It is Wednesday, May 25, and perhaps the rains predicted for today won’t materialize, with a chance of rain of only 15% and a high temperature of 25ºC (77ºC).
On this day in 1878, the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta H.M.S. Pinafore opened in London. In 1895, Oscar Wilde was convicted of “committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons” (homosexuality) and given two years of hard labor, which wrecked his health. He died at 46, impoverished and forgotten, three years later in Paris. On May 25, 1925, John Scopes was indicted in Dayton Tennessee for teaching that humans had evolved, and, in 1977 Stars Wars opened in American theaters.
Those born on this day included Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803), and those who died on this day included two well known photographers, Robert Capa (1954), a war photographer who stepped on a mine in Indochina, and Mary Ellen Mark (2015), famous for her photographs of the odd and marginalized. Here’s one:
A: How is it coming along?Hili: So far so good. But it’s time to start meowing for rain.
Ja: No jak?
Hili: Jak dotąd dobrze, ale trzeba zacząć miauczenie o deszcz.
Over in Wroclawek, Leon contemplates his coming noms:
Leon: I wonder what will be for dinner, duck or tuna.
And we have a new cartoon on epigenetics and religion from reader @michdevilish:
Emerson was born in 1803. He died in 1882.
Fixed, thanks.
Nice……..
I get so angry when I think about what happened to Oscar Wilde. And, at the same time, relieved to have been born in a different time, even though not everything has gone as it might have.
Back in my teens and twenties I never thought that I’d live to see gay couples getting married. It’s time for Australia to catch up, though I despair for gay couples in my long-time Asian home.
True dat, Steven. But Wilde’s time at Readying Gaol did give us one of the great opuses of prison lit, De Profundis.
Though I see, Steve, courtesy of an NHK program on a female LGBT activist whose name I don’t remember now, that at least one Tokyo ward issues a “not quite marriage” certificate – and I believe that a city in Mie does the same.
But it seems that Japan even makes things difficult for opposite-sex partnerships, or marriages where the wife does not want to take the husband’s name, in terms of legal relationship to children and the like. It’s conventional marriage or shacking up.
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Near the end of his life, when dying and largely confined to his hotel room, Oscar Wilde said,
“My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go.”
Funny to the last!
Ha! My kitty has been meowing for the rain to please stop already!