Saint Patrick's Day

Happy St. Patty's Day!  Pass the beer, would ya?

I think all major holidays and celebrations have a twisty-curvy bit inside them if you hold them up to the light long enough.  Saint Patrick's Day is an example that doesn't require all that much light, to be honest, being the weird sorta-religious, sorta-nationalistic, sorta-besotted global party that it is.

But hey, when else can ya drink the beer that's green, eh?

Edna Barth, author of Shamrocks, Harps, and Shillelaghs: The Story of the St. Patrick's Day Symbols, puts it pretty well: "For most Irish-Americans, this holiday is partly religious and partly festive.  St. Patrick's Day church services are followed by parades and parties, Irish music, songs, and dances.  To other Americans, the festive side is the one that is known the best.  Cheerfully noisy, greener than spring itself, the Irish holiday on March 17th is a welcome harbinger of the coming season."

Ahh, greener than spring itself -- a great way to describe the festivities, isn't it?

Growing up, even before I was old enough to enjoy the imbibing, I always loved St. Patty's Day for the greenery, the pinching, the horribad fake Irish accents, and so on.  Turning 21 (well, ish) just made it all that much better. And then, I learned that there are people who resent the holiday.  What...?

Yeah, there's more to it.  In fact, there's a long history of more to it.

Saint Patrick, as most people know, became famous for driving all the snakes out of Ireland.  Yay!  Who wants snakes, anyway, right?  Though, hold on a sec -- if you're talking about literal snakes, you have to agree that some are useful to have around.  They keep rodent populations under control, for one thing.  From a non-religious-metaphoric, non-ophidiophobic (fear of snakes) standpoint, then, why would the guy who de-snaked an island be a hero?

They weren't literal snakes, though.  They couldn't have been.  People who have studied fossil records have concluded that there were never snakes in Ireland.  The explanation I've read seems legit; way back when, those islands north of continental Europe were way too cold for cold-blooded reptiles.  As they warmed and the seas rose, a few snake species were able to migrate over to jolly old England herself, but none made it all the way to the Emerald Isle.  So, no snakes in Ireland for Saint Patrick to remove.

So if Saint Patrick didn't drive out the snakes, what did he drive "into the sea"?

Druids, the answer goes.  His charter mission from the Catholic church, after all, was to convert the pagans to Christianity.  That was what he was sent to do.  Basically, it was his job, and who better to do it than the bishop who, according to what I've read, actually grew up, up there? 

I can only imagine a similar thing today, with the performance statement saying something like, "Congrats and good job on exceeding goal on pagan-conversion rate.  Based on metrics, your annual performance raise will be 4.2%.  Advise increasing 401K participation in order to take advantage of new increase to matching funds."

*ahem*

So, pagans.  Druids, in other words.  The pagans in Ireland called their pagan priests druids (well, the Irish dialect version of the word, but you get the idea), and it was those folks who had to convert or leave in order for Saint Patrick to succeed in his mission.

So why snakes as a metaphor?  Well, the story is that the druids used a serpent as their primary symbol, and so "driving the snakes to the sea" is a less-metaphoric-than-usual metaphor for ridding the nation of druids.  Right?

Right, except that I'm struck by one question, that being the case.  Why would pagans, a group whose "religion" involves a close attachment to the world around them, choose as their symbol an animal that doesn't exist where they are?  It's kinda like how the University of Southern Mississippi chose "Golden Eagles" as their mascot when there isn't an eagle within hundreds of miles of them.  Granted, USM has the Internet to look up cool stuff about golden eagles, while the Irish pagans had -- um....  Yeah.  So what -- how -- when....?

Frankly, I don't get it.  Except, I have to point out, the poor snake really has gotten short shrift in Christian literature, hasn't it? 

Ah, well.  Anyway, that's the religious side of the holiday.  Then there's the green side.  Which is weird, too, because apparently Saint Patty's color was blue.  Oops.  But as tensions rose over the past couple of centuries (like they were ever low) between Catholics and Protestants, Irish and non-Irish, and so on, it's said that a great nationalistic wave swept over the holiday.  Green is the Irish color, and Saint Patrick's Day is the Irish holiday, and so therefore the holiday's color is green, begorrah!

All right, so green it is.  I like green.  But what about all the drinking?  Not that I don't like drinking -- far from it -- but why that on a sorta-religious mostly-nationalistic holiday?  Well, keep in mind that March 17th happens to fall, no matter when the moon cycle actually phases, somewhere deep within the vast expanse of Lent.  To folks like me who aren't Catholic, Lent generally means "hey, time to pretend to give something up for 40 days, and oh, look at all the purple cloth."  Many Catholics, however, view Lent in a much more serious light.  It's their 40 days to fast, to pray, to abstain, to contemplate -- in short, to really get serious about the whole religious thing. 

However....

Hey, every deeply serious process needs a moment or two of levity, right?  This one is particularly important, too, since it celebrates what can be claimed as a major accomplishment for the Catholic church.  Thus, many Catholics lift the Lenten rules just a tad--a wee bit, laddie!  Many bishops, from what this non-Catholic writer has heard, even make the lifting of rules official policy, thus creating what is effectively another Fat Tuesday right smack in the middle of the thing. 

Hey, not casting stones here.  It's a celebration.  Humans need celebration.  Ancient pagans recognized that, creating as they did the four solar and four mid-season holidays spaced out so nicely through the year.  The Catholic church agreed, doing much the same and even adopting many of the same time frames. 

No, no aspersion intended.  Quite the opposite, actually.  I love Saint Patty's Day, myself.

It's just -- interesting.  Ain't it?

Enjoy the celebration!  (just consume your green beer safely, and no driving afterward, okay?)

- TOSK

Happy Milk Chocolate Day!

Some days I'm full of pithy talk on the topics of writing, success, authorpreneurship, and so on.  Other days, I got nothin'.  Those days I just want to write my fiction and get on with the word count. 

Today is one of those days.

Still, I committed to writing a post a day for 2013, and though I've already blown it, I plan to at least see the year out.  Thus, I searched briefly online for something special about today, July 28, and found:

Milk Chocolate Day!

Woo hoo!  Celebrate briefly with me, will you?  After all, without milk chocolate, we couldn't have Peanut Butter Cups; they'd just end up being peanut butter lumps.  Instead of Butterfinger, we'd be stuck with peanut butter crisps.  Instead of Milky Way, we'd have long lumps of nougat.  And, um, so on.

So let's say it again--happy Milk Chocolate Day!

Now, I couldn't find anywhere on Wikipedia or elsewhere evidence that this is an actual official special day.  To my (brief and quite ineffective) research, Congress has never taken up the topic of milk chocolate day at all. 

That said, Food.com's National Milk Chocolate Day page is pretty certain the day exists, and if they say it is, then I'm good with it.  Right?  Make sense?  Who would argue with Food.com, anyway?

Besides, it's chocolate.  Every day could be chocolate day and I'd be perfectly happy to celebrate.

This holiday beats the tar out of other things I could write about, anyway.  July 28th is also, according to my inexhaustible friends at Wikipedia.com, the day Peru celebrates its independence from Spain.  I'm sure that's a great celebration to Peruvians, but it means little to us here in Tennessee and I'm sure it means even less good to the Spanish. 

July 28th is also World Hepatitis Day, a day named to raise awareness of Hep B and Hep C and their global impact on our health and welfare.  An important topic indeed, but--chocolate.

Oh, and July 28th is also the anniversary of the day that Andorra joined the United Nations.  Yay!  Now, I challenge you--go find Andorra on the map.  Uh huh.  Hint: it's not in Africa.  (yes, that was my first guess)

Did somebody mention chocolate?

Happy National(ish) Milk Chocolate Day!!!!

- TOSK

(PS: images courtesy of the folks over at Microsoft.com's Office team)

Taps

We hold a lot of tunes dear because of their complex and moving melodies and/or chord arrangements.  Taps isn't one of those.  In fact, as far as I know, there are no chords arranged for the song.  I've never heard it played on anything but a bugle/trumpet, for that matter.  Far from complex, it's written entirely in the harmonic triad of the horn's fundamental tone, a fact that allows it to be performed on any bugle or trumpet with no valve movement at all.

Simplicity to the extreme.

And yet Taps, for such a simple song, is one of the most touching pieces I've ever heard.  It closes out a service member's day, signaling the end of a long period of duty to the nation and, in some cases, a sprint to the room to avoid being written up.

I admit, I have first-hand knowledge of all of that.  Also have first-hand knowledge of how the peal of Taps echoes through the trees and assembled hearts and souls at a military funeral, and that one I sincerely hope you never have to experience.

Today being the special day of remembrance, though, I can't help wading through the feelings once again.  So many have given their lives in defense of the nation.  I recall my time as Casualty Assistance Officer for the kid from Puyallup, WA, whose parents had been disagreeing for so long they couldn't even agree on how to lay their son to rest--we ended up scattering his ashes over Mt. Rainier for one and then burying the urn in a military cemetery for the other.

I recall classmates.  I recall friends.

Today is their day.

This blog isn't long enough to list them all, nor is the factual portion of my memory, so I'll shorten the remembrances here to my classmates who fell in combat:

R.I.P., Lt. Col. Paul Finken, killed in 2006 in Iraq

R.I.P., Lt. Col. James Walton, killed in 2008 in Afghanistan

Be thou at peace.

- TOSK

Happy Mother's Day!

"A mother is a person who seeing there are only four slices of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie." - Tenneva Jordan

"The phrase 'working mother' is redundant." - Jane Sellman

"Sweater, n.: A garment worn by a child when its mother is feeling chilly." - Ambrose Bierce

"He is a poor son whose sonship does not make him desire to serve all men's mothers." - Harry Emerson Fosdick

"A mother's arms are made of tenderness and children sleep soundly in them." - Victor Hugo

"A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world.  And candy!  You take a box to Mother--and then eat most of it yourself.  A petty sentiment." - Anna Jarvis, credited founder of Mother's Day

(Brief disclaimer: nearly everything factual that I present in this blog was obtained from the Wikipedia page on Mother's Day or the Wikipedia page on Mother's Day (U.S. version).  Yes, yes, I despise Wikipedia as a cited source as much as you do, but the Internet connection where I'm staying is so awful I only get what I'm looking for on every other or every third click, and I don't have the patience for real research under that condition.)

Anal retentive hun that I am, I checked.  I haven't written about Mother's Day yet, in the more than two years I've been running this blog.  Shame on me.  A more generally-important topic can't be found--after all, every one of us either is a mother, or has one.  So let me begin by saying, for what is apparently the first time on this blog:

Happy Mother's Day!!!

Frankly, I used to hate Mother's Day, and for the same reason its very founder protested against the holiday just a few years after she successfully lobbied its enactment.  I like giving gifts.  I enjoy expressing loving sentiments.  On the other hand, I despise standing in line with all the other guys in the city waiting to spend our money on requisite cards and flowers.

Fact is, Mother's Day is one of a few holidays (second in my mind only to Valentine's Day) when retailers have us right where they want us: right smack in the wallets, and they're hanging on for dear cash.

It wasn't always that way, of course, but the transition apparently didn't take long.

The history: Ann Jarvis, mother of the holiday's founder, used the term in an extraordinarily useful way when a few years after the Civil War ended she created "Mother's Friendship Day" to reunite families that had been divided by that horrific series of events.  She had also created "Mother's Day Work Clubs" that were intended to improve sanitation and health for both Union and Confederate encampments.  She expressed to her daughter, Anna, a desire to mold these activities into an event honoring mothers, but she passed away in May, 1905, before that could happen.

Then Anna picked up the torch.  In May, 1907, two years after her mother's death, they held a Mother's Day service in the West Virginia church where Ann had taught Sunday school.  By the next year, Anna had enlisted the aid of John Wanamaker, the Philadelphia multi-millionaire who is often credited as the father of modern marketing (among his credits: the money-back guarantee).  Not only did they hold a Mother's Day service at the same church in May, 1908, but at the same time Wanamaker also held a much larger celebration in his store (go figure). 

Money talked as loudly back then as it does today, and so by 1910 West Virginia had declared Mother's Day an official holiday, and in May, 1914, the United States followed West Virginia's lead (yeah, I know, I can't believe I just typed that either).  Meanwhile Anna kept campaigning for the holiday's acceptance internationally, apparently right up to the point when she started campaigning against it for its rabid commercialism.

The holiday's acceptance world-wide seems to fall into three rough camps.  You'll see if you visit the overall holiday Wikipedia page I linked above that there are a lot of countries that celebrate Mother's Day on the same day we here in the U.S. do: second Sunday in May.  Why a Sunday?  Well, it was created by making it into a Sunday service, and where better to celebrate motherhood than the church?  In fact, according to my good Wikibuddies over there, Mother's Day is the third most attended church day in the year, falling only behind Christmas and Easter.  Ain't that cool?

So anyway, that's the first camp: "we'll follow along with the United States."  There's a second camp, the "yes, we'll celebrate mothers, but we'll not do it like the United States because they're so commercialized," and a third camp, the "United States can bugger off; we already have our holidays set" group.

The Wikipedia site has a rather long list of different nations' ways of celebrating the holiday.  I won't repeat all of it here, but at points it makes for an entertaining read.  Mexico, for example, has an interesting Mother's Day history; at one point apparently women were allowed to retrieve their sewing machines from the national charity/pawn shop for free on that day.  Yeah, that practice might be a little gender-insensitive, but then again the whole holiday's rather gender-centric, right? 

I don't want to sully my blog page with the story, but I'll suggest that you read under Germany what the Nazi Party did to the holiday.  It's worth considering how even a benign (if expensive) holiday can become a propaganda tool to the extreme. 

So, back to one of my favorite topics: me.  I truly used to despise Mother's Day as the embodiment of all things gilded and fake.  Used to hate buying and sending cards for that reason.

Then my mother got sick.  A few years later the most important woman in the world to me passed away.  She was a strong woman who had to fight for her children and her own safety several times.  Even riddled with cancer, she still insisted on taking care of her husband and on making sure their house was set when we came to visit--something we didn't do as often as we should have, admittedly. 

Now?  I'm still against commercialism.  I'd still rather not stand in line to buy a card.  But now, all the commercialism the world has to offer is--well, it's not such a big deal.  Part of me wishes I'd taken the time back then to buy more crappy, sappy cards for Mother's Day.

Regardless, I can't change what is past.  What I can do, though, is lay tribute where it is due, and today merely amplifies the fact that I owe much more than I can ever repay to my mother.

The mother of two great kids who I married?  We celebrate a little differently than most; every Mother's Day we go to a paint-a-pot place and create stuff together.  Yes, it's still spending money, but it's creating useful things in a fun way while spending time together, and we all enjoy it.  Every year but this one, of course, because we're over 800 miles apart.  I've already located a shop where we can go in June, though, once we are all back together here in Memphis.  

So thank you for reading my long history and tribute, and if your mother is still around, give her an extra hug today, okay?  And even--gah, I can't believe I'm saying this--get her an extra-special card or flowers.   

- TOSK

Happy Tartan Day

I have a strange habit.  Well, I have several, honestly, but the one I'm talking about is that every so often I'll look on the Always True And Honest portion of the Internet for something special to celebrate on whatever day it is.  Most days, it turns out, have been declared the Day Of Something.  Many have several Days Of designations going on.

For example, did you know that February 11 is White Tee Shirt Day?  Yay for White Tee Shirts!!!!  And everybody knows what February 14 is, right?  Yes, you got it!  February 14 is Ferris Wheel Day!

No, I'm not kidding.  Well, I'm mostly sort of not kidding.  There are several web sites that list the dates of the year and what to celebrate on them.  The one my Google keeps drawing me to is http://all-funny.info/real-list-of-national-days.  Since the web site is named "Real List of National Days" then it must be real.  Right?

Or not.  But hey, it's fun. Besides, I have, several times, correlated entries on that list with other sources.  Granted, the other sources are usually equally non-authoritative, but if everybody's saying the same thing, it must be--um, yeah, I can't even type that with a straight face.

But hey, so what if it's a big pile of steaming hogwash?  It gets me something to giggle about, something to post on Facebook and have my Friends react to: "Happy Panic Day!" "Don't you mean Happy Don't Panic Day?"  "No, that's later in the year.  Today is specifically identified as Happy Panic Day."  And many of my Friends, being my friends, will launch right into a strange discussion about the strangeness of a strange day.

See why I called it a strange habit?

Speaking of--in keeping with time-honored tradition on April 6th, Happy Sorry Charlie Day, I suppose.  I looked that up on the Holiday Insights site and found that it's got nothing to do with either Peanuts or Starkist Tuna.  Instead, it's just in reference to the common phrase "Sorry Charlie" used to bring rejection upon someone.

Incidentally, some people argue that the phrase actually did come from Starkist Tuna.  Others argue that it did not.  My own participation in the argument is limited to the fact that I like to eat tuna.

Regardless, to me, this designation sucks.  Who wants to sit around and celebrate the rejections of life?  I certainly do not.

Instead, I turn to my old friend Wikipedia looking for other ideas.

I'm in luck!  April 6 is National Tartan Day, and Wikipedia actually has references to Congressional records of the House Resolution (not a law) to prove it.  President Bush even signed a Declaration on the matter on April 4, 2008.  Because, you know, declaring a day "National Tartan Day" was an important thing to do while the nation was in the midst of a severe economic meltdown.

This, though, I'll celebrate.  I'm part Scottish, in fact, and somewhere over there in that great big pile of personal paperwork I have a genealogy report to prove it.  Plus I have some good friends who are Scottish, thanks in part to the world-wide nature of the Intertubes.  Plus I love Scotch.  And I like tartans, too--well, most of them.  Some are rather ugly, in my own opinion, and if you come at me with a claymore you can be certain your clan's isn't one of them. 

So yes, indeed.  Happy Tartan Day!  Join me in celebration of a great nationality and people, and raise a dram in their name.

- TOSK

The Origin of April Fool's Day

Been fooled today?  C'mon, most of us have.  Go ahead and raise your hand if somebody got a practical joke in on you in the name of April the First.

It is, after all, the day for it.  April 1, April Fool's Day.

Kind of a silly tradition, isn't it?  It's not like I'd have come up with it.  "Hey, let's pick a day of every year to make complete idiots out of each other, just for the fun of it."  Does that sound like fun to you?

That brings up an important question, then: where did this grand festival of foolishness get its start?

Having waxed historical lately, I took on the challenge, and what I found might surprise you.

Remember William the Conqueror, of, um, conquering fame?  He's the guy who brought the Saxon part north into Anglo-Saxon heritage.  He sailed his army over to Britain from Normandy and--well, conquered.  The Battle of 1066 was his great claim to fame.

He wasn't always called William the Conqueror, though.  I mean, he was especially not so before 1066 AD (the year in which the Battle of 1066 was fought, believe it or not).  But even occasionally after that shining example of conqueror-ship, he was often referred to, by people far away or who could run faster than he, as William the Bastard, a name that not-so-gently alluded to his birth being a result of an affair between the Duke of Normandy and a tanner's daughter.

The name really pissed William off, by the way.  He loved his mother, and he's said to have had the hands and feet cut off of a group of townspeople at a town he was conquering because they'd hung animal hides over the walls as an insult to him as the grandson of a tanner.

Can you blame him?

He also could neither read, write, nor speak English.  Heck, a huge majority of the natives at the time couldn't read or write the language, but he and many of his men couldn't even carry on a basic conversation in it.  That was why the English court formalities were (and continued to be, years after his passing) carried out in French.

It also led to some embarrassment.  Frivolity, as some might say.

See, on the first day of April in 1070, William sat in his throne room and received his daily intel from the coast-watchers.  In English, the fairly boring news of the day was meant to inform The Conqueror that the weather had lightened up enough to send out fishing fleets.  But his advisors were in a punky mood, and so they convinced the French-speaking ruler that the words actually meant that the weather had lightened up enough to sight the ships of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, who was known for not liking his (fellow Frenchman) Norman Bastard neighbor much.

Furious, William cried out for the army to be raised as he rushed to the top battlements of his castle.  When he got there, though, he only saw calm waters--and several giggling advisors.

He had all the advisors he could catch punished, of course, but most of them still lived long enough to spread the word of the grand new April Fool's tradition.

And if you believed all that, you've just been Fooled again.  The history of April Fool's Day actually goes way, way back in time, much farther than 1066. 

Charlemagne predated William by a few hundred years. Most of the rest of what I wrote was true, though.  I'll leave it as an exercise for the gentle reader to determine which. 

Happy April Fools Day!

- TOSK

Why Easter Is When It Is

"Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem." - William of Ockham ("Occam's Razor": among competing solutions, select the one that makes the fewest assumptions)

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Robert J. Hanlon ("Hanlon's Razor")

To all my Christian friends: Happy Easter!!!!

To all my friends who don't practice Christianity: Happy Easter to you, too!!!!

Which brings us to the question of why in the heck Easter bumps around the calendar so much, doesn't it?  Well, it brings me there, anyway, and I'm'a takin' you along for the ride, with your gentle permission.

I have, over the years, fallen into and out of the practice of a fair variety of religious/spiritual faiths.  I'm pretty firm now in my beliefs (and no, they're not spelled out in my Return of the Gods works of fiction), but while I was younger I went through all sorts of experimentation.  Never had intercourse on an altar table like a certain candidate for the Senate claimed to, but yeah, I shopped around.

During that experimentation I happened upon the theory that Easter is scheduled on the date it is because the early Church wanted to squish out paganism.  In doing so, they named and timed their major holidays to coincide with pagan ones, in this case the spring celebration of the pagan goddess Eostre, whose symbols (as a goddess of fertility/spring) were of course the bunny and the egg.

Darn those Christians.  Darn them to heck.

Now, for much of my life prior to this period I was a fairly devout Methodist, to the point where you'd see me carrying a Book of Discipline around with my KJV Bible w/ Concordance.  As much as I'd studied church lore, then, and as much as I loved spouting off with Hanlon's Razor, you'd think I wouldn't have gone for the "Church Ate My Holiday" conspiracy theory.

But I did.

I've learned more since, though.

It turns out that Hanlon's Razor is particularly appropriate in the explanation for the timing of Easter.  In the early days of the church, there wasn't even a standardized calendar.  As the faith spread through the western hemisphere, those in Europe followed the Julian, solar(ish), calendar, while those elsewhere followed the Hebrew, lunar(ish), calendar.  Easter, the holiday celebrating the rise of the Christian church's lord and savior, was thus celebrated on all sorts of days, often as not tied to the Jewish celebration of Passover.

That last fact really irked many, particularly western, Christians in the first couple of centuries, by the way.  They still blamed the Jews for killing Christ, after all.  Why, then, should they let the Jews tell them when to celebrate His resurrection?

Enter, Stage Right, that most inefficient of all human creations, the group.  You know, that organization that bequeathed upon the United States our three-fifths compromise?  Yeah, same thing, same stupidity, many centuries earlier.  In this case, in 325 AD, the new Roman Emperor, Constantine I, decided he needed to call everybody together to get some things straight.  So he called them all to a spot that was geographically central: the city of Nicaea, which was a large settlement at the time.  These days it's known as Iznik, Turkey, and wouldn't even qualify, population-wise, for its own Wal-Mart, not that that detail is particularly important. But if you're looking for Nicaea on the map, fuggeddaboutit.

All that said, the Emperor invited all 1,800 bishops of the church to gather in Nicaea to resolve some of the major canonical issues they were having.  And when the Emperor calls, the bishops come, right?  Not really.  Three bishops who were there published three different counts of attendees, numbers between 220 and 318, a variance that can probably (at least sarcastically) be explained by the fact that they were counting with Roman numerals.

"Was that XXIII or XXXII?  Oh, dang, now I must start over."

Socrates and others who weren't there later said there were 318 bishops in attendance, and hey, since they wasn't there, they must've had it right.  Glenn Beck would've probably estimated attendance at around 10,000, based on multiple drawings of the same bishops from different angles, and since that number feels best I'll just go with it, okay?

Now, where was I?  Oh, right, the Nicaean Council.  So all ten thousand bishops started talking about the major philosophical divides that were plaguing the early church.  Things like the divinity of Christ.  The need for a standardized Creed, because if everybody isn't murmuring exactly the same thing, you can't say you have a real church, right?  The need for more laws ("canons" is the correct term, I suppose) on important subjects such as the invalidity of baptisms done by the heretic Paul (not the same Paul who wrote all the bestselling letters.  I suspect he went by "The Other Paul" in online social media). 

Oh, and the date of Easter.

Sort of, anyway.  What the First Council of Nicaea (yeah, it worked so well they had another one a few hundred years later) did, specifically, was rule that Easter/Pascha would no longer be timed according to the Jewish calendar, and also that it would take place on the same day world-wide.

What they did was leave the actual calculation part as an exercise for the reader, kind of like in those physics texts that nobody ever actually reads.

Note, by the way, that so far I've said Julian calendar.  That was the modification of the Roman calendar done in the name of Julius Caesar.  For one thing, he wanted January 1 to be in the actual winter, so he decreed as the Roman Emperor that what we now know as 46 BC would actually be 445 days long.  (could you imagine having to deal with the IRS over that kind of a shift?)  Also, he recalculated everything so that they'd still have the special solar/lunar-ish alignment with the parts of each month (hence the shorter and the longer months) but the year would correspond to the 365.25 days the earth takes to fully traverse its path around the sun rather than the nice, round number of 365 days the earlier Roman calendar used.

Future emperors, of course, ignored parts of what Julius had put in place, thus causing the year to wander around a bit, but that's neither here nor there to this story.  The key fact is that now we use something called the Gregorian calendar, named after a Pope this time, which realizes that 365.25 is actually just a skosh off.  To acknowledge the fact, Pope Gregory XIII decided (well, a Jesuit scholar decided and he signed off on it, technically) that we'd toss away one Leap Day every hundred years.

Oh--and he also made ten days disappear that year.  Poof!  Bye bye!

Keep in mind that the Pope is Catholic.  You knew that, right?  Problem was, in 1582, when Pope Gregory XIII did the deed, there were already plenty of Protestants and other non-Catholic Christians in the world who really didn't give a rat's behind what the Pope said about their calendar.

Imagine yourself back then.  Your Pope says it's one month.  The folks down the street have a calendar that says it's different.  Now figure out when to celebrate Easter.  I dare ya....

Anyway, that's basically why Easter is the date it is--the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox is a whole lot easier to understand and calculate than all that other crap.

Luckily Christmas is always the same date every year.  Wal-Mart would have a helluva time figuring out its sales cycles otherwise.

- TOSK

Happy New Year!

"All of us every single year, we're a different person.  I don't think we're the same person all our lives." - Steven Spielberg

Well, it's finally here.  2013.  The Big One Three.  The first year since 1987 comprised of four different numbers.

I've been promising a set of Resolutions--goals, if you will--for 2013.  I've been considering them.  I've been tossing them back and forth with the lovely lady who shares all with me.  Here's what I've--we've--come up with for public consumption.

In 2013, I will:

• Write every day.  I've written nearly every day of 2012, but I got distracted at times.  For 2013, I'm participating in a 365-post blog challenge, to post something every day.  I'm gonna do it.
• Publish four books.  Hey, I pubbed 2 books and a novella in 2012.  I'm close on Atlantis; it's at beta readers now and is marching along nicely for a Feb 14th release.  Book 4 is written, though as a NaNo project it'll take some serious revision.  Then there's the Elf Queen book that is well-started and loaded into Scrivener.  And finally, I figured out where I want to go with Professor Kinder in my SciFi work.  
• Take risks.  I'm not convinced that the Ultimate Rules of Novel Marketing from 2012 will work in 2013.  I saw great results on giveaways early in the year, but not so much later on.  This year will be the year of trying to figure out how best to help people discover my works.  And on that note....
• Operate smarter.  Yep, I admit it, the TOSK thing was a dumb idea.  More on that later. (note: no, the previous two haven't been entirely measurable, but that's okay)
• Do a little freelance work every week.  The money's nice--oh, on second thought, I'll be honest.  The money pretty much sucks.  But the discipline is nice.  Online freelancing forces a writer to craft clean, error-free copy on a tight time limit. 
• Finish/Create a dozen short stories (one per month).  As with the freelance work, I don't see much money in that effort either, but shorts require a laser-sharp focus on clean beginnings and endings.  Those are my two weak spots, really, those beginnings and endings.  I do pretty dang well in the middle.  
• Keep up with my social networks on a weekly basis.  Not only have I let that fall off for myself, but I haven't been a great participant in the Alexandria Publishing Group.  They--we--have great plans for 2013, and I want to be an active participant in those.
• Move.  With the relocating we've done, from Anchorage to Biloxi to Richmond, and the associated uncertainties with housing options, we've been in apartments for way too long.  I'm tired of powerlessly yelling at my toilet when it randomly refuses to flush properly.  
• Exercise once a day. Five people that I know have passed away in the past few weeks, four of those to heart disease.  Message received, God.  

It's an ambitious list, to be certain, but there's nothing there that I can't accomplish.  What about you?  What grand goals do you have for 2013?  Are you willing to write them down and let everybody see them?

Have a great day, and a Happy New Year!

- TOSK

A Safe New Year's Eve

The only thing better than having a Happy New Year?  Having a Safe New Year.

As someone who is in charge of shepherding thousands of students each year through the twists and turns of a college education, I've become quite sensitive to the "stuff" outside of academics that we can't really control.  There's nothing worse, after all, than seeing a student with the ability and the motivation to succeed who is rendered unable to by circumstance.  And--that nasty circumstance always seems to bite us around this time of year.

So please, everybody, have a great and wonderful New Year's celebration. But please, also have a safe one.  There's no excuse for getting behind the wheel of a vehicle after you've been drinking.  It's hard enough watching out for other drivers who might be driving intoxicated when you're sober, after all. 

The AAA "Tipsy Tow" program that's been tossed around Facebook isn't available everywhere in the U.S., unfortunately.  It turns out that they stopped running it in most places after people abused the program, using the goodwill of AAA and the organization's member base to get home rather than planning responsibly safe alternatives.  That's sad, but I can't say I blame them much.

There are other programs, though.  A list of options, listed alphabetically by state and then by city, are available here, having been compiled by the NHTSA and hosted on the AAA web site.  If you plan to go out drinking, you should go through the list prior to departing to program the number into your cell phone.  Alternatively, if you're in the Richmond area, the law firm of Allen Allen Allen & Allen (I'm thinking they need two or three more people named Allen, aren't you?) is offering free options here. 

And so, on that note--enjoy responsibly, and enjoy safely, but enjoy your New Year's Eve celebration!

- TOSK

Merry Christmas, again!

"The xmas holidays have this high value: that they remind Forgetters of the Forgotten, & repair damaged relationships." - Mark Twain

You know, not to be a Danny Downer, but the frail and fleeting nature of life is a recurring theme in my books, and it's actually a central theme of Book 4 (which I hope to have out sometime next summer, but Book 3 must of course come first).  Still, that's fiction.  Over the past few weeks, meanwhile, I've had not one, not two, not three, but four different reminders of how that theme plays out in real life.  In real life, life is frail.  In real life, life is fleeting.  And in real life, we mere mortals can't just hop on over to Gaia's glade, asking as Crystal did for the secret to immortality.

We can, however, work to make every day we're given into a life well lived.  What does that mean?  Well, when my own life is over, nobody is going to stand at my remembrance ceremony talking about how many books I've written or sold.  Nobody is going to speak of the wondrous accomplishments with accreditation I've wrought.  They will, however, (hopefully) tell tales of relationships, of memories that span a lifetime of us all traveling through it together.

That's what life's about.

The beautiful thing, incidentally, about this season is that the very thing I just said life is about is amplified by the "Spirit of the Season."  We all decry the commercialism of gift-giving, yet we still participate.  Why?  Because, I think, down in our hearts, we know that the trading of gifts really isn't, or at least shouldn't be, about the gifts themselves.  Instead, it's about finding an easy way to open a connection between two people through which joy, friendship, and love can flow.

So as you journey through the events of Christmas Eve today, and Christmas Day tomorrow, keep all that in mind.  If you're like me and still have to brave the shopping areas (every single year I forget something till the day before Christmas) then try to do so with love and joy in your heart no matter how many idio--er, lovely fellow shoppers--cut you off.  Think of someone you haven't connected with in a while, and reach out to them.  Do it today, not tomorrow; you might find out as I did this morning that that person is no longer connectable with.  Practice a random act of kindness.  Smile at people, even--especially--when they don't deserve it.

Speaking of Christmas and gifts and stuff--I and my friends at Alexandria Publishing Group would like to help you enjoy the season with the gift of a free anthology.  It contains bits of all of our writing, from fantasy to science fiction to humor.  It's got Greek gods and zombies and nanobots, and even *gasp* a guitar or two, so what's not to love about it?

You can download it from Smashwords here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/268133

Enjoy, and have a very Merry Christmas, a Happy Holidays, a Joyful Kwanzaa, a Happy Hanukkah, a Merry Festivus, or whatever tradition you follow.  And please, make it be about your incredible fellow travelers in the voyage of life.

- TOSK

Happy International Talk Like a Pirate Day!

"There is more treasure in books than in all the pirate's loot on Treasure Island." - Walt Disney

Me fam'ly, th' pirate troop.  Arrrr!

 Avast, me hearties!  Shiver me timbers, mates, it's International Talk Like A Pirate Day.

On one level, the designation represents a lot of fun, as people wander around uttering dicey-sounding phrases and growls ("arrrrr...").  Some people, that is, of course.  I'm sure there are some who would applaud for a short while if the Dean wandered around campus referring to people as bilge rats and scupper-maids, but others would decry it as unprofessional and a distraction from the learning process.  And--they'd be right. Still, it's fun where appropriate.  From the official (more or less) web site:

Do we need Talk Like A Pirate Day?

Make no mistake. We do. But it's a little hard to articulate why, especially when you've made the mistake of referring to your wife as a scurvy bilge rat and tried to order her back into the galley.

Talking like a pirate is fun. It's really that simple.

It gives your conversation a swagger, an elán, denied to landlocked lubbers. The best explanation came from a guy at a Cleveland radio station who interviewed us on the 2002 Talk Like a Pirate Day. He told us we were going to be buried by people asking for interviews because it was a "whimsical alternative" to all the serious things that were making the news so depressing.

In other words, silliness is the holiday's best selling point.

The reality of pirates is pretty dark and ugly.  We've all been treated to media reports of small bands off the coast of Africa who, once they managed to put their hands on the lethal combination of boats and guns, ply the seas looking for death and destruction.  Other peoples' deaths and destruction, of course.  Nobody wants to talk like them, I think.

The fantasy of pirates, meanwhile, is--well, sexy.  All the men swagger like Captain Jack Sparrow as portrayed by Johnny Depp, and the women all look like Keira Knightley.   More to the point, since neither Captain Jack nor Will Turner do much for the holiday vernacular, all pirates in our fantasy world talk like Captain Barbossa. 

Today is the day, then, that we celebrate the fantasy in our lives.  Go ahead and pay homage to the noble tradition of writers crafting people, places, and things that could never exist in the real world in order that their readers' imaginations can revel in them.  We're not just celebrating works like Treasure Island, but rather holding up an entire genre of fiction: thank you, authors, for bringing us pirates, elves, space cowboys, Wookies, and yes, even vampires who sparkle. 

And talk like a pirate while you're at it, and smartly too, y'ken? Else ye'll walk the plank....

- TOSK

Happy Constitution Day!

"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." - Preamble to the U.S. Constitution

*spoiler alert* potentially political topic is ahead.  Keep reading at your own risk.

Happy Constitution Day!

Many people may not realize this but today hasn't always been Constitution Day, and no, I'm not talking about the obvious years before 1789.  September 17th wasn't an official holiday known as Constitution Day (technically, "Constitution Day and Citizenship Day") until the Omnibus spending bill of 2004 made it so.  And why did a spending bill create a holiday?  Well, because that's just How it Works.

Granted, most people don't even know the day exists.  Few people treat it like a "real" holiday--you know, when we sit around in pajamas until it's time to go watch a parade or drink heavily or something entertaining like that.  But we educators--everybody, in fact, whose institutions use federal funds or allow students access to federal student aid--have to know it exists.  We have to teach our students something about the Constitution every year.  In fact, it's the only thing I'm legally required to teach at my college--I could legally (and stupidly) turn my medical assistant classes into instruction in how to create beautiful basketry, but one day, each year, I must teach something about the Constitution of the United States of America.

Why?  Well, because that's just How it Works. 

It's tougher than it seems it should be these days, mind you.  Everybody from the guy with a Harvard law degree down to the radio talk show host who couldn't finish a semester of college is an expert on the document already, and they all disagree with whatever the other side agrees with.  And that's the funny thing about the document.  It was purposely written a little bit vague.  Ferinstance, it gives our government the responsibility for providing for "the general welfare" among other things.  Have you ever looked up the definition of "welfare"?  Yeah, that's such a general term by itself that the adjective does absolutely nothing for it.  Benjamin Franklin had a helluva time getting the group of men with extremely diverse views to agree on much of anything otherwise.  They probably couldn't even come to consistent decisions on which fast food place to eat lunch at, and thank God they didn't have to ponder the morality of chicken sandwiches, or they'd've gotten nothing done.  Still, people use it as an arguing point: "The Constitution doesn't say anything about _____!"

Even members of Congress get into that argument, so much so that sometimes they'll begin sessions with reading the Constitution itself out loud.  Now, that sounds kinda cool, at first.  Except that I, as a teacher, know that there's only two reasons we make classes read aloud.  The first is if we're trying to break the class in gently for being able to speak in public--reading aloud is Step A on that educational journey.  But I've listened in on C-SPAN, and I can tell you that if there's anybody, Republican or Democrat, in that august body who needs any additional training in the art of bloviation, they sure hide it well.  As for reading in class, the other time we bring it is for punitive reasons, when we know people aren't doing their reading homework outside of class and the material is important enough that we just make 'em suffer through reading it out loud instead of the far more enjoyable process of listening to us talk about it.  But seriously, I have to say that it really bothers me--students are students and they'll always find reasons and ways to not do their assigned work, but legislators make a whole lot more money than I do every year.  If they're not doing their assigned readings before they get there, send 'em home and find someone who will, I say. 

Anyway, back to the document itself.

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg raised some Americans' hackles early this year when speaking to the new Egyptian regime.  She said, "Let me say first that a Constitution, as important as it is, will mean nothing unless the people are yearning for liberty and freedom.  If the people don't care, then the best Constitution in the world won't make any difference.  So the spirit of liberty has to be in the population, and then the Constitution, first, it should safeguard basic fundamental human rights...."

All that is great, but what got under peoples' skin was her answer to a question about where to look for examples: "I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a Constitution in the year 2012.  I might look at the Constitution of South Africa."  Hoo, boy--one of our own Supreme Court Justices saying that our Constitution doesn't make a great example for a new government.  Let the fireworks begin.

Easy, though, folks.  Her point related to the currency of the effort, not value of the overall document, and I think that it's a good one.  Back when our Constitution was crafted, it was written for a rather different world.  When folks like Thomas Jefferson echoed phrases like "all men are created equal," they weren't using the male-gendered noun to meet a purely grammatical requirement.  Women didn't get the right to express their opinions in the voting booth, remember, till the 19th Amendment (Nineteenth!  Not first, not second, but nineteenth!) was enacted in 1920.  That's nearly a century and a half later.  Many of them also weren't talking about anybody who wasn't a landed gentleman of Caucasian descent, by the way, and some were even excluding the Irish immigrants, darn them (my own great-great-and-so-on-grandfather had already immigrated from Ireland several decades previous, so he was okay, and besides, he'd gone south to the Carolinas).  Each of the subsequent equalizations has happened over the years since, many requiring years of protest and push, and one unfortunately even requiring a war.

So all totaled, the document has been formally amended 27 times.  True, ten were at the same time, and one of the amendments was to undo an earlier one (the famous Prohibition amendment), thus leaving us with 25, um, "real" amendments.

And then there's the unofficial amendments, more accurately called interpretations.  For over two hundred years the Supreme Court has been responding to questions of law, interpreting the vague verbiage used in the U.S. Constitution in more or less interesting ways.  It's their job, of course, one specifically set out by the document itself.  A tough, thankless job it is, too; every decision they make seems to be hailed as wise and justified by one segment of the population and evil, biased, and an extreme of "judicial activism" by another segment.  Who says which only depends on which side of the population the Supreme Court agreed with.

You know, looking at the revisions that have happened over the years, it's easy, I guess, to think less of the document.  I'd suggest that's the wrong way to look at it, though.  Not only has the U.S. Constitution stood the test of time, but the years, revisions, and interpretations have only served to make it stronger, more just to everyone and not just a specific few. 

All except, of course, the Supreme Court decisions with which I disagree.  Those evil, biased, activist judges....  *ahem*

So, all that said, with 27 amendments and over two centuries of case law muddying the water, I'd agree with Justice Ginsburg that a new nation should look to less heavily-revised documents for the purpose of finding a template to use in crafting their own.  For all other purposes, though, I'm quite proud of the one we have, thank you very much, occasionally-vague though it may be.

Please, join me today in celebrating the United States Constitution.

- TOSK