It’s Hump Day: May 4, and I’m proud of myself for having done both laundry and (the worst task of all) ironing yesterday. On this day in 1904, the U.S. began building the Panama Canal (I’ve been through it–a real trip!), and, in 1970, the Kent State shootings occurred, with four unarmed students, protesting the war, killed by the National Guard. That set off a round of demonstrations and of course inspired Neil Young’s song “Ohio.” In 1979, Margaret Thatcher became England’s first woman Prime Minister.
Notable births on this day include Alice Liddell (1852), the model for Alice in Wonderland, Audrey Hepburn (1929), and Randy Travis (1959). Those who died on May 4 include all four students at Kent State (1970) and Moe Howard of the Three Stooges (1975, nyuk nyuk). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is looking forward to the juicy birds of spring:
Hili: I can’t see any starlings.
A: They will come when the cherries are ripe.
Hili: Let’s hope Cyrus is not going to scare them away.
In Polish:
Hili: Nie widzę szpaków.
Ja: Pojawią się jak wiśnie dojrzeją.
Hili: Żeby ich tylko Cyrus nie straszył.
Leon: Did you pack my snacks?
Extra lagniappe: I passed this restaurant sign yesterday and immediately noticed the superfluous apostrophes. At first I thought that “Monday’s $3 beers” referred to only those beers on sale for three dollars on Monday, but then I read on. And yes, this is indeed someone mistaking the possessive for the plural.
Finally, in other news, a hijab-clad doll, rescued from the sea and taken to an Indonesian village where it was revered as an “angel,” was found to be a sex toy.
It is a lost cause – but had I been there a wet thumb would have removed them!
talking of T-shirts (yesterday) – should we get Jerry one of these?!
http://entertainment.guardianoffers.co.uk/i-dd-rm000388/the-apostrophe-protection-society/
“And yes, this is indeed someone mistaking the possessive for the plural.”
… but only for days of the week (or should that be day’s of the week?).
Was Margaret Thatcher a woman? 😉
David Icke may have been onto something.
Hili, we have starlings and jays, you better pack a bag.
$3 dollar beer is a deal? I’m getting old.
Sure it was an angel in hijab… an angel of mercy f— 🙂
I know you’ve posted a picture of that sign before because I remember it having the exact same apostrophe problem.
So sue me! I forgot.
I just think it’s funny that someone keeps making the same mistake. I thought I was having some serious deja vu until I did a quick search.
I feel cheated. Cheated, I tells ya! The same pic of Hili two days running?
Also, almost as bad as the superfluous apostrophe is the terrible grammar on that sign. Half off wine bottles, half off sake bottles? No! Half off bottles of wine, half off bottles of sake, for crying out loud.
Unless, of course, they are selling only empty bottles, which leads me to another gripe; why do I always get the urge to punch people who refer to an ’empty bottle of wine’? It’s an empty wine bottle. ‘An empty bottle of’ is an oxymoron, said by oxy-breathing morons.
Of course, the bottle isn’t really empty unless its contents have been vacuumed and the bottle sealed.(/pedantry)
The possessive-as-plural is really annoying, yet commonplace. Why? There is no good reason to make such an error.
Errr, vacuum energy? Casimir forces?
Okay, a bottle under vacuum is virtually empty. Better?
OMG I used yesterday’s photo instead of today–they were next to each other on my desktop. I’ve now replaced the photo with the correct one: Hili among the blossoms. I hope you like it.
Thanks for noticing.
The author of the sign might be thinking in terms of “Monday’s Specials” rather than “Specials on Mondays”.
To say my father was a conservative was an insult to ultra conservatives. He maintained that the Guard was firing “warning shots”, they just fired a little low, and besides the protesters deserved it!
Two of the victims were not even protesters!
From Wikipedia: “Two of the four students killed, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, had participated in the protest, and the other two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, had been walking from one class to the next at the time of their deaths.” Ms. Scheuer, a student speech therapist, was reportedly with a boy to whom she was giving therapy.
The Guard seems to have fired at anything that moved. Not that I approve shooting unarmed protesters, even if I disagree with their cause.
It might also be seen as a contraction:
Monday is $3 beer.
Tuesday is 1/2 off wine bottles.
Wednesday is 1/2 off cold sake bottles.
You even used that in the previous post when you wrote, “… America looks really bad with a Presidential candidate who’s a loose cannon…”