Tuesday, March 7, 2023

Lost in Translation: "Santo Subito!"

 

Yesterday I was so tired after work that I didn't blog or do much of anything. Travalon and I watched Soul, a Pixar movie about a jazz musician whose soul gets stuck in a cat, and another soul goes into his body. It was pretty entertaining, and not entirely inaccurate about the in-between state. Then today I had to be on campus for interviews we are conducting for a dean. Why am I interviewing potential deans? Because I'm the Vice Chair in my shared governance body. The Chair was actually going to do it, but he couldn't, so I stepped in. It was a lovely day out, so I appreciated having to walk back and forth from the Union twice. 

Otherwise, nothing too noteworthy happened today, although at Adoration I saw someone had left a bunch of rosaries in the place where anyone can take them. I wasn't going to take one, but there was this really off-the-wall one with black and yellow beads and then very colorful starting beads, so I did bring that one home. When I got it home, I saw it was actually poop brown and yellow. Which reminds me, today I was looking at MyFace and someone had posted "Santo subito!" which I think literally means "saint suddenly!" in Italian but anyway, it is what people say when someone who dies was so holy that they feel like there is no need for a drawn-out canonization process, so basically "Saint right now!"... and MyFace "helpfully" translated it as: "Holy sh!t!" I don't know if all this incompetence on the part of artificial intelligence makes me less or more scared of it.

Travalon went down to the dock to enjoy the beautiful day, and he took some photos of waterfowl. This is the mallard with a purple head that we have seen other years.


Here you can see the "tuxedo duck" I saw on Sunday with a regular male mallard and two females.


This is a Canada goose, but I'm sure you knew that.


This is a male bufflehead.


I'm very puzzled by this black duck.


Is it just a female bufflehead in bad lighting? There is a duck called a black duck, but it looks like a dusky female mallard, so that is not what this is. Maybe I'll ask the Hive Mind at Wisconsin Birding if they have any idea. Sometimes people put really sketchy photos of birds on there, and they can still ID them. I'll let you know if I do it and they can tell me what it is.


Famous Hat


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