It's all Hallow's Eve

Ancient Romans celebrated a holiday called Feralia on February 21. At first it was a simple day off to recover from the holiday of February 20 (Salvia Divinorum), and to take care of last minute shopping before the holiday of February 22 (Salta Boca).



It was, coincidentally, the last day of the year according to the Roman calendar.

Over time it became a sacred day in its own right. It became a festival to honor the dead, and like most Roman holidays it involved some serious drinking. Feralia also resembled most other Roman holidays in that it outlasted the western Roman empire. The jolly men and women of the Mediterranean basin saw no reason to give up the riotous holiday, with all its drinking and orgies, despite countless reminders from an ascendant Christian church that drinking was bad (unless it was Jesus' blood) and orgies were worse.



At last, in the 7th century, Pope Boniface IV decided that the holiday was Christian after all, except that instead of honoring all the dead it should honor only dead saints, that instead of Feralia it should be called All Saints' Day, that instead of drinking and orgies it should be a day of prayer and meditation, and that instead of February 21 it should be observed on May 13.

The good peoples of the Christian world happily accepted the new name and date, but persisted in drinking and orgying. As punishment for this inappropriate enjoyment, Pope Gregory III moved it to November 1, and unwittingly laid the foundation for our modern Halloween.

Hold that thought.



Since as early as the 5th century BC, the ancient Celts had considered October 31 the last day of summer. They called the day Samhain (rhymes with Clamhain), and they believed all the divisions between the world of the living and the world of the dead were dissolved for that brief period. They thought the dead used this window of opportunity to possess the souls of the living, and the thought scared the piss out of them.

A variety of bizarre rituals to ward off the dead accumulated around Samhain over the centuries, including the sacrificial burning of virgins (when any could be found).

When these Celtic rituals collided with the Christian All Saints' Day, all hell broke loose. People didn't know whether they should pray, drink, orgy, burn virgins, or what. They tried a lot of different combination: they got drunk and prayed, they burned virgins and got drunk, they prayed to have orgies and got drunk with virgins, they prayed then got drunk and had orgies with virgins.



Eventually they settled on sending their kids out in silly costumes to ask their neighbors for candy. This was intended to keep them out of the house while the drinking and orgies raged, but since everyone's doorbells kept ringing from everyone else's children, the drinking and orgies gradually faded away.

Of course, this brief outline only traces the development of Halloween as we know it in America. The holiday is still celebrated in countries all over the world in an astonishing number of ways.



In Bulgaria, for example, October 31 is a national holiday called Pazardzhik. In rural districts, children dress up as kitchen utensils and dash from farm to farm tying chickens' feet together. Any unhappy farmer attempting to shoo the children away from his chickens will find himself pelted with manure and glass shards as the children sing playful Pazardzhik carols. In Mexico, the Day of the Dead lasts from October 31 through November 2, which has long been a concern to students of the Mexican calendar. The celebration is a fusion of sixteenth-century Spaniards' All Souls' and All Saints' Days and the Aztec festival honoring Mictecacihuatl, the Aztec goddess of the dead. (Mictecacihuatl was said to have died at birth as the result of complications relating to pronunciation.)



One can't help but marvel at the similarities between the Day of the Dead that arose in Meso-America and Kyrgyzstan's Day of the Very Sick (Nov 1), Papua New Guinea's Evening of the Emotionally Exhausted (Oct 31), and Vanuatu's Cardiovascular Appreciation Days (Oct 31 - Nov 2).

In Saudi Arabia, October 31 is Sandy Night. As soon as the sun sets, children scamper out into the desert and fill their home-made bags with sand. The holiday is believed to be derived from the ancient Bedouin tradition of sending children out to fill bags with sand.



In Chile, Halloween is infused with ancient Incan traditions. Fretful mothers extinguish the fires in their hearths for fear of attracting Spaniards while naughty children take their parents hostage and demand their weight in chocolate.



In Wittenberg, Germany, October 31 is celebrated as the day on which Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church in 1517. Many of the town's children frolic giddily about, nailing Theses here and there with impish delight, while others try to catch and burn them as heretics.



Whatever your own tradition, enjoy Halloween.

Evil Bastards, it seems, are not cineastes

With the death of Mr. Gaddaffi and the capture and death of Mr. Hussein before him, it is now painfully obvious to Evil Dictators everywhere - hiding out in a sewer or a 'spider hole' is not the way to go.



None of them watched The Third Man with a critical eye. A note to US Special Ops: remember to check all the sewers and 'spider holes'.

Dear Mr. Santorum

Please watch the skits you find are attacking you before you complain about them.



I'm sure most of the people involved in SNL love their families too.

This stuff is getting serious

Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream has come out in full support of the Occupy Wall Street Movement

Now if only Nabisco came out in support of the movement; no one would ever leave Zuccotti Park

It was a beautiful Tuesday morning

September 11, 2001 -

At 8:45 AM (EDT), hijacked American Airlines "Flight 11" crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in NYC. At 9:03 AM, a second hijacked plane, United Airlines "Flight 175" crashed into the South Tower of the Center. At 9:43 AM, American Airline "Flight 77" crashed into the Pentagon in the nation's capital. At 10:05 AM, the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapsed, followed by the North Tower at 10:28 AM.


September 11, 1932 -
MGM proved that the in fact ahd more stars than there were in heaven with the release of the Grand Hotel on this date.



The ensemble cast of the film never actually all appeared together in any of the scenes of the movie. I did not know this but the original 1932 trailer is apparently lost. It would have most likely looked similar in design to the film's opening credit sequence.


(With one kid starting Middle School and the other starting 4th Grade, we're still trying to work out all the changing that are going on in the home office here)
An Abbreviated Today in History:
September 11, 1936-
Franklin D. Roosevelt dedicates Boulder Dam (now Hoover Dam) by pressing a key in Washington to signal the startup of the dam's first hydroelectric generator in Nevada.

Hoover Dam is 726 feet tall and 660 feet thick at its base. Enough rock is excavated in its construction to build the Great Wall of China. Contrary to urban myths, no workers are buried in the dam's concrete.


September 11, 1967 -
The Carol Burnett Show premiered on CBS on this date.



After Jim Nabors appeared on the premiere episode, Carol Burnett would have him as the guest for each seasons first show because she considered him her "good luck charm". Carol Burnett and Vicki Lawrence were the only series regulars to stay with the program throughout its entire run.


September 11, 1987-
CBS went black for six minutes after anchorman Dan Rather walked off the set of "The CBS Evening News" on this date.

Because the tournament ended abruptly, CBS featured a blank screen for six minutes while producers frantically searched for the missing Rather.



And so it goes.

Keep Me In Your Heart

Break out the hooch kids, we're here to celebrate Warren Zevon on the 8th anniversary of his death -



























... I heard the General whisper to his aide-de-camp
"Be watchful for Mohammed's lamp" ...

Solidarity forever!

"Labor Day differs in every essential way from the other holidays of the year in any country," explained Samuel Gompers, founder of the American Federation of Labor. According to the U.S. Department of Labor, Mr. Gompers elaborated further: "All other holidays are in a more or less degree connected with conflicts and battles of man's prowess over man, of strife and discord for greed and power, of glories achieved by one nation over another. Labor Day. . . is devoted to no man, living or dead, to no sect, race, or nation."



And yet, despite Mr. Gompers's assertions, Labor Day is not a Seinfeldian holiday about nothing. It is, according to Department of Labor, "dedicated to the social and economic achievements of American workers. It constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country."

Workers being whom, exactly?



Whenever someone talks about Labor with an audible capital L, I picture a bunch of sweaty, grease-stained steelworkers, or guys in blue overalls and goggles with soldering irons. Their contribution is the oft-cited "sweat of their brows." Union regulations being what they are, though, they seem to be pretty well compensated for that sweat.

The term "Workers" has to include more than steelworkers and welders—otherwise we could just call it "Steelworkers and Welders Day." After all, a worker is just "one who works." I'm a worker (yes sporadically I consider myself a worker). Almost everyone I know is or was a worker.

The difference seems to be unions. If you belong to a union, you're a Worker or a Laborer (I'm not sure if they have different unions). If you don't belong to a union, you're a lousy lazy-ass—an exploiting bourgeois bastard.

Think what this means: Glenn Beck, Kim Kardashian, Snooki and the Situation are Workers. Your friends who work awful hours at lousy jobs in wretched offices — they're bourgeois scum.

But let's take a step back and see how we got a Labor Day holiday.

Grover Cleveland was a very unpopular man back in 1896. He was one of the fattest Presidents in US history. No one really likes a fat man - weighing over 300lbs, his nieces and nephews called him Uncle Jumbo to his face; only William Howard Taft was fatter, weighing in at a ginormous 335lbs, but I digress.

Two years earlier, Cleveland had broken up the Pullman Car strike using United States Marshals and some 2,000 United States Army troops, on the premise that the strike interfered with the delivery of U.S. Mail. During the course of the strike, 13 strikers were killed and 57 were wounded. It didn't win him any friends with the fledgling labor movement in America.



In order to throw a bone to Labor, Cleveland supported a holiday honoring workers on the first Monday in September, hoping it would help Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections. May 1st was initially proposed but was then rejected because government leaders believed that commemorating Labor Day on May 1 could become an opportunity to commemorate the Chicago Haymarket riots which had occurred in early May of 1886.



Cleveland was proven wrong and the Democratic party suffered their worse defeat ever.

So remember the cynical origins of the holiday while you are BBQ'ing this afternoon.