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Sylvia Plath Day

October 27, 2025/0 Comments/in October

Is it possible to wish someone a Happy Sylvia Plath Day? How can anyone celebrate the birthday of a woman who killed herself? Is this a joke? Is it sponsored by some brand of oven cleaner? We found evidence that this holiday exists:

From the Sylvia Plath Forum, created in 1998 by Elaine Connell and closed after her death in 2007:

To all avowed Sylvia Plath supporters and admirers:

I am with the Sylvia Plath day organizing committee. Let me explain: over 1,000 people signed a petition just recently in the city of Northampton, Ma to have a Sylvia Plath Day. The Mayor, consumed by the irresistible force of Plath petition signers/supporters then declared October 27, 2001 Sylvia Plath Day. As you know, Sylvia Plath attended Smith College in Northampton. We are planning a big celebration of the life and legacy of Sylvia Plath on October 27 of this year. We can use your help!

Michael
Northampton, Ma, USA
Friday, April 27, 2001

Unfortunately, we could find no Northampton public records to confirm the mayor was indeed “consumed by the irresistible force.” But if we still pore over her work and the minutiae of her life over fifty years after her death, does it matter if it’s official or not?

Published under a pseudonym

Of course, we remember Sylvia Plath because she wrote The Bell Jar, a novel that has been required reading for many in high school despite (mostly) unsuccessful attempts to ban it for its “overt rejection of the woman’s role as wife and mother.” And, like it or not, we remember her because she committed suicide. We study her poetry and prose, trying to divine what fueled her despair, what caused her to take her own life. Plath wrote this in her journal a few months before her death:

I feel outcast on a cold star, unable to feel anything but an awful helpless numbness. I look down into the warm, earthy world. Into a nest of lovers’ beds, baby cribs, meal tables, all the solid commerce of life in this earth, and feel apart, enclosed in a wall of glass.

Plath wrote poetry in a confessional style, revealing intimate details about herself. She was driven, publishing her first poem when she was eight. She was the first poet awarded a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. She wrote fifty short stories in addition to her one novel.

In February of 1963, her depression overcame her. For weeks, her doctor had tried to secure a bed for her in a psychiatric hospital. She sealed her children in their room upstairs, then sealed herself in the kitchen, put her head in the oven, and turned on the gas. She was thirty years old.

On Sylvia Plath Day, instead of fetishizing her death or lamenting the loss of all she might have written, we can celebrate her life by learning about her, reading her work, and being happy for what she shared with us in her short yet brilliant life.

It’s a day we should also acknowledge the brutal power of mental illness to damage and destroy lives.

Learn more at:
Neurotic Poets
This Day in History
Sylvia Plath and the Mythology of Women Readers: 2011, Univ. of Massachusetts Press

If you are thinking about suicide, read this first.

National Suicide Prevention Lifeline website and toll-free telephone number: 1 (800) 273-8255

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RIP Visit a Cemetery Day

October 26, 2025/0 Comments/in October

Visit a Cemetery Day is supposed to take place on the last Sunday of October each year, but the unofficial holiday has vanished without a trace.

The inaugural event in 2010 was intended to create an annual ritual of remembrance, according to organizers, mysendoff.com, International Memorialization Supplier Organization (IMSA), Kates-Boylston Publications, and American Cemetery Magazine.

By 2012, the founders were so confident in their new tradition that they announced the next Visit a Cemetery Day a year in advance, yet there is no record of it taking place in 2013 or any year since. Where has it gone?

Perhaps it has been forgotten as the industry adjusts to an evolving marketplace. (Check out this TED Talk on the Infinity Burial Suit that uses embedded mushrooms to digest dead flesh and promote “an individual engagement with the process of decomposition.”)

In 2014, American Cemetery Magazine rebranded itself as American Cemetery and Cremation “to better connect with the expanding readership and better align with the changing dynamics in the death-care profession.”

Access the digital version here. Unfortunately, you can no longer order a print subscription through MortuaryMall.com, but you can still find disaster pouches (a.k.a. body bags), cremation pan cooling racks, and stainless steel body trays with and without drain holes. If Very Berry spray “neutralizes body decomp odors” as advertised, imagine what it could do for your litter box!

Perhaps the most compelling reason to resurrect Visit a Cemetery Day lies in the game introduced on mysendoff‘s Facebook page on October 25, 2012:

“For those of you who are planning to introduce children to “Visit a Cemetery Day” we created a Cemetery Search game that is easy to play. Just click on the image and print your own card(s). It’s a fun way to start finding out some of the history that can be found in your local cemetery.”

Just in case Visit a Cemetery Day ever comes back from the dead, it may be a good idea to start the therapy fund for your kids now. It’s not a terrible thing for children to learn about death — but isn’t that what hamsters are for?

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July 8 is the Soapy Smith Wake

July 8, 2025/0 Comments/in July

Today is the 43rd annual Soapy Smith Wake. Since 1974, descendants of con man Jefferson “Soapy” Smith have held an annual wake for him on the anniversary of his murder in Skagway, Alaska, on July 8, 1898.

Soapy Smith, image at legendsofamerica

Jefferson Smith lived to prove the axiom, “A fool and his money are soon parted.” He gained his nickname due to his prize soap scam, in which he’d set up a display of soaps, make a show of placing bills from one to one hundred dollars around several bars, wrap them to resemble the other bars, then appear to hide them in the stack.

A shill he’d plant in the crowd would pay a dollar, unwrap a seemingly random soap, pull out a bill, and start shouting about his winnings. This convinced others to clamor to buy the other bars. There were no more winners. Smith had used sleight of hand of hand to conceal the fact that he had not put the money-wrapped bars in the pile. Halfway through, he announced the hundred-dollar bill hadn’t yet been found and auctioned off the remainder.

At some point in Smith’s mostly successful twenty-year career, Smith was arrested for running the prize soap racket. The police officer forgot Smith’s first name and wrote “Soapy Smith” in his logbook. The name stuck.

Smith’s luck came to an end on July 8, 1898, after his crew bilked a miner out of a sack of gold in a crooked game of three-card monte. Four men, including vigilante Frank H. Reid, confronted Smith, who refused to return the gold or turn over his associates. In the ensuing gunfight, Smith and Reid exchanged fire. Smith was shot through the heart and died instantly; Reid, shot in the groin, died twelve days later of his injuries.

Soapy Smith, dead, image at legendsofamerica

Soapy Smith was buried several yards outside the Skagway city cemetery. Over the years, his reputation grew to that of a Klondike-style Robin Hood, fleecing the rich to give to the poor. There’s no evidence he did anything but line his own pockets and those of the public servants and businessmen he bribed.

Reid was painted as a villain who murdered Smith. If we assume the two men shot each other—and there are those who question that—then Smith must have shot Reid first, since he couldn’t have fired after being shot through the heart. Unless the gun went off as he was falling, but then we’re getting into grassy knoll territory.

On July 8, 1974, members of Smith’s family and their friends began the tradition of holding a wake at his gravesite, toasting him with several bottles of champagne. When the group felt nature calling, they started another tradition by entering the cemetery proper and relieving themselves on Frank H. Reid’s grave.

A reporter present at the wake dubbed it the “sprinkling of Frank.” The Smiths and many residents found it humorous at the time. The family continued to furnish champagne for years until the wake was finally banned from the cemetery and moved to the Eagles Hall in downtown Skagway.

If you can’t make it to Skagway to celebrate, The Magic Castle in Hollywood, California, has held a Soapy Smith Party every year since 2004. No matter where you are, raise a glass, if you like, and toast the cantankerous, thieving criminal known as Soapy Smith. And if you have to pee, please use a restroom.

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INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY

June 28, 2025/1 Comment/in June

Today is INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY, celebrated on June 28 and October 22 each year. Derek Arnold created the unofficial holiday in October 2000 to draw attention to those who abuse the Caps Lock key and, by extension, everyone who receives their emails, texts, and Internet screeds.

Arnold claimed he had a higher purpose in mind, stating:

International Caps Lock Day is in fact a testament to the small mindedness of certain Western individuals: the majority of the world’s population writes in scripts which have no concept of letter casing. Therefore it is advised to laugh at anyone who invokes this day as an excuse to dismiss local typographical conventions: they are simply making an ass out of themselves.

That’s a lofty goal, but we suspect its popularity has more to do with the joy of hitting the Caps Lock key and capitalizing with impunity.

With the rise of the Internet has come the evolution of netiquette, which dictates that writing in capital letters is considered shouting: boorish, rude, and aggressive. Although many protest this reading, it has become an accepted interpretation of the practice.

Why do we celebrate this twice a year? Arnold added the second iteration to honor Billy Mays, the beloved pitchman who spoke exclusively in capital letters, who died on June 28, 2009.

Baptiste Candellier created Caps Lock Day, described as “a useless Google Chrome extension that displays everything in caps lock when it’s caps lock day.” It’s no longer available in the Chrome Web Store, so you’ll have to go the extra mile and actually click on the Caps Lock key. What a drag!

John Haller, another fan of the infomercial king, created the Billy Mays Caps Lock. When you hit the Caps Lock key, you’ll hear Billy Mays say:

“Hi, Billy Mays here!”
“It’ll make your whites, whiter!”
“Order right now and we’ll double the value!” or
“Here’s how to order!”

Or at least you could have. If we all band together, we can lobby Mr. Haller to update that code. There are people on the internet right now who have never experienced Billy’s buzz-saw vocal stylings. This cannot stand!

When we first observed this holiday on October 22, 2015, we had a few niggling observations about capslockday.com*: the site’s HTML listed the title as “internetonal caps lock day home page” and the page itself featured a photo of Billy Mays captioned, “GOOD NIGHT, SWEAT PRINCE.” Arnold also stated he was on SNAPCHET, which we can only assume is a social media network for country western music fans, and pointed out the caps lock key with the description “AT THE BOTTOM, WHERE IT SAY CASP LOCK.”

While we realize that correcting grammar and spelling is considered annoying by many these days, we can’t help but wonder: Why are there two holidays predicated upon the notion of irritating everyone else, yet there is no International Editors’ Day? THAT ~~AIN’T~~ ISN’T RIGHT.

On November 3, 2015, we noticed that the site had been taken down. With the help of the Wayback Machine, we captured the archived version of the page.* The Internet is forever….