Search Results for: valentine

It’s very weird getting asked if I can “reprint” something that only exists digitally. But, what the foschnizzle, it’s Christmas so here you go.

****************************

I received a lovely email yesterday from a regular reader. She said some very nice things about me and life in general and then got to the point. The point was that, as informative as this week’s articles have been about the holidays, I was “depressing the (expletive deleted) out of (her).” I guess I can see that. The history of Christmas is one of political compromise, violence and drunken debauchery. Not exactly the first thoughts that spring to mind when you think about ways to celebrate the birth of the Son of God. More likely a way to celebrate a frat party in honor of Biff’s trust fund. But it is what it is. Denying history doesn’t make it suddenly disappear, despite what you may hear from some recent political pundits. Nevertheless, she’s right. There are many aspects of the holiday that are cause for smiles. Honest ones too, not just the rueful ones I usually inspire.

We’ll start with some useless trivia.

Where did the Candy Cane come from? In a small Indiana town, there was a candymaker who wanted to spread the name of Jesus around the world. He invented the Christmas Candy Cane, incorporating symbols for the birth, ministry, and death of Jesus Christ. He began with a stick of pure white, hard candy to symbolize the Virgin Birth. The candymaker formed the stick into a “J” to represent the name of Jesus. It can also represent the staff of the “Good Shepherd.” He thought the candy was too plain so he stained it with a red stripe to symbolize the blood shed by Christ on the cross.

Christmas Games – Weird Ones
Shoe the Wild Mare
Shoeing the Wild Mare is a traditional Christmas game that goes back to at least the early 17th century.

Get a narrow(a few inches wide), strong wooden beam and suspend it from the roof with two even length ropes. The beam is the ‘mare’ of the title and should be level yet high enough above the floor so that a player’s feet are off-ground. A player ‘the farrier’ then sits on the ‘mare’ in the centre, a leg either side. This player has a hammer and has to give the underside of the beam “four time eight blows” at a designated spot. If he falls off, it is someone else’s turn.

Much hilarity, and the odd broken shoulder ensues. (Odd broken shoulders????)

Snapdragons
Apparently this is the best game ever to play on Christmas Eve. Make sure you have the fire department on speed dial though.

Very popular from the 16th to the 19th centuries, Snapdragons (or Flapdragons) has explicably declined in popularity.

Gather everyone around the dining room table, place a large flat dish in the centre. In the dish scatter a good handful of raisins then pour on top a layer of brandy or cognac. Set fire to the brandy and dim the lights. Players take it in turns to pluck a raisin out of the burning liquid and eat it quickly down. For a more competitive edge to the game use larger dried fruit such as apricots, one of which has a lucky sixpence stuffed inside.

Equipment needed: plate, matches, raisins, brandy, address of nearest accident and emergency department

I have actually played Snapdragons. It was how I learned to use saliva to quickly douse my tongue. Oddly enough, and this will be a blog for another day, that knowledge has proved useful.

Here’s some other useless trivia for you. In case Christmas isn’t violent enough for you there’s another game, called “Hot Cockles” which can make your week. One person gets blindfolded and then players give a blow to the blindfolded player, who had to guess the name of the person who gave the blow.

Whee!

Okay, let’s move on to some fun facts about Christmas trees.

Which actually had nothing to do with Christmas for centuries.

• The use of evergreen trees to celebrate the winter season occurred before the birth of Christ.
• The first decorated Christmas was in Riga, Latvia in 1510.
• The first printed reference to Christmas trees appeared in Germany in 1531.
• Nineteenth century Americans cut their trees in nearby forests.
• Christmas trees have been sold commercially in the United states since about 1850. Until fairly recently, all Christmas trees came from the forest. (ED: Not from a parking lot?)
• The first Christmas tree retail lot in the United States was started in 1851 in New York by Mark Carr.
• In 1900, large stores started to erect big illuminated Christmas trees.
• In 1856 Franklin Pierce, the 14th President of the United States, was the first President to place a Christmas tree in the White House.
• President Coolidge started the National Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony on the White House lawn in 1923.
• Teddy Roosevelt banned the Christmas tree from the White House for environmental reasons.
• In 1984, the National Christmas was lit on December 13th with temperatures in the 70’s, making it one of the warmest tree lightings in history.
• Between 1887-1933 a fishing schooner called the “Christmas Ship” would tie up at the Clark Street bridge and sell spruce trees from Michigan to Chicagoans.

My grandmother used to talk about that ship. She said it was so laden with pine trees that you could smell it from blocks away.

Also, just so you know, all of Santa’s reindeer are chicks.

Anyway, here are ten meaningless facts that you’ll use to impress your friends at holiday parties.

ONE
What percentage of mall Santa applicants were discovered to have criminal backgrounds by Pre-employ.com?
7%

Approximate amount generated by photographs with Santa in shopping malls in the USA in dollars:
$2,255,750,000

TWO
How many houses must Santa visit on Christmas?
842,000,000

How fast must he travel to visit all those homes?
4,796,250 Mph

THREE
Percentage of Americans who believe Santa in the off-season drives a sports car:
4%

drives an SUV:
25%

FOUR
How many presents would you receive if you were to get every present in “The 12 Days of Christmas”?
364

How much would all those gifts cost? (according to PNC Financial Services)
$18348.87

FIVE
Percentage of Americans who finish off their Christmas Shopping on Christmas Eve:
20

SIX
Percentage of pet owners who have their dog or cat pose and photographed with Santa Claus:
27

SEVEN
Percentage of Americans who re-gift:
28

EIGHT
Which type of Christmas tree is displayed more during the holiday season, artificial or real?
Artificial trees are the most popular with 40,694,463 on display in comparison to real trees at 34,335,809

NINE
How many Barbie dolls are sold every minute around the world?
180

TEN
How much trash is generated annually from the gift wrap and shopping bags:
4,000,000 Tons

So, burning question of the day, why does Santa wear red? Well, it’s a Catholic thing. You see, Santa is based, in part, on the life of St. Nicholas and he was the bishop of Smyrna, a spot in modern day Turkey. Bishops wore, and still wear, red capes. Then red was the way Norman Rockwell saw it, and red was the color Coca-Cola wanted when it pretty much created the modern image of Santa in 1931. So, Santa wears red.

Got it?

Cool.

Also, he is, depending on where you’re at at the moment, the patron saint of banking, pawnbroking, pirating, butchery, sailing, thievery, orphans, royalty, and New York City, thus making him the most popular, non-biblical, saint in history. Saint Valentine is a distant second.

Some other stuff that will make our reader feel a little better about the holiday. Contrary to popular belief, suicide rates during the Christmas holiday are low. The highest rates are during the spring.

One reason may be that Christmas has better music. It is estimated that the single “White Christmas” by Irving Berlin is the best selling single of all time, with over 100 million sales worldwide and that 50 million of those sales were of the Bing Crosby version.

Bing’s daughter starred in Star Trek and had sex with an android in one episode.

That has nothing to do with the topic at hand, I just thought I’d share.

I will end this blog with a dinner prayer by cartoonist Berke Breathed.

“Dear Lord, I’ve been asked, nay commanded, to thank thee for the Christmas turkey before us — a turkey which was no doubt a lively, intelligent bird — a social being capable of actual affection, nuzzling its young with almost human-like compassion. Anyway, it’s dead and we’re gonna eat it. Please give our respects to its family.”

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!

I have been a busy little Billy recently. That whole job thing has been taking up a lot of my time. Which is a good thing. It means I’ve hitched my wagon to a growing concern that has room for advancement. Never a bad realization. That said, the glorious world of World News Center podcasts on the Big Wake Up Call have continued apace. That means that, for the first time in this blog’s illustrious history, we’ve discussed stuff on the radio that wasn’t on the site. So, today, I’m going to fix that. Let’s start with the easy stuff. On September 19th, against the advice of all rational people, I turned 53. I also was able to note that I’m 170 lbs lighter than I was on Valentine’s Day 2013. Since that was accomplished under a doctor’s care you need not worry about my health. I mean I did have the flu last week but that’s about it.

So let’s get this party started. Supergirl is coming to TV.

CBS has given a series commitment to Warner Bros. TV’s Supergirl, EW has learned.

Based on the DC Comics character, the drama tells the story of Kara Zor-El, who was born on the planet Krypton, but escaped amid its destruction years ago. Since arriving on Earth, she’s been hiding the powers she shares with her famous cousin Superman. But now, at age 24, she decides to embrace her superhuman abilities and be the hero she was always meant to be.

Arrow and Flash executive producer Greg Berlanti and New Normal’s Ali Adler will write and executive-produce with Sarah Schechter.

For those of you who aren’t professional TV Producers, a series commitment is almost unheard of. It means there will be 13 episodes created no matter what. Unheard of, yes, but not insane. They know that, last March, a guy named Vincent Tran created a bit of fan fiction called Girl Of Steel and it won him awards, critical acclaim and free admission to every Comicon in the country. They also know they have a winning production team and, more importantly, that the comic book industry is no longer the sausage fest it used to be. There is a real market for strong, female, characters. Rumors say that Powergirl will also appear. Whether it’s the “lesbian lover” version or the “evil clone” seems to have not been decided. My guess is evil clone. CBS is still a family oriented station and Americans are cool with killing, not so much the kissing stuff.

for those of you who’ve been waiting for an invisibility cloak or stuff that see’s through brick, keep reading.

Janet Fang, from I Fucking Love Science, reports that researchers are closer now than ever before to making a cloak just like the one Harry Potter wore.

The idea of an invisibility cloak depends on manipulating light in the way electronic circuits manipulate the flow of electrons. When electromagnetic waves (such as light) hit an object like metal or wood, they scatter; that’s how we see the object. But say there’s an artificial material that cloaks the object—bending an incoming wave around it without scattering it. Then we wouldn’t be able to see the object.

We manipulate light all the time: magnifying glasses focus light down to a spot while mirrors reflect light and change its direction. But metamaterials can do something more sophisticated. “They’re able to bend light, to scatter it, to manipulate it in unusual ways,” Tiffany Walsh of Deakin University explains.

Simply put, if the light isn’t bouncing off your glorious bod, no one will know it’s there. Whether or not invisible people are a good thing or not I’ll leave for another day.

But as long as we’re bending light, let’s take a look at what Lisa Winter found.

A device that sees through objects.

“This is the first device that we know of that can do three-dimensional, continuously multidirectional cloaking, which works for transmitting rays in the visible spectrum,” Choi added.

The secret is not focusing the light straight through the center of the lenses. “This cloak bends light and sends it through the center of the device, so the on-axis region cannot be blocked or cloaked,” explained Choi.

If larger lenses are used, the device could conceal larger things, or see around large objects. Howell explained that this setup, which allows objects to be concealed when viewed from a span of 15 angles, could also be used to allow semi-truck drivers to see around their blind spots. As truck drivers are involved in over half a million accidents each year, this has incredible potential for real world integration.

Best of all, the researchers have included directions to make your own cloaking lenses here:

Image credit: University of Rochester

-Purchase 2 sets of 2 lenses with different focal lengths f1 and f2 (4 lenses total, 2 with f1 focal length, and 2 with f2 focal length)

-Separate the first 2 lenses by the sum of their focal lengths (So f1 lens is the first lens, f2 is the 2nd lens, and they are separated by t1= f1+ f2).

-Do the same in Step 2 for the other two lenses.

-Separate the two sets by t2=2 f2 (f1+ f2) / (f1 — f2) apart, so that the two f2 lenses are t2 apart.

NOTES:

Achromatic lenses provide best image quality.

Fresnel lenses can be used to reduce the total length (2t1+t2)

Smaller total length should reduce edge effects and increase the range of angles.

Okay, now you’ve got your invisibility cloak and you can see through objects. What’s next?

How about a nice jaunt around the solar system?

Those fun kids down at NASA have built a new space vehicle that can go anywhere in the solar system. And, just because they’re whimsical like this, they also built the most powerful rocket the world has ever seen.

NASA’s Orion spacecraft is built to take humans farther than they’ve ever gone before. Orion will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during the space travel, and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities.

Orion’s first flight test, called Exploration Flight Test-1, will launch this year atop a Delta IV Heavy rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 37. This test will evaluate launch and high speed re-entry systems such as avionics, attitude control, parachutes and the heat shield.

In the future, Orion will launch on NASA’s new heavy-lift rocket, the Space Launch System. More powerful than any rocket ever built, SLS will be capable of sending humans to deep space destinations such as an asteroid and eventually Mars. Exploration Mission-1, scheduled for 2017, will be the first mission to integrate Orion and the Space Launch System.

Say hi to this bad boy.

You’ll note the solar panels. Once in space it can power itself, and all its components, with nothing but sunlight. As envisioned it could travel between the planets indefinitely and just load and unload astronauts.

So, yes kids, this is a thing.

A very very cool thing.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!

This Sunday is Mother’s Day. Yes, it is Mother in the singular possesive. There’s a reason for that and we’ll get to it in a bit. One thing is certain is that the holiday has changed since its inception. Originally it was almost a religious holiday. A day of reverence and service. Now we have brunches and sales and MILFs. And, to be perfectly honest, I am a fan of the whole MILF thing. That, however, will be a story for another day. Other people aren’t so sure. I have good news for them. If you don’t really know what you’re into then just visit Cerebral Encounters and fill in the registration form. In keeping with our theme today I’ll note that it’s a site run by a MILF. Did I mention that I’m a MILF fan? Yeah, I think I did. Anyway, it’s Mother’s Day and maybe you’d rather not think about your mom the same way I do. If that’s the case allow me to take you down the dusty, and safe, roads of history.

The nice folks over at IB Times did a little poking through various tomes and were able to provide a pleasant, and brief, history of all the mothers’ day celebrations prior to it becoming a holiday here in the U.S., and later the world.

Ancient History:
The earliest history of the Mother’s day celebration can be traced to the Greek’s celebration of a day in honor of the maternal goddesses. Rhea, wife of Cronus and the mother of many deities of Greek mythology was honored.

A celebration of ancient Romans that dates back to some 250 years before Christ was born, is also thought to be a possible origin of the present day Mother’s day. They celebrated a spring festival called ‘Hilaria’ that was dedicated to Cybele, a mother goddess. However, the celebrations that usually lasted for three days with parades, games and masquerades; were thought to be notorious and the followers of Cybele were ultimately banished from Rome.

The fourth Sunday of lent was also celebrated by early Christians in honor of the Virgin Mary, Christ’s mother. But in the UK, the celebration was expanded to include all mothers and was called Mothering Sunday.

And that brings us up to the Civil War in the U.S. While the ancient celebrations tended to focus on what made moms moms in the first place – NAKEY TIME! – or focused on their role in society – VENERATION TIME!! – it wasn’t until it all got balled together with conservative Christianity and a woman with a mommy complex so severe that Freud would have surrendered that it all went down a dark path.

Brian Handwerk over at National Geographic has the whole, sordid, tale.

Before the brunches, before the gifts and greeting cards, Mother’s Day was a time for mourning women to remember fallen soldiers and work for peace.

When the holiday went commercial, its greatest champion gave everything to fight it, dying penniless and broken in a sanitarium. Of course, Mother’s Day marched on without her and is today celebrated, in various forms, on a global scale.

As early as the 1850s, West Virginia women’s organizer Ann Reeves Jarvis held Mother’s Day work clubs to improve sanitary conditions and try to lower infant mortality by fighting disease and curbing milk contamination, according to historian Katharine Antolini of West Virginia Wesleyan College.

The groups also tended wounded soldiers of both sides during the U.S. Civil War from 1861 to 1865, she added.

In the postwar years Jarvis and other women organized Mother’s Friendship Day picnics and other events as pacifist events uniting former foes. Julia Ward Howe, for one—best known as the composer of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”—issued a widely read “Mother’s Day Proclamation” in 1870, calling for women to take an active political role in promoting peace.

Around the same time, Jarvis had initiated a Mothers’ Friendship Day for Union and Confederate loyalists across her state. But it was her daughter Anna who was most responsible for what we call Mother’s Day—and who would spend most of her later life fighting what it had become.

“Mother’s Day,” Not “Mothers’ Day”

Moved by the 1905 death of her own mother, Anna Jarvis, who never had children of her own, was the driving force behind the first Mother’s Day observances in 1908.

On May 10 of that year, families gathered at events in Jarvis’s hometown of Grafton, West Virginia—at a church now renamed the International Mother’s Day Shrine—as well as in Philadelphia, where Jarvis lived at the time, and in several other cities.

Largely through Jarvis’s efforts, Mother’s Day came to be observed in a growing number of cities and states until U.S. President Woodrow Wilson officially set aside the second Sunday in May in 1914 for the holiday.

“For Jarvis it was a day where you’d go home to spend time with your mother and thank her for all that she did,” said West Virginia Wesleyan’s Antolini, who wrote “Memorializing Motherhood: Anna Jarvis and the Defense of Her Mother’s Day” as her Ph.D. dissertation.

“It wasn’t to celebrate all mothers. It was to celebrate the best mother you’ve ever known—your mother—as a son or a daughter.” That’s why Jarvis stressed the singular “Mother’s Day,” rather than the plural “Mothers’ Day,” Antolini explained.

But Jarvis’s success soon turned to failure, at least in her own eyes.

Storming Mother’s Day

Anna Jarvis’s idea of an intimate Mother’s Day quickly became a commercial gold mine centering on the buying and giving of flowers, candies, and greeting cards—a development which deeply disturbed Jarvis. She set about dedicating herself and her sizable inheritance to returning Mother’s Day to its reverent roots.

Jarvis incorporated herself as the Mother’s Day International Association and tried to retain some control of the holiday. She organized boycotts, threatened lawsuits, and even attacked First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for using Mother’s Day to raise funds for charities.

“In 1923 she crashed a convention of confectioners in Philadelphia,” Antolini said.

A similar protest followed two years later. “The American War Mothers, which still exists, used Mother’s Day for fundraising and sold carnations every year,” Antolini said. “Anna resented that, so she crashed their 1925 convention in Philadelphia and was actually arrested for disturbing the peace.”

Jarvis’s fervent attempts to reform Mother’s Day continued until at least the early 1940s. In 1948 she died at 84 in Philadelphia’s Marshall Square Sanitarium.

“This woman, who died penniless in a sanitarium in a state of dementia, was a woman who could have profited from Mother’s Day if she wanted to,” Antolini said.

“But she railed against those who did, and it cost her everything, financially and physically.”

Today, of course, Mother’s Day continues to roll on as an engine of consumerism.

In the U.S. alone, Mother’s Day 2012 spending will reach $18.6 billion—with the average adult spending more than $152.52 on gifts, the National Retail Federation estimates.

Sixty-six percent of Americans celebrating Mother’s Day will treat their mothers to flowers, the federation reports, and more than 30 percent of the surveyed celebrants plan to give their mothers gifts of jewelry.

The U.S. National Restaurant Association reports that Mother’s Day is the year’s most popular holiday for dining out. Last year the association estimated that some 75 million U.S. adults woud do just that on the holiday.

As for Mother’s Day being a Hallmark holiday, there’s no denying it, strictly speaking.

Hallmark Cards itself, which sold its first Mother’s Day cards in the early 1920s, reports that Mother’s Day is the number three holiday for card exchange in the United States, behind Christmas and Valentine’s Day—another apparent affront to the memory of the mother of Mother’s Day.

“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,” Jarvis once said, according to the book Women Who Made a Difference.

“And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.”

Mother’s Day Gone Global

The holiday Anna Jarvis launched has spread around much of the world, though it’s celebrated with varying enthusiasm, in various ways, and on various days—though more often than not on the second Sunday in May.

In much of the Arab world, Mother’s Day is on March 21, which happens to loosely coincide with the start of spring. In Panama the day is celebrated on December 8, when the Catholic Church honors perhaps the most famous of mothers, the Virgin Mary. In Thailand mothers are honored on August 12, the birthday of Queen Sirikit, who has reigned since 1956 and is considered by many to be a mother to all Thais.

Britain’s centuries-old Mothering Sunday, the fourth Sunday of the Christian period of Lent, began as a spring Sunday designated for people to visit their area’s main cathedral, or mother church, rather than their local parish.

Mothering Sunday church travel led to family reunions, which in turn led to Britain’s version of Mother’s Day.

All different yet all the same since at their core they honor the moms among us.

So whether your family busts outs the rites of Cybele and shares the wine and naked time with loved ones or if you celebrate the day in quiet reflection on what your mom means to you, just know that each of us here at the World News Center wish you a Happy Mother’s Day.

Oh, and for the record, we tend toward the whole naked with wine thing around here.

Listen to Bill McCormick on WBIG (FOX! Sports) every Friday around 9:10 AM.
Visit us on Rebel Mouse for even more fun!
contact Bill McCormick
Your Ad Can Be Here Now!