Is Sunday for the first or last day of the week?
1. Q&A.
Look at your calendar: a number will put Sunday on the far left, Saturday on the far right of the grid, and you get to bookend Monday through Friday with two “S”-days.
You can see the echo of Sunday as the seventh day in Hungarian, which borrowed its word for Friday, ‘péntek,’ from Greek. The ‘pent’ in péntek is that same Greek for five as we have in pentagon and so on. So if Friday is the fifth day, then clearly Monday is the first, Sunday the seventh.
When we see the week as five days of work followed by a “weekend” consisting of Saturday and Sunday, Sunday is that last hurrah before we head back to the routine. Monday through Friday is routine, and only on Saturday and Sunday do we get a break; they’re the two days on which we can break the routine, do something different, etc.
But I like Sunday as the first day of the week as well, a way to start the week off right, not finish it. If we should do something new every week, we should start the week with something new, something we haven’t done before.
2. Go Wilde.
I read my first Oscar Wilde play today.
Ms. S. is editing Wilde’s An Ideal Husband (1895) for a high school performance, and I was asked to look over her edits as to provide another set of eyes.
As she said after we discussed my comments and suggestions: “You over-analyzed it.” Which was the point in a sense, since if I over-analyze her decisions, they should clearly pass muster with any other reader or viewer prone to less intense analyzitis. Without spoiling much, suffice it to say that Ms. S. is shifting it from late-Victorian society to D.C. of about 1993. The text has been cut and characters excised, but the story and language remain intact, and now I need to read Wilde’s uncut version.
3. … shall rise again!
I’ve made lots of bread in my day, plenty of pie dough, any number of cakes, and the occasional dinner roll. But as of yet no hamburger buns.
This is not a dire exclusion. For one thing, hamburger buns, like dinner rolls, are made from a basic variation on simple white bread. You need a sticky but not too sticky dough (a 5:3 ration by weight of flour to water works) that you let rise until about doubled that you then cut into equal chunks, roll into balls and slightly flatten, and let proof on a baking sheet.
Lots of breads benefit from a high baking temperature; it ensures a tender but crispy crust and that the dough cooks all the way through without drying out. 400F is not unusual, higher for pizza, and lower for a number of breads. Softer rolls benefit from the lower end of that range; they are small so bake quickly, and we’re not looking for much of a crumb.
A recipe I’m trying today, my first batch of hamburger buns, is based on a video I found on YouTube:
The recipe is, nicely, given in weight/mass, not volume, where appropriate (flour and water). You’ll note that it’s basically a 5:3 ratio. That made it easy to resize. I’ll bake them soon.
Last night we got a couple different kinds of veggie burgers, and it’s the black bean I wanted to try tonight. I did not just want a black bean pattie on a plate, drizzled in a little mustard … it’s getting some greenery, some tomato, some spicy mustard, and so on. It’s Sunday; I deserve the works!
4. And a last time for everything.
It’s the last episode of this season of Doctor Who for quite a while … and our farewell to Rory and Amy.
Everybody has “their” Doctor. Mine was Eccleston, I suppose, though he was with us all too briefly. I never suffered the instant hatred some had for Tennant; others were so attached to Eccleston that whoever followed was bound to suffer. But they came around. Then came Smith. Ms. S. came to watch the good Doctor during Smith’s run, but I started her with Eccleston. At first she despised Tennant, then grew to love him, and then Smith was just not up to it. And let’s not get her started on Amy’s failings as a companion … but I like to think she has grown to like both the Smith-Doctor and Amy, and that she’ll be sad to see the latter leave (with Rory).
My first cross-stitch was a dalek.
5. Sundays: redux.
In German Sunday is just ‘Sonntag,’ the day of the sun. But there’s a difference between ‘on Sunday’ and ‘(on) Sundays,’ between “On Sunday I go shopping” and “Sundays I go shopping.” It’s not just a matter of what appears to be a plural in English. In German we would say:
- “Am Sonntag gehe ich einkaufen.”
- “Sonntags gehe ich einkaufen.”
The former employs a prepositional phrase, a preposition (“an”) with a noun phrase (“dem Sonntag,” in the dative case); the latter uses an adverb of time (“sonntags”), not a noun.
This is just trivia, even if it’s not entirely trivial.
