‘Cause today is Belgian Pride Parade day in Brussels!
From Johan Rooryck (in Brussels) to Facebook today:
So what do you do when you have misjudged the size of sprinkles containers you ordered online, and have come to own more sprinkles than you can eat in a lifetime? You just make a load of cakes for Belgian Pride Day, is what you do. Andrea did, that is.
Three occasions, the first deprecable in intent, though with some charms in the local execution of it; the second earnest in aim, but distressing in its commercialization and its substitution of a day’s dose of sentimentality for any lasting celebration of mothers (plus, it interferes with Ann Daingerfield’s birthday):
May 7-9: Palo Alto’s celebration of Cinco de Mayo on 5/7 (it has to be on a Saturday)
Mother’s Day on 5/8 (the punctuation of the name is merely the one I fancy; don’t get all riled up about it)
Ann Daingerfield Zwicky’s 85th birthday — she died in 1985 — on 5/9 (this is Arnold Zwicky’s Blog, so you get my occasions)
And then three sub-occasions:
family breakfast (a weekly event, this week a three-generation affair for me, Elizabeth Daingerfield Zwicky, and Opal Armstrong Zwicky) on 5/7
Masturbation Day on 5/7 (a major celebration in my one-person household) (I put the responsibility for the choice of date on Good Vibrations in San Francisco, and specifically on Susie Bright, though she will probably demur)
AMZ’s return to Sacred Harp singing on 5/8 (only via Zoom, but still)
Some close analysis, and some reflections, on the Jacquie Lawson animated greeting card “Easter Morning”, that I posted about yesterday, in “Sheep grazing among the Paschal roses”. There I looked at purple hellebores (and some other other crucifixion-symbolic flowers) and at Bach’s aria “Sheep May Safely Graze” (a performance of which accompanies the animation).
Now about the details of the animation’s images (especially, but by no means only, the plants).
From my old friend (of 60+ years now) BBC — Benita Bendon Campbell, aka Bonnie Campbell — yesterday, a Jacquie Lawson electronic greeting card “Eastern Morning”, full of symbols of the holiday (including many plants, hellebores among them) and accompanied by a particularly bright orchestral setting of Bach’s gorgeous aria Schafe können sicher weiden (“Sheep May Safely Graze”). Solid delight.
First, some plants. Then the music.
🐇 🐇 🐇 Despite yesterday’s incident of gun-jumping, premature social intercourse (“April is the most Abrahamic month”, here), this is the actual April 1st posting, and it’s drenched in cunicular sexiness — this month I really really really mean those rabbits — so it’s definitely out-of-bounds for kids and the sexually modest. I begin with two images — not in themselves salacious — and then get down and fluffy with a bit of amiably very dirty doggerel.
🐇 🐇 🐇 It’s still April Eve, but I have a big carton of April-related things, which I will unpack for you a day in advance.
To start with, tomorrow is (as always) April Fool’s Day and also the great linguist Leonard Bloomfield’s birthday.
Then, April this year is a festival of Abrahamic religion: Ramadan, Passover, and Easter, all coming up in the next few weeks. To recognize the last of these occasions, some words about Easter egg quotations and images. The wonderful cartoonist Ed Koren will put in an appearance here.
Finally, the April illustration from the 2022 Tom of Finland calendar, showing (among other things) the crotch plunge gesture. Warning: this material is vividly (homo)sexual, so distasteful for some readers.
For the 15th of March, Tim Evanson created this image (reproduced here with his permission):
(#1) Tim used a picture from a “Kittendales” calendar; a free clipart calendar page of March; and pictures of Tide products from the Target web site
The year has rolled around again to Four Days in March:
— 3/14, today, Pi Day, a holiday both mathematical and alimentary
— 3/15, the Ides of March, also (in my household) Higashi (Removal) Day, the day in the distant past when my man Jacques and I would set off from Palo Alto to drive east (higashi) across CA, AZ, NM, TX, OK, MO, IL, IN, and OH to Columbus, to trade universities
— 3/16, National Panda Day, a significant occasion for several of my ailuropodotropic friends
— 3/17, the culmination in St. Patrick’s Day
So this morning came a New York Times mailing for Pi Day with five pies — well, five things from the PIEESQUE category, embracing pies, tarts, flans, quiches, etc. — for us “to bake in the name of science”.
Some riffing on yesterday’s posting “Catchphrases for sale”, about this Zippy strip:
(#1) Offering fresh phrases — not already in circulation as catchphrases, sayings, proverbs, slogans, famous quotations, well-known names and titles, and the like — chosen at random
Zippy’s fresh phrases sound like catchphrases — roughly, free-standing expressions that you recognize as coming from a stock of quotations widely known in your culture, which then (if you wish) can be conventionally used to make some point — but are in fact novel. The things called catchphrases are then exquisitely embedded in particular cultures (note: “widely known in your culture” and also “can be conventionally used”).
