Today marks the 64th anniversary of the Normandy Landings known as D-Day. Code named Operation Neptune and Operation Overlord, they were the first operations of the Allied Powers’ invasion of Normandy during World War II. The operation was the largest single-day invasion of all time, with over 130,000 troops landing on June 6, 1944.

I had intended to post something worthy of the event and its historical significance but simply ran out of time. Not wanting to let such an important day in world history go by without remembering and honoring the heroes who fought and died there, I’ve provided a link to last year’s post. These champions climbed the cliffs, took the beaches, braved the machine gun nests, took out the gun batteries, did the unthinkable – the unimaginable. Their deeds that day define their valor and deserve our deepest gratitude and respect. They are the heroes we honor today.

This is a Patriot’s Journey post. You may also enjoy visiting the other journeyers: Drumwaster, Larry at The Bastage, the folks at The Line Is Here and Shortbus from The Edge of Reason…

In 1810, English poet William Wordsworth described a “sort of national property in which every man has a right and interest who has an eye to perceive and a heart to enjoy”. Painter George Catlin, in his travels though the American West, wrote in 1832 that the Native Americans in the United States might be preserved “by some great protecting policy of government … in a magnificent park … A nation’s park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!”

Years later, in 1864, the first steps toward creating what would later become our national park system were set in motion by Congress and President Abraham Lincoln. Yosemite Valley, seen as an important national treasure, was set aside by the federal government and ceded to the state of California. In doing so, it was agreed that the state would preserve these lands for public use, resort and recreation, and that no corporate development would be allowed in the protected lands. Eight years later, Yosemite Valley, along with Yellowstone, became the world’s first National Parks.

Dawn and I are fortunate to live close enough to Yosemite for regular treks. With each visit, we marvel at its splendor, its magnificence, its massive beauty. Its sheer enormity provides a cornucopia of hiking and photographic opportunities, far more than we could hope to experience in a single lifetime.

It’s been said that one cannot visit Yosemite and not feel closer to his creator. For us, it’s true.

This is a Patriot’s Journey post. Remember to check out the other Patriotic Journeyers: Drumwaster, The Bastage, the folks at The Line Is Here and Shortbus from The Edge of Reason…

Today marks the 134th running of the Kentucky Derby, affectionately known as the Run For the Roses and considered by many to be “the most exciting two minutes in sports.”

The classic American horse race, the Derby is the oldest consecutively run Thoroughbred race in America. It is run annually on the first Saturday in May at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky. Preceding the Preakness in mid-May and the Belmont in early June, it’s the first jewel of the coveted Triple Crown of Thoroughbred racing. Won by only eleven horses since 1919, Triple Crown winners include memorable names like Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Whirlaway and Affirmed.

The first Kentucky Derby was run May 17, 1875, before a crowd of 10,000 from around the city, state and surrounding areas. A field of fifteen three-year-olds ran a one and a half mile course with the race won by H.P. McGrath’s Aristides. The following year, the distance was shortened to the present mile and a quarter…

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Michael reminds me that today is also May Day. Ancient spring rites that related human fertility to crop fertility gave birth to most modern May Day festivities. May 1 is the traditional day to crown the May queen, dance around the maypole, perform mummers’ plays, and generally celebrate the return of spring. In Great Britain, the custom of “bringing in the May” involves gathering “knots,’ or branches with buds, on the eve or early morning of May 1.

Of course, the day is also linked to organized labor’s fight for workers’ rights and, since 2006, Uno de Mayo, organized demonstrations by illegal immigrants in an effort to gain legal status in the U.S. I prefer the more traditional May Day festivities of my youth: the celebration of spring and dancing ‘round the maypole.

The National Day of Prayer is an annual observance held on the first Thursday in May, inviting people to pray for the nation. The day was created in 1952 by a joint resolution of the United States Congress and signed into law by President Harry S. Truman. The theme for this year is “Prayer! America’s Strength & Shield.”

If there is a service in your community, you might consider attending. Our country could use some extra prayer right now. For more information, visit nationaldayofprayer.org.

Today is Earth Day, the April 22nd one, not to be confused with the Equinox Earth Day in March or the Earth Hour, also in March, or any of the various World Days (World Day for Water, World Day for Cultural Diversity, World Jump Day, et al). Each year, the April 22 Earth Day marks the anniversary of the birth of the modern environmental movement in 1970.

Among other things, 1970 in the United States brought with it the Kent State shootings, the advent of fiber optics, “Bridge over Troubled Water,” Apollo 13, the Beatles’ last album, the death of Jimi Hendrix, and the meltdown of fuel rods in the Savannah River nuclear plant near Aiken, South Carolina — an incident not acknowledged for 18 years. At the time, Americans were slurping leaded gas through massive V8 sedans, industry belched out smoke and sludge with little fear of legal consequences or bad press, and air pollution was commonly accepted as the smell of prosperity. “Environment” was a word that appeared more often in spelling bees than on the evening news.

But Earth Day 1970 turned that all around, thrusting the environment onto the national agenda. On April 22, 20 million Americans took to the streets, parks, and auditoriums to demonstrate for a healthy, sustainable environment.

Earth Day 1990 mobilized 200 million people in 141 countries and lifted the status of environmental issues onto the world stage, giving a huge boost to recycling efforts worldwide and helping pave the way for the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Earth Day 2000 combined the big-picture feistiness of the first Earth Day with the international grassroots activism of Earth Day 1990. Using the Internet to help link 5,000 environmental groups in a record 184 countries, it sent the message loud and clear that citizens around the world wanted quick and decisive action on clean energy. And Earth Day 2007 was one of the largest Earth Days to date, with an estimated billion people participating in the activities world wide.

Today, Earth Day Network reaches over 17,000 organizations in 174 countries, while the domestic program engages 5,000 groups and over 25,000 educators coordinating millions of community development and environmental protection activities throughout the year. Notable is that Earth Day is the only event celebrated simultaneously around the globe by people of all backgrounds, faiths and nationalities with more than a half billion people participating in Earth Day Network campaigns every year.

Who cares? Well, we all should. We can argue whether the pendulum has swung too far or not yet far enough, but we all agree that environmental issues command an important place on the world agenda and that we all share responsibility for the proper care and feeding of Mother Earth.

By the way, what ever happened to Captain Planet and the Planeteers? Did environmental extremists (or Turner) render them irrelevant? Anyone?

This story in yesterday’s paper made me smile. For 27 years, people have been walking past a display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, not paying any attention to the fact that it refers to Precambrian as an “era” when it’s actually a dimensionless unit of time (as we all know, right?) Anyway, 11-year-old Kenton Stufflebeam of Allegan, Michigan, noticed the glaring error during his vacation to Washington and alerted museum officials. The museum responded with a letter of gratitude to Kenton (although they misspelled his name and city - sigh) and promised to fix the problem.

It seems Kenton knew the period was misnamed because his fifth-grade teacher, John Chapman, had nearly made the same mistake in a classroom earth-science lesson before catching himself. “I knew Mr. Chapman wouldn’t tell all these students bad information,” he told reporters covering the story… Full story

I ran across this reprint of a 1943 article published in Mass Transportation Magazine that gave me a chuckle. Times have certainly changed; we like to think for the better. The eleven tips in this article prove the point.

I especially like, “Older women who have never contacted the public…are inclined to be cantankerous and fussy,” and “…’husky’ girls - those who are a little on the heavy side - are more even tempered and efficient than their underweight sisters.” The latter reminds me of advise from my grandfather: “Marry a fat girl. They’re less likely to run around on you,” and “Marry a girl with small hands…” But that’s another story.

Before you’re too critical of the managers and supervisors of 1943, remember that it was war time and the majority of male factory workers had enlisted or been drafted and were stationed away from home. To keep the factories running, women were hired to fill the jobs formerly performed by men. Managers and supervisors of the day had little, if any, experience supervising and training inexperienced female workers, so articles like this one attempted to help guide their dealings with their new workforce. It was new and awkward for everyone, workers and management alike, and a testament to our determination to support the war effort that we were able to pull it off!

Click on the thumbnail image of the article and give it a read. For those of you old enough to remember WWII, it’ll be a walk down memory lane. For those of you too young to remember, it’s a piece of history that shows just how far we’ve come.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention that, along with April Fools’ Day, yesterday marked the 32nd anniversary of Apple, Inc. In its 80th Anniversary issue, Time Magazine revisits a 2003 story titled, “80 Days that Changed the World” that includes a piece about how Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ushered in the personal computer with the founding of Apple on April 1, 1976:

They were two guys named Steve, so Steve Jobs was called Steve and Steve Wozniak went by Woz. At 25, Wozniak was the technical brains. Jobs, 21, was the dreamer with a knack for getting others to dream along with him. They had gone to the same high school, and in the hazy years after graduation - both were college dropouts - a shared interest in electronics brought them together. Jobs didn’t yet have his own place, so when their formal partnership began, the decision was made in a bedroom at his parents’ ranch house in Los Altos, Calif.

Most computers in 1976 were room-size machines with Defense Department size price tags, but Wozniak had been tinkering with a new design, and his computer was different. It wasn’t much to look at—just a bunch of chips screwed to a piece of plywood—but it was small, cheap and easy to use, and Jobs had noticed the stir it caused when they took it to a local computer club. “He said, ‘We’ll make it for 20 bucks, sell it for 40 bucks!’” Wozniak remembers. “I kind of didn’t think we’d do it.” Jobs came up with the name, inspired by an orchard in Oregon where he had worked with some friends: Apple Computer. “When we started the little partnership, it was just like, Oh, this will be fun,” Wozniak says. “We won’t make any money, but it’ll be fun.”

They didn’t go out and celebrate that day. Woz wouldn’t even quit his day job designing chips for calculators at Hewlett-Packard until months later, after Jobs had sold his Volkswagen bus for seed money. Nobody, not even Jobs, saw what was coming next: that Apple would create the look and feel of every desktop in the world and start our love affair with the personal computer.

I didn’t become an Apple fan (I prefer “user” or “evangelist”) until the introduction of the horribly overpriced ($10,000) Lisa, the first personal computer to feature a visual desktop (GUI) and a mouse. And when Apple later introduced the Macintosh, well, I was hooked. Happy birthday, Apple!

Michael D sent this bit o’ folklore last year, but I think it’s worth a re-post…

Although the origin of playing practical jokes and pranks on this day is hazy, many folklorists believe that it may date back to 16th century France. At that time, New Year’s Day was March 25, with a full week of partying and exchanging gifts lasting until April 1. In 1582, the Gregorian calendar moved New Year’s Day back to January 1. Those who forgot or refused to honor the new calendar were the butts of jokes and ridicule.

And according to weather folklore, “If it thunders on All Fools’ Day, it brings good crops of corn and hay.”

It’s also my daughter-in-law’s birthday (No fooling!) Happy birthday, Kim!

I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s April Fools’ Day posts. I guess I can come clean now; all are jokes. I will admit that the Polar Bear Conservancy had me going for a few minutes until I read some of the ridiculous statements made within.

There are quite a few more pranks posted on the Web yesterday and today; I chose only a few that I thought were pretty good or are anticipated annual jokesters. I hope none of you actually bought real estate on Mars!

Happy April Fools’ Day!

My wonderful wife, Dawn, often challenges me with questions I usually try to answer off the top of my head. But if my answer fails to satisfy her, she assigns me the task of finding the “real” answer and getting back to her. Such was her question about the origins of the Easter Bunny and its colored eggs since, we all know, rabbits don’t lay eggs and the whole Easter Bunny thing isn’t even mentioned in the scriptures. Well, I’ve put it off for as long as I can. Easter is this Sunday and I was reminded that the question is still “out there.” So I did some cursory research and here’s what I learned.

The answer lies in the ingenious way that the Christian church absorbed pagan practices. After discovering that people were more reluctant to give up their holidays and festivals than their pagan gods, the church simply incorporated pagan practices into Christian celebrations. As recounted by the Venerable Bede, an early Benedictine monk, clever clerics copied pagan practices and by doing so, made Christianity more palatable to pagan folk reluctant to give up their festivals for somber Christian practices.

In second century Europe, the predominate spring festival was a raucous Saxon fertility celebration in honor of the goddess Eostre (Ostara), whose sacred animal (or consort, depending on which version you choose to believe) was a hare. One story holds that Eostre hurled the hare into the heavens after giving it the power, once a year, to lay colored eggs. Another popular piece of folklore is that Eostre once saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a hare. Because the hare had once been a bird, it could still lay eggs, and eventually became the modern Easter Bunny.

But the eggs associated with the hare also have another, even more ancient, origin — The eggs associated with this and other vernal festivals have been symbols of rebirth and fertility for so long, the precise roots of the tradition are unknown and may date to the beginning of human civilization. We know, for instance, that ancient Romans and Greeks used eggs as symbols of fertility, rebirth, and abundance.

And eggs were solar symbols that figured in the festivals of numerous resurrected gods. Pagan fertility festivals at the time of the spring equinox were common and it was believed that, when day and night were of equal length, male and female energies were also in balance, hence the connection to fertility. In this context, the hare was often associated with moon goddesses; the egg and hare together represented, respectively, the god and goddess.

Moving forward fifteen hundred or so years, German children awaited the arrival of Oschter Haws, a hare who laid colored eggs in nests made from children’s caps and bonnets to the delight of those who discovered them Easter morning. Abandoned plover nests found in the spring were said to have been those of Oschter Haws in which he laid his colored eggs. It was this German tradition that popularized the Easter Bunny and Easter basket in America when introduced into American culture by German settlers in Pennsylvania.

Many modern practitioners of neopagan and earth-based religions have embraced these symbols as part of their religious practices, identifying with the life-affirming aspects of the spring holiday. The neopagan holiday of Ostara, for example, is descended from the Saxon festival. Ironically, some Christian groups have used the presence of these symbols to denounce the celebration of the Easter holiday and many churches have abandoned the pagan moniker in favor of more Christian oriented titles like “Resurrection Sunday.”

So there you have it, Dawn. I hope this gets me off the hook on this one so I can move ahead with some of your more recent “questions.”

Today is leap day, an “extra” day that rolls around every four years. Many take this day off from work on the pretext that, because it’s an “extra” day for which they’re not receiving extra pay, it should be used for something special. A few see it as a chance to “stick it to the man” by not showing up for work.

In any event, Happyfeet asked me to explain the illustration in Monday’s Leap Years post and so here’s my “long way around” take on it, with a little history and folklore thrown in for good measure:

Brief History

In ancient Rome, leap day was on February 24 due to February being the last month of the calendar. The original Roman calendar added an extra month every few years to maintain the correct seasonal changes. The Julian calendar was implemented in 45 BCE, resulting in a leap day being added to the end of February every four years.

In 1582 Pope Gregory XIII refined the Julian calendar with a new rule that a century year is not a leap year unless it is evenly divisible by 400. The introduction of the Gregorian calendar was observed in some countries including Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain. The conversion took longer for other countries such as Great Britain (1752) and Lithuania (1915).

Tradition and Folklore

A tradition was introduced many centuries ago to allow women to propose to men during a leap year. This privilege of proposing was restricted to leap day in some areas. Leap day was sometimes known as “Bachelors’ Day”. A man was expected to pay a penalty, such as a gown or money, if he refused a marriage offer from a woman. Sadie Hawkins Day, from the old Li’l Abner comic strip, was loosely based on leap day.

The tradition’s origin stemmed from an old Irish tale referring to St Bridget striking a deal with St Patrick to allow women to propose to men every four years. This old custom was probably made to balance the traditional roles of men and women in a similar way to how the leap day balances the calendar.

It was also considered to be unlucky for someone to be born on a leap day in Scotland and for couples to marry in a leap year, including on a leap day, in Greece.

So here’s that explanation, Happyfeet. The illustration depicts a woman offering her heart in marriage on a leap day. She’s apparently received a refusal or two since she’s carrying a bag of money and may be wearing a new gown. But the day’s not over and she’s still “on the job”. Work for you? Works for me.

Observances

Leap day is also St Oswald’s Day, named after a 10th century archbishop of York who died on February 29, 992. The feast is celebrated on February 29 during leap years and on February 28 in other years. February 29 is one of the days of Ayyám-i-Há (February 26 to March 1) in the Bahá’í calendar. These days are dedicated to fasting preparations, charity, hospitality and gift-giving.

2008 is a leap year, so Friday will be February 29th, a date that rolls around just once every four years. If that’s your birthday, that makes you, what, eight? Ten?

Confused? Well, here’s the short explanation. Our year is measured by how long it takes the Earth to go around the Sun. It doesn’t take 365 days but 365 1/4. Actually… 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds. So, every four years we effectively lose a day. To prevent drift in our calendar we adjust the four year period to be 1,461 instead of 1,460 days. You can read more on The “Straight Dope” website.

Anyway, here are three smart things you should know about leap years in order to impress your friends and maybe win a few beers, compliments of Wired Magazine:

1) A leap year is any year evenly divisible by four — except for century years, which have to be divisible by 400. It’s not a perfect system: The Gregorian year is 27 seconds longer than the astronomical year. By 12008, we’ll be three days off.

2) October 5-14, 1582, never happened in Catholic lands. Brits (and their American subjects) born September 3 to 13 had no birthday in 1752. Those days were dropped when the Western world switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

3) International Atomic Time — kept by ultraprecise clocks — is gradually out-pacing astronomical time, which is determined by our planet’s rotation. (Earth’s spin is slowing — what a drag.) So in 1972, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service began adding occasional leap seconds. They’ve done it 23 times, most recently adding an extra “one-Mississippi” on December 31, 2005.

The first known association of Valentine’s Day with romantic love is in 1382’s “Parlement of Foules” by Geoffrey Chaucer, but the earliest origins of the holiday can be found hundreds of years earlier. The date was likely named in honor of a priest who was clubbed, stoned and then beheaded in the 3rd century for marrying young couples in contravention of Claudius II’s edict forbidding marriage. Hardly the sort of cheery story one might expect for the origin of a holiday devoted to romance and love!

Although we still celebrate it today, Saint Valentine was actually removed from the calendar of celebrated saints’ days in 1969 – perhaps due to the array of “unfortunate” events that have occurred on the date throughout history. Weddingpaperdivas wants us to be aware of the “darker” side of the holiday, offering their list of the 14 most unsavory events in the history of Valentine’s Day. Continue reading…

Today we recognize the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth President of the United States, and it seems only fitting that we take a few moments to reflect upon his life. I hope you will join me.

It may surprise some of you to learn that Lincoln’s birthday is not a designated Federal holiday, although some states - Illinois, Connecticut and possibly others - observe it as a State holiday. Others, including California, have created a joint holiday to honor both Lincoln and George Washington, sometimes calling it “Presidents Day”. It coincides with the Federal holiday officially designated “Washington’s Birthday”, observed on the third Monday of February. In California, government offices are closed on Lincoln’s birthday but businesses remain open. Some display flags.

I thought it appropriate that today we remember the man before and during his presidency. Much has been written about Lincoln and whole sections of libraries are devoted to works about him. A cursory search of the Internet yields even more. Following is a very brief biography extracted from our government’s web site:

Lincoln warned the South in his Inaugural Address: “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you…. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect and defend it.”

Believing secession to be illegal, Lincoln was willing to use force to defend Federal law and the Union. When Confederate batteries fired on Fort Sumter and forced its surrender, he called on the states for 75,000 volunteers. Four more slave states joined the Confederacy but four remained within the Union. The Civil War had begun.

The son of a Kentucky frontiersman, Lincoln had to struggle for a living and for learning. Five months before receiving his party’s nomination for President, he sketched his life:

“I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families—second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks…. My father … removed from Kentucky to … Indiana, in my eighth year…. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up…. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher … but that was all.”

Lincoln made extraordinary efforts to attain knowledge while working on a farm, splitting rails for fences, and keeping store at New Salem, Illinois. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, spent eight years in the Illinois legislature, and rode the circuit of courts for many years. His law partner said of him, “His ambition was a little engine that knew no rest.”

He married Mary Todd, and they had four boys, only one of whom lived to maturity. In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen A. Douglas for Senator. He lost the election, but in debating with Douglas he gained a national reputation that won him the Republican nomination for President in 1860.

As President, he built the Republican Party into a strong national organization. Further, he rallied most of the northern Democrats to the Union cause. On January 1, 1863, he issued the Emancipation Proclamation that declared forever free those slaves within the Confederacy.

Lincoln never let the world forget that the Civil War involved an even larger issue. This he stated most movingly in dedicating the military cemetery at Gettysburg. In his address, he said: “that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln won re-election in 1864, as Union military triumphs heralded an end to the war. In his planning for peace, the President was flexible and generous, encouraging Southerners to lay down their arms and join speedily in reunion.

The spirit that guided him was clearly that of his Second Inaugural Address, now inscribed on one wall of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D. C.: “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds…. “

On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Lincoln was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington by John Wilkes Booth, an actor, who somehow thought he was helping the South. The opposite was the result, for with Lincoln’s death, the possibility of peace with magnanimity died.

Lincoln was a great president. It is fitting that we remember him this day.