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Amelia Earhart Day

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Amelia Earhart Day

image – history.com [since scrubbed from site]

Today is Amelia Earhart Day, celebrating the aviation pioneer’s birth on July 24, 1897.  In 1932, she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, for which she received the U.S. Distinguished Flying Cross. A member of the National Woman’s Party and an early proponent of the Equal Rights Amendment, Earhart’s self-confidence and spirit of adventure made her an inspiration to young women.

Earhart vanished without a trace on July 2, 1937, during her attempt to circumnavigate the globe. Despite the likelihood that the plane was never found because it crashed into the Pacific Ocean and sank, theories about her disappearance persist to this day, running the gamut from midair abduction by aliens to a secret move to New Jersey to live under an assumed name.

One popular hypothesis claims the Japanese captured Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, torturing and executing them or holding them in secret for the rest of their lives. Some claim Earhart was a spy for the U.S. Others say she was one of many English-speaking women forced to make radio broadcasts as Tokyo Rose, although propagandists wishing to demoralize American servicemen surely would have seen the benefit in using her real name.

On July 9, 2017, the History Channel aired “Amelia Earhart: The Lost Evidence,” featuring a photograph that showed two Caucasian people on a dock at Jaluit Atoll, with a vessel carrying something that resembled plane wreckage in the background.

A military history blogger scouring archival images soon found the photo had been taken in 1935, two years before the crash. This revelation called into question the veracity of the entire documentary. The cable channel has since canceled reruns and deleted streaming video of its program. It also released this statement:

“HISTORY has a team of investigators exploring the latest developments about Amelia Earhart and we will be transparent in our findings. Ultimately, historical accuracy is most important to us and our viewers.”

As of July 2025, I have been unable to find any information regarding the conclusion of the investigation. Please let me know if you’ve seen any so I can update this post.

No matter the truth of her death, we should all celebrate the life and accomplishments of this extraordinary woman.

Happy Amelia Earhart Day!

Invite an Alien to Live with You Day

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Today is Invite an Alien to Live with You Day. Relax! We aren’t talking about the aliens that a certain reality star turned president has said are coming to murder us and steal our jobs — although, once we’re dead, they’d technically just be taking advantage of sudden employment opportunities.

invite an alien to live with you day

When “Ayy” met “Nanu nanu”

This type of illegal alien comes from the planet Ork. Robin Williams was born on July 21, 1951; he was introduced to us as Mork on February 28, 1978, when his spaceship crashed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and he wandered onto the set of Happy Days.

On September 20, 1977, the show aired an episode that would later inspire the term “jump the shark,” which connotes the moment when the quality of a particular program begins to decline. In it, Fonzie dons water skis — still wearing his signature leather jacket, of course — and proves his courage by jumping over a caged shark.

When series creator Garry Marshall announced, less than five months later, that his eight-year-old son had suggested they put a spaceman on the show, everyone involved thought it was a horrible idea. Actors agreed: Dom DeLuise and Roger Rees backed out of playing Mork. Two days before the shoot, a staffer tracked down a comic she’d seen doing an alien bit and brought him in.

As writer Brian Levant told E!,  “It is 3:30, we have a run-through of this episode, which is considered to be the biggest piece of s–t in the history of the show, and it was brilliant. The run-through lasted an hour and fifteen minutes of a 22-minute show. And it was Robin Williams’ literal birth as an entertainer.”

Marshall’s spinoff, Mork & Mindy, premiered on September 14, 1978, and ran for four seasons, averaging 55 million to 60 million viewers per week. Viewers were taken in by Williams’ frenetic, madcap style and impish charm. He was a walking verb orbited by exclamation points.

After he committed suicide on August 11, 2014, it was revealed that he’d been suffering from Lewy body dementia, a progressive brain disease that can cause visual hallucinations, memory loss, decreased mental focus, rigid body movements, sleep disorders, anxiety, and depression. Today would have been his 74th birthday.

Perhaps the best way to celebrate today is to acknowledge our sadness and then remind ourselves of the gifts he gave us by watching Mork and Mindy, his comedy specials, or a marathon of our favorites from his movie career. He once said, “The truth is, if anything, I’m probably addicted to laughter.” We certainly got hooked on him.

There are hundreds of quotes by Robin Williams online. Many are scripted lines, which generally shouldn’t count, although Robin often embellished his dialogue. So we’ll say up front that he spoke the following words as Mork from Ork. We don’t know if he ad-libbed any of it, as he was famous for doing, but it sums up what we hope he knew:

“I don’t know how much value I have in this universe, but I do know that I’ve made a few people happier than they would have been without me, and as long as I know that, I’m as rich as I ever need to be.”

We miss you, Robin.

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?

July 11 is Cheer Up the Lonely Day

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cheer up the lonely day

So close. Find the correct quote below, courtesy of quoteinvestigator.com.

Today is Cheer Up the Lonely Day, created by Francis Pesek of Detroit, Michigan. His daughter L.J. Pesek described him as “a quiet, kind, wonderful man who had a heart of gold.”

“He got the idea as a way of promoting kindness toward others who were lonely or forgotten as shut-ins or in nursing homes with no relatives or friends to look in on them.” She said he chose July 11 because it was his birthday.

What is the definition of the word lonely?
ˈlōnlē/ adjective
  1. sad because one has no friends or company.
    “lonely old people whose families do not care for them”
    • without companions; solitary.
      “passing long lonely hours looking onto the street”
    • (of a place) unfrequented and remote.
      “a lonely stretch of country lane”

The elderly can become isolated as their circles of friends grow smaller due to the illness and death of their contemporaries. They may be relocated to facilities at the fringes of their communities. Loss of physical mobility makes it a struggle to visit others; losing autonomy after lives spent caring for themselves and others takes a psychological toll that can result in depression.

Mark Twain once wrote, “The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up.” There’s no denying that time spent face-to-face with loved ones, telling them how much they mean to us, does our hearts good. We also know what it’s like to be lonely. It can happen in the middle of a crowd. It only takes a moment to be kind to a stranger today.

Have a happy Cheer Up the Lonely Day and remember how good it feels. That way, we can keep it going tomorrow and every day after that.