If you’re reading this in the morning on November 25, the first thing you should do is make sure nothing breakable is near the edge of a shelf or table or counter. Because for some reason, today seems to have a particular affinity to earthquakes.  The first one we have any records of was in… Continue reading

Every once in a while there’s a day that seems to be tied to an idea. The thing is, it’s not always easy to discover what the idea is. Take today, for example. November 24 is “Evolution Day” in celebration of the date in 1859 that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species. It… Continue reading

Have you ever wondered why actors are called “thespians”? It’s because of November 23. Partly, anyway. This is the day in 534 BCE that, according to Aristotle, someone named “Thespis” was the first person to portray a character on stage in a play. We’re talking about well over two thousand years ago, when record keeping… Continue reading

It’s November twenty-second, and strangely enough there’s a long string of connections. “The problem here is that you will reach a point where it might be difficult to decide which are reality and which are nightmare.”  It all started in 1961, when a dancer named Liz Powell was hospitalized for exhaustion. She’d been experiencing a… Continue reading

November 21 is the day that the settlers in Plymouth Colony signed the Mayflower Compact in 1620. Except that if you’d asked them at the time what day it was, they would have said it was November 11 — because it was. It didn’t become November 21 until 1752, when the old calendar was finally… Continue reading

Undermined once again by reality, the very day after making a snide comment about “there’s no Children’s Day,” what do we land on? Children’s Day. It all started in 1857 in Chelsea, Massachusetts when a church held a special service dedicated to children. At the time they called it “Rose Day”, but in a prescient… Continue reading

It’s entirely appropriate that in a year that might deserve to be flushed down the drain, November 19 is World Toilet Day. It’s a serious holiday, though, started by the UN to get people to do something about sanitation, worldwide. Although even the UN has a slight bit of trouble keeping a straight face; when… Continue reading

Today is Mickey Mouse’s birthday! At least that’s what the Disney company says. There’s plenty of room to argue about it. What happened on November 18, 1928 was that “Steamboat Willie” was released, starring Mickey and Minnie. It was a big hit, but it was really Mickey’s third film.  Mickey’s first film was called “Plane… Continue reading

November 17 is a bit of an odd day in the history of, well, history. It’s not that nothing ever happened — it’s more like a number of things that did happen might was well not have. Maybe an example is in order. In 1810, the Napoleonic Wars were still in progress in Europe, and… Continue reading

When the colonists in North America first declared themselves the United States, I bet you don’t know which country was the first to officially recognize the new nation. It happened on November 16, 1776, and had to do with a ship — so there’s a hint; it had to be a country with a harbor.… Continue reading