Egads!

Egads! Ack! And Help!

Do you have any idea what today is? Do you?

It's awful. Horrible. Not a day to mess around with.

It's Monday the 13th!

Not just any old Monday, mind you, although that is bad enough. It has the number 13 attached to it, to make its evil even more perfidious and heinous.

You cannot trust any Monday, what with having to start yet another week of daily nose to the grindstone dullness and tediousness. A Monday the 13th, however, has a double dose of the lousiness, nefariousness, loathsomeness, and vileness that a regular Monday has.

Take the advice of Garfield the Cat, and don't get out of bed on Monday the 13th.

Too late, you say? You are not reading this on your laptop in bed, but are in fact already up and around, going about your usual Monday business? Then hie thee to someplace to get an amulet or charm to ward off the potential dark evils of the day. A couple of suggestions might be to go out in your yard and look for a 4 leaf clover, find a cross-eyed hunchback who shot a rabbit at midnight at a crossroads with a bow and arrow and beg the rabbit's foot from him (yes, those are the traditional requirements for it to be lucky), go get a horseshoe from the barn. Anything.

Oh, and by the way, as you can see from the list below, today is also Defy Superstition Day.

Go out there and have a great Monday, everyone.


Today is:

Celiac Awareness Day

Defender's Day -- US except Maryland

Defy Superstition Day

Dia de los Ninos Heroes -- Mexico

Faulty Day

Fortune Cookie Day

Horn Dance -- Abbots Bromley, England (ancient traditional dance, possibly Anglo-Saxon in origin)

Epulum Jovis -- Roman Calendar, celebrated on the Ides of September, during the Ludi Romani festival for Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva marked with a lectisternium (special feast)

National Peanut Day

National Pet Memorial Day

National Urban Eden Day

Positive Thinking Day

Potato Bowl -- Grand Forks, North Dakota (through the 18th)

Programmers Day

Snack-A-Pickle Time

St, Venerius' Day (patron of lighthouse keepers)


Birthdays Today:

Ben Savage, 1980
Tavis Smiley, 1964
Jean Smart, 1959
Nell Carter, 1948
Jacqueline Bisset, 1944
Bela Karolyi, 1942
David Clayton-Thomas, 1941
Judith "Miss Manners" Martin, 1938
Mel Torme, 1925
Roald Dahl, 1916
Claudette Colbert, 1903
John J. Pershing, 1860
Milton Hershey, 1857
Walter Reed, 1851
Cesare Borgia, 1475


Today in History:

The temple of Jupiter on Rome's Capitoline Hill is dedicated on the ides of September, BC509
Building begins on Hadrian's Wall, 122
St. Francis of Assisi receives stigmata, 1224
Michelangelo begins work on his statue of David, 1503
Henry Hudson reached the river that would later be named after him, 1609
NYC becomes the first capital of the US, 1788
US Government takes out its first loan from NYC banks, 1789
Six teenage military cadets known as Niños Héroes die defending Chapultepec Castle in the Battle of Chapultepec, 1847
Vermont railroad worker Phineas Gage incredibly survives a 3-foot-plus iron rod being driven through his head; the reported effects on his behavior and personality stimulate thinking about the nature of the brain and its functions, 1848
Hannibal Goodwin patents celluloid photographic film, 1898
Lusitania completes her maiden voyage, arriving in NYC, 1907
The temperature (in the shade) at Al 'Aziziyah, Libya reaches a world record 57.8*C (136.04*F), 1922
Elizabeth McCombs is the first woman elected to the New Zealand Parliament, 1933
Chiang Kai-shek elected president of the Republic of China, 1943
IBM introduces the first computer disk storage unit, the RAMAC 305, 1956
Hurricane Gilbert is the strongest recorded hurricane, based on barometric pressure, in the Western Hemisphere, 1988*
Largest anti-Apartheid march in South Africa, led by Desmond Tutu, 1989
The Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples was adopted, 2007
Hurricane Ike makes landfall, damaging Galveston Island, Houston, and surrounding area, 2007


*Replaced by Hurricane Wilma in 2005