A weekly note

I thought this was going out yesterday, and at the time I thought May 21, 2021 looked pretty cool. But now it’s May 22, and bear with me while I go down a very strange rabbit hole.

Tomorrow is May 23rd (see, I can count), which is one version of Pentecost, a Christian holiday celebrated 50 days after Easter. Another is Shavuot, a Jewish holiday celebrated 50 days after Passover (last week).

There’s no good way to explain my brain or this rabbit hole, but I’m in it and there’s no turning back so I’m going to just dig right through.

• May = 05 = 0 + 5 = 5
• 23 = 2 + 3 = 5
• 2021 = 2 + 0 + 2 + 1 = 5

A word for a holiday, rooted in pénte, “five”, and all of the date’s parts individually add up to 5!

And because you’re invested now: There are only a few “5” days this year, all in May. There were three “4” days in 2020, all in April. The game wasn’t really possible in 2017 through 2019, though you could probably play a different version where you use “month 12” instead of adding 1 and 2 for December.

Of note, Pentecost and Shavuot were both on May 27 in 2012. The last time it could have been possible for Pentecost to land on a “5 day” would be the year 1400, and I was going to stop there, but then I got interested in the difference between the Gregorian and Julian calendars and now I’m pretty sure there was no “5 day” in 1310, 1301, 1220, 1202, or at any point in the 12 or 11th centuries. I’m not going back any further, I promise.

Anyhow. I’m slightly sorry. Enjoy 5 day tomorrow. It’s our last for 9 years.

✑

I did really enjoy Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast a few years ago. It made me want to read more Hemingway, but I haven’t since.

✑

It’s official: Happy Prime announced our first open position yesterday.

It was very heartwarming to see the WordPress community amplify the announcement so quickly. We’ll be posting the position on a variety of job boards over the next week as well to make sure we’re reaching as many people as we can.

If you can’t tell, actually posting a position and hiring someone is something I’ve never really done before. It’s exciting! It’s terrifying! And I can’t wait to find out who we’ll be working with.

✑

We’ve had a couple of robins move in to a tree near enough that they use our front yard as a regular feeding and scavenging ground throughout the day.

Every so often a starling will land a few feet from one of the robins and stalk it around. It almost looks like it’s pretending to focus on something else in a casual “oh, did I happen to land near you” way. The robin will sometimes charge at the starling and scare it away a few hops, but it quickly returns to stalking.

Then! We saw the starling steal a massive worm from a robin right as it pulled it out of the ground. This has now happened at least three times. The robin looks on disappointed while the starling gathers up the worm and takes off.

It’s extremely annoying as the viewer, and while I normally find starlings to be very cool, I’m definitely team robin on this one.

A bit of searching confirmed this behavior in a journal (that’s a PDF link), in which they documented “Starling stealing worms from Robins” on the University of Washington campus in Seattle in 1972.

The starling success rate was 36%!

✑

If you haven’t yet seen The Linda Lindas and their performance of Racist Sexist Boy, you should. I have now purchased all of their available music and am so very happy to watch youth be punk. 🤘🏻🎸

✑

Also good recently, Mannequin Pussy’s Perfect, the songs released so far off of black midi’s Cavalcade, and if you use Bandcamp, you should friend me or whatever it’s called over there. It’d be fun to see others’ collections.

✑

Oh what else. The daffodils are gone by a couple weeks. The lupine is arriving in full force—I took a picture of it on May 28th last year. Things in general are starting to look lush. We’d definitely benefit from more rain. This spring feels more hopeful than last year?

And I’m done writing this update. 🍻