Skoal!

I only offer up a toast after a perfectly sober Monday because you can win a bar bet or two knowing that today is, in fact, a bunch of total fakery. Give people a choice like this:

Which of these is not, technically, a legal United States government holiday?
- Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr.
- President's Day
- Thanksgiving Day
- Christmas Day

and you'll usually wind up drinking for free. Today's holiday is, and always has been, Washington's Birthday, even though by a late 1960s Congressional proclamation it has been designated to fall on a day that never was Washington's Birthday by either pre- or post-Gregorian calendaring.  As Hendrik Hertzberg splains in this week's New Yorker (oh, go on, I haven't bothered you about them for awhile):

Ever since 1968, when, in one of the last gasps of Great Society reformism, holidays were rejiggered to create more three-day weekends, federal law has decreed the third Monday in February to be Washington’s Birthday. And Presidents’/’s/s Day? According to Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives, it was a local department-store promotion that went national when retailers discovered that, mysteriously, generic Presidents clear more inventory than particular ones, even the Father of His Country. Now everybody thinks it’s official, but it’s not. (Note to Fox News: could be a War on Washington’s Birthday angle here, similar to the War on Christmas. Over to you, Bill.)

Just to add to the Presidential confusion, Washington’s Birthday is not Washington’s birthday. George Washington was born either on February 11, 1731 (according to the old-style Julian calendar, still in use at the time), or on February 22, 1732 (according to the Gregorian calendar, adopted in 1752 throughout the British Empire). Under no circumstances, therefore, can Washington’s birthday fall on Washington’s Birthday, a.k.a. Presidents Day, which, being the third Monday of the month, can occur only between the 15th and the 21st. Lincoln’s birthday, February 12th, doesn’t make it through the Presidents Day window, either. Nor do the natal days of our other two February Presidents, William Henry Harrison (born on the 6th) and Ronald Reagan (the 9th). A fine mess!

So those signs you saw in the banks which wouldn't let you cash your check today because of Presidents Day? Lies. Soon as they reopen, I'm demanding my cash back in the new Nixon-portraited commemorative three-dollar bills.

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As long as I'm dispensing information, here, for the hundreds of people who cared, are the remaining answers to the What Poem Was That meme from last week. The source which collected all of these, kews and ayes, was one of my favorite old sources for trivia questions when I ran games on AOL: the Williams College semiannual trivia contest, which broadcasts questions throughout the night on the college radio station, accompanied by music which hints at the answers. Some of their recent events haven't been chronicled, but last month's contest was, which produced the Odd Fact about Handel and Hendrix mentioned here later in the week last week. The poems, however, were all from the December 1994 contest, which had somehow escaped me all the other times I stole from it.


( And now ladies and gentlemen, heeeeeeeeeeere's Johnny Donne! )