It’s cold, it’s grey and it’s the 290th day of the year (leaving 75 days until the forced jollity of yet another New Years Day).
It is Spreadsheet Day, Hagfish Day, Global Dignity Day, International Day for the Eradication of Poverty Day, Take Your Parents to Lunch Day, Wear Something Gaudy Day, Mulligan Day, Playing Card Collection Day and Forgive an Ex Day.
From our time running the Quercus group I knew there were lots of special days, but I didn’t know there were this many.
I’ll take a quick run through them.
Spreadsheet Day – don’t use them. If I’ve managed without them for 60 years I can’t see that they are a lot of use.
Hagfish Day – never seen it on a menu so I think we can safely ignore it.
Global Dignity Day – sounds like someone, somewhere got a grant and is busily building a career based on bullshit.
International Day for the Eradication of Poverty – each year people gather “to renew their resolve to combat poverty”. I’m sure all the poor people are suitably impressed.
Take Your Parents to Lunch Day – I can’t help thinking that this would be better on a Sunday when the kids aren’t working or at school.
Wear Something Gaudy Day – in our house, I thought, every day is Wear Something Gaudy Day. However, when you read the information it seems the bar is set considerably higher by the enthusiasts.
Mulligan Day – American slang about second chances. We already have enough American slang thank you, so I’ll take a rain check on that one.
Playing Card Collection Day – got to be good. Days about collecting should be encouraged. I just went looking for the correct name for a playing card collector. I didn’t find it but I did find the material for a whole new post.
Forgive an Ex Day – Why? They’re an Ex for a reason. We were discussing a new gift shop idea the other day when we got fed up with eBay – wondering if there would be a market for insulting gifts. This would be a good day to try it out – sending a bunch of dead flowers and Turkish Delight flavoured with rosewater and the bitter tears of regret.
That is probably enough now. It was meant to be a post detailing my progress in my 1,000 Haiku Challenge but it seems to have been diverted.
The next post might be about Haiku but as it’s Pizza Month I may just carry on with more random discussion of the vagaries of modern life.
I just thought I’d let you know I noticed the inclusion of ‘rain check’.
Glad somebody did. 🙂 Half the people reading it probably don’t know it’s an American expression.
😀
I look forward to the Cards post. Don’t forget to include yourself
🙂
Haha! This was really funny! I must agree, taking parents (or grandparents) to lunch would be much more practical on Sundays. And on that point, society is in a pretty sad state if it needs a special, designated day for spending time with family. When my grandmother was still alive, I would sneak into her house almost every Sunday while she was at church and make a really nice lunch for her to co e home to. One time, I even made roast goose! As for taking her out to eat, I did that often, too, whenever I wasn’t tied up with work or school. (In case you’re wondering, my grandparents were more like my parents than my actual parents, so I devoted my efforts more to them.)
Ok, enough rambling. Thanks for the entertaining post!
Nice to hear about someone looking after the old folk. You are right about society, we shouldn’t really need most of these days or months. Pizza month seems OK though.
Sure, pizza month can stay. It might give me an excuse to actually eat pizza, which I seldom do.
They also have Black Cat Awareness Month if you want something less food based.
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I am with Andrew, I like spreadsheets a lot and unlike many things that I like, they are actually useful and time saving and don’t make you fat.
I have a simple life that doesn’t need such sophistication. Give me a scrap of paper and a pen and I’m happy. 🙂
Same here. Technology is way too complicated!
Glad to hear I’m not the oldest Luddite in town!
It is good to find a man always happy as pens and scraps of paper are easy to get hold of.
They don’t need electricity to work and if you lose a bit of paper it’s less bother than a computer malfunction. 🙂
I spent a weekend recently at a nature-based spiritual event in the woods where a whole clan of 15 or so people wrote haiku all weekend long. I was not among them, since it seemed like a terrible idea to me, and instead I learned Lithuanian sutartines, which are ace–polyphonic pagan-based vocal music in Lithuanian. There should be a month for it! Here’s an example. It is believed that the Lithuanians learned this music form from cranes and other waterfowl, hence the many in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wbyn61KgaqA
That sounds excellent – much better than I was expecting! Sounds like it could have been time well spent.
Haiku in bulk are often not a great experience. 🙂
I’ll stick the words ‘I agree’ on there to make one.
I thought it was rather contradictory myself–buckets of short pithy doins that you sort of aren’t allowed to stop until the three or four days are up.
The term “Lithuanian folk music” would never have excited me, but the discipline and intricacy of them do impress me, and it genuinely has helped improve my brain function perceptibly within the short time I have been singing it and listening to it–the brain follows the several strands of it and feels pretty smug when it can do it. It did give me terrible times for a while there when it was combined with the folk movements and thgings, and that just made the epilepsy rear up and be really confusing while it agreed to the new arrangement.
It seems to have been worth it in the end. All music confuses me so I’d have had no chance.
I regard it sort of like maths–just make the right doot doot in the right place, and it works.
🙂 Sounds like a good system.
It produced computers, I guess, and backing vocals, so it seems okay to me.
the teacher actually had us tootle on little reeds, just little one-note things that would annoy every parent ever, and one guy and I were to go toot toottoot on our little respective reeds, over and over, and some others did different patterns, and it produced the most complex and interesting contrapuntal thing. It was very cool and all just repetition of patterns. You could have done it hitting a hammer on a tv over and over.
Hitting a TV would have many other benefits too, including exercise and freeing your mind…
I used to shoot them in shooting pits in the US and that was decent, if poor sport. Bowling pins actually absorbed the bullets and percussion and did not always explode–little-known fact, that.
A whole new insight into American life for me… 🙂
I found some really amazing Scandinavian spiritual music recently. My 4 year old and I have started playing it as bed time music. It has a deep, resonance, and heavy kind of sound, but is almost like a chant. The sound reminds me of singing bowls and Buddhist monks chanting and native American ritual music, but with more of a heathen flair.
Sounds interesting. I’ll try to hunt some out on You Tube.
It is, and I did see one video, admittedly of poor quality, as it appeared to be made by someone in the audience. But the actual performance was really cool! They were playing in a totally natural place, in a mountain gorge or something. (I’m not good with mountainous terminology.)
I will have a look tomorrow.
It would be interesting to know what it is. It could well be Lithuanian. I like knowing what the songs mean, personally, so I can feel good about them. Lithuanian sutartines are pretty much all nature and farming and some battle subject matter, and some of the youtube videos feature armour from the 1400s or so on people, and historical artifacts.
The group is called Wardruna. My favourite of the two albums I’ve heard so far is called Yggdrasil. I think they are Norse, but I could be mistaken. Definitely not Lithuanian. I used to date a Lithuanian guy and lived with a whole group of guys from there. The language has a very distinct sound.
Yggdrasil is definitely Norse so that would make sense.
Lets leave the American ideas in the Americas!
🙂 Good idea!
Hey, come on, now! Sometimes, the Americans have a few good ideas worth sharing. 😉
I’ll take the Fifth on that. Pah! More Americans in my head! 🙂
Haha! I was just going to say, the fifth amendment is totally American! 😂
🙂
” Turkish Delight flavoured with rosewater and the bitter tears of regret” HA! That is awesome.
🙂 Thank you.
I can happily manage without any of them except spreadsheets – I do like spreadsheets!
There’s something for everyone on the list. If we move onto the month list., it starts with pizza month and moves on to black cats…
Lots of days, that’s for sure. As for mulligan…I thought it was a stew. Had never heard of the second chance definition. Maybe we are too far north in Maine to get much slang from the rest of the country? 😉
That could explain a lot. 🙂
I’d never heard of mulligan either… I’m from the deep South. Well, if Florida can still be considered deep South.
go any further south you get wet, so Florida sounds pretty south to me.
Haha! Geographically, yes, but culturally, that has changed. Much of the southern states were originally populated by a large number of people from the badlands of england/Scotland. That area near the English/Scottish border. Many were brought over as bond servants and sent to the south to do the hardest work. From what I’ve read, they were the cheapest labour, snatched off the streets and sold cheaper than African slaves, who had to be purchased from the slave runners. Anyway, I digress. The point is, the deep South imported their Scottish and English rural culture with them, and evidence of it remains to this day. Oh, yeah, Irish, too. That probably explains why southern food tastes so wonderful, because it derives directly from the British isles. Even southern slang comes from there, although it’s evolved separately from the old countries. Well, Florida’s southern culture is being quickly replaced by other groups of various descent. Some from other European origins, some from completely different continents altogether. Everyone thinks they want to live in the sunshine state. 😄
I was very impressed with Florida when I saw it on a fishing programme. If I win the lottery I’m going to go fishing in Florida.
I have to admit, the fishing is really good there! I used to do a lot of fishing growing up. Miss it.
🙂 One day…
Can’t go too much farther south in the U.S., can you?
My thought exactly!