It’s now the 15th day of October 2021. I wonder what this post will say. I never know. It just seems to flow from somewhere and ends up as words on the page. Poems are the same and so are song lyrics. I’ve never written a novel but I’m sure that’s what would happen. I do know what day it is because it comes from a website. Today is I Love Lucy Day, Breast Health Day, Global Hand Washing Day, National Cheese Curd Day, National Chicken Cacciatore Day, National Mushroom Day and National Roast Pheasant Day. There’s more but these are enough. Mushrooms work fine for me. The history part of this post is mostly up to me because I have to pick a few footnotes from a thousand years of stuff that happened. Did you know that on this day in 1520, King Henry VIII ordered bowling lanes to be built at Whitehall? I didn’t. In 1674, the Torsåker witch trials began. They were the largest witch trials held in Sweden. 71 were beheaded and burned. At the actual trial, The Lutheran priest ordered two young boys to stand at the door of the church to identify the witches by an invisible ‘devil’s mark’ on their forehead as they walked into church. This was religious hysteria. Unbelievable. In 1860 an 11-year-old Grace Bedell writes to Abraham Lincoln telling him to grow a beard. Which he did. In 1883 on this day the Supreme Court held that the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which made it a crime for the operators of hotels, theaters, and other public accommodations to discriminate on the basis of race, was unconstitutional on the grounds that the Constitution didn’t extend to private businesses. I learned something new today which also happens to be the German philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche’s birthday. He died in 1900 at the age of 55. I’ll wrap up this post with a couple of his observations: “And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music” and “Enjoy life. This is not a dress rehearsal.” I’m satisfied with this post. Abide.
