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National Nachos Day

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Today is National Nachos Day and should not be confused with International Day of the Nacho (October 21) or with the International Nacho Festival (October 13-15). To be honest, we’re a bit confused ourselves. To get to the bottom of this delicious mystery, let’s dig in (sorry).

Although we’re not sure why it’s celebrated on November 6th, the origin of National Nachos Day is this: In 1943,  Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya inadvertently invented nachos at a restaurant in Piedras Negras, Mexico. (To pinpoint the exact date it happened would strain credulity, wouldn’t it?)

A group of officers’ wives whose husbands were stationed in Fort Duncan Airbase in Texas crossed the border to have dinner at the famed Victory Club. The women were more than fashionably late: the restaurant had closed, and the cook had gone home. The ladies were hungry.

Anaya’s son related the legend in an interview in the Sun Sentinel.

“My father was maître d’ and he said ‘Let me go quick and fix something for you.’ He went into the kitchen, picked up tostadas, grated some cheese on them – Wisconsin cheese, the round one – and put them under the Salamander [a broiling unit that quickly browns the top of foods]. He pulled them out after a couple minutes, all melted, and put on a slice of jalapeno.”

Whether Mamie Finan, one of the wives, or Anaya himself christened the dish Nacho’s Especiales is a matter of debate among snack historians. This much is certain: the dish was a hit. Somewhere along the way, the name was shortened to nachos. Anaya’s original recipe appeared in St. Anne’s Cookbook in 1954.

national nachos day

Ignacio Anaya went on to work at the Moderno Restaurant in Piedras Negras, where his original recipe is still used. He later opened his own establishment, appropriately named Nacho’s Restaurant, also in Piedras Negras.

By 1960, when he sought to claim ownership of the nacho, it had already been around for seventeen years and was in the public domain. To honor Anaya’s creation, Piedras Negras hosts the International Nacho Festival every year.

The snack’s popularity grew in 1976 when businessman Frank Liberto began selling a modified version at sporting events in Arlington Stadium, home of the Texas Rangers. That first year, sales totaled $800,000.

Liberto’s secret? He altered one ingredient, creating a pourable processed cheese product with a long shelf life that didn’t need to be heated. We can’t tell you the formula’s secret, proprietary ingredients; just that, by the Food and Drug Administration’s standards, it legally can’t be called cheese. But that’s never stopped anyone from tucking into a bowl of nachos. Better snacking through modern chemistry, right?

In 1978, the treat became available at the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium, where iconic sports announcer Howard Cosell was covering Monday Night Football with Don Meredith and Frank Gifford. At some point, a plate of nachos was brought up to the booth.

national nachos day nachos

The broadcasters needed to fill some dead airtime, so Cosell decided to riff on the snack’s name. “‘They brought us this new snack—what do they call them? knock-o’s or nachos?’” recalls Liberto. “He started using the word ‘nachos’ in the description of plays: ‘Did you see that run? That was a nacho run!’”

Cosell and others used the word for weeks afterward, helping Liberto’s nachos branch out from their Texas birthplace. Ignacio Anaya invented the original nacho. Frank Liberto modernized them, turning them into a concession snack and a profit machine.

Ignacio Anaya died in 1975. A bronze plaque erected in Piedras Negras honors his memory and October 21 was declared the International Day of the Nacho. Why was that date chosen? Was it his birthday? The date he died? We don’t know.

So there you have it, folks. Hungry yet?

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November 1 is National Author’s Day

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National Authors' DayToday is National Author’s Day. In 1928, teacher Nellie Verne Burt McPherson suggested the creation of a holiday dedicated to American authors at a meeting of the Bement, Illinois, Women’s Club.

McPherson was inspired by an experience she’d had more than a decade earlier while lying in a hospital recuperating from an illness. She’d written a fan letter to Irving Bacheller after reading his story, Eben Holden’s Last Day A’Fishin.

She was thrilled when the author responded by sending her an autographed copy of another one of his stories. She remembered his kindness when she pioneered the observance.

As president of the club, she submitted her idea to the General Federation of Women’s Clubs. It was celebrated unofficially for many years. In 1949, the United States Department of Commerce made it an official holiday, but it remained largely unknown for almost 20 years.

After McPherson’s death in 1968, her granddaughter, Sue Cole, began promoting the celebration of National Author’s Day. She urged readers to write to American authors to “brighten up the sometimes lonely business of being a writer.” Other ways to celebrate include re-reading a classic, picking up a current title, or writing reviews for your favorite books and authors on Goodreads or Amazon.  

Happy National Author’s Day!

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National Magic Day

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Everybody knows today is Halloween. But it’s also National Magic Day, when members of the Society of American Magicians (SAM) and many other groups celebrate by offering free magic performances for kids, the ill, the elderly, and shut-ins.

Why is this holiday celebrated today? In 1938, a Chicago member of SAM proposed a holiday to honor Harry Houdini. October 31st was declared National Magic Day in memory of the day Houdini died.

national magic day houdini in chains

Houdini set the standard for a type of performance known as Escape Or Die. There are at least three possible ways for a magician to risk his life in the event of failure.  These are death by drowning, as in the water escapes Houdini pioneered; death by suffocation, as in escapes from airtight enclosures such as coffins; and death by falling (also originated by Houdini), in a straitjacket escape while hanging from high above the earth, where falling meant certain death.

In 1915, at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, Houdini was chained in a locked box weighted down with 500 pounds of iron and dropped into the bay. He escaped. To celebrate the fair’s centennial, the Palace of Fine Arts, the only building to remain from the exposition, constructed an “escape room” that challenged all who entered to escape within 80 minutes.

On September 30, 1926, in Worcester, MA, he performed the first public test of an airtight coffin, seeking to prove there were no secret tubes siphoning air to him or other trickery. The Daily Telegram reported that Houdini would be sealed for one hour “in the coffin in which he will be buried when he dies.”

national magic day houdini coffin test

The test went off without a hitch. What no one knew then was that it would become Houdini’s casket only one month later, after his death on Halloween 1926.

Houdini wasn’t killed by a feat gone wrong; he died of diffuse peritonitis due to acute appendicitis, widely believed to have been caused by a punch to his abdomen on the morning of October 22, 1926. A young man who may have been a college student, an amateur boxer, or both decided to test Houdini’s boast that he could withstand any blow. The magician later claimed he was injured only because he wasn’t given time to prepare by tensing his abdominal muscles.

Research shows it’s unlikely that a punch could directly rupture an appendix, even one that’s already inflamed. In any case, Houdini mistakenly assumed the pain he suffered afterward was due only to the punch, leading him to refuse medical treatment for what could have been a routine case of appendicitis.

Instead, he continued to perform for two more days until, overwhelmed by pain, he agreed to be hospitalized. The surgeon who removed his appendix found it had burst, spreading peritonitis throughout Houdini’s body. The odds were against him in the days before antibiotics, but he held on and endured another surgery, seeming to rally before finally slipping away on October 31st at the age of 52.

Ten years later, his wife Bess held what she called The Final Houdini Séance on the roof of the Knickerbocker Hotel. Supposedly, she had a compact with her late husband to contact her within ten years. There’s nothing to substantiate that. It appears that Bess wanted the subject of communicating with Harry to be closed. After her husband did not reappear,  she wrote:

Since the failure of the ten-year test, it is my opinion that all concerned have struck a mighty worldwide blow at superstition.

There is a recording of the séance or, more likely, a theatrical reading of the transcript, which was released as an album. On it, Bess says, “It is finished.”

She couldn’t have been more wrong. The “final” séance spawned dozens of Halloween Houdini séances that continue to this day. Some bill themselves as “official.” As Houdini himself would tell you, that’s impossible. One thing’s for sure: If séances work, then Mr. Houdini’s phone is ringing off the hook right about now.

*****

P.S. Houdini was well known for his hostility to the Spiritualism movement so popular in his day and attempted to discredit so-called mediums at every turn. (He had tried to contact his dead brother and father as a young man and was embittered by the experience.)

So it seems a bit odd that he befriended Arthur Conan Doyle, who was a fervent believer in psychic phenomena. Each sought to convert the other until Doyle’s wife Jean offered to contact Houdini’s mother shortly after her death.

He agreed, wanting to believe it was possible.  During the séance, Jean went into a trance while holding a pencil and jotted a message from Houdini’s mother through a method known as “automatic writing.” Houdini took the note, saying nothing about the fact that his mother had never learned to read or write and, in any case, spoke no English.

He went public soon after, saying that he didn’t believe the Doyles were being intentionally deceitful. They were simply gullible. Doyle responded by saying the language of the spirit is universal. Their friendship never recovered.

Read more about Houdini’s amazing exploits. Honor his skepticism of mediums and con artists, while experiencing the childlike wonder of a magic show. Have a happy National Magic Day!

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Create a Great Funeral Day

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“Funerals are the party no one wants to plan.”create a great funeral tombstone

So says Gail Rubin, a death services planner, radio host, and leader of the Albuquerque chapter of Death Café. She’s been called the Doyenne of Death and liked it so much, she trademarked it. She runs a site called A Good Goodbye – Funeral Planning for Those Who Don’t Plan to Die.

It’s appropriate, she says, that Create a Great Funeral Day comes right before Halloween and the Day of the Dead. “Before ghosts can go a-haunting and spirits of the deceased can be celebrated, someone’s gotta die.”

Countless movies and television shows have poked fun at the stress of eulogizing a complete stranger, but how much do we know about our loved ones? Enough to plan the party after they’re gone?

Create a Great Funeral Day

This holiday originated with Stephanie West Allen in 2000 after her mother-in-law died, leaving no instructions for her funeral. Watching her husband struggle to create a meaningful service inspired Allen to write Creating Your Own Funeral or Memorial Service: A Workbook to encourage people to pre-plan their funerals and spare their families that stress.

This book is invaluable in addressing the amount of work involved in organizing a funeral. Many people are unaware of the processes required, including collection, transfer, preparation, choice of cremation or burial, selection of a plot, niche, or home storage, and the type of urn that best suits one’s decor.

Go Wish (just not for more time)

Another, more playful planning tool is Go Wish, a card game developed as a fun way to start a conversation and clarify the end-of-life wishes of the targeted family member. If a relative shows up with this card game, he might know more than you do about your latest MRI results. And he might have his eye on your collection of mint-condition Life magazines.

create a great funeral day go wish

The Go Wish game is a set of 36 cards and can be played by several people or in “solitaire” mode, which just sounds like the saddest thing ever.  Each card has a short statement that the individual (let’s just call him the goner) will rank in order of priority of what’s most important to him in his last weeks or months of life.  He can then explain to a possibly imaginary friend or family member why he sorted it the way he did.

The game’s maker, Coda Alliance, has tested the game in hospitals, nursing homes, community meetings, and elsewhere. A researcher stated, “In one large group, where I emphasized that we did need to collect the packs for re-use, there was nonetheless a 30% attrition rate – a testament to this being a desirable commodity.”  Or maybe nursing homes are a breeding ground for degenerate thieves.

Boomers are Doing it for Themselves

While Create a Great Funeral Day was not a big hit when it began, Allen says attitudes are changing, her book is getting less resistance, and its readership is growing. Why? “The boomers are doing it. The boomers are the do-it-yourselfers, they had their own way of doing anything, they did their own weddings, they’re going to do their own funerals, and that’s just now starting, so they’re going to have a huge impact.”

Boomers: Is the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association (ICCFA) pandering to you when its site sports a YouTube link to Blue Öyster Cult’s 1976 song, Don’t Fear the Reaper? Per ICCFA, the song’s message is that love endures beyond the grave despite the best efforts of the Grim Reaper, a personification of death from European folklore.  We thought it was just about getting stoned.

Pressing the Flesh

It isn’t surprising to learn that 38% of so-called Millennials and 32% of Gen-Xers have tattoos. But you may not have realized that increasing numbers of older people are getting inked, too. A Pew Research study found that roughly 15% of Baby Boomers—those born between 1946 and 1964—have at least one tattoo. (The results were published in 2010, and we haven’t found anything more recent. Perhaps it isn’t exactly catnip for grant money.)

So what happens to that tattoo when you die? Good news: you don’t have to take it with you! When you join Save My Ink Forever, you’ll have peace of mind knowing your tattoo will be harvested from your body within sixty hours of your death and treated with a proprietary blend of chemicals that halts decomposition.

create a great funeral day tattoo

Yes, this is a real tattoo.

According to the company, this preservation process permanently alters the human canvas, or “raw art.” Then the finished piece, which is technically no longer skin and therefore not creepy at all, will be shipped to your lucky loved one. It now offers framing services as well. We’re guessing that local framing shops may have been squeamish about mounting said art.

If you’d like to leave your tattoos to that special someone, start saving your change now: preserving a full-body tattoo costs between $80,000 and $100,000. Does the price vary due to the donor’s, um, surface area? Will it arrive in a massive frame, or as a Barry-skin rug? (We know your name is probably not Barry, but it works for the pun. Please bear with us. Oops, did it again.)

Get Started!

Don’t wait another day to create a great funeral for yourself. Remember, if you build it, they will come. (Have we mentioned paid mourners? Can’t hurt!) Now get out there and have fun!

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