Tuesday: Hili dialogue

March 15, 2016 • 6:30 am

It’s not only Primary Election Day in Chicago (fortuitously, my polling place is in my building, so I can go downstairs to vote at 6 a.m.), but it’s also the Ides of March, when Julius Caesar was stabbed to death in 44 B.C. (but how do they know the calendar is the same?). On May 15, 1493, Christopher Columbus returned to Spain after his first trip to the Americas, and in 1922, Fuad I became King of Egypt after that country gained its independence from the United Kingdom. Finally, on March 15, 1956, My Fair Lady opened on Broadway.

Notable births on this day include Andew Jackson (1767), Jimmy Swaggart (1935), and Sly Stone (1943)—and that’s pretty much it. Those who died on the Ides of March include Julius Caesar, of course, as well as H. P. Lovecraft (1937), Aristotle Onassis (1975), Rebecca West (1983), and Benjamin Spock (1998). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has spotted swans flying over the Vistula. How she knows the Latin name of the genus is beyond me.

Hili: The dinosaurs have returned!
A. What dinosaurs?
Hili: The big white ones! Cygnus in Latin.
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In Polish:
Hili: Dinozaury wróciły.
Ja: Jakie dinozaury?
Hili: Te takie duże, białe, po łacinie Cygnus

Sadly, only two readers sent in photos of themselves eating pie on Pi Day: Fiona Clifton, who sent a photo of herself consuming a lovely pie, and Jonathan Harvey, eating a store-bought blueberry pie:

Here I am celebrating Pi day in Horsham, England, with a blackberry and apple lattice pie served with custard. Delicious!

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Jon Harvey:

PiDay

And. . . Rachel Housinger, daughter of reader Sharon, put together a compilation of 44 pie-related movie and TV clips:

11 thoughts on “Tuesday: Hili dialogue”

      1. And Robert ordering lemon meringue pie with coffee for breakfast, in The Bridges of Madison County.

        (I forgot to eat pie… I was too busy gawking at the birdies outside. ‘Sides, it’s even more difficult to herd catz in the Spring. I know it’s unofficially Spring, because the Redwing Blackbirds were back in my neco o’ the woods 4 days ago and the Black-capped Chickadees back yesterday!)

  2. So Columbus made four trips and did not find what he was looking for (China). Only missed it by 7 or 8 thousand miles. He also never set foot on what later became U.S.A. He did get a holiday.

  7. I’m always suspicious of Roman dates especially because of their stupid lunar calendar, but Wikipedia says this:

    The Romans did not number days of a month sequentially from the first through the last day. Instead, they counted back from three fixed points of the month: the Nones (5th or 7th, depending on the length of the month), the Ides (13th or 15th), and the Kalends (1st of the following month). The Ides occurred near the midpoint, on the 13th for most months, but on the 15th for March, May, July, and October. The Ides were supposed to be determined by the full moon, reflecting the lunar origin of the Roman calendar. On the earliest calendar, the Ides of March would have been the first full moon of the new year.

    I take a lot of these dates as “traditional dates” kind of like 753 BC being the traditional but not archaeological founding of Rome.

    At any rate, καὶ σὺ, τέκνον?

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