Today is Sunday, March 20 and there are only 280 days until Christmas.  I played some Christmas music the other day when the lovely Elaine was napping.  I don’t know if I enjoyed it more because it was Christmas music or because I played it in March.  Either way, I liked it.  Today we remember the birthdays of Balthasar Bekker, George Caleb Bingham and Carl Reiner.  On this day in 1616 Walter Raleigh was released from the Tower of London to seek gold in Guyana, in 1868 the Jesse James Gang robbed a bank in Russelville, KY of $14,000 and in 1969 John Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibralter.  In Tunisia it is Independence Day, in the US it is National Ravioli Day and it is also Won’t You Be My Neighbor Day.

Let me start by saying that I know I had the wrong date last week.  Apparently I was so excited by DST that I jumped ahead a whole day.  I hope the mistake didn’t create any issues for anyone other than me.  It took me a day to get back in sync with the calendar.

So we have passed St. Patrick's Day and now everyone has gone back to being not Irish.  I have never quite gotten the big thing about the day.  Suddenly, one day a year, everybody wants to drink green beer, eat corned beef and cabbage and speak with a brogue.  I am not sure why. Did you hear about the Irish women’s libber?  She goes around saying Erin go braless.  Sorry, that just sort of came out.  But again why do we ignore other saints?  There are a number of other saints whose days are recognized throughout the year.  Why don’t we have parades and celebrations for them?

For example, St Fidelis of Sigmaringen.  Sigmaringen is in Germany, so we could still drink beer.  We could also eat schnitzel and bratwurst and other German delicacies.  It is written of St. Fidelis that if a poor man needed clothing Fidelis would often give the man the clothes off his back.  So on St. Fidelis Day, April 24, we could have a parade where the participants took off their clothes and threw them to the crowd.  Instead of wearing green, everyone could walk around with no clothes on.  This is starting to sound like my kind of holiday.  I think we should think about starting a movement.  Let me know your thoughts.

I want to express my concern with people’s lack of knowledge in the use and pronunciation of the English language.  As an example there have been several commercials using the word pure.  The people doing the voice overs have pronounced the word as peur instead of pyoor (like poor, but with a u).  It is almost as if these people have gone through life never having heard words pronounced correctly.  What really gets me is that no one connected with the commercial thought the proper pronunciation was important.  Either they were not aware that it was being said wrong or they just didn’t care.

Another thing I heard recently, again on several different occasions, was someone referring to a toast as doing a cheers.  One instance was a commercial for a beverage.  Several “real people, not actors” were asked their opinion of the beverage being touted.  They all, of course, expressed their amazement at how good it was.  I would love to see a commercial where they show someone who says, “I don’t really like this.  It doesn’t have a good flavor and it is kind of thick.”  I know that will never happen, but it would be interesting to see some honest reactions … but I digress.  So everyone was raving about the beverage and one girl says, “This is really good.  Do you want to do a cheers?”  A cheers?  How about drinking a toast to the beverage.

I personally do not like it when people take a word that is normally a noun and use it as a verb.  An example of that is how the word source has been used lately.  One advertiser brags about how their ingredients are sourced from local providers.  I recognize that source can be used as a verb, but why can’t they say they get or obtain their ingredients.  For that matter, how do we know that just because the provider is local, their product is good.  Just because they are local doesn’t mean they are clean or that they follow the proper guidelines … sorry, digressing some more.  It seems to me that they feel that if they source something rather than get it, it somehow makes it better.  I think we should get back to using regular words.  People have enough problems with our language as it is.

This week our fact tells us that 50% of American women say that they would marry the same man.  Another fact; however, tells us that 85% of American women are happier after their divorce or separation.  So while those women would marry the same man, they would be happier if they got divorced or separated.  Go figure.