Happy Hanukkah! The eight-day Jewish holiday also known as the “Festival of Lights,” which honors the redidication of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem in the 2nd century CE, begins today. (If you’re unfamiliar with the details of the origin of this holiday—that’s what jewfaq.org is for.)
To commemorate the holiday this year, the Jewish Museum in New York City has a display entitled “An Artist Remembers: Hanukkah Lamps Selected by Maurice Sendak.”
Please meet Mrs. Florence Green (this article is from February):
The revels were not quite as wild as on Armistice Day. Still, there was plenty to celebrate yesterday when the world’s last surviving female veteran of the First World War celebrated her 110th birthday.
Florence Green, from King’s Lynn, Norfolk, was 17 years old when she joined the Women’s Royal Air Force, in the late summer of 1918.
She looks good! 110? Wow!
Imagine telling the good Florence when she was still a young woman in the 1920s, “Hey Flo, you’re going to have your own Wikipedia page some day!” She’d be like, “Umwut? LOL.”
Although the Bathroom Reader is a U.S. production, we have had for many, many years an unexplainably huge amount of fans in Canada. All we can ever think of to say about that is…this.
From Uncle John and the entire worldwide staff of the Bathroom Readers Institute, a very special Christmas – or other December holiday of your choosing – to all of our readers, browsers, fans, fanatics, critics, and quoters everywhere. May the holiday season be filled with the best and warmest possible experiences for each and every one of you.
Here’s a BRI salute to all our veterans out there, those gone and those still with us. Thank you, from all of us.
And here’s an appropriate excerpt from Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Salutes the Armed Forces, called, “Old Soldiers.” (Click on images to enlarge; click a second time to sharpen image.)
Holy Cow, we almost missed it. (Thanks, Ginger.)
“2001: Two weeks after the death of Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, fans get together and celebrate May 25 as “Towel Day” in his memory. The tradition continues each year since.”
Why towels, for the three non-Hitchhiker fans out there? Take it away, TowelDay.org:
From the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
A towel is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value. You can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble-sanded beaches of Santraginus V, inhaling the heady sea vapors; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a miniraft down the slow heavy River Moth; wet it for use in hand-to-hand-combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (such a mind-boggingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can’t see it, it can’t see you); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.
Hap
py Earth Day, Earthlings! Here’s a cool little story for the occasion, from Uncle John’s Certified Organic Bathroom Reader (page 21), on the creation of that nifty little symbol used the world around that let’s you know if a product is recyclable and/or made from recycled materials. Little known fact: It’s creation was timed to coincide with the very first Earth Day.
Or: Happy St. Patrick’s Day!, as an old superstition says for the very best cabbages you should get out to the garden and plant them today. After that you can have some corned beef and cabbage and a good fat glass of Guinness—you deserve it.
A few more St. Patrick’s Day tidbits:
