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National Day of the Horse

December 13, 2016/1 Comment/in December

Today is the National Day of the Horse. On November 18, 2004, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed S.R. 452, described as:

A resolution designating December 13, 2004, as “National Day of the Horse” and encouraging the people of the United States to be mindful of the contribution of horses to the economy, history, and character of the United States.

The resolution goes on to state that “the horse is a living link to the history of the United States;” “without horses, the economy, history, and character of the United States would be profoundly different;” and “horses are a vital part of the collective experience of the United States and deserve protection and compassion.”

What the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives have failed to do is pass a permanent federal ban on the slaughter of horses for human consumption. The American Horse Slaughter Prevention Act (AHSPA) was passed by the House on September 7, 2006. It had to be approved by the Senate as well in order to become law. But the bill was sent to a Senate committee, where it languished and eventually died because it was never approved for a full vote.

It was reintroduced on January 7, 2007, and sent to the House Agriculture Committee, which failed to approve it for a vote, thus killing the same bill it had passed four months before. On Jan 17, 2007, the Senate put forth its own version; it, too, failed to reach a vote, officially dying on January 3, 2009, when the 110th Congressional session ended. A bipartisan effort to revive the AHSPA in 2011 went nowhere.

While numerous state legislatures have enacted laws outlawing the practice, the federal government has sidestepped the issue, choosing instead to add language to its budget proposals that will indirectly impact businesses that slaughter horses.

A line item that denies payment of federal inspectors for time spent evaluating horses deprives an operation the opportunity to receive a USDA seal of approval. Without it, the meat can’t be sold for human consumption. (In 2006, the USDA countered by issuing CFR 352.19, a regulation that would allow companies to circumvent the funding ban by paying for their own inspections.)

In 2014, President Obama signed a budget that included the prohibition against funding for horse inspections. Although many hailed it as a momentous step, others saw it as just one more in a series of temporary fixes that must be requested and granted anew with each successive budget proposal. It did (and does) nothing to prevent U.S. horses from being shipped to Mexico or Canada for slaughter, their meat then exported worldwide.

The protection of this majestic animal isn’t all that’s at stake. Horses are dosed with compounds that accumulate in their tissues and can be toxic to humans. Phenylbutazone, a pain medication routinely given to horses, is known to be carcinogenic to people, especially children; trace amounts can cause potentially lethal aplastic anemia.

Since horses aren’t raised for human consumption, there are no regulations in place to protect anyone who might one day consume their meat. That is more of a risk than most of us think. Horse meat has been discovered in, among other things, school lunches and hospital meals. It’s possible that we’ve unwittingly eaten some already.

There is a permanent solution called the Safeguard American Food Exports Act (SAFE), its stated goal:

Amends the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act to deem equine (horses and other members of the equidae family) parts to be an unsafe food additive or animal drug.

Prohibits the knowing sale or transport of equines or equine parts in interstate or foreign commerce for purposes of human consumption.

It was introduced in the Senate on March 12, 2013. What happened?

Read twice and referred to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.

Clearly, there is more work to be done. Each year, approximately 150,000 horses—including pregnant mares and foals—are packed into trucks and taken to Mexico and Canada. Conditions are deplorable as the only goal is to keep the horses barely alive until they are slaughtered and their meat packaged for sale to humans.

It’s not too late to help. The SAFE Act (S. 1214/H.R. 1942) was revived in 2015 and is still knocking around in committee. Find your Congresspeople on govtrack.us and tell them to keep it alive. Someone should take a stand against this big, cruel business. It might as well be us.

Happy National Day of the Horse!

December 12 is Poinsettia Day

December 12, 2016/0 Comments/in December

Today is Poinsettia Day, which marks the death of Joel Roberts Poinsett on December 12, 1851. Poinsett was appointed in 1825 by President John Quincy Adams as Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Mexico. (The title “Ambassador” wasn’t created until 1896.)

While there, Poinsett, an amateur botanist, introduced the American elm to Mexico. In 1829, he returned to his home in South Carolina with cuttings of a shrub with red flowers and cultivated it in his greenhouse.

The plant has a rich history in Mexico. The Aztecs called it Cuitlaxochitl (from cuitlatl, for residue, and xochitl, for flower) and used the leaves to dye fabrics and the sap to control fevers. Today it’s known in Mexico and Guatemala as La Flor de la Nochebuena (Flower of the Holy Night) and is displayed during celebrations of the Dia de la Virgen de Guadalupe, which also happens to take place on December 12.

We’re not sure who started the rumor that poinsettias are poisonous, but we’ve found many studies refuting it, including this one, published in the American Journal of Emergency Medicine:

To determine if there was any validity to the toxicity claims, 849,575 plant exposures reported to the American Association of Poison Control Centers were electronically analyzed. Poinsettia exposures accounted for 22,793 cases and formed the subset that was analyzed to critically evaluate the morbidity and mortality associated with poinsettia exposures. There were no fatalities among all poinsettia exposures and 98.9% were accidental in nature, with 93.3% involving children. The majority of exposed patients (96.1%) were not treated in a health care facility and 92.4% did not develop any toxicity related to their exposure to the poinsettia.

Experts say a fifty-pound child would have to eat at least five hundred leaves just to get a bellyache. Since they taste terrible and a plant has a fraction of that number of leaves, it’s unlikely anyone is going to make a meal of them.

Although poinsettia leaves won’t kill pets, either, its emetic properties can make them throw up which, let’s face it, is no fun for anyone involved. Just to be on the safe side, keep it away from Fido and Mr. Whiskers. Everyone else can enjoy the sight of this iconic symbol of the holiday season and have a happy (and healthy) Poinsettia Day!

Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting

November 30, 2016/0 Comments/in Holidays by Month, November

The Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree Lighting has become a worldwide symbol of the holiday season. The tree is lit on the Wednesday after Thanksgiving, celebrated with live musical performances at Rockefeller Plaza and broadcast around the globe on television and the internet.

What’s the truth behind the legend? Worldwide Weird Holidays investigates.

Tree Story

Oneonta, New York, lost a longtime resident on December 10, 2016: a 14-ton, 94-foot-tall Norway Spruce we’ll call Bruce. (They’re all named Bruce.) He’d called the town home for nearly a century when the Eichler family contacted Rockefeller Center’s head gardener and chief Christmas tree hunter, Erik Pauzé. He visited, liked what he saw and Bruce’s fate was decided.

“We’ll miss the shade but for the most part we’re happy to gain the space back because it did monopolize the entire yard,” Craig Eichler said.

On Thursday, Bruce was cut down and loaded with the help of two hydraulic cranes onto a custom-made telescoping trailer that can stretch to 100 feet and accommodate a tree up to 125 feet tall, although the width of New York City streets limits the height to 110 feet.

Bruce was then bound like Gulliver and driven 140 miles to New York City on a route carefully plotted by a committee of local and city planners, under the watchful eye of a police escort.

At his final destination, the same cranes were used to fix Bruce into place by skewering his trunk onto a steel spike. A team of thirty giant-tree specialists attached guy wires to his midsection to hold him upright, then erected scaffolding to assist the workers who would later festoon him with 50,000 lights strung on more than five miles of electrical wire. Since 2007, the tree has been “green” (evergreen?), using LED lights and drawing part of its power from a 365-panel solar array installed on the roof.

The Star

Bruce will have a fabulous, if hefty, headpiece. In 2004, the old fiberglass star decorated with gold leaf was replaced by the Swarovski Star, designed by German artist Michael Hammers. It weighs 550 pounds, is 9.5 feet in diameter and sports 25,000 crystals with a million facets. In 2009, Hammers decided to upgrade the star’s lighting system by adding 720 tiny white LEDs and 3,000 feet of wire to the star’s interior, which were then connected to 44 circuit boards.

That’s a lot of look.

History

Although the official Christmas tree tradition began in 1933, the year 30 Rockefeller Plaza opened, the practice began during its Depression-era construction, when workers decorated a twenty-foot-high balsam fir tree with “strings of cranberries, garlands of paper, and even a few tin cans” on Christmas Eve of 1931, according to Daniel Okrent’s Great Fortune: The Epic of Rockefeller Center.

In the above photo, construction workers receive their paychecks next to the Christmas tree they’d set up on the Rockefeller Center site. Pauzé estimates from the number of tree rings that Bruce is approximately 95 years old, so he was likely a sapling in 1931.

Visiting Hours

If you’d like to see Bruce get lit up like a, well, you know, make your way to Rockefeller Plaza between West 48th and 51st Streets and Fifth and Sixth Avenues before 9 pm. Expect a lot of company, many security restrictions and possible rain.

But you won’t be allowed to bring umbrellas, backpacks or large bags, according to the New York City Police Department. The streets surrounding Rockefeller Center will be closed from 3 pm until after the ceremony. Highly armed officers will patrol the area—only as a precaution, of course.

Bruce will be lit until midnight tonight, then from 5:30 am until midnight daily; he is expected to receive up to 750,000 visitors per day. On January 7, 2017, his lights will be doused forever at 8 pm and the process of removing him from his final perch will begin.

His remains will be donated to Habitats for Humanity. Those who benefit will never know how famous their house’s sturdy timber once was. I’d like to think that’s how Bruce would have wanted it.

Happy holidays!

November 29 is Square Dance Day

November 29, 2016/2 Comments/in Holidays by Month, November

Today is Square Dance Day. Some of us remember awkward co-ed square dance lessons in the high school gym. Or maybe we watched a group do-si-do on a parade float down Main Street. How can we keep the memory alive of an American folk dance and its European roots? We’re glad you asked.

In 17th-century England, teams of six–all men, for propriety’s sake–began performing what was called the morris dance. The fad inspired a country dance in which couples lined up on village greens to practice weaving, circling and swinging moves reminiscent of modern-day square dancing.

French couples in the 18th century squared off for dances such as the cotillion and quadrille. Folk dances in Scotland, Scandinavia and Spain are also thought to have influenced square dancing.

Europeans brought these dances with them when they settled the North American colonies. French styles became popular after the American Revolutionary War when many newly-minted citizens disdained British traditions. Several square dancing terms have their origins in the French language, including “promenade,” “allemande” and “do-si-do”—a corruption of “dos-à-dos,” meaning “back-to-back.”

A similar style called the “running set” caught on in 19th-century Appalachia. At first, participants memorized all the steps but soon the dances became so complicated that it became necessary to have someone call out cues. This caller’s original function was to call out the steps in time to fiddle music, so dancers wouldn’t have to memorize them all.

As square dance calling became an art form in its own right, the best ones invented lines to say between cues such as “Don’t be bashful and don’t be afraid. Swing on the corner in a waltz promenade.” A caller might also come up with new dance steps and routines.

Waltzes and polkas, which allowed couples to get closer to each other without raising too many eyebrows, supplanted group-based dances by the late 19th century. As the jazz and swing eras dawned, square dancing came to seem even more outdated.

In the 1920s, automaker Henry Ford decided to revive the tradition as a form of exercise and, more important, as instruction in proper manners with the opposite sex. He paid for the development of a national program, opened ballrooms, made attendance mandatory for his factory workers, and produced instructive radio broadcasts for schools throughout the country.

Lloyd Shaw, a folk dance teacher in the 1930s, wrote books about the rescued art of square dancing and held seminars for a new generation of callers. In the 1950s, standards were developed for square dancing across the United States, allowing dancers to learn interchangeable routines and patterns.

Recordings made the square dance more accessible since a trained caller no longer had to be physically present. Anyone in the country could dance to Ernest Legg of West Virginia’s calling on 78:

Ladies do and the gents you know,
It’s right by right by wrong you go,
And you can’t go to heaven while you carry on so,
And it’s home little gal and do-si-do,
And it may be the last time, I don’t know,
And oh by gosh and oh by Joe.

Square dancing continues to thrive in some areas although its overall popularity has waned in recent decades, according to the United Square Dancers of America. Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Tennesse and Virginia have all seen fit to make the square dance their ‘folk dance’ State Symbol.

Want to know more? Let Bugs Bunny call the tune:

Happy Square Dance Day!

Sources:
History.com – Square Dancing: A Swinging History
Appalachian History – And it’s home little gal and do-si-do

Posts

National Day of the Horse

December 12 is Poinsettia Day