There is no holiday today.

The non-holiday will be duly not celebrated.

This may not end well

This poor mouse hamster is pretty obviously out of his depths—unless, that is, this photograph was taken on May 20th, Pick Strawberries Day, the day on which everyone in the world, regardless of species, is obligated to choose strawberries over any alimentary, sartorial, or transportative alternative. (Good thing Pick Strawberries Day isn’t the first Tuesday in November; one shudders to think whom we might have elected over lovable incumbent Strawbarack Obama.)

For those of us too ensconced in the urban grind to go out and pick our own strawberries, here’s a guessing game. Can you locate the strawberries in the pictures below?

1.

We'll start with an easy one

2.

A little bit harder now

3.

Tricky!

4.

No WAY you'll get this one

Give up? » Read the rest of this entry «

I couldn’t resist.

There once was a girl from Japan
Whose limericks never would scan
When she was asked why,
She said, with a sigh,
“It’s because I always try to fit as many syllables into the last line as I can.”

Today is No Socks Day. Which means, obviously enough, I’ll be getting my argyle ya-yas out in other ways, but also that we should take a minute to commemorate the recent passing of a former First Cat.

Socks (the non-wearable kind), you will be missed.

Also, yesterday was Odd Day, so named for having a date expressible by three consecutive odd numbers. “That’s not very impressive,” you’re maybe saying. Well, after November 13th, 2015, we won’t see the likes of Odd Day again for ninety years. You won’t be so smug then, will you? No, you’ll probably be dead.* I wrote an irregular sonnet using only the odd letters of the alphabet, but nobody seems to be interested. The last line is “my smoky magic makes you acquiesce.”

*Technically, Europeans only have until November 9th, 2013 to be smug.

Today’s holiday, Lumpy Rug Day, first came across my desk under the felicitous misspelling “Lumpy Run Day.” This made no sense to me, but I decided to run with it. As it were.

A cursory trawl through Wikipedia and Wookieepedia (sic) narrowed the Lumpy in question down to a few suspects: Chewbacca’s son Lumpawarrump, Happy Tree Friends mainstay Lumpy, or 1971 Bonesman and sometime Winnie the Pooh character Heffridge Trumpler Brompet Heffalump, IV. Given their respective physical peculiarities, running around the block or neighborhood in character could be a fun way to spend May 3rd, I guess. But why?

I kept searching. Google proposed a New York Times article from June 1891 entitled “It Was Lumpy on the Sound; Annual Regatta of the Larchmont Club A Success,” and for the sake of thoroughness dredged up this. Both involved forward motion, and at least one involved apostrophe abuse, but—call me a snob—I couldn’t see celebrating either nationally. Urban Dictionary had some suggestions that were, predictably, too heinous to repeat here.

It was then that I began to suspect a misspelling. What if there was no such thing as Lumpy Run Day? What if a finger had slipped somewhere along the way, dooming Rumpy Bug Day to obscurity? What if my ignorance was about to besmirch those who had struggled against untold hardship in order to assure the legacy of Dumpy Pug Day? What if it was the future of Comfy Lugz Day or Hampi Drug Day or Rumpy Doppelgänger Day that I held in my trembling, sweaty hands?

Ultimately it was Google who set me straight: did I mean lumpy rug day? Seems I did. How embarrassing.

Today, as it turns out, is about lumpy rugs, literal and figurative, and, somewhat misleadingly, about the cathartic importance of beating them, literally and figuratively. Have you swept any mildly uncomfortable truths under the area rug of denial? Does your toupée of self-awareness need to be adjusted? Has the baby powder of iniquity left a discolored patch on your carpet of moral tidiness? Today is the day to thwack it mightily with the rug beater of candor, center it on your balding pate in the mirror of personal revelation, or shampoo it with the shampoo of righteousness. Um, respectively.

If not, it still seems pretty fun to run around the block in the manner of a Heffalump.

She put her empty coffee cup in the sink, went to the kitchen door, and called, “Sam? Would you come in here for a minute? I want to ask you something.” 

They could hear Sam’s little feet trotting down the hall. He appeared in the kitchen door, grinning, with his blue jeans sagging and his sneakers untied.

“Hi, Anastasia!” Sam said. “Today at nursery school I did blocks. All the blocks have letters. I can spell my name with blocks, and I can spell ‘airplane,’ and ‘cookie,’ and—”

Anastasia smiled at him and didn’t say anything. She kept her mouth clamped closed.

“Sam, old buddy,” said Mrs Krupnik casually, “I have a question I want to ask you.”

“Okay,” said Sam happily. “Can I have a cookie?”

Anastasia handed him a raisin cookie from the cookie jar. She kept her mouth tightly closed.

“Sam,” said his mother, “are you interested in sex?”

Sam had stuffed half a cookie into his mouth. He chewed solemnly.

“Sam?” asked his mother.

“I’m thinking,” he said, with his mouth full. “I’m giving it serious thought.”

Finally, after he had swallowed, he asked, “How do you spell it?”

Anastasia grinned. Victory was in sight. She began to open her mouth to say “S.” But her mother glared at her.

“Anastasia,” Mrs Krupnik said in warning, “keep your mouth absolutely shut, or our bet is off.”

To Sam, Mrs Krupnik said, “S-E-X.”

Sam chewed the other half of his cookie slowly. He frowned. He was thinking. You could always tell when Sam was thinking because his forehead wrinkled up.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he said suddenly, and trotted out of the kitchen.

Anastasia sat very still with her mouth tightly closed. Her lips were beginning to ache.

Then Sam reappeared. “Yes,” he announced. “I am very interested in sex.” And off he went, back to his game in the living room.

Mrs Krupnik stared at Anastasia. Her eyes narrowed into a suspicious look. “All right,” she said, finally. “A bet’s a bet. You win.”

Anastasia relaxed her mouth and wiggled her tongue a bit to make sure it still worked. She grinned. “Thanks, Mom,” she said.

“You tricked me somehow. Tell me how.”

Anastasia took a cookie and began to pick the raisins out, one by one. She popped them into her mouth. She didn’t say anything.

“Why am I always outsmarted by a thirteen-year-old? Tell me how you did it!”

Finally Anastasia shrugged. “It wasn’t a trick. It was just that I’ve been teaching Sam to play Scrabble. I knew when he left the kitchen that he was going off to check the Scrabble points in ’sex.’ X is one of his favorite letters. Eight points for an X.” She broke off a bit of the raisinless cookie and put it in her mouth.

Her mother watched her chew. 

—Lois Lowry, Anastasia Ask Your Analyst

Something on a stick.
On a harpoon, for instance.
More on this later.

Slow down, I think I see Castor Troy

In parts of Europe
kebabs are known as “kebaps”
but the sticks don’t change

Lollipop lolli
pop o lolli lolli pop
you’ll put an eye out

Spoons and forks and knives
are sophisticated sticks
in a certain sense

Chopsticks do not count
they are sticks, but the “on” part
isn’t quite the same

The less said about
erotic popsicles and
corn dogs the better

Campfire marshmallows
flags brooms mops certain puppets
cubes of fancy cheese

John Travolta, who
is technically Nic Cage, at
the end of Face/Off

Those implements used
to play mallet instruments
I forget the name

One of the kids in
Lord of the Flies, and maybe
Jeremy Bentham?

O the nakedness!

Wow! Half of Chocolate-Covered Raisin Day is already half over, and I haven’t done a thing to celebrate! Who knew this Chocolate-Covered Raisin Day would be such a busy one? Not like the carefree Chocolate-Covered Raisin Days of my youth. While I celebrate my Chocolate-Covered Raisin Day with various secular and matronly tasks such as sewing and asbestos removal, I will fob off my annotative duties on you, the unsuspecting reader, by means of a multimedia contest. It’s time we brought Chocolate-Covered Raisin Day into the twenty-first century. 2.0.

So: combine this with this, preferably by means of this, and report back to us in the comments section. For no particular help but grammatical abuses aplenty, see here. The winner will win something à propos. It won’t be Raisinets. Make us proud, unsuspecting reader. Make us proud.

Okay, back to the gas tungsten arc welding shop. Happy Chocolate-Covered Raisin Day!

While I wait for Gabe to lurch in and bumble about slurring nonexistent fricatives in the word “alectromancy,” here is a Silkworm ditty I am listening to serially to commemorate the day. It’s from their 2002 album Italian Poultry. Or something like that.

Silkworm  “A Cockfight of Feelings”

Today we celebrate cowardice. It is a most venerable— wait, sorry, that’s poltroonery. I haven’t been sleeping well.

Today we celebrate chickens and turkeys, ducks and geese, pheasants and peafowls and spatchcocks and turtledoves. (Pigeons too, if you eat pigeons.) We traditionally celebrate these noble avifauna by praising them for their low cholesterol content, then cooking and eating them. Maybe not the most intuitive way to celebrate something, but it seems to work for Secretary’s Day.

DND progenitor holidayinsights.com recommends “eggs for breakfast, a chicken sandwich for lunch, and barbecue chicken for dinner.” (It also speculates, in the absence of conclusive research, that the creator of Poultry Day was “the poultry industry.”) For those of us who are not content to eat poultry in normal quantities, there’s turducken. For those of us who are really, really hungry and also batshit insane, there is the True Love Roast. For those of us who are not hungry but still insane, there is the time-honored pastime of cockfighting. Did you know that’s where the word “cockpit” comes from? Did you know Louisiana didn’t outlaw it until less than a year ago? Did you know Wilford Brimley is an outspoken defender of cockfighting rights according to one totally dubious Angelfire page?

"That's the last time I bet my pants on you, Foghorn"

Sure, that’s all plenty festive. But it seems to me, bleeding-heart vegetarian and squeamish liberal that I am, that a nice way to celebrate “chicken, turkey, and other birds we commonly consume” would be to pass on consuming them for a day. Maybe also to pass on strapping four-inch blades to their legs and pitting them against one another in heavily lucrative deathmatches.

What do I suggest? I suggest alectromancy:

A circle of letters was traced on the ground and laid out with some sort of grain placed on each letter. Next a rooster, usually a white one, was let [to] pick at the grains, thus selecting letters to create a divinatory message or sign. The chosen letters could be either read in order of selection, or rearranged to make an anagram.

I’ll get the Scrabble tiles. Who’s got a white rooster?