Posts

June 28 is Monday Holiday Law Day

/0 Comments/in

monday holiday law dayToday is Monday Holiday Law Day. Call it the mother of all holidays about holidays, and Lyndon B. Johnson the father of the long weekend.

On June 28, 1968, President Johnson signed a bill moving the official celebration of Washington’s Birthday, Memorial Day, and Veterans Day from their traditional dates to Mondays. The change was meant to give employees the opportunity to travel and spend more leisure time with their families, while making the workweek more efficient by removing the interruption of mid-week holidays.

Johnson also established a holiday to recognize Christopher Columbus and his voyage to the New World. According to the Congressional Research Service of the Library of Congress, “By commemorating Christopher Columbus’s remarkable voyage, the nation honored the courage and determination of generation after generation of immigrants seeking freedom and opportunity in America.”

The law did not merge Lincoln and Washington’s birthdays into a generic Presidents’ Day. This myth, perpetuated by sales hawking everything from automobiles to mattresses, may have its roots in an early draft that recommended it. Congress rejected it on the grounds that a holiday for all presidents would diminish George Washington’s historical significance. His birthday, February 22, 1732, is now officially celebrated on the third Monday in February.

Memorial Day began for the purpose of tending to the neglected graves of Union soldiers in Confederate cemeteries. (A similar tradition in the North was called Decoration Day.) Eventually, the two merged, and May 30 was chosen by a group of veterans because, according to an address by President Barack Obama, “it coincided with the time when flowers were in bloom.”

The holiday wasn’t officially named Memorial Day until 1967. The following year, President Johnson moved its observance to the last Monday in May. Some veterans have complained that moving the date to create a long weekend cheapens its meaning.

Columbus Day was scheduled for the second Monday in October. Some states had already enacted their own commemorative holidays occurring on October 12, the anniversary of Columbus’ landing in 1492; they were required to jettison them and conform to federal law.

Veterans Day, called Armistice Day until 1954, was observed on November 11 to mark the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, when Germany agreed to an armistice with the Allies, effectively ending World War I. President Johnson changed it to the fourth Monday in October. In 1975, Congress voted to revert to November 11 in recognition of the importance of the date. The law went into effect in 1978.

(The spelling of Veterans Day is no mistake: While the holiday is commonly printed as Veteran’s Day or Veterans’ Day, the United States Department of Veterans Affairs website states, “Veterans Day does not include an apostrophe but does include an ‘s’ at the end of ‘veterans’ because it is not a day that ‘belongs’ to veterans, it is a day for honoring all veterans.)

Happy Monday Holiday Law Day!

Share this:

Happy Birthday to You Day

/0 Comments/in

happy birthday to you dayToday is Happy Birthday to You Day. While this song may evoke pleasant memories for us, at one point, the right to sing it was so hotly contested that 6,000 Girl Scout camps received letters demanding the payment of royalty fees.

On this date in 1893, teachers (and sisters) Mildred and Patty Hill composed a tune and lyrics for kindergarten students to sing before the start of their school day. It was called “Good Morning to All” and used the music we now recognize as “Happy Birthday to You.”

Good morning to you,
Good morning to you,
Good morning dear children
Good morning to all.

It was published that year in Song Stories for the Kindergarten. A few years later, the lyrics were modified and the first note split to reflect the two syllables of Happy. Copyrights for that second version have been sold many times over the years. Many have complained that a song almost 125 years old should be in the public domain.

In 1996, the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP), the industry’s main professional guild, sent letters to 6,000 Girl Scout camps demanding payment of fees for the singing of “Happy Birthday to You” and “God Bless America,” among other songs. ASCAP’s director of licensing later apologized, saying, “What we were really chasing here…was going after the summer camps that are really like sending your kids to a resort.” So targeting well-to-do camps was okay? Not really an apology, in our opinion.

On August 5, 2013, scientists sent special instructions to the surface sampling device of the Mars Rover Curiosity. The apparatus, which employs a sound transducer at the business end to help it more easily penetrate a variety of soils and clays, audibly “hummed” Happy Birthday to You in celebration of its first year on the surface of a planet an average of 140 million miles away from Earth. NASA paid a royalty fee.

Fights over the validity of copyrights continued until June 27, 2016, when a judge affirmed a $14 million class-action judgment against Warner/Chappell Music, which had purchased the copyright in 1988. Poetic justice? Perhaps. Estimates that the company has made at least $2 million in fees per year since acquiring it render the penalty more poetic than just.

At least, we can all sing Happy Birthday without having to pay a toll. But what about this other schoolyard favorite:

Happy birthday to you,
You live in a zoo,
You look like a monkey
You act like one too.

That one could cost you.

Share this:

Barcode Day

/0 Comments/in

barcode day

Today is Barcode Day. On June 26, 1974, at Marsh’s Supermarket in Troy, Ohio, a 10-pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum became the first product bearing a barcode to be rung up by an electronic scanner.

That historic moment had been a long time in the making. In 1952, American inventors Norman J. Woodland and Bernard Silver were granted a U.S. patent for a classification method and apparatus utilizing identifying patterns. Diagrams showed code in straight lines and concentric circles with varying degrees of reflectiveness. Unfortunately, they were ahead of their time and eventually sold off the patent for $15,000.

Railroads began to use barcodes in the late 1960s; companies encoded identifying information onto plates mounted on the sides of each car. Trackside scanners read them and transmitted the results, allowing owners to keep track of their rolling stock on a grand scale. However, dirt and damage to the plates caused issues with accuracy and reliability, and the system was eventually abandoned.

As usage spread,  the establishment of a universal standard became imperative to avoid confusion between disparate systems.  In 1970, Logicon, Inc. created the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code (UGPIC) for use throughout the retail industry.

barcode day

visual approximation

The UGPIC evolved into the Universal Product Code (UPC) symbol set, still used in the U.S. today. The first piece of equipment built to use UPC was installed in the Troy, Ohio, grocery store, which, along with that pack of gum, made history.

In 2002, Forbes magazine reported that the same pack of gum was on display at the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History. While the scanner is housed there — no longer on view — a staffer has clarified that the 10-pack of Juicy Fruit accompanying it is not the actual 10-pack of Juicy Fruit, but rather a representation.

Our guess is that the gum was chewed over 40 years ago without a thought to its cultural significance, which is okay if you think about it. It served its purpose, maybe even got stuck to more than a few shoes — it had 50 sticks in it, after all.

Happy Barcode Day!

Share this:

RIP World Championship Rotary Tiller Race

/1 Comment/in

June 25, 2025: When we first wrote about the World Championship Rotary Tiller Race, we thought the tradition would last forever. Unfortunately, 2022 marked the 32nd and final PurpleHull Pea Festival and Rotary Tiller Race. That’s unfortunate because, as you can see from our write-up, it was a great reason to travel to Emerson, Arkansas.

world championship rotary tiller raceJune 25, 2016: Today is the World Championship Rotary Tiller Race, the main event of the PurpleHull Pea Festival in Emerson, Arkansas. In 1990, Emerson native and part-time newspaper columnist Glen Eades decided his hometown needed a little excitement. As he explained, “We were so boring we didn’t even have a cop.”

He approached Mayor Joe Mullins about hosting a festival to honor a southern favorite grown in many local backyards: purple hull peas. Several town meetings were held to discuss the idea, and somewhere along the way, Eades suggested a rotary tiller race. Mullins remembers thinking, “Glen, I don’t know what you’ve been drinking, but you need to change brands.” The plan was approved, and the PurpleHull Pea Festival became a reality.

Since then, it has grown in size and stature, winning the 2001 Arkansas Festival of the Year Award. Over the years, the World Championship Rotary Tiller Race has evolved, too. Its website proclaims:

There simply is no other event like it.  Unique among motor sports, we like to say it is the highlight of the tiller racing season. ‘Course, to the best of our knowledge, our one-day event is the tiller racing season.

Following a brouhaha cryptically referred to as the “Great Tiller Racing Controversy of ’93,” festival organizers created the World Tiller Racing Federation to write and enforce official rules governing all races. One such rule dictates that the racetrack must be exactly 200 feet in length. Another requires that racers, called tiller pilots, wear shoes. (Believe it or not, up until that point, some chose to compete in bare feet.)

The event has become so famous that The Wall Street Journal has sent a reporter to cover today’s race for its column on odd topics. In recent years, the festival’s Antique Tractor Show & Competition has held two races of its own: the Barrel Push, which is pretty self-explanatory, and the Slow Race, in which contestants try to keep the tractor running at the lowest possible speed without stalling.

The PurpleHull Pea Pageant judges age groups from 0-11 months all the way to 16 years and up. According to the signup sheet, “Contestants will be rated on Facial Beauty, Stage Presentation/Personality and overall appearance,” winners of “Side Awards: Most Beautiful, Photogenic, Fashion, Prettiest Hair, Prettiest Smile” will receive a trophy, and “All Queens will receive a Nice Crown, Sash & Trophy.”

Zero months? We’re going to go out on a limb and say that if your daughter’s too young to hold up her own head with or without a crown on it, she’s probably too young to enter a beauty contest. Your time would be better spent making sure your husband keeps his shoes on for the race.

Admission is free to the Tiller Race, Tractor Show, Pup-Pea Dog Show, Pea Shelling Competition, Big Daddy’s Hot Water Cornbread Greatrip PurpleHull Peas & Cornbread Cook Off, the Million Tiller Parade, and “Pea-tacular” Fireworks Show.

To raise money, each year festival organizers choose a group of “Tiller Girls,” teenagers who roam through the crowd watching the race. According to the site,

They’re there for two reasons.  First, for visual stimulation.  Second, to take up donations. The Tiller Girl who collects the largest total amount of donations earns points toward winning the title of Tiller Goddess.

Oh, thank goodness. We were worried it might be something creepy.

Share this: