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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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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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National Hot Dog Day

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national hot dog dayToday is National Hot Dog Day, according to the National Hot Dog and Sausage Council (NHDSC), an august body created by the North American Meat Institute, which has declared July to be National Hot Dog Month.

The NHDSC serves as a clearinghouse of information about the preparation and nutritional quality of hot dogs and sausages, funded by contributions from manufacturers and their suppliers.

National Hot Dog Day was established in 1991 to coincide with the annual Capitol Hill Hot Dog Lunch in Washington, DC. As a result, the holiday’s date is dictated by the congressional calendar and falls on the third Wednesday in July.

Here are a few stats:

  • In 2024, 896 million pounds of hot dogs were sold at retail stores. That number represents more than $3 billion in retail sales.
  • Ten percent of annual retail hot dog sales occur during July, which is why it is designated as National Hot Dog Month.
  • Hot dog producers estimate that an average of 38 percent or $1.16 billion of the total number of hot dogs are sold from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
  • The NHDSC predicts that major league ballparks will sell 20 million hot dogs during baseball season this year.
  • According to sales data for 2024, New Yorkers spent more money on hot dogs in retail stores ($111.7 million) than any other market in the country. Residents of Los Angeles came in second, spending $90.6 million on hot dogs.

If you’re curious, NHDSC has a video showing how hot dogs are made. We can’t say whether it will make you more or less hungry for a hot dog. Results may vary.

Have a happy National Hot Dog Day!

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