Some Divine Comedy

It seems that, when G-d created the world, He promised man that there would be good, obedient, submissive women to be found in all corners of the world.

Then He made the world round.


If you end up driving down the right roads in Louisiana, you can sometimes end up with whiplash from the double takes you do reading the signs on the side of the road.  For example, one man was very surprised to see a "Vatican Baptist Church" sign, complete with service times.  He felt a little better after he saw the sign up the road a bit further welcoming him to Vatican, Louisiana.




Then there was the accountant who complained, when he got to heaven, that he was only 45, so he had been taken way too young.

"We have you down as 85," he was told by an angelic secretary.

"How can that be!" he yelled.

"We added up your billable hours."


No, Wednesday isn't usually joke day, but it beats having a Wednesday whinefest that no one wants to read, including me!




Today is:

Assyrian Martyrs Day -- various Assyrian communities

Battle of Boyaca Day -- Colombia

Canadian Open Old Time Fiddle Championship -- Shelburne, ON, Canada (these folks aren't just fiddling around, they are good!  through Sunday)

Eid al Fitr -- Islam (celebration of the end of Ramadan; begins at sundown, and runs through sundown on the 11th, but local dates and official government observances may vary)

Festival Wednesday -- British Virgin Islands

Harvest Holiday -- Slavic Pagan Calendar (reaping ceases for a few hours in honor of Volos' beard; bread is eaten and offerings given to Mother Earth and Volos for a bountiful harvest)

Independence Day / National Day -- Cote d'Ivoire

Miss Crustacean USA Beauty Pageant and Ocean City Creep -- Ocean City, NJ, US (crowning the most beautiful and fastest tree crab on Earth)

National Lighthouse Day -- US

National Raspberries in Cream Day

Particularly Preposterous Packaging Day -- sponsored by Wellcat Holidays, and especially the kind no one can open without a machete, what's with that!

Professional Speaker's Day -- www.professionalspeakersday.com

Purple Heart Day -- US (originally instituted this day in 1782 by George Washington)

Ramazan Bayramy Eve -- Turkey

Say "Cheese" Day -- begun by ecard companies looking for something to celebrate; in my family, we do not say "Cheese", we say "Chicken Lips!" Try it some time when walking past tourists who are trying to get a good photo, and watch them smile genuine smiles and come up with a good picture.

Sea Serpent Day -- no one knows why today, just enjoy

Smartest Leprechaun Eisteddfod -- Fairy Calendar

St. Albert of Trapani's Day (Patron of Carmelite schools; Messina, Italy; Trapani, Italy)

St. Cajetan's Day (Patron of job seekers and the unemployed)

Take Last Winter's Snowballs Out of the Freezer and Have a Fight Day -- in the northern hemisphere, it's certainly hot enough


Birthdays Today:

Charlize Theron, 1975
David Duchovny, 1960
Garrison Keillor, 1942
B.J. Thomas, 1942
"The Amazing" James Randi, 1928
Carl "Alfalfa" Switser, 1927
Billie Burke, 1884
Mata Hari, 1876


Today in History:

Battle of Crannon between Athens and Macedon, following the death of Alexander the Great, BC322
Construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore begins in Florence, 1420
Coup again the Tianshun Emperor by the Ming Dynasty Chinese military general Cao Qin, 1461
Francis Drake's fleet returns to Plymouth, 1573
The first documented performance of Macbeth, at the Great Hall at Hampton Court, 1606
Sieur de La Salle's brigantine Le Griffon becomes the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes, 1679
Cherokee Indians take Ft. Loudon, Tennessee, 1760
George Washington creates the Order of the Purple Heart, 1782
Simon Bolivar triumphs over the Spanish at the Battle of Boyaca, 1819
The long simmering tension between the Hatfields and the McCoys on the Kentucky/West Virginia border erupts into full scale violence on election day, 1882
The Peace Bridge opens between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York, 1927
IBM dedicates the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I), 1944
Thor Heyerdahl's balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashes into the reef at Raroia in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have traveled from South America, 1947
Explorer 6 transmits the first TV photo of Earth from space, 1959
The "artistic crime of the century" occurs when Philippe Petit of France, after months of planning and smuggling in materials, makes an illegal tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, 1974
Viking 2 enters orbit around Mars, 1976
The Washington Star ceases all operations after 128 years of publication, 1981
Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai are chosen to be Japan's first astronauts, 1985
Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants breaks baseball great Hank Aaron's record by hitting his 756th home run, 2007