All's Well That Ends With Friends...In One Piece

"Hey, mom, good news!"

Coming from #2 Son, that could mean anything, and usually with him good is relative.

"Sammy's mom says we can hang out again!"

There was a problem?

"Well, yes, ever since New Year's Eve and the explosion."

Do i really want to hear about this?

"Yeah, it was awesome! You see, Fred and me decided to set off one of those artillery shells, and you're supposed to put them in a tube, see? So we did, but we forgot that it has to have back pressure to push up against, and so we lit it, and then Fred says, 'Hey, dude, we don't have a back on this thing!' and I said, 'Oh, this is going to be bad!' and about then it blew up. And it burned my hands, and set Fred's afro on fire, and it was really, really loud, and Sammy's mom said I was a bad influence and couldn't hang around with Sammy any more. But I explained to her that we only set stuff like that off on New Years and Fourth of July, and besides I won't set stuff off if he's too close, 'cause he's younger'n me, so she said we could hang out together again."

You set your hands and Fred's afro on fire?

"Yeah, but we're both okay, and it wasn't too bad."

To me, that did not end well. To him, if he still has his friends, mostly intact, it's all good.


Today is:

A Room of One's Own Day

Aukland Day -- New Zealand

Better Business Communication Day

Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day

Compliment Day

Conversion of St. Paul -- Christian

Dinner Party Day (for Bobby Burns, of course)

Dydd Santes Dwynwen -- Wales (For St. Dwynwen, the Welsh Valentines Day)

Festival of Constructive Energy

Macintosh Computer Day

National Irish Coffee Day

Observe the Weather Day (A beautiful St. Paul's Conversion day means a prosperous year, precipitation means an expensive year, clouds mean much loss of livestock, and wind means war looms in the year ahead.)

Old Disting -- Norse Calendar (A market day held at the same time as a sacrifice to the female powers.)

Opposite Day

Robert Burns' Night -- Scotland; Newfoundland

St. Tatiana's Day

Up-Helly-AA Day -- Lerwick, Shetland (fire festival)


Anniversaries Today:

Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn, 1533 (secret wedding)
Moscow University is established, to coincide with St. Tatiana's Day, 1755


Birthdays Today:

Alicia Keys, 1981
China Kantner, 1971
Etta James, 1938
Corazon Aquino, 1933
Dean Jones, 1931
Edwin Newman, 1919
Virginia Woolf, 1882
William Somerset Maugham, 1874
Robert Burns, 1759


Today in History:

Founding of Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1554
Battle of Mikatagahara, in Japan; Takeda Shingen defeats Tokugawa Ieyasu, 1573
The Treaty of Utrecht marks the beginning of the Dutch Republic, 1579
Eliakam Spooner of Vermont patents the first seeding machine in the US, 1799
The first US engineering college opens, Rensselaer Polytechnic, Troy, NY, 1825
Sojourner Truth addresses the First Black Women's Rights Convention, in Akron, Ohio, 1851
Mendelssohn's "Wedding March" is first played, at the wedding of Queen Victoria's daughter Princess Victoria, to crown prince of Prussia, 1858
The soda fountain is patented by Gustavus Dows, 1870
Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell form the Oriental Telephone Company, 1881
Bilu, a Russian Zionist organization, forms, 1882
Nellie Bly beats Phileas Fogg's time around world by 8 days (72 days), 1890
The first US transcontinental telephone call is made when Alexander Graham Bell in NY calls Thomas Watson in SF, 1915
The League of Nations is founded, 1919
The 1924 Winter Olympics opens in Chamonix, France (in the French Alps), inaugurating the Winter Olympic Games, 1924
The Guiding Light debuts on NBC radio from Chicago (in 1952 it moves to CBS television, where it remains until Sept. 18, 2009), 1937
At the Hollywood Athletic Club the first Emmy Awards are presented, 1949
The Clementine space probe launches, 1994
Russia almost launches a nuclear attack after it mistakes Black Brant XII, a Norwegian research rocket, for a US Trident missile, 1995
During a historic visit to Cuba, Pope John Paul II demands the release of political prisoners and political reforms while condemning US attempts to isolate the country, 1998
Three independent observing campaigns announce the discovery of OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb through gravitational microlensing, the first cool rocky/icy extrasolar planet around a main-sequence star, 2006