If there exists the tiniest fissure in space-time which would allow us to slip ahead to a predetermined point in the future, how many folks would take a shortcut to 2021? I feel that most who bemoan the current calendar have an unrealistic expectation that the spectre of doom that has blanketed this year for many will magically vanish when we throw our bread against the wall on New Year’s Eve. There is no logical reason to assume this to be true. That said, I can state with certain that this mandated celebrate-a-thon will come to an end at that time, so I’ll start stretching out my bread-tossing arm now. December may fly by. Meanwhile, here was yesterday:
National Play Monopoly Day
For a slight twist on the guts of this day I opted to play McDonalds Monopoly yesterday, in that I finally went online and entered the various contest pieces we’d collected over the last few weeks into our virtual game board. As luck would have it, we are just one shy of winning a Transat family vacation for 4, so if anyone out there has the Vancouver Airport and wants to join our ‘family’ and take a trip together, hit me up.
Monopoly itself is not our favourite board game, nor would it break the top 20. If played properly the game does not take a marathon session to finish, but everyone has their own slight variants on the rules. And the purpose of this board game was to show how dangerous and economically unhealthy a monopoly is, so by winning the game you are essentially becoming the largest threat to the in-game universe’s national economy. You become the 1%. And still you pay a $75 Luxury Tax, same as us poor schlubs.
The McDonalds version, which has been around since 1987, is more pleasant. First off, most people end up winning some actual prize at some point – though I’d bet most never cash in their free muffin pieces because who thinks of McDonalds if they’re craving a muffin? Just as a person can cheat in the board game, that has also been tried with the McGame. And very successfully. The head of security for the company that operates the contest (by law it has to be a 3rd party company) snagged every top prize from the game between 1995 and 2000. He pilfered the super-rare winning pieces and gave them to family and friends, sold them to strangers, or (and this is where it gets weird) passed them along to a contact he made with the Colombo crime family. It was an impressive fraud, and one that should prompt us all to avoid participating in games like this unless we happened to be headed to the restaurant anyway. No point in clogging up the arteries unnecessarily if the game can be fixed. McDonalds insists the game has been clean since that one gigantic fraud case, but still. The doubt persists.
And now we don’t have to pretend to enjoy playing the actual board game to celebrate this one.
World Toilet Day
The United Nations, crafter of the super-communist New World Order and various other conspiracies your weird aunt is frothing about on social media these days, came up with this celebration to bring attention to toilets. Toilets are grand, and while we’d like to think they are plentiful everywhere around the world, the reality is that they are not. 4.2 billion people on this planet don’t have access to a top-notch sanitation system. That’s more than half the humans.
This year’s theme for World Toilet Day is climate change, and the effects that climate change can have on poorly-maintained sanitations systems around the world. Just imagine the smell when an unexpected flood wreaks havoc on a run-down system.
There are numerous streaming videos and extensive reports available online if you’re interested in learning more about the toilet situation on the planet. I glanced through it, but couldn’t commit to making a day out of it. How did we celebrate? We made a point of deeply appreciating our comfy toilets and their effective poop-removal capabilities. I’d go into more detail, but I’m pretty sure no one wants that.
Have A Bad Day Day
Did I have a bad day yesterday? Not really, but I can certainly find a few things to complain about. This is one of those ultra-weird celebrations concocted by Ruth & Thomas Roy, strictly for the sake of padding the list of holidays with heaps of strangeness. Store owners are encouraged to tell their employees to wish customers a bad day today, something I’m confident roughly zero store owners are doing. Because nobody would be in on the joke.
So to celebrate this one, I thought we should simply try to have a bad day. We didn’t try very hard, as that’s trickier to manage than one would expect, but we did have some issues. First off, Jodie was working until well after 8:00, so we hardly saw one another all day. Secondly, it was cold as all hell and I had to go outside and clear off new snow from our walks. Thirdly, I had to sit through a lengthy training session during the afternoon, one that will have almost no impact on my life.
It wasn’t a bad day, but it was a tedious one.
National Carbonated Beverage With Caffeine Day
We couldn’t find the source for this day, which is deeply generic and remarkably easy to celebrate. We try to keep our carbonated beverage consumption at one per day (not counting frothy, yummy beer or soda water), and Coke Zero is our standard go-to. Yesterday I tried to pretty it up from the usual drink-out-of-the-can tradition.
We once again ramp up to a weekend with a deep hope that we’ll actually get around to counting our progress thus far. This count would determine just how much of our remaining 40-ish days will be devoted to manic celebration and how many we can cruise through. Here’s what’s up today:
- National Peanut Butter Fudge Day. Our team baker (hi, Mom!) may need to help us out here.
- National Absurdity Day. Isn’t every day of our lives an absurdity? I’d argue it is, if you’re living your life right.
- Name Your PC Day. What will we name our computer? So many possibilities! So little drama!
- Beautiful Day. Literally a day to appreciate all the beautiful stuff in our lives. After acknowledging my wife, what else remains?
- Globally Organized Hug A Runner Day. Well, our dogs do a lot of running. We could hug them. The other alternative is running.
celebrate366.com 