Every day is weird, but July 9, 2011, is truly the oddest day of the year — from a calendar standpoint.
If you wrote the date in numerical form, it would look like this: 7/9/11 — all odd numbers.
To make things odder, there are only six days EACH CENTURY when three consecutive odd numbers make up the date.
The odd sequence of events began on Jan. 3, 2005 (1/3/05), which was followed by March 5, 2007 (3/5/07), and May 7, 2009 (5/7/09).
Other than July 9, there will only be two days — Sept. 11, 2013 (9/11/13), and Nov. 13, 2015 (11/13/15) — left to celebrate this, well, odd series of calendars quirks.
I’ve seen, online, that there are several states have cancelled Fourth of July Firework display mainly because of the very real threat of fires brought on by severe drought conditions.. I guess that’s quite reasonable though it seems almost sacrilegious when viewed through the perspective of Founding Father John Adams who wrote to his wife about the signing of the Declaration of Independence (though he was off by two days) that the day should be…”solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.”
While it might not have happened more than once or twice, it seemed that the small town I grew up in on Cape Cod, Orleans, only had fireworks displays every other year.
The reason for the cancellations were quite political and caused by people who would, today, be quite comfortable being labelled as “Tea Party” members, i.e. short-sited, moronic dunderheads.
Our fireworks were shot off down at Nauset Beach for several reasons among which were you can’t set the Atlantic Ocean on fire, the beach had the biggest parking lot in town and the town’s bandstand was there for concerts put on by the Town Band (to which I, and later my brothers, all belonged).Coincidentally it was also where my family had its restaurant. The only one on the beach.
Orleans had what is called “Town Meeting” form of government. Truly the most democratic form of governance there is. Every year a couple of weeks before the Town Meeting registered voters and tax payers of the town would receive the annual “Warrant.” The Warrant contained all the issues that were to be faced by the Board of Selectmen for the coming year and all the spending issues that were to be expected: school budget, how much money was going to be spent for the library, the fire and police departments, road maintenance expenditures, that sort of thing. There would also be an appropriation for such things as Fourth of July fireworks.
At Town Meeting anyone could get up and have their say as to whether or not such funds should be appropriated and spent and one of the early “Teabaggers” would get up on their hind legs and say that the town shouldn’t spend money on fireworks at the beach because all it was doing was giving Jim Philbrick’s Snack Shack a huge pay day at tax payer expense, what with the crowd going to the beach and buying popcorn, sodas, hot dogs, etc. at my family’s restaurant. There would generally be enough people to agree that the money could be better spent on other things.
So, that year we’d have to go to a neighboring town if we wanted to partake of a grinchless Fourth.
Then, of course, the following year’s Town Meeting there would be someone else who would get up and ask why there wasn’t any money being set aside for a Fourth of July fireworks display? “When I was a kid,” they’d say, “we always had a fireworks display. Whatever happened to them?” Then there’d be a special appropriation made and we’d have fireworks again for a year and this pattern seemed to go on year after year. Or at least so it seemed that way to me.
The interesting thing was that while the Fourth always WAS a big day for our business, in the 35 years my family operated the Snack Shack the Fourth was NEVER the busiest day of the year. It was almost always beaten by just an ordinary day that peaked with a simple Wednesday night band concert.
Here in Panama, of course, the Fourth is just the day sandwiched between the third and the fifth of July. But over in Gringolandia, better known as Boquet, a couple of restaurants are holding Fourth of July parties for the expat community.
For those of you who aren’t going to have a fireworks display this year I leave you with this from the Concours International Feux d’Artifice pyromélodiques @ Monaco 2010, part of an International fireworks competition held every year with the display synchronized to music. Enjoy and have a happy fourth.
From today’s Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel newspaper…
Lighthouse Point woman accused of domestic violence hours into marriage
FORT LAUDERDALE—
Newlyweds from Lighthouse Point spent their first morning as husband and wife telling the story of their honeymoon night — to police.
Bernadette Besario Catan-Keeler, 30, was arrested and charged with domestic violence battery Sunday morning. Police said she attacked her husband and bit him.
The couple told authorities they got married Saturday.
Judge John “Jay” Hurley set her bond at $4,500, and ordered Catan-Keeler to stay away from alcohol and her husband.
“For newlyweds, this is not starting things off on the right foot, for sure,” he said.
A while back I got hit with a particularly nasty virus and had to take my computer back to its original state. That is so that it was back to the way it was the day I bought it. Fortunately I regularly back up projects I’m working on and such things as my photos, etc., so I didn’t lose any of the really important stuff. However, I did lose all my bookmarked links. That had the small blessing of eliminating literally hundreds of links I rarely visited. But today I decided to check out some of the links I have here over on the right-hand side of the page to see what they’ve been up to…started with:
Did any of you see the wonderful movie “The Straight Story” starring Richard Farnsworth? Directed by director David Lynch who did such oddball productions as “Blue Velvet” and “Twin Peaks” presented the touching and straight-forward account of how Alvin Straight who, hearing about his estranged brother suffering a stroke decides to visit him and make amends. But Alvin’s legs and eyes are too impaired for him to receive a driving license, he hitches a trailer to his recently purchased thirty year-old John Deere Lawn tractor and sets off on the 240-mile journey from Laurens, Iowa to Mount Zion, Wisconsin.
Well, John Hinton, of Washington state decided to take HIS lawnmower to sea.
We all wonder about silly stuff. At least I think people do. For example, the comedian Steven Wright wonders what it would be like to skate on the OTHER side of the ice.
Yesterday at the supermarket I made an impulse buy of a 1 lb. package of pancake mix which set me off to wondering, once again as I have over the years about wheat.
Thanks to the serendipity of the internet I got answers to some of those things I’d wondered about.
For instance, more foods are made with wheat than any other cereal grain. Like pancake mix when you take out the other things in the one pound box like, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid, sugar, sodium bicarbonate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, dextrose, nonfat dry milk, partially hydroginateed soybean oil, salt, wheat gluten, calcium carbonate, defatted soy flour, sorn syrup solids, soy lecithin, sodium casseinate, mono and diglycerides, soybean oil and lactic acid. ( I may rethink the whole idea of pancakes for breakfast after writing this out.)
One of the things I wondered about the most was how much space did it take to produce that pound of flour?
In the United States, one acre of wheat (depending on wheat class and where grown) yields an average 42 bushels of wheat.
One bushel of wheat contains approximately one million individual kernels.
One bushel of wheat weighs approximately 60 pounds.
One bushel of wheat yields approximately 42 pounds of white flour.
One bushel of wheat yields approximately 60 pounds of whole-wheat flour.
A bushel of wheat yields 42 commercial loaves of white bread (one-and-a-half pound loaves).
A bushel of wheat makes about 90 one-pound loaves of whole wheat bread.
One bushel (Weird word, bushel. Say it over real fast a half a dozen times in your head.) takes up 1/42 of an acre. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre, so 1/42 of that is 1,037.14 square feet. The size of the average American home today is 2,700 square feet which is up from 1,400 square feet in 1970. To get one loaf of this
you need an area roughly 5’X5′ and that loaf of whole wheat bread grows on less than half that space.
So now I’ll just have to find something else to wonder about.
It used to be very rare to see more than one piano player performing at a time simply because there would only be one piano available. With the advent of the electronic keyboard it’s possible for several pianists to get together and play.
Way back in the mists of time for this blog I posted a video of Professor Longhair, Tuts Washington and Allen Toussaint playing together for a PBS special.
Today I stumbled on this video with FOUR great piano-pounders on one stage, Ann Rabson (from Saffire, the Uppity Blues Women), Dona Oxford, Arthur Migliazza and Daryl Davis. I know that Ann is the woman sitting at her keyboard. I’ve seen her perform before and talked to her between sets. So, by elimination the other woman has to be Dona Oxford. I’ve never seen or heard of the two guys before but other YouTube videos show that Arthur is the guy sitting at his keyboard.
One More Good Adventure 