Welcome to Worldwide Weird Holidays, where you’ll find a new reason to celebrate every day of the year.
September 1 is Chicken Boy Day
/1 Comment/in SeptemberToday is Chicken Boy Day, celebrating the birthday of the fiberglass legend on September 1, 1969, or thereabouts. Official birth records are unavailable. Twenty-two feet tall, referred to by many as the Statue of Liberty of Los Angeles, California, Chicken Boy stood atop his namesake restaurant on Broadway between Fourth & Fifth Streets for fourteen […]
Wisconsin State Cow Chip Throw
/0 Comments/in SeptemberOn the Friday and Saturday before Labor Day, a festival known as the Wisconsin State Cow Chip Throw takes place in Sauk City/Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin. It’s estimated that 40,000 people attend each year. The current record for a throw is 248 feet. Perhaps a little background is in order. The pioneers who settled the Plains […]
La Tomatina
/0 Comments/in AugustToday is La Tomatina, a legendary festival held on the last Wednesday of August in the Spanish town of Buñol. Thousands come from around the world to participate in what is billed as the World’s Biggest Food Fight. The tradition is only 72 years old, relatively new in European terms, but no one can seem […]
August 30 is Hellespont Swim Day
/0 Comments/in AugustToday is Hellespont Swim Day, when participants will follow the path swum in 1810 by Lord Byron, an English poet and a leader in the Romantic movement. Byron chose the course in honor of the Greek myth of lovers Leander and Hero. Hero, a priestess of Aphrodite, lived in a tower in Sestos (the present-day […]
August 29 is National Chop Suey Day
/2 Comments/in AugustToday is National Chop Suey Day. It honors the popular Chinese-American dish of uncertain provenance. Legends abound regarding the origin of chop suey. Some say it was invented in the 1860s by a Chinese cook in San Franciso who, fearing he would be beaten by a rowdy bunch of miners demanding food after hours, served them a […]
August 28 is National Bow Tie Day
/1 Comment/in AugustToday is National Bow Tie Day, inaugurated on August 28, 2012, to celebrate the quirky neck accessory. Croatian mercenaries of the 17th century tied scarves around their necks to hold their shirt tops together. French soldiers brought the style home after the end of the Thirty Years’ War. They called it the cravat, derived from […]
August 27 is National Petroleum Day
/0 Comments/in AugustToday is National Petroleum Day, also known as Oil and Gas Industry Appreciation Day. Crude oil was first pumped from the ground in China’s Sichuan Province 2,500 years ago. Its discovery in the U.S. is credited to Edwin L. Drake who, on August 27, 1859, struck oil 70 feet below the surface of Titusville, PA. The […]
August 26 is Women’s Equality Day
/0 Comments/in AugustToday is Women’s Equality Day, created in 1972 to commemorate the date in 1920 when, after decades of effort by activists across the country, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, granting women the right to vote. Fifty years later, on August 26, 1970, feminist Betty Friedan led a nationwide protest called the Women’s Strike […]
August 24 is Pluto Demoted Day
/0 Comments/in AugustToday is Pluto Demoted Day. On August 24, 2006, at a meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, 424 members of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to enact new rules governing the classification of planets. The IAU narrowed the definition of a planet after the discovery of several worlds at the edge of our solar system. Pluto […]
August 18 is Mail Order Catalog Day
/0 Comments/in AugustToday is Mail Order Catalog Day. On August 18, 1872, Aaron Montgomery Ward issued the first mail order catalog of Montgomery Ward & Company of Chicago, Illinois. It was a one-sheet list of 163 items. Several years earlier, while working as a traveling salesman, Ward learned that customers in rural areas lacked access to quality […]