It’s Tuesday, September 10, 2019, and National Hot Dog Day. It’s also Gibraltar National Day, National Ants on a Log Day, and World Suicide Prevention Day.
What is “ants on a log”? The site explains:
National Ants on a Log Day is dedicated to the tasty, healthy, and fun snack food. Ants on a log consist of a spread, such as peanut butter, placed on celery sticks, with raisins put on top. Peanut butter is the most common spread, but ricotta and cream cheese or other spreads may be used. A variation of the snack, gnats on a log, uses currants instead of raisins, and ants on vacation is a variation without raisins. The snack has been around since the 1950’s. . .
Well, so have I, but I’ve never seen it, much less eaten it. Here’s apparently what it looks like. It doesn’t look all that appetizing, though without raisins it might be ok. (My mom used to give us Cheez-Whiz on celery sticks).
Stuff that happened on this day include:
- 1547 – The Battle of Pinkie Cleugh, the last full-scale military confrontation between England and Scotland, resulting in a decisive victory for the forces of Edward VI.
- 1846 – Elias Howe is granted a patent for the sewing machine.
- 1939 – World War II: Canada declares war on Germany, joining the Allies: Poland, France, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.
- 1960 – At the Summer Olympics in Rome, Abebe Bikila becomes the first sub-Saharan African to win a gold medal, winning the marathon in bare feet.
Here are Bikila’s two wins (he won again in 1964, but wearing shoes). That guy must have had tough feet! Sadly, Bikila became paralyzed from the waist down in a 1969 auto accident, and died four years later from complications. He was only 41.
- 1967 – The people of Gibraltar vote to remain a British dependency rather than becoming part of Spain.
- 1977 – Hamida Djandoubi, convicted of torture and murder, is the last person to be executed by guillotine in France.
- 2008 – The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, described as the biggest scientific experiment in history, is powered up in Geneva, Switzerland.
Notables born on September 10 include:
- 1801 – Marie Laveau, American voodoo practitioner (d. 1881)
- 1864 – Carl Correns, German botanist and geneticist (d. 1933)
Correns and several other people were responsible for the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900. The rest is history.
- 1929 – Arnold Palmer, American golfer and businessman (d. 2016)
- 1933 – Karl Lagerfeld, German-French fashion designer and photographer (d. 2019)
- 1937 – Jared Diamond, American biologist, geographer, and author
- 1941 – Stephen Jay Gould, American paleontologist, biologist, and author (d. 2002)
- 1945 – José Feliciano, Puerto Rican singer-songwriter and guitarist
- 1953 – Amy Irving, American actress
- 1982 – Misty Copeland, American ballerina and author
Feliciano is, of course, most famous for his renditions of “Light My Fire” and “Feliz Navidad,” but here he is doing a version of Bill Withers’ classic “Ain’t No Sunshine“:
Notables who expired on this day were few, and include:
- 1797 – Mary Wollstonecraft, English philosopher, historian, and novelist (b. 1759)
- 1935 – Huey Long, American lawyer and politician, 40th Governor of Louisiana (b. 1893)
- 1983 – Felix Bloch, Swiss-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1905)
- 2005 – Hermann Bondi, Austrian mathematician and cosmologist (b. 1919)
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili again has aspirations above her station:
Hili: Do I look like a lynx?A: No, you look like a cat.Hili: Maybe that’s even better.
Hili: Czy wyglądam jak ryś?
Ja: Nie, wyglądasz jak kot.
Hili: To może nawet lepiej.
The bad old days before iPods and other pocket-sized music dispensers (h/t: Stash Krod):
A cartoon sent by reader Bruce:
Perhaps you know enough Portuguese (or Spanish) to understand this (translation below):
“If you see a bird, stop drinking”.
Grania sent me this tweet on April 7:
https://twitter.com/41Strange/status/1114946532636160000
More brave Iranian women:
Imagine waking up in morning and wearing whatever you want on your own body…
Most of you don’t have to imagine. That’s your reality.
But that is not the reality for women whose bodies are controlled by the Islamic Republic of #Iran#WhiteWednesdays#FreeFromHijab pic.twitter.com/nWcwzwqDFv
— Yasmine Mohammed 🦋ياسمين محمد (@YasMohammedxx) September 7, 2019
From reader j.j. Be sure to read the whole sign:
This might help too …….. RT to save a life! pic.twitter.com/6bIchfcMk6
— Ben 💚🍍on🍕 (@BenGiggman) July 28, 2019
A tweet from Heather Hastie; this is fricking adorable!
"bonjour, motherfuckers"
📹Imgur user: starkart pic.twitter.com/sKzNpaJiEj
— Paul Bronks (@SlenderSherbet) September 2, 2019
Four tweets from Matthew Cobb. You think you got troubles? Look at this mite-y beetle!
Whenever I come across any of these gorgeous dung beetles – Trypocopris pyrenaeus var. coruscans – I flip them over and photograph their undersides, to see how many phoretic mites they are carrying!😊https://t.co/AdvUUatNFC pic.twitter.com/cwCumxzjor
— Raymond Cannon (@rcannon992) September 9, 2019
The ultimate weapon:
VBCI pic.twitter.com/L9fGosibYB
— Giant Military Cats (@giantcat9) September 2, 2019
Bobkittens!!!!
So much rumpus in my backyard this morning. The [house] cats can hardly stand it. pic.twitter.com/WT8qpVKgzl
— Mike Brown (@plutokiller) September 9, 2019
I love this thieving raccoon!
Raccoon Steals Fritter At Shop, Forgets The Coffee:
🍩Watch a critter swipe a fritter
🍩A Mission Impossible-style raid
🍩Raccoon removes a ceiling tile from the roof of a coffee shop
🍩Showed off its super-agile skills after dropping down from the ceiling to steal a fritter pic.twitter.com/Ppx7H2dfNJ
— Laurel Coons 🧬🧬🧬 (@LaurelCoons) November 12, 2018
Really the last full scale conflict between Scotland & England was the 1745-6 uprising – Culloden… I suppose you could argue that it was an intra-state conflict though, & not specifically inter-state! had the Jacobites won they would not have let Scotland become a separate state I would suppose…
I would have said the Battle of Worchester (1651), because the Jacobite Rebellion was a revolt not a war.
Revolting!
PS typo – Worcester… sauce!
“If you see a bird, quit drinking. It’s a cat”
Dried cranberries on peanut butter on a celery stick might be good. Those are much better than raisins.
When I saw “ants on a log”, I thought he was talking about my favorite insect food. Ants that tend aphids are wonderful eaten raw, fresh off the stick. They are full of honeydew inside but have a slight acidic tang. I used to share these with my laser lab mates in college….
We got the snacks with Cheez Whiz as well. The raisins would’ve made it even worse.
We got the snacks with Cheez Whiz as well. The raisins would’ve made it even worse.
This “ants on a log” thing might explain something I saw yesterday. Title “Antzzzzz!”, image http://iruntheinternet.com/lulzdump/images/ant-eater-aardvark-nose-through-fence-1353405244f.jpg
(Though I’m pretty sure that Mr “I Run The Internet” is wrong considering an aardvark as a possible.)
And now I have Papa Celestin’s “Marie Laveau” stuck in my head.
My memories of the ’60 Olympics are pretty hazy, but I recall Bikila and his bare feet, and Wilma Rudolph, who had worn polio braces on her feet as a kid, yet cleaned up in the women’s sprints that year, and Rafer Johnson, who won the glamour event of the decathlon. (I also know that a young boxer outta Louisville name of Cassius Clay won gold in Rome as a light-heavyweight that summer, but I have no recollection of him until a couple years later when he started reciting poetry and telling anyone who’d listen that he was gonna whup heavyweight champ Sonny Liston.)
The Philco “ad”, is of course a modern joke– “my music” is a phrase used by digital advertisers today. I was most amused by the location of Philco’s headquarters– “Assining, NY”– almost close enough to real upstate NY names to be convincing!
’10 Ersatzen Way’ is also a clue.
But I have to admit it fooled me. I figured it was a ridiculous product that no-one would buy, but the ‘ad’ is well enough drawn in the contemporary style that it just looks right. And it’s no more absurd than the very first microwave ovens that were 5’6″ tall, weighed 750 pounds and cost $5000.
cr
… and replaced a red-hot teaspoon on the chest.
Jeez, that bear warning sign is truly beautiful. It reads perfectly normally till the last line.
8-))
cr
I can’t help it but whenever I see Hili looking nonplussed, I wonder if she’s got Cyrus on her mind.
As Buscemi’s character in Fargo told the escort he took to the hotel’s “celebrity room,” with José Feliciano, you got no complaints:
Informal Portuguese uses shorthand spelling. The spell-corrected text in the cat photo goes: “Se você está vendo um pássaro, pare com a bebida; é um gato.”
Several tweets upthread is this intriguing picture. Is that a polar bear or a “pizzly” bear (or even a “grolar”)? The noted location, 200km N of Gillam, Manitoba would be 50-100km from the shore of Hudson’s Bay, so a Polar is perfectly credible. But the light brown colouration does look quite uniform and sharp-edged, unlike mud splotches. Actually, it looks rather “panda-shaped”. Which raises interesting questions on how bears control their coat colour.
I suspect the queues to take up that investigation are going to be short.
The PlutoKiller (for it is he, book here) had a bob cat in his back yard a year or so ago, with bobcatlings. But the lot disappeared after a big wldfire went through. Whether this is a return, or the dam back with a new brood, or just re-population, I don’t know. Is the timing and sizing credible for it to be a return?
Last summer, I had several guests over to swim and eat dinner on the deck. During dessert, we were enjoying a lovely chocolate babka someone brought. Well, we got about a quarter of the way through the babka when, while nobody was paying too much attention, a raccoon came up from the bars of the railing next to the table, jumped up, took the entire tin in his mouth, looked at us as if to say, “what? What bitches?”, and then scurried off with it. Just came up and stole it right out from under our noses.
We found the tin fifteen minutes later next to the deck. There was no babka left.