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We would have been smack dab in the middle of Oktoberfest season had it not been cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic but today is still National Beer Drinking Day – a wonderful reminder to enjoy the world’s most popular adult beverage. Today is also St. Wenceslaus’ Day, patron saint of brew masters, named afterContinue reading “Not quite from Bulter’s Lives of the Saints”

Koalas have unique fingerprints. So do chimpanzees and gorillas. However koala fingerprints are so similar to human fingerprints that even the most seasoned forensic scientists would have a hard time telling a koala fingerprint from a human one.

Today is the 116th anniversary of the completion by Albert Einstein of his paper, Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?, introducing the equation E=MC², on this date. Before this, E equaled just about anything you wanted it to equal. Just think what the atomic bomb would have been like ifContinue reading “So that’s what it means”

September 27, 1954 –Steve Allen sat down at his piano and the Tonight Show premiered nationally on NBC on this date. The show began in 1953 as a local show on WNBT-TV, the NBC station in New York City. Tonight! began in 1954 when Sylvester L. Weaver Jr., the president of NBC, decided to expandContinue reading “The Tonight Show”

(Europe, Asia, Africa, Australia, Antarctica, North America, South America) New Zealand is actually part of a much bigger, sunken landmass. Dubbed Zealandia, it was only discovered after humans had traveled to space as they were able to easily see it from above the Earth. Some scientists believe it should be formally recognized as the world’sContinue reading “Kids will have to relearn ‘Eat an apple as a nighttime snack’.”

September 26, 1580 –Francis Drake returned to Plymouth, England, on this date, ending a three-and-a-half year journey around the world. Drake was knighted and awarded a prize of 10 thousand pounds (which he probably invested in his delicious snack cake company.) It was nearly four more centuries, however, before The Beverly Hillbillies premiered on CBS-TVContinue reading “You figure out the connection”

On this day in 1789, Congress proposed twelve amendments to the Constitution of the United States. Habeas Corpus Luteum and Freedom from Unreasonably Surging Seashores were ultimately rejected but the other ten passed and have come to be known as the “Bill of Rights.” In honor of this important anniversary, I have chosen to celebrateContinue reading “Give ten cheers”

September 24, 1896 –… Life is essentially a cheat and its conditions are those of defeat; the redeeming things are not happiness and pleasure but the deeper satisfactions that come out of struggle. On this date in 1896, a young Minnesota woman gave birth to a depressive, witty young alcoholic named Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald.Continue reading “There are no second acts in American lives”

September 24, 1964 – We all visited 1313 Mockingbird Lane for the first time when The Munsters premiered on ABC-TV on this date. The first season opening credits were an outrageous parody of the opening credits of The Donna Reed Show, which always began with Donna Reed lovingly passing out lunches to her departing familyContinue reading “The Munsters”

Today is National Punctuation Day (!,?.) It’s a celebration of the lowly comma, correctly used quotation marks and other proper uses of periods, semicolons, and the every mysterious ellipsis. (The Interrobang is a combination of both the exclamation point and a question mark, used thusly: “What are you doing[insert interrobang. Unfortunately, the interrobang isn’t standardContinue reading “Hooray for the Percontation Point”