Today is National Book Lovers Day! And no one knows why!

It's one of those non-binding, unofficial, head-scratching "holidays"--like National Burrito Day!!--National Light Bulb Day!!--National Elastic Band Day!!--where the Ken and Barbie dolls on Good Morning America or your local news will fill up thirty seconds of airtime chatting about it with light, pleasant laughter and 20,000 watt smiles that have gone heavy on the Crest White Strips lately.

"It's National Book Lovers Day!" one anchor will say to the other at the news desk. "It's in honor of all those who cherish a good book, and readers are encouraged to cozy up with their favorite today and enjoy!"

Then there's a little back-and-forth between the anchors for ten seconds before they hand it off to the meteorologist with awkward, idle chit-chat about favorite books before a fifteen minute forecast ensues that explicitly details it'll be 82 degrees and sunny for the next week.

The point of all this?

Not only is the "holiday" only a holiday in name only, no one has any idea how it came about. Reputable news organizations don't reference any source, while websites devoted to keeping track of such days of the year say:

"While the day’s origins may be shrouded in mystery and rumor, the books themselves are not..."

Or this:

"Within our research, we were unable to find the creator or origin of National Book Lovers Day..."

In essence, anyone could lay claim to this with a reasonable story conjured up. Grow a spine and tell the world your grandpa or grandma were book distributors and created the holiday in 1887 in rural Iowa. Make it a family affair. There's no reason not to strive for such familial honor. People have claimed worse things in life after all, like creating polyester or Arby's.

Are you really addicted to a specific poet? Take them to work with you.

Jonesing for a little Robert Frost or Maya Angelou during the weekdays, but find yourself going through withdrawals and the shakes while at work? Good news! You can take them to work with you.

Oh, hello, T. S. Elephant. #TakeYourPoetToWorkDay #PoetToWorkDay @tspoetry pic.twitter.com/PkZ8PmZZhG

— WC Literary House (@WCLiteraryHouse) July 20, 2016

An organization called Tweetspeak Poetry sponsors various poetry "holidays" throughout a given year, all in an effort to make poetry more approachable to today's modern sensibilities. Picture your mom gussying up cauliflower when you were a kid all in hopes you might digest more of it. Same thing.

The third Wednesday of every July is Take Your Poet to Work Day. This year that would be July 19th. As the sponsors, Tweetspeak Poetry has a downloadable coloring book of famous poets ranging from American (Dickinson, Hughes, Whitman, etc.) to international (Akhmatova, Neruda, Issa, etc.).

Happy #TakeYourPoettoWorkDay Forget yours @ home? Stop by the 2nd fl. & make a new one :) @tspoetry #poettowork pic.twitter.com/hT3xQEuqZF

— CSCC Library (@CSCC_Library) July 20, 2016

After coloring in your favorite poet, you're supposed to cut out the drawing and adhere it to a Popsicle stick and--voila!--you take them to work with you. Not only do you get to color, you have a semi-valid excuse to scarf down a half-dozen Popsicles all of a sudden.

Tweetspeak also recommends leaving coloring book sheets in the lunch room, all in hopes that lazy coworker of yours might actually show some initiative and color in their own favorite poet, too.

I snuck a #poettowork today @KCLibrary #AnnaAkhmatova pic.twitter.com/Z3fc8tj3Yz

— KaiteStover (@MarianLiberryan) July 20, 2016

Polish off another half-dozen Popsicles and tell yourself you're just doing it to be selfless and help others who need a stick.

You're so generous!!

NPR wants your Twitter poetry. Calm yourself.

That insatiable desire to yawn you just felt by reading the letters "NPR" is a natural reaction to the hushed, baby-whisper, dulcet voices that come from their on-air personalities.

Now, to really amp the excitement level, NPR wants your poetry in honor of National Poetry Month. Not just any poetry, though. They only want Twitter poetry. NPR even has firm ground rules, including that you can't write an epic poem and take a photo of it as an attachment, nor can you involve art in your work. They only want 140 characters of poetry--in essence, a haiku.

To submit a poem via Twitter, they've given it the hashtag #NPRpoetry, which is almost as sleep-inducing a hashtag as their on-air programming.

Somewhere, the great haiku writer Matsuo Basho just passed out from boredom. And that's sad, as he's been dead for hundreds of years.

Baseball Opening Day, Walt Whitman, and Susan Sarandon

Most of Major League Baseball officially has its Opening Day today, the sports equivalent of a town crier heralding spring in the form of bat and ball and glove.

April is also National Poetry Month, a quick 30-days where Americans casually pretend they read poetry and recount that time in second grade they were really digging Shel Silverstein.

Many poets have written about baseball, though--one of the rare times literature and sports merge, as the construction, the imagery, the metaphors inherent in baseball are hardly found in other American team sports. Be it Donald Hall, May Swenson, Marianne Moore--when writers tend to comment or craft a piece about a sport, rare as it is, usually it's about baseball.

Case in point: Walt Whitman, of all people, is quoted in the movie Bull Durham by Susan Sarandon's character as she woos her latest lover, who is a baseball player. Sarandon's character, after all, believes in "The Church of Baseball." She claims Whitman said, "I see great things in baseball. It's our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us."

Not quite what he said. Good try, though.

So what did Whitman actually say about baseball? The sport of bats and balls was newly created at the time Whitman was an old man. A writer named Horace L. Traubel began having conversations with Whitman late in the famed poet's life and took notes, compiling them in a book called With Walt Whitman in Camden. Being Whitman, of course, his thoughts weren't pithy.

His actual thoughts on baseball?


"I like your interest in sports ball, chiefest of all base-ball particularly: base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character. Sports take people out of doors, get them filled with oxygen generate some of the brutal customs (so-called brutal customs) which, after all, tend to habituate people to a necessary physical stoicism. We are some ways a dyspeptic, nervous set: anything which will repair such losses may be regarded as a blessing to the race. We want to go out and howl, swear, run, jump, wrestle, even fight, if only by so doing we may improve the guts of the people: the guts, vile as guts are, divine as guts are!"

Later, in another conversation with Traubel, Whitman continued on baseball:


"Baseball is the hurrah game of the republic! That's beautiful: the hurrah game! well—it's our game: that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game: has the snap, go, fling, of the American atmosphere—belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of our historic life."


If, as Sarandon's character in Bull Durham believes, that there is a Church of Baseball, then Whitman saw the divine in it a hundred years earlier in the twilight of his life, the American game, our game, a beautiful thing, with divinity found in guts.

Forget the graduation video. Israeli sixth graders accidentally receive porn DVD instead.

In honor of National Hug Day, sixth graders at an elementary school in Haifa were to receive a commemorative DVD of their graduation ceremony. It was supposed to be the type of video that makes soccer moms and grandparents alike fan themselves from excitement.

Except an excitement of a different sort popped up on the video--excitement in the form of hardcore porn. Apparently there was a whole different form of hugging going on.

According to The Jerusalem Post, the school claims the DVD maker created the graduation ceremony video on used pornographic discs which left in scenes from various--uhh--lusty movies.

Parents have been aghast. "This is a scandal," said one.

Damn right. Who gets their dirty movies on DVD anymore?

Famous Writers with Cats: Robert Graves...special National Cat Day edition!

Writers need inspiration somewhere in life, and for many that inspiration comes from their pet cats.

This is a running series where we post pictures of famous writers with their feline companions--the cute, the cuddly, the creepy. And that's just the writers.

Today:  Robert Graves

Today is National Cat Day, where we honor our feline companions for not eating us in our sleep.

Here we see a prime example of why a gang of cats is more dangerous than the Bloods and Crips.

If Robert Graves with his hands in his pockets isn't the model enthusiastic cat owner, I'm not sure what is. Behind the wife and a small tree. YOU MUST BE SAFE!!

Look at the little one to the right. He's ready to pounce like Simba in The Lion King. And the black one on the left? Pure murder in his meow.

Anytime a hungry posse of pussycats get get together at dinnertime, you might lose a limb. Their bone-straight tails collectively suggest Graves and his wife were both eaten alive shortly after this photo.

Trees can't stop Mr. Whiskers. Only cans of Fancy Feast.

It's (British) National Poetry Day!

Created in 1994, and held every first or second Thursday in October (depending on the year), the purpose of National Poetry Day is to engage citizens throughout the United Kingdom and embrace every aspect, every form, every style of poetry. This can be the epic variety from 500 years ago, or an advertisement jingle from 2015. All that's important is that poetry gets a little love today--to be read, to be appreciated.

Since 1999, every National Poetry Day has had a theme. For 2015, the theme is 'Light.'

Considering this is the United Kingdom's commemorative day, my appreciation today goes to the most obvious of all British writers.


A Fairy Song Poem, by William Shakespeare

Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire!
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon's sphere;
And I serve the Fairy Queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green;
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours;
In those freckles live their savours;
I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.

2013's Color of the Year: Emerald

Pantone Inc. came up with their color of the year for 2013, and much to the delight of leprechauns and Idi Amin impersonators everywhere, Pantone selected Emerald.

According to Pantone's over-hyped description:

Emerald, a vivid, verdant green, enhances our sense of well-being further by inspiring insight, as well as promoting balance and harmony.

And here I've been wearing blue all this time. What a downer color! Explains a lot now.

It’s also the color of growth, renewal and prosperity – no other color conveys regeneration more than green.

What does gold represent then? Poverty? Because you can't afford to buy gold?

Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute, doesn't want to downplay Emerald. "As it has throughout history, multifaceted Emerald continues to sparkle and fascinate," she says. "Symbolically, Emerald brings a sense of clarity, renewal and rejuvenation, which is so important in today’s complex world."

At some point, Eiseman morphed into a hybrid of Tony Robbins and Deepak Chopra to describe a color.

And here you were thinking Emerald just looked green.

Today is World Teachers' Day

I don't know when this blog became the champion of obscure holidays. We're about five minutes away from saluting Hamster Liberation Day in Lithuania (not sure if this is a holiday, but someone work on this), but are you championing the cause of little people? No. So let's not judge.

These holidays keep coming in waves during autumn. (God forbid anyone put something noteworthy in the month of August.) Today it's World Teachers' Day--a holiday largely ignored in America because we like to attack teachers for the failure of our children to aspire to our irrational dreams we're shortsighted. There's a National Teacher's Day in America that takes place in June, but students and parents are largely busy with planning summer vacations by then, and Arbor Day is right around the corner, too. And everyone knows you don't go hatin' on Arbor Day.

Massachusetts is the only state to have its own statewide Teachers' Day in September--which is also untimely, since everyone is busy getting back to school. Que sera, sera.

So we're left with the international World Teachers' Day, which is commemorated far and wide by...err...uhh...no country really. Estonia? Is that a country or something in Lord Of the Rings? Estonia recognizes it. Mauritius, Moldova, Serbia, and Qatar, too. If that isn't a block of powerhouse, worldwide governmental bodies, I don't know what it.




photo: nycisnot4sale.com    Showing you everything that was fantastic about 1980's fashion trends. Shoulder pads on par with an NFL linebacker? Tres chic!

Today is Ask a Stupid Question Day.

According to Wikipedia, the holiday was created by teachers in the 1980s to get their students to ask more questions.


Okay, I'll play along:

In the oldies song "Who Put the Bomp," what exactly is a 'bomp' anyway? Or a 'shoo'?

Where was Baby New Year born? I assume Sheboygan.


What did the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey mean? Is there a gigantic space baby floating over Earth? If there is, I think it's time for us to freak the hell out. How does this go unnoticed by humanity? I'd think we'd all be in a lather that a giant fetus might start eating us--and that, my friend, would be a more logical end to the movie. Just pandemonium as the giant space baby licks its lips and reaches out for America.

There's no other day I can ask these things.

Today is National Punctuation Day.

Its' a day, to commemorate; how—important proper "punctuation" is in our daily lives?

No better day than today to go out and yell at a grocery store for obsessively using quotation marks when labeling their produce.





photo: e4africa.co.za

Shiver me timbers! Today is Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Arrrgh you ready?

((God, I'm so ashamed I just did that.))

This is probably Johnny Depp's least favorite day of the year.

Today is National Bookmobile Day.

Yup. There is such a thing.

I remember my hometown's bookmobile making rounds throughout the city when I was a wee lad. It looked like an abused school bus that just got out of a stint in rehab. Like it had scabies. Like a bad imitation of a predator van, minus the Dateline NBC camera crew in tow.

I never went inside that bookmobile. I like to think this is why I haven't needed therapy in adulthood.




(That's an old-timey photo from Nashville, TN, showing their bookmobile. Their bookmobile looks like it belongs to a prison, and the warden will walk out, sunglasses on, rifle over his shoulder, telling you in a thick, southern accent that what we have here is a failure to communicate.)

International Women's Day: 2012

Pay some respect to the women in your life today. It's International Women's Day. Created in 1909, and largely only celebrated in most of the world starting in 1977, it's a day to remember the struggles women have faced--and still face--in an unjust world of inadequate pay, secondary status, and nonexistent civil rights in large swaths of the world.

Being largely raised by only women myself--women who worked two jobs or struggled daily to get by--a hat-tip / fist-bump / hug goes to my mother. She's credited with anything good that comes out of me.

And anything bad in me? Outside influences. I promise, she's trying to fix it. Every day.




As a side note: how is this not an official holiday in the United States? It's an official holiday in various countries including, but not limited to: Moldova, Uzbekistan, Mongolia, Zambia, Eritrea, Angola, Armenia, Russia, China, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Burkina Faso, and Uganda. UGANDA! Home of the ever-internet-famous memes Joseph Kony...Uganda celebrates International Women's Day.

But not America.

2012's Color of the Year: Tangerine Tango

Something called the Pantone Color Institute (your guess is as good as mine) has come out with their Color of the Year.

The winner: Tangerine Tango.

Disregard for the moment that Pantone selects the color of the year for a year that hasn't happened yet. Small oversight.

According to the Pantone website description:

“Sophisticated but at the same time dramatic and seductive, Tangerine Tango is an orange with a lot of depth to it,” said Leatrice Eiseman, executive director of the Pantone Color Institute®.

Thank God, too. I've been so let down lately by unsophisticated, shallow oranges that have no depth. What tramps!

Pantone's Leatrice Eiseman continues:

"Reminiscent of the radiant shadings of a sunset, Tangerine Tango marries the vivaciousness and adrenaline rush of red with the friendliness and warmth of yellow, to form a high-visibility, magnetic hue that emenates heat and energy."

Who doesn't love a wedding? Even a wedding of colors. If only fuchsia and turquoise would stop pussyfooting around and finally tie the knot we'd all be happy, amiright??

Pantone:
"A winner in cosmetics because of its versatility, Tangerine Tango is a bit exotic, but in a very friendly, non-threatening way."

Unlike all those threatening exotic things in life, like Hawaii. And Spam.

Talkin' Turkey

When people mention 1970's television, I imagine television that's full of warm brown and orange tones. Think: All in the Family, The Jeffersons, The Partridge Family. Shag orange carpeting should be required. Bell-bottoms optional.

But here's Walter Cronkite hosting an edition of the CBS Evening News on November 13, 1972, which, based on film quality, looks pulled from a 1938 time capsule.

Why does it matter? Because it's about Cuero, TX, and their annual Turkey Trot, as told by Charles Kuralt.

Let's revisit Thanksgiving during a simpler time, when watching television made you feel like you had cataracts.

The month of March? National Caffeine Awareness Month.

Also know as National Fantasticness Month.

Except National Caffeine Awareness Month is a trap. "Awareness" should have been a red flag. No one uses the word "Awareness" when referencing a commemorative month unless they hate the thing they're commemorating--like breast cancer or heart disease.

Turns out there's a non-profit group called The Caffeine Awareness Association (who I must assume is a verrry sleepy group) that hates your morning cup o' Joe. Clearly, they've never had a quality latte made for them...