Today is Timkat in Ethiopia and Eritrea, corresponding to Epiphany in the Orthodox church. It celebrates the baptism of Jesus.
Animal Reviews:
Signzzzzzzz
Today is the birthday, in 1939, of Phil Everly (Everly Brothers), in 1943 of Janis Joplin, in 1946 of Dolly Parton and in 1949 of Robert Palmer. I searched in vain for a video of all of them singing together
Today is the festival of Thaipusam in Malaysia (and some other countries). It celebrates the birth of Lord Murugan.
Pelicans…
Bada Bing!
“Doc, I think my son has gonorrhea,” a patient told his urologist on the phone. “The only woman he’s screwed is our maid.” “OK, don’t be hard on him. He’s just a kid,” the doc soothed. “Get him in here right away and I’ll take care of him.” “But Doc, I’ve been screwing the maid too, and I’ve got the same symptom she has.” “Then you come in with him and I’ll fix you both up,” replied the doctor. “Well,” the man admitted, “I think my wife now has it too.” “Son of a bitch!” the physician roared. “That means we’ve all got it!”
Agnorant: A person who is extremely ignorant yet simultaneously extremely arrogant.
My friend got a degree in Egyptology but he can’t get a job. So he’s getting a Ph.D. so he can teach other people egyptology. It’s literally a pyramid scheme.
If you still think there’s such a thing as perfect parenting, just know that I’m a pediatrician and parenting author and my toddler is eating strawberries dipped in ketchup for dinner tonight.
My kid just referred to the newspaper as “the floppy iPad”.
My 4yo son approached me with a very solemn expression. “Dad, why did you let the dinosaurs die?”
When one door closes and another door opens, you’re probably in prison.
To me, “drink responsibly” means don’t spill it.
It’s the start of a brand new day, and I’m off like a herd of turtles.
When I say, “The other day,” I could be referring to any time between yesterday and 15 years ago.
I remember being able to get up without making sound effects.
I had my patience tested. I’m negative.
Remember, if you lose a sock in the dryer, it comes back as a Tupperware lid that doesn’t fit any of your containers.
If you’re sitting in public and a stranger takes the seat next to you, just stare straight ahead and say, “Did you bring the money?”
When someone asks what I did over the weekend, I squint and ask, “Why, what did you hear?”
When you do squats, are your knees supposed to sound like a goat chewing on an aluminum can stuffed with celery?
I don’t mean to interrupt people. I just randomly remember things and get really excited.
Dear Jim Jordan,Why are you so scared? Liz Cheney just asked you to answer some questions. It’s not like she asked you to go hunting with her dad.
I guess we should retire the expression “avoid it like the plague” given how little effort people put into avoiding the actual plague.
Today is the birthday, in 1941, of Bobby Goldboro. I couldn’t bring myself to post any of his sappy stuff though, so here is Joan Jett instead.
Today is Martin Luther King Day in the United States. It’s also John Chilembwe Day in Malawi. Chilembwe was born in what was then Nyasaland (now Malawi) and was trained as a minister in the United States. Back in Nyasaland he grew disgusted with the cruelty he saw on many white-owned estates. In 1915 he led an uprising protesting against forced labor and British rule. He was killed trying to escape. He is credited with creating a sense of nationhood in Nyasaland and his image appears on most banknotes in Malawi.
And now back to our regularly scheduled program.
The Twitter account @Thereisnocat_ collects photos of very well hidden cats.
Today is the birthday, in 1943, of Chris Montez, who had this hit in 1962.
I recently finished reading The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles. I very much enjoyed Towles’ two previous novels – The Rules of Civility and A Gentleman in Moscow, so I was eager to read this one and I was not disappointed.
From The Odyssey onward, plenty of great stories are about trips or quests and this is one. NPR calls it the new Great American Road Novel and it fits that description. The premise is straight-forward. Upon the death of his father from cancer, 18-year-old Emmett Watson is released early from a juvenile work farm in Kansas and driven home by a kind warden to a small town in Nebraska, where he is reunited with his precocious 8-year-old brother, Billy. Facing foreclosure on the family farm and violent retribution from the family of the bully he accidentally killed at the fairgrounds, Emmett has an immediate and stark choice — should he stay or should he go?
Trained as a carpenter, he looks for a place with a growing population where he can use his skills to buy houses, fix them up and sell them. He settles on California because, besides the attraction of the growing population and wealth, it’s where is mother, who deserted the family when he was a child, lives. He’s take his eight-year old brother, Billy, with him and drive across the Lincoln Highway to San Francisco.
Young Billy, eager to traverse his mother’s path, proves to be a worthy sidekick for this all-American journey. He wears a watch with a second hand and carries in his Army surplus backpack a flashlight, a compass and a folded road map, along with his mother’s postcards and a well-thumbed compendium of adventure stories featuring 26 heroes, from Achilles to Zorro. From the cherished book, he knows the tropes of the travel tale, the requirements of heroes. California, here we come.
It’s classic misdirection as neither of them set even one foot westward. They set off on a different quest. Shortly after the warden drives off, two fellow inmates turn up, stowaways from the warden’s trunk — trouble-maker Duchess and his hapless but sweet protegé, Woolly. (In another fun connection for Towles nerds, naïve trust funder Wallace “Woolly” Wolcott Martin is the nephew of Wallace Wolcott from Rules of Civility.) a couple of stowaways, They were Emmett’s former bunkmates at the work farm, in the trunk of the kind warden’s car. “Ta-da!” says one, Duchess, the resourceful son of a vaudevillian, as Emmett discovers him in the barn. Duchess is a persuasive and original figure, an avenging moral accountant with a ledger of debts to collect.
Woolly, the other stowaway, is a sweet, stunted, “medicine”-addicted naïf from a wealthy Northeastern family. Woolly has been deemed unfit to receive a large family trust, and Duchess and Woolly have in mind an “escapade” to the Adirondacks to retrieve the money from the wall safe of a family home.
Emmet agrees to drive the fugitives as far as Omaha so that they can catch a bus to New York. While in Omaha, Duchess, the novel’s primary agent of chaos and digression, requests a short detour to an orphanage where he used to live. After he breaks in through a window to deliver strawberry preserves to the orphans, he steals Emmett’s Studebaker and, with Woolly, commences escapade.
Emmet and Billy give chase, stealing a ride on a freight train and Towles goes all in on the kind of episodic, exuberant narrative haywire found in myth or Homeric epic. There are all sorts of diversions and roadblocks and interesting characters, including one named ‘Ulysses’. It’s a rambunctious, wild novel full of digressions, magic tricks, sorry sagas, retributions, and the messy business of balancing accounts.
Like Towles’ other novels, The Lincoln Highway is not short and you might wonder what the plot is, but, as one of the characters points out: “How easily we forget — we in the business of storytelling — that life was the point all along,” Go and read this book, it’s a wonderful story full of people and life.
today is Orthodox New Year and, in India and Sri Lanka is Pongal, a harvest and thanksgiving festival marking the start of spring, the end of the traditional farming season and the gathering of the first food from the harvest.
I didn’t find any good birthdays today, so here’s this:
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