fun, strange holidays grouped by month

Curiosity Day

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Today is Curiosity Day. On August 5, 2012, NASA’s Mars Rover Curiosity landed on the red planet after a procedure so complicated its engineers dubbed it Seven Minutes of Terror.

On November 26, 2011, an unmanned spacecraft carrying the 1,982-pound SUV-sized rover launched from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. After traveling 354 million miles, it entered Mars’ thin atmosphere, its heat shield reaching 1,600 degrees as the craft slowed from 13,000 to 1,000 mph. A supersonic parachute was deployed to decrease the speed further, to 200 mph.

The shield was jettisoned to allow the ship’s radar to “see” the surface. Rockets fired to slow the rate of descent to several feet per second. They couldn’t get too close to the surface because of the dust cloud they would create, potentially damaging Curiosity’s sensitive equipment.

To solve this problem, engineers designed a carrier they called a “sky crane,” which used the rockets to hover at a safe height while gently lowering the rover the rest of the way via cable. (Another nickname: “rover on a rope.”) Once it was deposited on the ground,  the carrier severed the tether and veered away, crashing into the surface several hundred yards away.

The process from atmospheric entry to touchdown took seven minutes. There was a 13.8-minute delay receiving signals at Mission Control; there could be no intervention from Earth, so there was no margin for error. The outcome had already occurred. Everyone involved with the $2.5 billion project waited helplessly until the signal reached them: Curiosity had made it.

The rover is equipped with a small nuclear power plant. Since landing, its instruments have discovered carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, and sulfur in rock, methane in the atmosphere, and the remains of an ancient streambed. All are indicators that life may have existed there in the past.

It has also sent back some great selfies like this one, combining multiple images taken with the Mars Hand Lens Imager (MAHLI) camera at the end of its robotic arm. ( See how here.)

curiosity day

Another of the rover’s instruments is the Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM), which utilizes vibrating plates to move soil samples through the chemistry module. On August 5, 2012, engineers directed them to produce musical notes and “sing” Happy Birthday to Curiosity.

We can’t help but be inspired by people with the vision, ingenuity, and gumption to take on the challenge of the seemingly impossible and not give up until they achieve it. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses the phrase “Dare Mighty Things” at the end of its Seven Minutes video. It’s taken from a speech by President Theodore Roosevelt:

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

Curiosity was built to last one Martian year, 687 Earth days. As of August 5, 2025, it has been running for 4749 Earth days. We salute everyone who worked on this project. Curiosity is out there on Mars, right now, doing its thing. If we work together, is there anything humanity can’t do?

Happy Curiosity Day!

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US Coast Guard Day

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Today is U.S. Coast Guard Day.

After the Continental Navy disbanded in 1785, no provision existed in the U.S. Constitution for the establishment of a permanent maritime force.

In 1790, Alexander Hamilton, the country’s first Secretary of the Treasury, founded the service that would become the Coast Guard.

Established to enforce tariff laws and manned by crews of civilians, the fleet became known as the system of cutters, named for the type of vessel used: armed ships, usually single-masted, that measured at least 65 feet in length.

From 1798 through 1800, the U.S. and France fought an undeclared naval war known as the “Quasi-War,” precipitated in part by the U.S. reneging on the repayment of loans received from France during the American Revolutionary War.

Congress passed legislation authorizing President John Adams to reestablish the U.S. Navy and conscript revenue cutters from the Treasury Department during the conflict.

In September of 1800, Adams and Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of France, signed a treaty ending hostilities between the two countries.

The Revenue Cutter Service and the United States Life-Saving Service, created in 1848 to save shipwrecked sailors, merged in 1915 to become the U.S. Coast Guard.

Happy U.S. Coast Guard Day!

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National Watermelon Day

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2025 Watermelon Queen Elanie Mason

Today is National Watermelon Day. It closely follows July’s Watermelon Month, established in 2008 by a unanimous U.S. Congressional Joint Resolution.

Today’s holiday is sponsored by the National Watermelon Promotion Board (NWPB), an organization whose strategic mission is to increase consumer demand in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico while working to develop trade with England and Japan.

NWPB raises funds by charging nine cents per hundredweight of watermelons intended for human consumption. The fee is split between producers and handlers and paid in total by importers.

Its Board of Directors decides how best to spend those fees to secure high-value print, television, and radio publicity. It is dedicated to expanding watermelon’s summertime appeal to make it an everyday, year-round choice for consumers.

Another group supporting today’s holiday is the National Watermelon Association (NWA), which welcomes all who work in the industry to join one of nine regional chapters. Its website has information on everything from creating attractive in-store displays to factoring climate change into crop planning.

Since 1964, NWA has crowned a National Watermelon Queen. The 2025 Queen is Elanie Mason. Here’s a description of her duties.

She embarks on a nationwide tour throughout her reign, blending media expertise with industry knowledge to champion watermelon consumption. From engaging supermarket shoppers to influencing policymakers, she tirelessly advocates for the prosperity of the watermelon industry.

This holiday has made us appreciate watermelon as more than just something we buy when we’re feeling nostalgic. We lug it home, resent it for taking up half the fridge, never cut into it because it seems like too much work, and finally throw it out, vowing never to buy one again. But the siren song of the watermelon is strong. In fact, there’s one in my fridge right now. Maybe this time will be different!

Happy National Watermelon Day!

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National Ice Cream Sandwich Day

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national ice cream sandwich day

Jersey Shore circa 1905

Today is National Ice Cream Sandwich Day.

According to Geraldine Quinzio, author of Sugar and Snow: A History of Ice Cream Making, the ice cream sandwich was invented in 1899 by a pushcart peddler in New York City. It consisted of vanilla ice cream pressed between two thin graham crackers.

In July of 1900, The New York Tribune reported that the vendor was so busy making the sandwiches that he didn’t have time to make change and required all customers to pay exactly one penny.

The photograph you see here was taken at the New Jersey shore in 1905  and shows a popular pushcart on the beach. Supposedly, the modern iteration of the sandwich using rectangular chocolate cookies was created in 1945 by Jerry Newberg, who sold them at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh, PA.

Here are a few of the “fun facts” quoted everywhere from blogs to news outlets today:

  • It’s estimated that 48 ice cream sandwiches are consumed per second in the United States.
  • If all the ice cream sandwiches made during the year were placed end to end, they would circle the globe 3 1/2 times.
  • Almost 50 percent of all ice cream sandwiches are consumed by residents of states on the Eastern seaboard.

We don’t know this trivia’s original source, but we’ve tracked it back to a newspaper article dated December 21, 1995. We hope someone will freshen up those stale statistics. Inquiring minds want to know how many times ice cream sandwiches would wrap around the planet now.

Other versions of the ice cream sandwich have been created all over the world, many predating the American kind. We’ll leave that debate to the food historians.

Happy National Ice Cream Sandwich Day!

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