Friday, April 22, 2016

The twisted history of Earth Day

They say it’s your Earthday.

On your Day Planner (printed on partially recycled paper one would hope) you may notice that  April 22nd is officially called Earth Day.

You’d figure there would be a pretty straightforward explanation of the origins of Earth Day but noooooooooooo.

Earth the planet may have one mother but a lot of people are claiming paternity for Earth the Day. The two leading folks are former Senator Gaylord Nelson and a chap named John McConnell, founder of the Earth Society.

Back in 1962 Senator Nelson claims he persuaded JFK to go on an unheard of environmental tour of the country (in his gas guzzling, smog-belching stretch Cadillac no doubt.)  He claims that he wanted to make the environment a political issue. To quote Nelly:


In 1969 he watched anti-war demonstrations and noticed that campus teach-ins were an effective way to educate and organize American youth. He thought the same could be done for the environment. And thus in his words:


On Oct 3rd 1969 a scant week or two after Gaylord’s speech and a few hundred miles south in San Francisco -- the other paternity suspect John McConnell got the Mayor of San Francisco to read a proclamation penned by McConnell that introduced the notion and the precise words “Earth Day”:

Here’s the proclamation:

 As Earthians we need a day to celebrate our global unity and
 destiny, and
 The observance of EARTH DAY will alert concern and interest for
 our planet -- with its precious treasure of living things, and
 EARTH DAY is to remind each person of his right, and the equal
 at the same time the equal responsibility of each person to
 preserve and improve the Earth and the quality of life thereon,
 That in the City and County of San Francisco March 21st (Vernal
 Equinox) be the designated EARTH DAY - a special day to remember
 Earth's tender seedlings of life and people; a day for planting
 trees and grass and flowers, for cleaning streams and wooded
 glens. That to further these purposes a Silent Hour For Peace (a
 time for quiet reflection or prayer) be observed on Earth Day at
 19:00 G.M.T. (11:00 a.m. P.S.T.). That on EARTH DAY the EARTH
 FLAG, which portrays in its center our "Beautiful Blue Planet;"
 be flown to encourage mutual respect for Earth and all its

There are a few interesting nuggets in there if you Earthians look closely enough. One of which is that Earth Day was to be celebrated on the Vernal Equinox, not as it is today on April 22nd.  Aside from the fact that symbolically the Vernal Equinox has always been a welcome home Mother Nature type celebration, the date itself was something the entire planet earth could synchronize its calendar to.

The April 22nd date came from the Gaylord faction, they had the Washington Beltway clout to declare a National Environmental Day. That particular date was chosen because it happened to be convenient for organizing.  Aside from that – the March date could still be rather chilly in the East and Midwest. April promised nicer weather for folks planning on going out into nature.  Some right wing wackos (but I repeat myself) claim the April 22nd date was chosen because it is also Lenin’s birthday. (I thought Lenin was a member of the Red Party not the Green Party.) Somehow in their DDT addled brains, being a friend of the environment makes you an enemy of democracy.  I can hear them now –“Karl Marx was a tree-hugger. Saddam Hussein recycles!” They’d be shocked to learn it was Richard Nixon who started the Environmental Protection Agency.

The other interesting nugget is the mention of an “Earth Flag” flying above City Hall.  How was there an Earth Flag before there was an Earth Day? This is where it becomes clearer that McConnell may have been the first Earthian.

For those of you too young to remember, or not yet a gleam in a parent’s eye, 1969 was one wacko year in one very disturbing decade.

JFK was assassinated in 63, Malcolm X in 65, MLK in 68, RFK in 68. There was rioting in the streets. The Days of Rage in Chicago, the Long Hot Summers with Newark and Detroit burning in July of 1967.

The war was raging in Vietnam. The nightly news had footage of American troops using napalm and Agent Orange to defoliate the jungles. The skyline of most major cities couldn’t be seen through the smog, America’s great rivers oozed with mercury.

69 was the culmination. There was the Woodstock Festival and the My Lai massacre.  And Man actually walked on the moon. Some claimed the lunar landing threw the universe out of orbit (which would explain how the ‘69 Mets won the World Series.)

The moon thing was key though. Before the lunar landing we had unmanned missions to orbit the moon. Those missions sent back pictures of the earth as well as the moon. It’s hard to explain to people nowadays how shocking it was to see a real-time picture of Earth from space. The Earth looked blue and beautiful and delicate and small. Small enough to break.

That sight had an effect on Mc Connell:

When the first photo of Earth appeared in Life (magazine) in 1969, I was deeply stirred -- as were many other people -- by what I saw. … In viewing the first photo from space, thereby sharing in part the experience of the astronauts, we experienced in a deep and emotional way a new awareness of our planet. As I looked at the Life photo it occurred to me that an Earth flag could symbolize and encourage our new world view and that the Earth as seen from space was the best possible symbol for this purpose.

NASA sent him a transparency of the photo used in Lifeand he copyrighted the Earth Flag in 1969. 

McConnell again:
Our first 500 flags were produced in a hurry, in order to use them at the "Moon Watch" at Central Park in New York City. This was the big event where we watched and celebrated the first landing on the Moon on 20 July 1969.

10,000 gather in Central Park to watch the moon landing.

The key thing is he had copyrighted the name and produced the flag months before Sen. Gaylord’s Seattle Conference or had officially introduced the idea of a global holiday called Earth Day at a UNESCO Conference on the Environment.

So McConnell looks like the real Earth Day daddy.

Of course, the advent of Earth Day itself was the culmination of a long series of events.

The true mother of the modern environmental movement would have to be Rachel Carson author of the seminal work “Silent Spring”. Published in 1962 it foretold a day when there were no songbirds in spring.

Another notable year on the environmental timeline would be 1967 --a group of volunteers on Long Island halted the spraying of DDT and formed a group called The Environmental Defense Fund. They would eventually get the FDA to ban the use of DDT in 1969.

Earth Day itself went from being a local celebration in San Francisco in March of 1970, to a national celebration in April of 1970. It was celebrated all over the earth on March 21, 1971 when Secretary General U Thant proclaimed the first worldwide Earth Day.

Earth Day was celebrated by most of the Earth last month. Wha?
Yep, San Francisco, Berkeley and Denver also celebrated the original Vernal Equinox date.

Here in the rest of the U.S. this is officially Earth Week and Friday is Earth Day. I don’t think the world really cares when we Americans celebrate Earth Day. But, it’s fairly important to our fellow earthlings that we do contemplate the environment. After all, we Americans make up only 4% of the world’s population; yet consume 25% of its resources.

By the way, you might be surprised to learn that in relation to the rest of the country you New Yorkers who live in this concrete jungle are comparatively Green. This is mainly due to the fact that Gothamites are walkers, who don’t own cars or lawns, nor require lawn mowers, pesticides nor fertilizer. And the city grows vertically instead of sprawling horizontally.

So my tender seedlings of life, I exhort you to put on your Earth Shoes and get out and spend some time with your mother this weekend. You haven’t communed with her in a while, have you?

Your Fellow Earthian,


Wednesday, April 20, 2016

The twisted history of 420 day


Whoaaaaaaaa Dude –happy highday.






Snagged from


Status: True.




And here are the whackjob, stoner,
totally bogus claims about 420 Day:

420 is the penal code section for marijuana use in California.





It's the number of chemical compounds in marijuana.




The 20th of April is the best time to plant marijuana.


It's the code you send to your drug dealer's pager.



Untrue, says Grateful Dead Productions spokesman Dennis McNally.




That last bit was a bit of a buzzkill.

Happy 420 Day folks.

Resident Space Cowboy

And, since I bring it up…..

its weirdo lyrics leave many folks mystified:

Some people call me the space cowboy, yeah
Some call me the gangster of love
Some people call me Maurice
Cause I speak of the pompitous of love




"I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree.

They weren’t stolen from Vernon Green.

"I really love your peaches wanna shake your tree
Lovey dovey, lovey dovey all the time.


In other words, the Space Cowboy was a Cattle Rustler.

Friday, April 1, 2016

The Twisted History of April Fools Day

Trying to uncover the origins of April Fools' Day is quite a fool's errand in itself.

Some say it can be traced back to a Roman festival called Hilaria (as in “hilarious”) It was celebrated on the 8th day before the Kalends of April (March 25th.) It was a day of light-hearted fun and masquerades.

There are lots of conflicting stories; this is touched upon in the following poem from the late 18 th Century.

The first of April, some do say,
Is set apart for All Fools' Day.
But why the people call it so,
Nor I, nor they themselves do know.
But on this day are people sent
On purpose for pure merriment.
--Poor Robin's Almanac (1790)

This then is the prevailing theory:
Over the years the calendar for the Western world has shifted considerably. The Romans originally had a ten-month calendar.

The truly creative names of the 7th, 8th 9th and 10th months were: Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten. Or in Latin: Septem, Octo, Nove, Decem (September, October, November, December, duh.) Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar decided they wanted their own months and thus July and August were added. (In reality they bumped the months named Five and Six, Quintilis and Sextilis ( now that's a way cooler name than August.)

More important to our story is the fact that on the old calendar the New Year used to begin in spring. Made sense, new beginnings, crops coming alive.

So in late March, or early April, folks had their New Year celebration. They'd run out into the fields making noise to scare the evil spirits from their emerging crops (and thus the New Year's noisemaker was born)

Folks followed Julius’s Julian calendar for ages.
Then in 1562, Pope Gregory decided to introduce a new one for the Christian world. On the Gregorian calendar the New Year fell on January 1st. Initially, some folks stuck with the original date and had their parties in March and April. Eventually the parties petered out.

Then those tricksters the French come into the picture. Practical jokers in France began sending out invitations to fictitious New Years Eve parties to be held on April first. If you showed up for one you were called an April Fish. Don't ask me why you were a fish; the French have some weird thing with food. Actually, one explanation is that an April Fish is a newly spawned fish, a naïve youngster susceptible to trickery-–easily caught.

In France today, April first is called "Poisson d'Avril" April Fish. French children fool their friends by taping a paper fish to their back. When the " fool" discovers the trick, the prankster yells "Poisson d'Avril!" April Fish!
(A few years back a friend thanked me for this memo. He said he now understood why schoolmates back in Ohio taped paper fish on each other's backs on April 1st.)

The tradition spread to England and further.
In Scotland the fool who is pranked is called a GOK, a slang word for a cuckoo bird. The day is called Tally Day and centers around keester kicking, putting “kick me” signs on people’s backs.In England the prankee is called a Gob or a Gobby.

All pranks are supposed to end by noon. Otherwise the prankster will have bad luck for the “new year”. The fools who are pranked are supposed to accept the prank graciously; otherwise they will have bad luck.

Historically the media gets involved in pranks. Keep that in mind when you read the paper on today. The rather staid BBC, the British Broadcasting Corporation, pulled one of the most famous April Fools' pranks. In 1957 they ran a report of how in Italy spaghetti is harvested from spaghetti trees. You can see this classic prank at:

One of the more famous American April Fools' pranks was pulled by Sports Illustrated in 1985 an expose of how the New York Mets had a pitcher in training camp who pitched barefoot and could sling a 106 mile an hour fastball. You can read the story at:

So, if someone pulls an April Fools' trick on you
just remember the words of Mark Twain:

"The first of April is the day we remember
what we are the other 364 days of the year. "

Born in the month of Sextilis