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Rain Day

rain dayToday is Rain Day. Why? According to records kept since 1874, it has rained in the town of Waynesburg, PA, on July 29th in 118 of the last 151 years, more than 78% of the time, a statistical anomaly.

Every year, the town holds a festival, come rain or come shine. Events include a t-shirt design competition, umbrella and window decoration contests and the requisite beauty pageant.

Here’s a sample of the Miss Rain Day application and contractual agreement from 2022.

“I am of good character, have never been married, divorced, had a marriage annulled, given birth to a child or convicted of a crime.”

Picky, picky!

Happy Rain Day, Waynesburg!

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The Great Texas Mosquito Festival

great texas mosquito festival

Willie Man-Chew

Since 1981, the Great Texas Mosquito Festival has been celebrated on the last Thursday, Friday and Saturday of July in Clute, TX.

Visitors are greeted by a 26-foot-tall mosquito clad in a cowboy hat and boots. Promoters claim it’s the world’s largest and we certainly hope they’re right.

Highlights include the Mosquito Calling Contest, where entrants are judged on their ability to emulate and attract the biggest, orneriest skeeters around.

What festival would be complete without a beauty pageant? Anyone in shorts can compete in the Mosquito Legs Contest.

Other events are the Mosquito Chase 5K Run, Horseshoe Pitching Tournament, Cornhole Toss, BBQ and Fajita Cook-off, Haystack Dive, Bingo, and 6oo-meter Kids Run.

Other attractions are carnival rides and games, a petting zoo, food vendors, and nightly musical entertainment. Organizers estimate 13,000 attend the three-day festival each year, sponsored in part by Budweiser, Sonic, Whataburger, and Texas Roadhouse.

A darker side to the proceedings is revealed by the sponsorship of Dow and BASF chemical companies and Killum Pest Control. We urge all mosquitoes to beware. Willie has sold you out: it’s a trap!

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World Listening Day

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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National Simplicity Day

national simplicity dayJuly 12, 2025, is the 208th anniversary of author and consummate liar Henry David Thoreau’s birth. His name is held in high regard, and his work evokes a fondness and nostalgia in readers and inspirational-quote-mongers.

Thoreau’s account of his retreat into nature and the wisdom it brought him is largely fictional. At Worldwide Weird Holidays, we’re okay with that. We ask only that publishers stop classifying this stuff as memoir. Call it a novel.

Then maybe we can all stop trying to live up to an impossible standard that he didn’t even try to reach. Any pompous ass can say profound things when his mom’s on the way over to cook dinner.

*****

National Simplicity Day honors the birthday, on July 12, 1817, of Henry David Thoreau, author, ersatz ascetic, armchair philosopher, and navel-gazing misanthrope.

Thoreau famously went to live in a cabin in the woods, the better to ponder life without the inconvenience of other people and the irritations of everyday, well, life.

In Walden, or, Life in the Woods, he wrote, “I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beechtree, or a yellow birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.”

Thoreau certainly could turn a phrase; many of them clog the arteries of inspirational sites and satisfy the sweet tooth of quote-mongers who reverently offer them up on posters, mousepads, and coffee mugs.

He neglected to mention that the area was always bustling with people. A commuter train passed nearby. He hosted parties. He lived a twenty-minute walk from his parents’ house and made the trip several times a week to enjoy his mother’s cooking.

The man who advised his readers to eat only one meal a day to avoid indulging base appetites was visited by his mother and sisters at least once a week to bring him food, tidy up the cabin, and clean his laundry.

Let’s be clear. We don’t fault the man for entertaining, eating well, and having the women in his family help him. The problem is that he wrote as if he were roughing it in the middle of nowhere, with no one but the trees and forest creatures for company. He then used that fictitious narrative to promote an ideology he never practiced.

If Thoreau couldn’t or wouldn’t “unplug” in the 1850s, how can we expect his philosophy to succeed for us today? And who says we should even try? After all, the Unabomber actually lived in a cabin by himself for many years, and his manifesto included instructions for living off the grid. Upon further investigation, we found that he also received support from his family.

Exhortations to simplify one’s life can be helpful, but they often mask disdain and smug superiority. Thoreau reminds us of the intrepid explorer in a documentary, ostensibly forging a path that was trodden moments before by the cameraman walking backward in front of him.

Have a happy National Simplicity Day! But if you can’t keep it simple, don’t worry – you’re in good company.

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