National Day, Week, Month,Year

I am interested in the phenomenon of emphasizing a product, service, idea, story, personality for a day.  I ask Google “What national day is today?” and get a variety of results.  I am strongly reminded of what happened and continues to happen when I do a search on a topic or person.  For maybe a decade or more, what I guess were other searches that had been held on the same or related topics were presented.  I found that those other searches and topics always gave me new ideas and extended my thinking.  This was before the letters “AI” were everywhere and data centers were hotly discussed and/or resisted.

It wasn’t until today that I grasped that having a National Pickle Day could be modified into National Pickle Week or Month.  The possibilities have me reeling.

Guys! Stay alert. It is Sadie Hawkins Day!

• Today is Friday, November 13, 2026, which features several special days and observances according to the National Day Calendar and National Today.

• National Indian Pudding Day

• World Kindness Day (Global Observance)

• National Dream Destination Day

• National Hug a Musician Day

• Guinness World Records Day

• National Jersey Day

• Sadie Hawkins Day (Look it up.)

• Symphonic Metal Day

Three memorable activities

Some campus organizations are actually for retired people, not so much for the typical college student.  One such organization at the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point is “Learning is Forever” - “L.I.F.E.”.  Life holds “coffees” where interested members meet at a big table, and talk.  The recent meeting was about three activities we had done that were basically smallish but memorable.

Mine were 

1. I breathed

2. I ate

3. I read

Turns out that breathing is both essential for our bodies to operate normally and also a good attention anchor for meditation. Eating, similarly, supplies what our bodies need to stay living.  Reading, while not a function needed for basic life, is educational and something for our ever-busy minds to focus on.

I mentioned, when discussing my three activities, the book “City Reading” by Henkin that discusses the emergence of signs and written advertisements as a greater portion of the population could read.

What does that say?

I am intrigued and respectful when I discover that a person can and has spoken another language.  The book “City Reading” by David Henkin makes me think of reading and writing, both, not just speaking and listening.  I guess it is logical that a person who has spent time with books as I have to wonder about other ways of writing than I use.  Here is what Google came up with:

Many languages use completely different handwriting systems, scripts, and stroke styles compared to English. English uses the Latin (Roman) alphabet written horizontally from left to right with connected or separate cursive and print letters. [1, 2]

Major Languages and Scripts Different from English

• Arabic and Persian (Farsi): Written from right to left using an abjad script where letters continuously flow and change shape depending on where they sit in a word (making cursive/handwriting deeply integrated into print).

• Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese): Uses a logographic system (Hanzi) where every character represents a word or concept rather than a phonetic sound. Characters are built from strict stroke orders and proportions, fitting inside an imaginary square block rather than a linear sequence.

• Hindi and Sanskrit (Devanagari script): Uses an abugida script characterized by a prominent horizontal line running across the top of the letters (shirorekha), with vowel and consonant markers hanging or attached below.

• Korean (Hangul): Groups individual phonetic letters into square syllable blocks rather than writing them out in a straight, continuous line.

• Japanese: Combines three different writing systems together: Kanji (borrowed Chinese logographic characters), Hiragana, and Katakana (syllabaries), which demand strict adherence to specific stroke orders.

• Amharic (Ethiopic/Ge'ez script): Uses a writing system where the shape of each character shifts and morphs depending on the specific vowel sound attached to the consonant family.

• Russian and Ukrainian (Cyrillic script): Uses a left-to-right alphabet sharing some roots with Latin, but children are typically taught a distinct, interconnected cursive script (письмо) from the first grade that looks quite different from standard Latin cursive. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]

A worry

Some of my pills are very small.  Some are reasonable size.  A few are capsules but most are hard and about the size I find fairly easy to handle and swallow.  When I am going to be scanned by one machine or another, I may get special temporary instructions to skip some pills.  My wife sorts our medicines and vitamins into four pill containers every Saturday morning.  She seems to be able to look at a small chunk of this or that and recognize which of about a dozen of my meds it is.  Fortunately, she loves me and accompanies me when I meet with physicians.

I have a high school buddy from years ago who is a retired pharmacist.  He seems like a nice, well-educated man but I have been worried that pharmacists will establish a criminal gang and impose impossible conditions on us all, just to conquer.  I guess artificial intelligence will take care of itself but how about pharmacists?

One place

We have a house with many windows.  When we knew we needed a house, we bought a book of house designs.   We looked through the book separately but we both selected the same design.  We asked our magical son-in-law to build it and he did.  Each of the two of us moved many times as a child but we have lived in this house for over 30 years.

Trying to be both neat and economical

For a week or so, my desk and nearby areas have been a mess.  I have many wires for charging devices, so many there are two large tangles of wire. I have two large crates of wire, plugs, covers, etc.  I spread lots of junky stuff out, trying to check on old devices to see if they still have life and function in them.  The desktop computer and an Apple tablet are steadily in use but older models of several types are still waiting for final throwing-away.

Repeated post

Thursday, March 12, 2026 (not today’s date!)

In this age of artificial intelligence, it is often worthwhile to ask Google whatever is on your mind.

 They could ask me anything!

A friend of mine said that the day of her doctoral oral exam, she thought "They could ask me anything!".   That might be correct.  Some clown or provocateur might ask for some outlandish knowledge.  What was Mozart's mother's maiden name?  Other members of the orals committee or the candidate herself might counter with Why do you ask that?  Or What is the relevance of that question?

As I age and think, I find more and more subjects that I don't know about.  New subjects are invented, including those that I have never heard of. Items I did know include many that I have forgotten.  Most of several courses I used to teach and some science and social studies units even for 5th graders I could not teach now without a serious review of lessons and facts.

By the way, if a candidate for a doctor's degree, like a PhD, gets asked something he can't answer, he will just calmly say "I don't know".  Doing so is much more acceptable than guessing or bluffing.

My understanding of talk

My wife and I have had good communication between us so it is painful for both of us that my hearing is getting worse and worse.  I can tell when she speaks but I can’t understand what words she said.  I know many other avenues of communication remain but I don’t think any are as quick and handy as talking.  She can understand me when I speak and with a repetition or two or more, I can understand her.

Two deer

I was looking out into our backyard when a doe and a fawn walked into sight.  The deer remind me of church go-ers with their graceful, slow, cautious walk.  The two animals lay down not far from each other.  Our yard is the next-to-last one in a string and those neighbors have two dogs.  I think the deer can smell their presence and are not attracted. They laid there for a couple of hours before walking off somewhere.