Picture This

Remember having to take pictures for school?

In grammar school, you forget. Mostly because you tried to. Taking school pictures is so far down the radar of young kids that the parents are lucky to find the paper about how they have to send money on a certain day crammed in the bottom of the child's backpack, wedged between a forgotten library book and yesterday's peanut butter sandwich he couldn't trade for something better and therefore hid.

Then you have to stand in line with a bunch of pushing and shoving, as no one wants to go first, and get handed one of those little plastic combs -- only one per kid, please -- so you can comb your hair since you forgot to do that, too, this morning.

The only good thing about it is the comb, which everyone later combines with a piece of paper to form a makeshift musical instrument which sounds very much like a kazoo, but which your little brother later breaks, and getting out of the classroom for a while.

Once you get old enough to care about the opposite sex, it gets worse.

Then you don't forget, but you wish you could when your hair won't cooperate, a huge zit sprouts overnight, and you spill half of your lunch down your shirt.

Today is picture day at the children's school. May it be mercifully brief, and may their future selves not think they look as dorky as we are sure we looked.

Today is:

Back Badge Day -- Gloucestershire Regiment, British Army

Birth of Benito Juarez, a Fiestas Patrias -- Mexico (trad.)

Fragrance Day and Flower Day -- the first full day of spring

Harmony Day -- Australia

Human Rights Day -- South Africa

Independence Day -- Namibia

International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

Memory Day -- internet based, to examine the use of memory aids throughout history

Mother's Day -- most Arabic nations

National Common Courtesy Day -- guess it's not so common any more, someone had to declare a holiday to try to foster some

National French Bread Day

National Tree Planting Day -- Lesotho

Naw Ruz -- Baha'i (New Year, and an end of the time of fasting; begins sunset previous evening)

Paper Dress Day -- the paper dress was introduced as part of an ad campaign by the Scott Paper Co. on this day in 1966

Single Parents' Day -- sponsored by Parents Without Parners, on the date of their inception in 1957

Spring Fairy Fun Day -- Fairy Calendar

St. Enda's Day

St. Nicholas of Flue's Day (Patron of councilmen, difficult marriages, large families, magistrates, parents of large families, Pontifical Swiss Guards, separated spouses, Switzerland)

World Down Syndrome Day

World Forestry Day

World Poetry Day

Yanaidaishi Ennichi -- Yamaguchi, Japan (festival at the temple known to locals as Otaishisama "the great master".

Youth Day -- Tunisia


Birthdays Today:

James T. Kirk, 2233
Ronaldinho, 1980
Kevin Federline, 1978
Matthew Broderick, 1962
Rosie O'Donnell, 1962
Ayrton Senna da Silva, 1960
Gary Oldman, 1958
Eddie Money, 1949
Timothy Dalton, 1944
John D Rockefeller III, 1906
Florenz Ziegfeld, 1867
Modest Mussorgsky, 1839
Johann Sebastian Bach, 1685


Today in History:

The Byzantine emperor Heraclius restores the "True Cross" to Jerusalem, 630
Accession to the throne of Japan by emperor Antoku, 1188
3,000 Jews are killed in the Black Death riots in Efurt, Germany, 1349
n Oxford, Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer is burned at the stake, 1556
Czar Peter the Great begins his tour through West, 1697
Fire destroys 856 buildings in New Orleans, Louisiana, 1788
With the church leadership driven out of Rome during an armed conflict, Pius VII is crowned Pope in Venice with a temporary papal tiara made of papier-mâché, 1800
Code Napoléon is adopted as French civil law, 1804
The Bahá'í calendar begins, 1844
An earthquake in Tokyo, Japan kills over 100,000, 1857
The Zoological Society of Philadelphia, the first in the US, is incorporated, 1859
Journalist Henry Morton Stanley begins his trek to find the missionary and explorer David Livingstone, 1871
Loretta Walsh becomes the first female US Navy Petty Officer, 1917
Charles Lindbergh is presented the Medal of Honor for his first trans-Atlantic flight, 1928
Shah Reza Pahlavi formally asks the international community to call Persia by its native name, Iran, which means 'Land of the Aryans,' 1935
Alan Freed presents the Moondog Coronation Ball, the first rock and roll concert, in Cleveland, Ohio, 1952
Martin Luther King Jr. leads 3,200 people on the start of the third and finally successful civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, 1965
The first Earth Day proclamation is issued by San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto, 1970
Canadian paraplegic athlete and humanitarian Rick Hansen begins his circumnavigation of the globe in a wheelchair in the name of spinal cord injury medical research, 1985
Bertrand Piccard and Brian Jones become the first to circumnavigate the Earth in a hot air balloon, 1999