amsterdam, this tale was made up by an American (Mary Mapes Dodge, who had never been to Holland when she wrote her 1865 book, "Hans Brinker, or The Silver Skates," in which the account of the boy's wondrous feat appears).
On the one hand, it is connected to the arts and sciences: all wondrous inventions appear at first to be the result of magical operations, until their true causes are discovered.
In fact, his passion for the nineteenth-century romantics, who accused scientists of making nature out to be far less wondrous than it appears, made up part of the central riposte for his 1998 book, Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder.
During a visit to a national grocers' convention in Orlando, Fla., he appeared almost giddy about the wondrous technology of supermarket scanners, apparently unaware that they had been quite familiar to American shoppers for more than a decade.
Soon, those wondrous and forbidden delicacies appeared on a platter before me.
Thus the focus and the stage space could appear to expand and contract in wondrous fluidity.
This character, Yunior, appears to be the same Yunior who narrated "Brief Wondrous Life" and who stars in "Drown," Mr. Díaz's critically acclaimed 1996 debut collection of stories.
In light of the history that these streets have witnessed, this humble scene would appear to be a final heartbreaking wonder in this wondrous city.
Rosi appears like a documentary filmmaker but he's really a wondrous storyteller, one who has created a genre all his own, and in the process changed us, the audience, to fit around it.
