Apple #720: October, the Eighth -- er, the Tenth Month

I've recently been battling the effects of too little sleep and too much work for too long, so my posts have been spottier than usual lately.  I'm starting to make inroads on the exhaustion, though, so I thought I'd give you another Daily Apple.  This one is about a little inconsistency I noticed this afternoon.

October is the tenth month in our calendar.  But clearly, octo- means eight.  How did a month named "eighth month" wind up in the tenth spot?

And wait a minute. September = 7, November =9, December = 10.  But they are in the 9th, 11th, and 12th month positions.  How did that happen?



Even Philosoraptor wants to know.
(Meme from imgflip)

The Short Answer

• As you might guess, it's because of the transition from an old calendar to the calendar which we now use.

• In the very old Roman calendar, October was the 8th month.  When the Roman calendar was revised, more months were added, and that pushed October into the 10th slot.

The Complete Answer

• Regular Daily Apple readers will know that a three-sentence answer to any question is probably not the entire answer. The complete answer may take longer to get to, but therein lie the oddities, and therein lies the fun.

• First of all, the Romans didn't quite have it all down pat when it came to their calendar.  They got their ideas about their calendar from the Greeks, but they added their own special flair to it.

• Initially (before 700 BCE or so), their calendar had 10 months.  Nice, round number.  Easy to work with. The months were ordered thusly:

1. Martius
2. Aprilis
3. Maius
4. Junius
5. Qunitilis
6. Sextilis
7. September
8. October
9. November
10. December

• You can see the Romans trying to be logical.  They were creative with the first 4 months' names, and then they gave up and named the months after their position.  But that made things easy to keep track of.

• The problem was, the earth's rotations and the months and days don't fit nicely into a 10-month package.  The Romans wound up with 61 days that didn't belong to any month at all.

• I don't know what people did for those 61 days.  Went around holding their breath, I suppose, or saying, "We are in the monthless days," I don't know.

• Then Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome--this was before there were emperors or even a republic--came along.  He ruled from 615-673 BCE, after the first king, Romulus, had died.  He decided to reform the calendar and account for those rogue 61 days.

Sculpture of Numa Pompilius. I'm talking about him as if he were an actual person, and he was, but he lived so long ago, and so many stories have been told and re-written and exaggerated that it's difficult to know what he actually did and what was done by other people and got attributed to him. From what I gather, he's sort of a catch-all figure for Things People Did During the 700 BCE years.
(Image from Crystalinks)

• Numa added two more months, January and February, at the end of the calendar.  So his months went like this:

1. Martius
2. Aprilis
3. Maius
4. Junius
5. Qunitilis
6. Sextilis
7. September
8. October
9. November
10. December
11. January
12. February

• He preserved the logic of the months' names and their positions, and his calendar came closer to the actual solar year, but it fell a little short at 355 days long.

• To correct that problem, he said that every other year there should be an inter-calendar month of 22 or 23 days, whichever was necessary, called Mercedinus.   

• You would think that Mercedinus would be inserted after February, but that's not quite how it went. Numa said Mercedinus should be inserted within February, after the 23rd or 24th, and then once Mercedinus was over, they'd go back to February and finish that month.  So in practice his calendar went more like this:

• 1. Martius
• 2. Aprilis
• 3. Maius
• 4. Junius
• 5. Qunitilis
• 6. Sextilis
• 7. September
• 8. October
• 9. November
• 10. December
• 11. Januarius
• 12. Februarius
• (no number). Mercedinus for a while
• 12. back to Februarius

• Numa also declared that the previous practice of figuring out what day it was solely by what the moon was doing was too fuzzy.  From then on, every month would have 31 days.  Er, mostly.  

• The Romans liked 31 because they believed that odd numbers were lucky.  But not every month could have 31 days and keep the calendar corresponding with actuality, so Numa said some months would have 29 days. Keepin' it odd.

• But even with these improvements, the Roman calendar was still messed up.  The months wound up moving slightly as time progressed so a month that used to be in spring, after a certain amount of time, would wind up in summer.  

• Also, since the priests were still in charge of announcing when it would be the Ides or when it would be the Kalends, they were messing with the decrees to make parts of a month longer or shorter so the rulers they liked would be in power longer.  There were decrees being made left and right, changing the length of months all the time.  The whole thing got pretty jacked.

Replica of a fragment of a Roman calendar (one of the Fasti), showing January through May. Days were reckoned by the new moon (Kalends) and how many days had passed since that, the first quarter (Nones) and how many days after that, and the full moon (Ides) and how many days had passed since then. Crystal clear, right?
(Figure from Calendars through the Ages)

• When Julius Caesar came along, he said, "I'll fix this."  He asked an astronomer for advice and based on what that guy told him, in 45 B.C.E. he established a new calendar that had 365 days (10 more than the Roman calendar) divided into 12 months.  Sounds familiar, doesn't it?

Julius Caesar, perhaps decreeing that we should all abide by his new and improved calendar.
(Photo from Calendars through the Ages)

• He made January the first month of the year.  This was in keeping with a practice that many people had been following for about 100 years already because January 1 was the beginning of the civil year in Rome, when the elected consuls would begin their one-year term.  (Sort of ironic that Caesar, who inaugurated the empire and put an end to the Republic, would codify a practice associated with the rule of the republicans).

• He didn't change the order of any of the months, just shifted the beginning of the year to January.  So his calendar went like this:

1. Januarius
2. Februarius
3. Martius
4. Aprilis
5. Maius
6. Junius
7. Qunitilis
8. Sextilis
9. September
10. October
11. November
12. December

• We follow this order of the months today (except now we call the seventh month July after--guess who?--Julius, and the eighth month August after another emperor, Augustus). 

• So that's how the eighth month wound up being the tenth month.

But Wait, There's More

• After a few years, the astronomers discovered the Julian calendar wasn't right.  So they added a Leap Day at the end of February every third year.  But then after a few more years it became obvious that still wasn't right, so they changed Leap Day to every fourth year. 

• After more time passed, they discovered that this still wasn't right.  An extra day was getting added every 128 years.  So every 128 years, they had to shift the calendar to skip that extra day.

• Even so, that calendar was pretty popular and some parts of the world or some scholarly disciplines still use it.

• In 1582 during the tenure of Pope Gregory XIII, a new calendar was adopted, which we call the Gregorian calendar after the Pope, even though it was an Italian astronomer who came up with it.

Luigi Lilio, the Italian doctor/philosopher/astronomer who came up with the calendar we call Gregorian and which we use today.
(Image from adnkronos)

• The Gregorian calendar was pretty much the same as the Julian calendar, except the number of days in each month were a little more flexible -- no need to stick with that lucky odd number anymore -- and the months were adjusted so the first day of a new season fell on the 21st, or as close to that as possible, and the way Leap Day was calculated was more nuanced.

• Leap Years would not be every fourth year absolutely, but would occur only if the year is evenly divisible by 4.  But if the year is evenly divisible by 100 it is not a leap year, unless the year is also evenly divisible by 400.

• This got rid of that problem of an extra day every 128 years, and it also helped keep the months more closely aligned with the seasons each year.  It is the calendar we follow today.

• By the way, English-speaking folk took longer to switch to the Gregorian calendar.  It wasn't until 1752 that Great Britain and the then-colonies began counting their days the Gregorian way.

• The Gregorian calendar still isn't perfect, by the way.  It adds an extra 27 seconds each year, which amounts to 1 extra day every 3,236 years.  In a few thousand years, somebody will have to tweak our calendar some more. 

Another indicator of how the Gregorian calendar still contains errors. You can see how the calendar date of the summer solstice falls at various times relative to June 21.5 as the years progress, and then gets readjusted with the divisible-by-400 leap shifting. If our calendar has this much variation in it, imagine how much variation there must have been in the Roman calendar compared to seasons and equinoxes.
(Chart from Wikipedia)

Bonus Fact

• In the very early days of the Roman kings, a priest (pontifex) would keep track of what the moon was doing and when a new moon started, the pontifex would announce that a new month had begun. The verb for "to solemnly announce" is calare, and it is from that verb that we get our word calendar.

Sources

Calendars through the Ages, Early Roman Calendar

Timeanddate.com, The Month of October and The Julian Calendar and The Gregorian Calendar and The Christian Calendar

Times News, October was once the eighth month, October 19, 2013

Infoplease, A History of the New Year

The Calendar FAQ, The Julian calendar

Lawrence A. Crowl, A History of the Months and the Meanings of their Names

Apple #683: Days of the Week

I was thinking about doing a Daily Apple on Tuesday.  Wednesday is hump day, Thursday is now apparently throw-back Thursday, Friday is the end of the work week, but what about Tuesday?  No one pays any attention to Tuesday.  Except sometimes there are two-for-Tuesday things.

I wondered what Tuesday is named for.  I don't know if I was taught this way, or if this is something my brain came up with on its own, but I thought that the days of the week were named for Roman gods.  Saturday is named for Saturn, obviously.  The other ones I was less sure about. Thursday must be named for Thor -- not Roman, but still a mythological god.  Friday was maybe named for Friya.  But again, what about Tuesday?  Could there be some relationship to the word "two?"



Days of the week -- in bottlecaps
(Photo from BeansThings on Flickr)



Wrong. Some of my assumptions were actually correct, but for wrongity wrong reasons.  Saturday is in fact named for Saturn, but, oh, let me show you what I found out.

• The days of the week are named for the planets in our solar system, including the sun & the moon. (The planets are named for gods, so there's some overlap here.)

• This is more obvious in the Romance languages than it is in English. 

• Let me show you with a table.  Blogger is terrible at handling tables, so I hope this turns out OK.

 

Day	Celestial Body	French	Spanish	Italian
Sunday	Sun	Dimanche	Domingo	Domenica
Monday	Moon (Luna)	Lundi	Lunes	Lunedì
Tuesday	Mars	Mardi	Martes	Martedì
Wednesday	Mercury	Mercredi	Miércoles	Mercoledì
Thursday	Jupiter (Jove)	Jeudi	Jueves	Giovedì
Friday	Venus	Vendredi	Viernes	Venerdì
Saturday	Saturn	Samedi	Sábado	Sabato

• It's really easy to see where French, Spanish, and Italian used the names of the planets for their days of the week.  The only one that doesn't quite fit is Sunday.  In these languages, their word for Sunday means "Day of the Lord."

• I suppose if the Earth's rotation had allowed for more days of the week, we'd also have days named after Uranus and Neptune and maybe even Pluto.

• But hang on a minute.  The order of the planets in this list does not correspond with the order in which we usually think of them, in terms of their distance from the sun.

 

Nine planets (minus Pluto) and their position relative to the sun. This is not how our days of the week are ordered.
(Image from Nine Planets)

• Here is what some people have proposed as the reason for this order.  Put the celestial bodies in our list in a circle, assuming Earth is at the center.  Order them according to their time of revolution around the earth, and you get this:

(Diagram from The Calendar FAQ)

• OK, now start with the moon (Monday), and count one position clockwise around the circle for each hour of the day: Saturn 1, Jupiter 2, Mars 3, Sun 4, Venus 5, etc.  Stop when you hit 24 and your finger will be on Mars.  The next day of the week.  Do the same thing again, beginning with Mars, and the 24th position will be Mercury. And so on until you have the planets listed in the order we've seen above.

• Pretty clever, eh?

• So why don't our words for days of the week look like those French & Spanish words?   Why isn't our Tuesday more like Mars Day?

• Answer: because of that whole Old English thing.

Celestial Body	Old English	Current English
Sun	Sunne	Sunday
Moon (luna)	Mona	Monday
Mars	Tiu	Tuesday
Mercury	Wōden	Wednesday
Jupiter (Jove)	Þunor	Thursday
Venus	Frigg	Friday
Saturn	Saturnus	Saturday

• You can definitely see the similarities between Old English and our present-day English.

• But it sure seems like a big leap from "Mars" to "Tiu," and from "Mercury" to "Wōden." And what's that weird letter Þ?

• Tiu -- sometimes spelled Tiw, this was the name of the Old English/Germanic god of war.  Mars was the Roman god of war.  Tiu's name is a descendant of the old Norse name for their god of war, Tyr.  Just as people say the Roman god of war, Mars, and the Greek god Ares were the same thing (though they kind of weren't), so you could also say that Tiu and Mars were pretty much the same gods. Tiu is also known as the god of hand-to-hand combat, heroism, and justice.

This is Tiu, or Tiw.  He was kind of a bad-ass.  There was a seriously bad wolf, Fenrir (hello, Harry Potter fans) whom the gods were trying to tie up and subdue. The wolf said he would never give up unless one of the gods put their hand in his mouth. Tiu was the only god who had the guts to do so.  The dwarves made a magical ribbon and the gods used it to bind up the wolf, but not before he'd bitten off Tiu's hand. So Tiu is often depicted as being one-handed.
(Image from Saxons and Vikings in Britain)

• Wōden -- this is another descendant of a Norse god, in this case, Odin.  Wōden was an Anglo-Saxon god who was the big cheese, in charge of all sorts of things. He created the earth and sky out of the body of a dead giant, he made the first man and woman, and he made the laws that govern the universe.  You'd think that would make him like Jupiter/Jove, but he was also the god of learning, poetry, and magic. So he got correlated with Mercury, who was the god of poetry, communication, speed, trickery, and the escort to Hades.  Tiu (or Tiw) was one of his children.

This is Odin, the Norse god whose Anglo-Saxon counterpart was Wōden. Odin was seriously cool. He's flanked by his two ravens, Thought and Memory, who flew off and came back to him with news of each day's events. It's hard to see it in this drawing, by he's often shown missing one eye because he agreed to lose one for the privilege of drinking from the fountain of wisdom.
(Image from U Colorado Mythology Course)

• Þunor -- First of all, that weird letter Þ is called a "thorn." It's from the Old English alphabet and it's pronounced th. So you'd say this name Thunor.  Looks like thunder, doesn't it?  This is the Anglo-Saxon god whose counterpart in Norse mythology is Thor, who was the god of thunder, lightning, storms, oak trees, strength, and war. (I'm beginning to wonder, who wasn't a god of war?)  Þunor was another son of Wōden's. 

Þunor, or Thor, using his hammer to fight off the giants. In addition to all those other strong-man things, he was also the god of protection of humankind.
(Painting by Winge, 1872, from Wikipedia)
 

• Frigg --  Frigg was the wife of Wōden. Sometimes her name is spelled Frigga. Some say she is not the same goddess as Freya; others say she is very similar and so might be the same.  She is the goddess of love, marriage, and motherhood.  She weaves the web of destiny, so she knows everyone's fate, but she does not reveal it. This may explain why Friday is such an exciting day of the week.

Frigg, goddess of love and marriage and motherhood, and also weaver but not revealer of destinies. She looks like she knows more than she's telling, doesn't she?
(Image from Norse Gods and Goddesses)

• The rest of the days -- Sunday / sun; Monday / moon; Saturday / Saturn -- seem pretty obvious, so I won't go into them in detail. You get the picture.

• You might be thinking, well, this is only Western cultures that have named their days of the week this way.  

• It is true that in many other languages, the days of the week are simply numbered -- 1st day, 2nd day, 1st day off, 2nd day off.  

• But take a look at the days of the week in Japanese:

	Orthography	Romanization	Translation
Sunday	日曜日	nichiyōbi	Sun day
Monday	月曜日	getsuyōbi	Moon day
Tuesday	火曜日	kayōbi	Fire day
Wednesday	水曜日	suiyōbi	Water day
Thursday	木曜日	mokuyōbi	Wood day
Friday	金曜日	kin'yōbi	Gold day
Saturday	土曜日	doyōbi	Earth day

• You might think at first that this is a completely different method for naming the days of the week -- at least, except Sunday & Monday.

• But if we look at these names through the lens of the Chinese theory of the five elements (yes, I know Chinese and Japanese culture are two different things, but they did borrow things from each other quite often), you start to see something pretty familiar.  Remember, the Japanese terms are elements.

• Fire -- the color red, south, summer, midday, and the planet Mars
• Water -- the color black, north, winter, midnight, and the planet Mercury
• Wood -- the color green, east, spring, dawn, and the planet Jupiter
• Gold -- the color white, west, autumn, dusk, and the planet Venus
• Earth -- the color yellow, the center, the end of each season, and the planet Saturn

• Adding those definitions to our chart, we get this:

	Orthography	Romanization	Translation	Celestial Body
Sunday	日曜日	nichiyōbi	Sun day	Sun
Monday	月曜日	getsuyōbi	Moon day	Moon
Tuesday	火曜日	kayōbi	Fire day	Mars
Wednesday	水曜日	suiyōbi	Water day	Mercury
Thursday	木曜日	mokuyōbi	Wood day	Jupiter
Friday	金曜日	kin'yōbi	Gold day	Venus
Saturday	土曜日	doyōbi	Earth day	Saturn

(with thanks to Bathrobe's Days of the Week)

• Again, pretty cool, eh?

• By the way,  the days of the week in Chinese (Mandarin), are essentially numbered, as in ritual-day one, ritual-day two, ritual-day three, etc.  

• However, there is one old set of names in Mandarin for the days of the week that nobody uses anymore, and that set is based on the planets.  

• The theory, very speculative, is that the planet-based names originated in ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. That tradition was picked up on by the Greeks and Romans and spread through the Western world. It also traveled westward to cultures in Persia, the Middle East, and Central Asia, and eventually reaching China and Japan.

Sources
Oxford Dictionaries, Just Plutonic? Roman gods and their relationship to the days of the week
Bathrobe's Days of the Week, In the West, Japanese, Chinese
The Calendar FAQ, The Week
Lawrence A. Crowl, The Seven-Day Week and the Meanings of the Names of the Days
Calendars through the Ages, Our Seven-day Week
Infoplease, Woden
Behind the Name, Þunor and Thor
Encyclopedia Mythica, Frigg
Norse Mythology for Smart People, Frigg

Apple #670: Easter Candy Facts

A lot of people have a lot of opinions about Easter.  I have mine, you have yours.  But one thing we can all agree on is Easter candy.  So here are your fast Easter candy facts to have at the ready as you're sitting around with friends & family this weekend, gnawing the ears off some hapless chocolate bunny.

The bunny might be hopless too, since it's chocolate. Hahahaha!

Look at the ears on those chocolate bunnies.  Just asking for it.
(Photo and chocolate bunnies from Lake Champlain Chocolates. Each year, they make a 3-pound chocolate bunny they affectionately call Mr. Goodtime Bunny.)

• After Halloween, Easter is the biggest candy holiday of the year.  Bigger than Christmas. 

• 120 million pounds of Easter candy are sold each year in the United States.

• The total amount of candy manufactured in anticipation of each Easter includes:

• 90 million chocolate bunnies
• 91.4 billion eggs of various sorts
• 700 million marshmallow Peeps
• 16 million jelly beans

• Children's favorite color of jelly bean: red. 

There's one marshmallow Peep born every 6 seconds.
(Photo from Buzznet)

• Altogether, we Americans spend $14.7 billion with a B on Easter stuff.  Not just candy, but decorations, clothes, Easter bonnets, etc.  That's about $131 per household. 

• $2.1 billion with a B of that is candy.
• 70% of the $2.1 billion is chocolate.

• 76% of chocolate bunny-eaters say they eat the ears first. 

• According to Guinness world records, the largest chocolate Easter egg was over 34 feet tall and weighed 15,873 pounds. I'd hate to be around when that thing hatched.

• Cadbury starts making & selling their creme eggs on New Year's Day through Easter.  So get 'em now before they vanish for the rest of the year. 

What's the creme in those Cadbury eggs made of? Sugar & water. That's it.
(Photo from Buzznet)



Hoppy Easter!
(Photo from Healthline)


Sources
Do Something.org, 11 Facts About Easter
ABC15 Arizona, Easter candy: 9 facts that may surprise you
ABCNews, 90 Million Chocolate Bunnies and Other Fun Easter Facts
Chicago News Tween US, Hunting for Easter egg trivia? Find 11 fun facts here

Apple #640: International Picnic Day

As I type this, it's still Father's Day.  But by the time most of you read this, it won't be anymore.  So I wondered, what holiday is yet to come in the near future that I can help you prepare for?  A little Googling and I found the answer: International Picnic Day, June 18.



Le Dejeuner sur l'herbe (Luncheon on the grass) by Edouard Manet, 1862.  A French guy's idea of a picnic.  Involves nudity, of course.  What do you expect?  He's French.
(Painting by Edouard Manet, image sourced from 365 Foods)

• No one's really sure how International Picnic Day started showing up on people's calendars.  It's not a national US holiday; it's not officially recognized by Congress. Some "national" holidays turn out to be marketing schemes promoted by manufacturers of whatever product is being celebrated, but in this case, there isn't really an international picnic-maker, so that's not the case.

• Some say International Picnic Day has something vaguely to do with labor unions.  Often, particular labor unions have some sort of annual celebration, and those celebrations sometimes include picnics.  But as you've probably gathered by my description, this is all a bunch of guesswork, and nobody's really sure.

• Please don't confuse International Picnic Day (June 18) with National Picnic Day (April 23).  The origins of National Picnic Day are similarly obscure.  Since it makes much more sense to me to have a picnic in June (sunny, warm!) than in April (windy, maybe rainy or chilly), I vote in favor of the International version.

• But even if we don't know why we're celebrating it, or why there are 2 holidays devoted to picnics, why not have a picnic anyway?  Because June 18 is not only International Picnic Day, it's also International Panic Day.  Why anyone wants to celebrate terror so complete it renders you incapable of all logical thought, I don't know.  But it is another obscure holiday that is also celebrated for inexplicable reasons on June 18.

• What better way to counteract Panic than to have a Picnic?

• So, now that I've convinced you to have a picnic on June 18, here's how you can do that.

• I'm sure you envision a picnic as spreading a red & white checked cloth on some patch of grassy ground, opening a wicker basket full of sandwiches and maybe potato salad or grapes & cheese, with maybe some lemonade or possibly even a bottle of wine in the bargain.  Not that that's bad, but you don't need to feel like you have to have all that stuff, or eat a meal in exactly that way, because a picnic actually allows a lot more variety than that.

Your picnic does not have to look like this.  In fact, if you're a living breathing human being, it probably won't.
(Photo from Latinas y punto)



Hopefully your picnic would look more like this.
(Photo from the Orange County Historical Society, sourced from Local Dog Picnic)



Or maybe your picnic would look like this.
(Photo from Sunshine and Silliness)

• The word picnic comes from a French word, piquenique, which was kind of a nonsense word that came from the word for "to pick."  It's generally assumed that it means "pick a little bit."  That's because the first picnics were actually potlucks -- meals where each guest brought something, and everyone would sample from each dish.  Thus you'd pick a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Piquenique.

• These original piqueniques were informal by nature, and somebody at some point decided to add to the informality by having them outside.  Over time, it was the outside part of the equation that stuck.  

• That's because eating outside is fun!  Or it can be, if it's not too windy so all your napkins blow away, or if it's not too buggy.  But you can choose where or how to have your picnic and avoid those possible unpleasantries.

• The only rules of picnics are that you eat outside, and keep it informal.  You don't have to carry the food there in a picnic basket.  This culture likes to make you think you have to buy all sorts of cute & matching stuff in order to enjoy an event, or spend 17 hours making things all cutesy and matchy-matchy in your kitchen like some cookie-cutter Martha Stewart.  But the heck with that.  Get some food that tastes good, find a friend or two and go eat it outside!

Egad. If you want to spend money to get a bag of stuff that would allow you to think that your picnic could be absolutely perfect -- though I think "picnic" and "perfection" are oxymorons -- you could get this deluxe picnic backpack complete with 4-piece place setting for $49.50.
(Photo & backpack from Lee Valley)


Or wait. Even better. This "suitcase picnic basket" has stainless steel place settings for 4, a fleece blanket, a cheese knife & cutting board, corkscrew, vacuum flask, 4 wine glasses, and a "fully insulated corduroy wine duffel."  For only $290!  Ai yi.  You'd need to take a vacation to get over the stress of paying for your picnic basket.
(Photo and picnic basket from Bed Bath & Beyond)



If you get one of those, then you're just asking for Yogi Bear to come find you.
(Image from The Gadgets Page)

• You don't even have to prepare all the food yourself.  You could ask your guest(s) to prepare something too, so it would be a picnic in the truly traditional sense of the word.  If you wanted to. 

• You don't have to sit on the ground.  You could eat at a picnic table.  You could even eat on your own back porch.  As long as it's outside and informal, it's technically a picnic.

Picnic area at Colerain Park in Cincinnati.  Picnic tables under a tree, plus one of those grill things, even a place to throw away your trash.  Looks like a great place to have a picnic.
(Photo from Colerain Township Parks)



How about a picnic on the beach?  This beach is particularly exotic -- it happens to be in Fiji -- but maybe there's a little inland lake near where you live.  Wouldn't it be nice to sit by that lake and have a little snack and listen to the water birds?
(Photo from Lalati Resort)



This British family is having a picnic on the lawn in front of some English school.  Why not have a picnic in front of your school? (For those of you living in England, there's an iPhone app that helps you find picnic spots in Britain: Great British Picnics.  What a great idea!)
(Photo from Traveling Greener)



A super-combo of an idea: tailgate picnic at the beach!
(Photo from Chronically Vintage)

• You don't have to sit under the trees or even near the trees.  You could picnic on the beach, under a tent, in a gazebo, or out of the back of your car.  Yes, a tailgate counts as a picnic.

• You don't have to have sandwiches.  You could have hot dogs, especially if you're at a campground and one of those eternally-standing grill things is nearby.  

• You could have smoked salmon & bagels.  You could have rice noodles with shrimp.  Or maybe sushi or California rolls.

• Instead of potato salad, how about beet & goat cheese salad?  Or celery and carrot sticks?  Or sliced watermelon?  Or a bowl of blueberries and chopped strawberries?

• The stuff you carry the food in doesn't have to be fancy.  You could put the orzo salad in a Mason jar.  The sandwiches could go in a paper bag.  The sangria could go in a Thermos.

• You could even have a picnic out of your bike.  OK, this would require the purchase of a gizmo, and in this case, the gizmo is made by some guy in Sweden so it might be hard to come by, but it's still a good idea.  Maybe it would inspire you to do some bicycle-picnicking.

The picnic bike, invented by a guy in Sweden whose name I think is Erling Ekmark.

(Photo from The Urban Observer)

• Here are some picnic-friendly recipes I came across that looked like they might be good:
• Anti-pasto chicken sandwich
• No-peel potato salad with pickles and hard-boiled eggs.
• Corn and chick pea salad (I love chick peas)
• Peanut noodle salad with cucumbers and red peppers
• Bacon tomato quiche 
• 1-hour pulled pork sandwiches
• Chicken tenders with apricot sauce
• Sweet Hawaiian mini burgers
• Beef kabobs in Mojo sauce
• Marbled cheesecake squares
• Butterscotch blondies
• Fudge-walnut brownies
• Cantaloupe popsicles

• The New York Times offers 101 recipes for quick picnic foods.  The first page lists the top 9.

• Get some food, find a pal, and go eat outside!  Have a happy International Picnic Day!

The most important thing about a picnic is that everybody has a good time.
(Photo from Chronically Vintage)

Sources
Mental Floss, 20 Offbeat Holidays You Can Celebrate in June
Holiday Insights, June 2013 Bizarre and Unique Holidays
Mahalo, International Picnic Day
Snopes, Picnic Pique

Apple #631: April Fool's Day Pranks

For your April 1 pleasure, I thought I'd collect a few especially choice April Fool's Day pranks.

Left-handed Whopper

(Photo from Magique)


In 1998, Burger King published a full-page ad in USA Today, saying they were offering a new sandwich: the Left-Handed Whopper.  All condiments had been rotated 180 degrees for the ease of Burger King's 1.4 million left-handed customers.

Lefties all over the country lined up for the new Whoppers, many of them failing to realize that rotating the condiments 180 degrees meant there was actually no difference.

Instant color television

Black & white TV, magically transformed to color
(Photo from Ugo) 


In 1962, when televisions were still only black and white, the Swedish television station Sveriges had a "technical expert" tell people on the air that if you stretched a pair of nylon stockings over your television, the nylon would bend the TV's light wavelengths in such a way that you could see the black & white picture in color.  You also had to "angle yourself" so your eye could catch the wavelength from the right position.

An estimated "thousands" of people who tried it discovered that it did not work at all, only stretched out a perfectly good pair of nylons.

Internet shut down for spring cleaning

This prank first sprang into existence in 1997, but it's been updated and resurrected periodically ever since.

DO NOT CONNECT TO THE INTERNET FROM 12:01 AM GMT ON APR. 1 TO 12:01 AM GMT, APR. 2 !!
*** Attention *** It's that time again!
As many of you know, each year the Internet must be shut down for 24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which eliminates dead email, inactive ftp and www sites, and empty USENET groups, allows for a better working and faster Internet.
This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 1 until 12:01 a.m. GMT on April 2 (the time least likely to interfere with ongoing work). During that 24-hour period, five powerful Internet search engines situated around the world will search the Internet and delete any data that they find.
In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do the following:
1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their Internet connections.
2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the Internet.
3. Disconnect all disks and hard drives from any connections to the Internet.
4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way.
We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconveniences will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of the Internet, once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and jetsam.
We thank you for your cooperation.
Kim Dereksen
Interconnected Network Maintenance staff,
Main branch,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sysops and others: Since the last Internet cleaning, the number of Internet users has grown dramatically. Please assist us in alerting the public of the upcoming Internet cleaning by posting this message where your users will be able to read it. Please pass this message on to other sysops and Internet users as well.
Thank you.

BBC Suspends gravity

In 1976, an astronomer for the BBC's Radio 2 told listeners that later that morning, Pluto and Jupiter would align in a way that would cause a temporary reduction in gravity on Earth.  He said that at 9:47, people should jump in the air so they could experience a brief sensation of floating.

One minute later, the phone lines into the BBC were jammed with calls from people saying they had jumped at precisely 9:47, and they had experienced the sensation of floating.


This is apropos of nothing. I was looking for a photo of people jumping in an elevator and came across this. Since it's April Fool's, I thought I'd show it to you anyway.
(Photo from Elevator World)

BBC Flying penguins

In 2008, the BBC released a video showing an amazing discovery -- a group of penguins can fly.



It was such a hit, they still have a link on their Nature Wildlife page that suggests that the penguins are real: "Flying penguins are a very recent addition to the penguin family in evolutionary terms."

Here's how they did it:

Towing an iceberg

In 1978, Australian electronics entrepreneur Dick Smith often wondered why you couldn't tow an iceberg from Antarctica to places that needed fresh water.  He'd said these musings aloud to the media, and they were forever asking him when he was going to do this.  Finally, he announced that an iceberg would be arriving in Australia the following week, and the media passed on his announcement to the public.

That April 1, his employees started phoning radio stations and newspapers, saying, "What's that thing out in Sydney Harbor?  It looks like an iceberg." 

There was in fact something large and white in the harbor, but it wasn't an iceberg.  It was a barge, covered with a big sheet of plastic, shaving cream, and fire-fighting foam.

Enough people believed it was an iceberg that even the Australian Navy called to offer them a place to moor.  Within hours, driving rain had melted much of the foamy "ice," and the jig was up.



Entrepreneur Dick Smith and his "iceberg."
(Photo from smh.com.au)

Fake volcano eruption

In 1974, residents of Sitka, Alaska, woke up to black smoke pouring out of the top of Mount Edgecumbe, which was a giant volcano.  They called the police, ran out of their homes, and otherwise feared imminent eruption.

Actually, a man named Porky Bickar had dropped a hundred tires, oily rags, Sterno, diesel oil, and smoke bombs inside the mouth of the volcano and set them on fire, creating the black smoke.


Mount Edgecumbe, with Porky's faux eruption.
(Photo from Sitka, Alaska)


He also wrote "April Fool" in giant letters in the snow nearby.  Since he used a helicopter to fly all his incendiaries up there, he told the FAA what he was up to.  And as a member of the police commission, he also told the police what he'd done. Now that's preparation.

The FAA controller reportedly said, as the helicopter was coming back to ground, "The son of a gun looks fantastic!"

Sitka residents also say that when Mount St. Helens erupted six years later, one of their townsfolk wrote to Bickar saying, "Now you've gone too far."

I say, let's have more pranks like people used to pull in the 1970s.


Sources
Huffington Post, The 10 Best April Fools' Pranks Ever, March 29, 2012
Squidoo, Top 10 Biggest Pranks Ever
Dan Fletcher, The Left-Handed Whopper - 1998, Time, April 1, 2011
Mark Hill, The 7 Ballsiest Pranks You Won't Believe Actually Worked, Cracked.com, April 1, 2010
Sitka, Alaska, Porky's April Fool's Day Adventure
snopes.com, Internet Spring Cleaning
UK Mirror, Football's greatest April Fool pranks
smh.com.au, Just tip of the iceberg, March 29, 2003

Apple # 624: Valentine's Day

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later.  An entry about Valentine's Day.


Happy Valentine's Day
(Image from Maple North)


The day is not all saccharine sappiness.  At least, its history encompasses a far greater range of emotion than how we currently think of it.

The History -- Juno Februata

• Long, long ago, in the days of the Roman empire, the Romans used to have a couple of pagan festivals in the middle of February.  

• On the 14th, they celebrated a feast of Juno called Juno Februata (of February).  She was queen of the Roman gods, and since she was married to Jupiter and had to put up with a lot, she was the goddess of marriage.  

Juno, Roman goddess of marriage, women, and childbirth. That thing on her head means she's queen.
(Photo from Goddess a Day)

• There were probably various sacrificial rites conducted in Juno's honor.  But the one practice that people describe the most is as follows: young boys (or men) drew names of young girls (or women) from a jar. Whatever girl's name he drew, the two would be paired for the length of the festival.  Something like "going together," I suppose. 

• Sometimes they stayed paired up for the entire year, until the next name-drawing.  Sometimes the couple fell in love and later married.

The History -- Lupercalia

• On the 15th of February (some say it lasted from the 13th through the 15th), the Romans celebrated Lupercalia.  Lupercus and Faunus were in charge of agriculture and fertility, and they along with Romulus and Remus were the founders of Rome. 

• The men got drunk, and then two of their number got naked and sacrificed a goat and a dog. The two pressed the blood from the knives onto their foreheads, then wiped it off entirely on some wool moistened with milk.  Then they cut the goat skin into strips and, naked except for basically their underwear, ran with the strips of goatskin around the outer perimeter of the city.

• The women would go line up along the perimeter, hoping that they would get scourged by the men with the goat skin as they ran past. 

• The "goat-skin scourge" was supposed to purify people of curses and bad luck, and promote fertility. Sometimes the women got down to various states of undress so that getting hit with the goat skin would have an even greater effect on their fertility.

A rather tame depiction of Lupercalia
(Image from The Ancient Standard)

• The entire ceremony, from the sacrificing to the scourging, was "accompanied by much rowdiness and horseplay."  It was enormously popular, and it's one of the pagan festivals that persisted the longest after the changeover to Christianity.  The priests had a really hard time getting people to give this one up.

This might be closer to what Lupercalia was actually like.
(Image from wikinut)

The History -- St. Valentine

• Fast forward to A.D. times, and we get to the people named Valentine.  There's a lot of confusion about who was St. Valentine and what he did.  A lot of sites say things like "a priest who was a hopeless romantic," and other such nauseating anachronisms.

• There are actually 3 St. Valentines, and what is known about each of them is rather hazy.  Which may account for some of the confusion about who did what, and what's legend and what's history.  

• One was a priest in Rome (this is probably the one everyone talks about), one was a bishop in Terni, Italy, and the third was martyred in Africa.  Let's start with the priest in Rome.

St. Valentine is the patron saint of couples either engaged or married, bees and beekeepers, and travelers.

(Image from WhollyRoaminCatholic)

• Near the end of the Roman empire, the Romans were running out of men to go to the outer edges of the empire and keep the Goths and the Huns etc. at bay. At some point around 270 A.D., the emperor Claudius II decided that the reason more healthy young men didn't want to go off and be soldiers was because they were married and didn't want to leave their wives, or if they did become soldiers, all they did was moon about their wives and they were too weak to fight.  So Cladius II issued a decree that soldier-age men were no longer allowed to get married, and if they did, they'd be executed.

• Valentine (who was not yet a saint) agreed to marry young couples in secret.  He performed many marriage ceremonies in secret until finally he was found out.  Claudius II had him arrested.

Another depiction of St. Valentine
(Image from WhollyRoaminCatholic)
 

• Stories about what happened get a little fanciful and it's hard to sort out history from legend.  Some say Valentine befriended the blind daughter of one of his jailers and cured her of her blindness.  It was this miraculous healing that was one of the things that qualified him for sainthood.

• Valentine met with the emperor, and some say the two got along great at first, but then either the emperor tried to get Valentine to worship the Roman gods, or else Valentine tried to convert the emperor, but regardless, the two had a falling-out.  Claudius II ordered Valentine to be executed.

• The legend has it that the blind (or maybe no-longer-blind) jailer's daughter heard that Valentine was to be killed, and she was extremely sad.  Valentine asked his jailer for a pen and paper and he wrote her a little note, probably telling her not to despair, and he said in it, "From your Valentine." 

• That last bit sounds a lot like someone made it up well after the fact, doesn't it?

• Well, anyway, Valentine was executed.  In fact he was beaten with clubs and stoned, and then beheaded.  It was the 14th of February.

• The other guy named Valentine? (probably not the one in Africa) Also executed on February 14.

• Centuries later, in 496 A.D., Pope Gelasius declared the 14th of February as St. Valentine's feast day.  He did this to try to create a celebration that would be very different in nature than Lupercalia, which was still being celebrated at that time.

The History -- the Middle Ages to the present

Medieval depiction of marriage.  If you wanted to imagine this is St. Valentine conducting a secret marriage, I suppose you could.

(Image from Nights of Passion)

• Even though people did make the switch from Juno & Lupercal to Valentine, the 14th never quite lost its association with romance and pairing up. 

• For example, Chaucer linked the 14th to romance in his "Parliament of Fowls" when he wrote ""For this was on St. Valentine's Day, When every fowl cometh there to choose his mate." 

• The Lupercalian practice of drawing sweethearts' names out of a box seems to have persisted into the Middle Ages.

• Somehow, by the 18th century, people went from drawing names out of a box to giving each other gifts and tokens of affection on the 14th.

• In the 1840s, Esther A. Howlanda Mount Holyoke (yes, just like the college) made her own greeting cards decorated with lace and ribbons and birds and cupids.  Other women had been making cards like this for a long time, but she began to make and distribute them on a large scale.  She was, in effect, the first commercial producer of the Valentine's Day greeting card.

Current Valentine's Day Facts

 
Red roses are among the most popular gifts for Valentine's Day
(Photo from House of Flowers) 

• About 100 million roses (most are red) are sold in the US for Valentine's Day each year.

• About 1 billion cards are exchanged.

• Women purchase 85% of the Valentine cards; men purchase 73% of the flowers.  

• Men buy nearly all of the 35 million boxes that are sold for the holiday each year.

• Each year, about 1,000 Valentine cards are addressed and mailed to Juliet in Verona, where Romeo and Juliet was set.

• Interesting that all of today's facts about the holiday are not about religion or festivals or gods or God, but rather about stuff you can buy. 

You could always be unconventional and go with tulips.
(Photo from South Bay Buys)


Related entries: Roses, Chocolate, February

Sources
The Pagan Library, Lupercalia
Alberta Mildred Franklin, The Lupercalia, Columbia University dissertation, 1921
Arnie Seipel, The Dark Origins of Valentine's Day, NPR, February 13, 2011
Wikipedia, Juno Februata
Encyclopedia Mythica, Juno
Catholic Online, St. Valentine
The Holiday Spot, History of Valentine's Day
St. Valentine's Day.org Fun Facts
She Knows, Fun facts about Valentine's Day, February 3, 2009
My Dear Valentine, Valentines [sic] Day Facts

Apple #572: Leap Day

This Apple follows hot on the heels of my entry about Cheesiness, but I could not let this Leap Day pass by without talking about it.

I don't want to dig too much into the calendar reasons for Leap Day. My main interest is in finding out, since it is an oddball date on the calendar, what are some especially interesting or unusual that have happened on Leap Days in the past.


People generally associate frogs with Leap Day because of leap-frogging, but I choose the kangaroo.
(Photo from Elverado Junior High School)


The Numbers

• In short, the reason we have Leap Days is because the days need to get rounded off. The Earth takes 365.242199 days to orbit around the sun. Since our calendar doesn't allow for fractions of days, after a while those fractions build up, so we need to insert an extra day.

• If we didn't have Leap Day, after 100 years, our calendar would be out of sync with the planet's position relative to the sun by 24 days.

• It took a while before we got this figured out. Julius Caesar introduced the concept of Leap Year, but he had too many of them in his calendar. We didn't get that problem corrected until about 500 years ago.

Julius Caesar says, "I say, put Leap Day here!"
(Photo from somewhere on this bukisa page)

• All this is, of course, in the Gregorian calendar. Other calendars from around the world have Leap Years of their own too.

• If you don't have a calendar handy, here's how to figure out if year such & such was a Leap Year:
  

1. If the year is evenly divisible by 4, it is a Leap Year except see #2.
2. If the year is evenly divisible by 100, it is not a Leap Year, unless the number is also divisible by 400.

• Or you could just use this calculator.

The Lingo

• If you want to get really fancy when you talk about Leap Year, call it a bissextile year.

• The word doesn't mean anything other than Leap Year. It sounds like it has something to do with the number six because, originally, it did.

• The word comes from the Latin phrase bissextilis annis, which was the Roman way of referring to Leap Year. Except they counted their Leap Year differently than we do. Their Leap Day fell on February 24, and the phrase means "counting backwards to six days before the Calends of March."

• Or you could just remember that it means Leap Year.

• You could get fancy with the lingo another way and say that Leap Day is an example of an intercalary day.

• Intercalary means some sort of addition--a day, a month, an hour; any unit of time but usually a day--inserted into a calendar year.

• It also means, in botany, tissue growing between the upper and lower bracts on a plant stem.
  

• So if you were into grafting, you could graft an intercalary branch onto your favorite plants on the intercalary day of this year.

Except the only use I've seen of intercalary in the botanical sense is like this: a patch of cells that are different from those above and below, not a completely whole branch or stem.
(Image from TutorVista)

• Leap Year itself is a rather strange phrase. I wasn't able to find a definitive explanation for why we call it that, but it seems to be that, due to the addition of the extra day, the next day leaps ahead on the calendar. That is, if this were a non-Leap Year, the 1st would normally fall on Wednesday. But because we insert that extra day before it, the 1st leaps ahead to Thursday.

Notable Birthdays

Only about 0.07% of the world's population is born on Leap Days. Here are a few notable Leap Birthdays:

• 1736, birth of Ann Lee, founder of the Shaker religion.

• 1792, birth of Gioachino Rossini, Italian composer of such enduring hits as The Barber of Seville and William Tell.

Rossini. He's thinking, "Ho ho, I was born on Leap Day. And I write operas. Ho ho!"
(Image from Higher Revelations)

• 1904, birth of a man with 26 first names, each one starting with a different letter of the alphabet and in alphabetical order. Plus his last name was enormously long. His name: Adolph Blaine Charles David Earl Frederick Gerald Hubert Irvin John Kenneth Lloyd Martin Nero Oliver Paul Quincy Randolph Sherman Thomas Uncas Victor William Xerxes Yancy Zeus Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenberdorft Sr. That's actually the shortened version of his last name. At its full length, it weighs in at 585 letters (some sources say 590). He shortened it to Mr. Wolfe Plus 585 Sr.

• His profession? Typesetter.

• Also in 1904, Jimmy Dorsey, jazz saxophonist, composer, and conductor.

• 1916, birth of Dinah Shore, actress, singer, talk show host.

• For all you literary types, in 1920, Howard Nemerov was born.

• Also in 1920, birth of James Mitchell who played Palmer Cortlandt for decades on All My Children.

• 1928, birth of Annie Blanche Banks, except she became a star of the burlesque stage and changed her name to Tempest Storm.

Whew. A lot of photos of Tempest Storm are NSFW. This is a rather tame one (get it? Tame, in spite of the jungle print?) and it's got a bongo drum in it. She's being musical.
(Photo from Holly Graphics)

• 1940, birth of Seattle Slew's trainer, Billy Turner.

• In 1940, Peter Anthony Keogh, the first of three generations born on Leap Day. His son Peter Eric Keogh was born on Leap Day in 1964. Peter Eric's daughter & Peter Anthony's granddaughter, Bethany Wealth Keogh, was born Feb 29, 1996.

• 1944, birth of Dennis Farina, actor, most recently on Law & Order.

Dennis Farina says, "Hey. Don't try to tell me I can't celebrate my birthday each year just because I was born on the 29th."
(Photo from Hollywood Memorabilia)

• In 1948, twins Yuri and Nikolai Pimenov were born. They went on to win the silver medal in the 1976 Olympics for coxless (that means no one is in the boat yelling at them) pair rowing.
  

• 1960, birth of Heidi Henriksen. She was the first of 3 siblings born on consecutive Leap days. In 1964, her brother Olav was born on February 29. In 1968, youngest brother Leif-Martin was born on February 29.

• Lots of hockey players: Lyndon Byers (1964), Simon Gagne (1980), Cam Ward (1984), and Adam Sinclair (1984).

• And football players too: John Niland, Cowboys (1944); Gary Conklin, 49ers (1968); Bryce Paup, Packers and Bills (1968); Fabien Bownes, Bears (1972); Mark Farraway, CFL's Eskimos (1972).

If you get to celebrate the actual anniversary of your birth only every four years, your cake had better be something special like this. This is a vanilla hazelnut cake that one friend made for Katie, who was celebrating her 7th Leap-Year-Day. That thing on the frog's tongue that looks like a bandage is actually a fly.
(Photo and cake by saptally on Cake Central)


Misogynistic Traditions That I Hope Have Died Completely

• In 1960, the first Playboy club opened. Hef chose to open his club on Leap Day, because it is traditionally known as Bachelor's Day.
  

• But this doesn't quite make sense because Bachelor's Day is traditionally when women, who are culturally "not allowed" to propose marriage to men, are on this oddball day allowed to propose marriage and the man is supposed to accept. The bachelor may refuse, but only if he pays a penalty. The penalty varies depending on the country, but in many European countries it was 12 pairs of gloves, so that she will have one pair for each month and will thus be able to hide the fact that she is not wearing a wedding ring.
  

• This tradition goes all the way back to Irish lore when St. Bridget supposedly asked St. Patrick if there could be one day out of the year when women could propose marriage. He agreed, but said it had to be on February 29th.

• Similarly, this day is also sometimes known as Sadie Hawkins' Day, after a character in the cartoon strip Li'l Abner--that cultural bastion of civility. Sadie, renowned for her ugliness, was an inveterate man-chaser. Out of pity or some other equally distasteful response, it was agreed that on February 29, whatever man she was chasing at the time would have to accept her proposal.

• Let's move on.

Actual Historical Events

Some fairly major events took place in African American history on Leap Day. True, February is Black History Month, but it's pretty remarkable that three of the events which are the reason that month was so designated happened on a Leap Day.

• 1968, the Kerner Commission Report was released, which said that the recent riots that had been taking place all across the country were due to "white racism." This may seem patently obvious to us now, but at the time, some people were saying that the riots were fomented by African American political groups in a nationwide conspiracy. The report said that "our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal." It said that major remedies should be undertaken at once, otherwise American society would face continued polarization "and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values."

• In 1972, Hank Aaron signed a contract with the Atlanta Braves for $200K, which made him the highest-paid baseball player at the time. When I first read this, I thought, big deal. But then I remembered, hey, he was African American. That really was a big deal.

Also in 1972, Hank Aaron hit his 649th home run, moving him past Willie Mays on the list of most home runs. He wound up breaking Babe Ruth's record with 755 total in his career, and he still holds the record for the most RBIs: 2,297.
(Photo from This Day in Georgia History)

• 1940, Gone with the Wind was awarded eight Oscars for Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Cinematography, Art Direction, Film Editing, and Actress. Most exceptionally, Hattie McDaniel was awarded the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Mammie. She was the first African American actor ever to win an Oscar.

Here she is accepting her Oscar. I thought you might like to hear her talk without the thick accent she adopted in the movie.

Enjoy your Leap Day to the fullest!


Sources
Collins English Dictionary, bissextile, intercalary
Nancy C. Wooten, Leap Year Round-Up, Orangeburg Times & Democrat
Honor Society of Leap Day Babies, Famous Leapers
ClassicalNet, Gioachino Rossini
Museum of Hoaxes, World's Longest Surname
TheyNow.com, 29th Leap Day
History.com, This Day in History: February 29
Bleacher Report, The 50 Greatest Baseball Players of All Time, December 17, 2009