strange, bizarre and kooky holidays happening in July

National Daiquiri Day

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national daiquiri day

Hemingway statue at El Floridita

Today is National Daiquiri Day. Although conflicting legends abound, the most likely origin story credits an American engineer named Jennings Cox with inventing the drink.

In 1898, Cox supervised an iron mining operation in a town off the coast of Cuba called Daiquiri. Every night, he and his crew gathered at a local bar after work.

One evening, when the bar ran out of gin, Cox blended Bacardi with sugar and lime and named it after the Daiquiri mines.  It quickly became a staple in Havana.

In 1909, the U.S.S. Minnesota docked in the area. Captain Charles Harlow brought junior medical officer Lucius Johnson with him on a tour of the 10-year-old Spanish-American battlegrounds. They met Cox at Daiquiri and enjoyed his creation.

Johnson brought the recipe to the Army and Navy Club in Washington, D.C., where it became a favorite — except during Prohibition, of course. By the 1940s, the daiquiri had become a fixture in bars across the country.

National Daiquiri Day falls just two days before the birthday of Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961). The author immortalized the cocktail in his novel, Islands in the Stream: “This frozen daiquiri, so well beaten as it is, looks like the sea where the wave falls away from the bow of a ship when she is doing thirty knots.”

He’s also quoted as saying, “Don’t bother with churches, government buildings or city squares, if you want to know about a culture, spend a night in its bars.”

He certainly followed his own advice. El Floridita, a bar Hemingway frequented in Havana, Cuba, has immortalized him with a life size statue. The bartender there, Constantino Ribalaigua, created a doubly strong, sour version of the cocktail for the writer, who was diabetic and apparently worried more about the toxic effects of sugar than alcohol.

The following is based on that recipe, according to A. E. Hotchner, who documented his stay at the author’s home in Cuba in his book entitled Papa Hemingway.

Papa Doble
Ingredients:
3 oz Bacardí Carta Blanca
Juice of 2 limes
½ oz grapefruit juice
6 drops of Maraschino liqueur

Preparation:
Blend all ingredients with crushed ice and serve in an ice-cold coupe glass.

Whether you like your daiquiris sweet, strong, or virginal, raise a glass and have a happy National Daiquiri Day–or evening, if you prefer. Cheers!

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Insurance Nerd Day

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Insurance Nerd Day

July 18th is Insurance Nerd Day, created in 2016 to celebrate everyone employed in the insurance industry. It originated as a social media campaign to dispel the myth that insurance is a “boring” career path and to attract young people entering the workforce. Since then, the movement has been gaining momentum and, thanks to the efforts of a dedicated group of self-described insurance nerds, has become an annual holiday.

Insurance Nerd Day Worldwide Weird HolidaysWhat is an Insurance Nerd?

Insurance Nerd
\in-ˈshər-ən(t)s  \ˈnərd\
noun: A term of endearment for a person who is enthusiastic and passionate about working in insurance. Hobbies may include talking about insurance in his or her free time, convincing others to join the insurance industry, reading insurance publications for fun, collecting insurance company memorabilia and posting about insurance on social media to their non-insurance friends.

 

History of Insurance Nerd Day

Insurance Nerd Day Worldwide Weird HolidaysAccording to a recent study conducted by McKinsey and Co., 25 percent of insurance professionals will reach retirement age by 2018. Another study by Griffith Insurance Education Foundation found that only 5 percent of college students indicated they were “very interested” in pursuing a career in the insurance industry. As a result, the field is facing a critical talent gap.

To call attention to this issue, Pioneer State Mutual Insurance Company declared July 18, 2016, Insurance Nerd Day and took to social media to celebrate its employees and encourage other insurance professionals to help break the stereotype that the industry is boring.

 

How to Observe Insurance Nerd Day

Dress up like an Insurance Nerd to show your pride and honor those who work in the insurance industry. Check out more photos on Pioneer’s Facebook page. Use #InsuranceNerdDay to join the fun on X, snap and share pics on Instagram, and spread the word on Bluesky.

Have a happy and healthy Insurance Nerd Day and always remember to be as nerdy as you want to be, every day of the year!

 

 

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World Listening Day

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world listening day

Nice work, if you can get it.

Today is World Listening Day. It honors the birth on July 18, 1933, of Raymond Murray Schafer, the Canadian composer, teacher, and environmentalist who invented the study of acoustic ecology at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University in the late 1960s.

Acoustic ecology utilizes field recordings to create and preserve the planet’s disappearing soundscapes while combating schizophonia, a term Schafer coined to describe a unique medical condition. “We have split the sound from the maker of the sound,” Schafer explained.

“Sounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape.” We have a strong sensory response to this: it smells like feces and sounds like tenure.

The first World Soundscape Project was born out of Schafer’s frustration with the noise pollution he felt was ruining the beauty of Vancouver.  It has evolved into a serious course of study. This business of listening seems to rely on a whole lot of talking.

The World Listening Project (WLP) was established in 2008 as a not-for-profit, tax-exempt organization dedicated to understanding societies, cultures, and environments through listening and preserving audio recordings. Finally, someone has found a way to achieve tax-exempt status for recording a garage band or just the sound a garage makes.

WLP and the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology (MSE), under the auspices of the American Society for Acoustic Ecology (ASAE), created World Listening Day in 2010. Why? Per its site:

Cities’ sonic identities are continually fluctuating as residential and commercial infrastructures develop. The resultant social dynamics of industrialization and gentrification sponsor variegated relationships between people and the public and private places they occupy.

“…sponsor variegated relationships”? It looks like a thesaurus bled out all over an SAT. We get it: change sucks. Why can’t everything be like yesterday? If only we had a way to preserve it forever, like on DVD, but without the pesky visuals.

The theme for World Listening Day 2025 is “Echoes of Balance: Listening to Restore Harmony.”  Per the organizers:

This theme encourages people to focus on how listening can help restore inner peace, rebuild broken connections, and revive ecological balance.

While we agree that listening is an essential and underappreciated art, we don’t understand the need to starve other senses, such as sight, to do it; we aren’t sure we can engage deeply with an unheard language. But maybe we weren’t listening closely enough. Would you mind repeating it?

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Wrong Way Corrigan Day

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wrong way corrigan dayToday is Wrong Way Corrigan Day. On July 17, 1938, Douglas Corrigan (January 22, 1907 – December 9, 1995), a pilot and aircraft mechanic who had recently flown from California to New York, took off from Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, ostensibly to make the transcontinental trip back to Long Beach. Things didn’t go according to plan.

Five years earlier, Corrigan had purchased a used 1929 Curtiss Robin OX-5 monoplane with the intention of making a transatlantic flight just as aviator Charles Lindbergh had. He built a new engine with 165 horsepower instead of the Robin’s original 90 and fitted it with extra fuel tanks.

In 1935, he applied for permission to make a nonstop flight from New York to Ireland. The Bureau of Air Commerce rejected his request, stating that his plane was unfit for the transatlantic trip, although it met the requirements necessary to make cross-country voyages.

Corrigan made further modifications and repeatedly applied for full certification to no avail. In 1937, he was informed that his numerous alterations had rendered the plane too unstable for safe flight, and its license would not be renewed.

On July 9, 1938, Corrigan left Long Beach bound for Brooklyn, having secured an experimental license, permission for a transcontinental flight, and conditional consent for a return trip. Cruising at 85 miles per hour for maximum fuel efficiency, he made the trip in 27 hours. Near the end of the flight, a gasoline leak developed in one of the tanks, filling the cockpit with fumes.

After landing at Floyd Bennett Field, where all available resources were being used to assist Howard Hughes in his preparations for takeoff on a world tour, Corrigan decided that repairing the tank would take too long, making him unable to meet his scheduled return flight on July 17, 1938. At 5:15 that morning, with 320 gallons of gasoline and 16 gallons of oil, Corrigan took off and headed east. He kept going.

Corrigan later claimed he’d been unaware that he was navigating by the wrong end of the compass needle until 26 hours later. If he’d noticed the cockpit flooding with gasoline after ten hours, as he recounted in his autobiography, he likely would have tried to land the plane: if, that is, he believed there was land below.

Instead, he used a screwdriver to punch a hole through the floor opposite the exhaust pipe so the draining gasoline would be less likely to cause an explosion. Then he reported increasing the engine speed by more than 20 percent to decrease his flight time.

He landed at Baldonnel Aerodrome in Dublin, Ireland, after a 28-hour, 13-minute flight. His stunt (or mistake) caught the public’s attention. As a result of his newfound fame, officials were obliged to let Corrigan off the hook. His pilot’s license was suspended for only two weeks. When he and his plane returned via steamship to New York, the city greeted him with a ticker-tape parade.

The man who became known as “Wrong Way” Corrigan never admitted he’d done it on purpose.

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