A colleague greets us every morning by informing us of a selection of celebratory or commemorative days, mostly light-hearted, sometimes serious, mostly from this site. Yesterday was End of the Middle Ages Day and World Otter Day (coincidentally – the former is celebrated on 30 May and latter on the last Wednesday in May). The end of the middle ages is pegged to the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453. Our manager responded with photos of Benedict Cumberbatch imitating photos of otters. (I later found this video.)
I commented “First they said ‘You otter be an actor’. Then they said ‘You actor be an otter’”. I wish I could say that I then commented “Obviously, he’s the Otterman emperor”. Well, I did say it, but not until this morning, because I didn’t think of it until after I logged off yesterday afternoon. Sigh … l’esprit de l’escalier is a fine thing.
The whole concept of the middle ages has been questioned, which I was going to discuss at greater length, but I’ll leave you with this. Certainly a lot of things happened between about 1400 and 1550, and life would never be the same again.
Never Pure and Rarely Simple 
I tend to think of the period prior to 1066 as the Dark Ages and the period afterward as the Middle Ages,
but that is clearly England-centric as it is based on the Norman Invasion and the development of Anglo-Saxon (Old English) into Middle English.
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yesterday was also World MS day but your colleague wouldn’t have known that and it’s not as funny as World Otter Day.
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I think he mentioned that, but I couldn’t check my work emails because I wasn’t working today. Yes, it’s hard for me to write my usual kind of light-hearted blog post about MS. I could write a serious one, but couldn’t do any justice to the topic.
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As Alanis Marmoset said, “You otter know.”
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Maybe I otter have known that song, but didn’t. I have heard zero of her songs in full and know of one. That may be ironic.
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