From the Visit Pittsburgh site, for 4/12’s occasion, “How to Celebrate 412 Day in Pittsburgh”:
We love celebrating Pittsburgh every day, but 412 Day is an extra excuse to honor all things Steel City.
Whether you live in the 412 or outside of it (maybe the 724 or 814?), people far and wide come to Pittsburgh to celebrate 412 Day every April 12th. The city comes alive in fun festivities and Pittsburgh pride
A Jacquie Lawson digital greeting card from my old friend Benita Bendon Campbell (who appears frequently on this blog) for Easter, featuring garden flowers, cresshead eggs (eggshells with human faces drawn on them and with green plants — cresses especially — sprouting from them, like hair), and, eventually, large amiable rabbits (not shown below). A penultimate shot of the developing scene:
(#1) A festival of spring flowers and cressheads
This is ultimate March: 🐅 tiger 🐅 tiger 🐅 tiger, as the inaugural rabbits of April mass for April Fool’s Day, Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday, and this year at sundown tomorrow, the first day of Passover, as Good Friday and Easter Sunday are soon upon us; today is the Transgender Day of Visibility, fitting most uncomfortably with what has been, for some years now, Cesar Chavez Day — which I now choose to celebrate as Dolores Huerta Day (you might have an alternative proposal).
So the calendar brings us a contended landscape of some of the best and the worst in humankind, along with the landscape of the daily news, which supplies some of the most appalling reports alongside some of the most heartening. Meanwhile, the mechanics of daily life have not gone well for me; most notably, my internet access vanished for most of yesterday; and dips into very low barometric pressure have made my joints scream with pain. But I endure. And tomorrow is another month.
I am reminded by Amanda Walker that today is DEC-20 Day — it’s the date, kids — causing me to recall times working at research labs that used DEC-20s as their shared workhorse machines. This DEC-20 brought me two cartoons, the first a Zippy glancingly related to Christmas, the second a Bizarro directly about Christmas in popular culture.
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for the outgoing month of November; and 🎄 for the first Sunday in Advent, so the beginning of the religious Christmas season — focused on the Christ child — that ends on Epiphany, January 6th; and 🏴 St. Andrew’s Day, 11/30, the national day of Scotland, so break out the thistles; meanwhile, 🦃 the follow-up to (US) Thanksgiving continues, on what I like to think of as Black Sunday (in the Long Black Weekend: “She walks these days in a long black veil”)
At my house, the adventures in leftover Thanksgiving food — originally, soy sauce and black vinegar roasted chicken (10-12 pieces, mostly thigh meat) on a bed of japchae (crunchy veg on Korean glass noodles, thin noodles made from sweet potato starch) — continues; the chicken has come to an end, but the japchae made the base for a fantastic herbal soup that has so far provided two meals and will give me two more. All of this done with takeout, household staples, and a microwave. I do not cook — that’s long gone — but I am a demon assembler.
Like modern American Christmas, modern American Thanksgiving is an event celebrated with food, companionable gatherings, and pageantry, but Christmas also has tons of music, in a variety of genres. Which Thanksgiving largely lacks. A fact that led Laura Whitton Bonnett to post on Facebook on the day itself:
We were trying to find Thanksgiving music to enjoy during cooking.
LWB then offered a few suggestions for appropriate Thanksgiving music, taking the search into two genres; and I ventured into two more. Suggestions that are no longer of much use this year, so save this posting for next November.
Tomorrow is 11/22; on my calendar this brings up a set of two deeply discordant anniversaries and the birthday of an admirable colleague and friend. And this year 11/22 is the date of Stanford’s preeminent sporting event, to add a note of passionate silliness to the whole business.
🎈 election day in my country🎈 (the first Tuesday in November) — for which I re-play this Jim Benton cartoon:
(#1) From my 3/3/25 posting “Warnings”: it’s all the fault of the Cassandras; they should have made us believe them, they shouldn’t have let us not believe them
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit to inaugurate November; it’s a beautiful bright fall day here in Palo Alto, the day after the costumes and candy of Halloween, and also The Day of the Dead, to honor those who have died before us
This posting is a continuation of yesterday’s “Medicine Day”, a list — an alarming inventory — of the medically significant conditions of my life, very roughly in chronological order. I admitted that the list was surely incomplete, and in fact I was driven to get up in the middle of the night to construct a second list, almost as big as the first.
But I will hold that recital of afflictions off for a bit, to entertain you with a note on one of my grand-child Opal’s favorite Halloween candies and one on yellow-orange marigolds for Mexican remembrances of the beloved dead.
🐅 🐅 🐅 tiger tiger tiger for ultimate October; and of course that very odd couple, Halloween and (Protestant) Reformation Day (put on your best witch’s hat and nail some theses to the old church door!)
Musing over the oddities of my life this morning, I recalled a series of unusual medical conditions that suddenly turned up and then passed away: otoliths with (terrible) vertigo, Bell’s palsy, a (benign but quite notable) scrotal mass, that sort of thing. So I set out to list the medically significant conditions of my life, very roughly in chronological order.
