It’s December 15, which means just 10 shopping days before Christmas—also the beginning of my personal holiday, Coynezaa, which extends for six days until my birthday on December 30. On this day in 1791, the Bill of Rights, including the crucial First Amendment promoting freedom of speech and of worship, became law in the U.S. after ratification by Virginia’s General Assembly. Now, 225 years later it’s under attack from both Republicans and left-wing college students. On this day in 37 A.D. Roman emperor Nero was supposedly born, but I can’t believe that given the calendar change. Finally, on December 12, 1968, Walt Disney died of lung cancer in Los Angeles and was later cremated (he is NOT cryogenically preserved). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili surveys her domain—the universe. Remember, this is Hili’s world, and we just live in it.
Hili: One has to rise above it.
A: Above what?
Hili: Above everything.
Hili: Trzeba być ponad.
Ja: Ponad czym?
Hili: Ponad wszystkim.
*******
In nearby Wroklawek, tabby Leon is not pleased with the noms on tap. And one of those gingerbreads looks suspiciously salacious.
Leon: Oh, I just took a nap and here are gingerbreads. It’s not my cup of tea.
It is also International Tea Day – whatever that is! All I know is I am the beverage facilitator at work… 🙁
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/features/international-tea-day-five-healthy-reasons-to-put-the-kettle-on-a6773766.html
Was that a slight hint ? the ref to 30th December.
Suetonius gives the date as “at Antium nine months after the death of Tiberius, on the eighteenth day before the Kalends of January, just as the sun rose,” which is, yes, 15 December. But that is on the Julian calendar, rather than the Gregorian calendar.
Really, calendars should be simpler. Which raises the obligatory XCKD.
That ginger cookie is a ding-dong church bell. 🙂
It seems to be missing the ‘ding’.
Calendars are very arbitrary things. They assume that the Earth (etc.) keeps returning to the same place…but nothing could be further from the truth. Even without considering the pure hash that Einstein makes of such a concept, we’ve got the Earth’s equatorial precession to contend with, the galactic rotation, the relative motion of nearby stars and galaxies…
…and, when you add it all up, any sort of calendar useful for day-to-day human living is going to have problems, no matter what sort of leap year arithmetic you do, with daily precision at a scale of millennia. At some point you just have to throw up your hands, use the local calendar of the events in question, and satisfy yourself with a purely arbitrary decision that such-and-such is as bad an equivalent day in the modern calendar as any.
So, sure. Nero was born on December 15 in 37 CE. We can be really confident he was born around the time of the winter solstice 1,978 years ago…and today is as good a day to remember that fact as any.
Cheers,
b&
Interesting note on that Bill of rights vote by Virginia that put the thing over the top. If you look at Virginia’s declaration of rights, done many years before, it had a very specific right (section #13) that talked about the militia and the need for this to avoid having any standing army. However, no right to bear arms — surprise, surprise.
Well, I must say that December 15th isn’t the most interesting of days. So, I’ll share that it’s my birthday. Presuming I’m not innumerate, I’m 37.
Happy birthday Charleen.
Thanks, rickflick.
I was curious to see what Jerry would choose to post about today, and I searched around the Internet last night to see what I could find out about 12/15. Nothing captured my imagination.
I enjoyed Jerry’s post on the anniversary of Christopher Hitchens’s death. Hitchen’s words in the video about people wanting to hang on to religion (as their favorite toy) due to fear of death gives me a cognitive peg; I’ve heard other atheists allude to religion not likely going away anytime soon for this very reason. Now I wonder whether they got this from Hitchens.
Thinking about this was more interesting to consider than Nero and Disney.
I’m sure Hitch isn’t the first to point out that the spur if not the saddle of religion is our inevitable death. Some people come to grips with this in adolescence or sometime later, but there are those who never do.
True. What’s driving my curiosity is how ideas spread themselves in the atheist community. It’s not that many haven’t made the connection between religious fealty and death but whether this gets vocalized, who gives the thought verbal air time, and whether there is an increase in use of the idea after someone says it. It is doubly interesting that Hitchens is referred to as the Hitch and just Hitch.
Agree. Those are very interesting issues. One term ‘meme’ was coined by Richard Dawkins and became pretty widely used in the atheist community and outside it. It carries some of the meaning you refer to. Ideas which ‘catch on’, a bit like genetic mutations that are picked up by a species.
Maybe would could start a meme right now and propose ‘the Dawk’ for Richard Dawkins.
🙂 Yes, I did have meme in my head while writing that, though my use of it may not be the official version of it. (I was fishing. . .) Though I haven’t yet read Dawkins, I’m following him on Twi**ter. The image of the “selfish gene” is so successful and closely connected with him that I don’t think the Dawk would take off. But maybe 🙂 I don’t know what makes something spread. There was another thread on another post where people were talking about whether deference to authority was selected for. Seems to me that when a person is memed or caricatured that that has power/authority. For this reason, I wish people would stop talking about Donald Trump’s hair. He’s been memed into infamy by that wacky yellow. It would be better to ignore him, but it’s hard to ignore such a vivid image. . .
When watching Big Bang Theory a few nights ago, Sheldon Cooper said “memetic epidemiology,” which made me laugh. I do wonder about meme surveillance.
Of all his books, I especially like The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype. Both are pure biology.
The God Delusion is his big atheism book.
Speaking of Dawkins and memes, Terry Eagleton tried to start one of his own with “Ditchkins,” introduced in his book “Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate.” His attempt to conflate Hitchens and Dawkins never caught on, perhaps because creating an atheist strawman from two very different thinkers was an act of stupidity, or perhaps because his book’s sales figures were dwarfed by Dawkins’.
Slight mistake: Disney died on December 15, 1966, not December 12, 1968.
Anyone looking for a good biography of Disney should read “The Animated Man” by animation expert Mike Barrier. My favorite saying of Disney’s was directed toward at early competitors: “We can lick them all with quality.”
And when it cane to character animation, Disney and his staff produced top quality work, at least on a technical level. Unfortunately, the stories they chose helped infantalize a medium that was capable of more than talking animals and princesses.