What Would Jimmy Do?

“It is with some sadness that we had to announce the demise of the Williamson/Stracensky Family Web Site.” Fourteen years ago today, if you happened to be at this place on the Internet, you read those words. For a number of years I put in a fair amount of time and effort to maintain and keep up-to-date a web site dedicated to the Williamson/Stracensky families. I thought at the time, and still do, that a centralized location to keep up with all the family events and activities was a good idea. 

But I was wrong — the site never got very much use. We surveyed the family as to whether we should keep it — or not. Four (4) family members responded that would be sorry to see it go.

So — on March 31, 2007 if you looked for the Family Web Site, you got a page, headlined “The Family Web Site is Dead — Long Live the Blogs.” If you read further, you learned that the Williamson/Stracensky Family Web Site had been taken down and replaced by blogs — one by Claire and one by me. 

Initially, my plan was to blog about family…. but that thought quickly went away and I decided the family wasn’t interested in the web site, and there was no reason they would be particularly interested in my blog. My blog turned out to be about nothing — it consists of my thoughts whenever I sit down to update it. Just whatever happens to be on my mind or pops into my head. 

Over the years, I’ve often addressed significant family events or activities and I’ve more often blogged about nothing in particular.

Claire maintained her blog for a while, but it is currently inactive. I continue to ramble on about nothing every day or so. Fourteen years seems like a long time, but the years pass fast. While today may not be a monumental occasion, it’s a special day here in the world of “What Would Jimmy Do?”
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Today is World Backup Day. You faithful readers know that for the last couple of years, I’ve blogged about this day because — well, it’s important. But— I still think it’s misleading. When I first heard about it I was very excited because it seemed like the kind of day I’d be in to celebrating. Of course, I discovered that the day didn’t have anything to do with going backwards… it’s a day when you’re supposed to backup all your computer files. I will continue to support the day, but my opinion is that World Backup Day should be about — backing up.

I suppose it’s appropriate, or an omen or something, that the day before April Fools is World Backup Day… this “day” originally started as World Backup Month and was originated by a hard drive company by the name of Maxtor. Maxtor was later acquired by Seagate Technology.

Before computers became the center of our world, backup seemed to mean to undo one’s actions or to reconsider one’s thoughts, but today when “backup” is used, most people immediately associate it with a computer. 

I think our data is backed up regularly, so I don’t need a special day to do it…. but as I said, for those that don’t this is an important day. So — since I won’t be doing a special data backup today, maybe I’ll do something else related to back or backwards, like maybe thinking of words that can be spelled the same backwards, such as level, madam, radar, noon, rotator, mom or racecar.

Celebrate the day any way you want, but don’t forget to backup the stuff on your computer….
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Palm Sunday is the Sunday before Easter and the sixth Sunday and final day of Lent. The day marks the occasion when Jesus rode on a donkey and entered Jerusalem. It is called Palm Sunday because people in Jerusalem cut palm branches and waved them in the air and laid them out on the ground before Jesus rode into the city.

In biblical times, it was common for kings and important people to arrive by a procession riding on a donkey. The donkey symbolized peace, so those who chose to ride them showed that they came with peaceful intentions.

Palm Sunday is one of the most important days in the Christian calendar after Christmas and Easter. Catholic churches bless palm branches with holy water and them distribute them to congregants.

Palm Sunday rituals vary by geography. When we were living in the Philippines, on Palm Sunday a statue of Christ riding a donkey (the Humenta,) or often the presiding priest on horseback, is brought to the local church in a morning procession. Congregants line the route, waving ornately woven palm branches, called palaspás, and spreading aprons (tapis) made for this ritual in imitation of the excited Jerusalemites. At the entrance to the church, children dressed as angels scatter flowers as they sing traditional tunes. The first Mass of the day then follows.

Once blessed, the palaspás are brought home and placed on altars, doorways and windows. The Church teaches that this is a sign of welcoming Christ into the home, but many believe that the blessed palaspás are apotropaic, deterring evil spirits, lightening and fires. Another “folk” custom is to feed pieces of blessed palaspás to roosters used in cockfighting. This practice was strongly discouraged by the Archbishop of Manila. In the provinces in the Philippines, the flowers strewn by the angels during the procession are added to the rice seeds being planted, in the belief that these will ensure a bountiful harvest. 

So no matter how you celebrate Palm Sunday, it is an occasion for reflection on the final week of Jesus’ life — a time to prepare our heart for the agony of His Passion and the joy of His Resurrection.
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This month’s full moon will appear tomorrow night — with an odd name. March’s full moon is called the full Worm Moon.

According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, the name Worm Moon was given to the March Moon because of the earthworms that appear as the soil warms in the spring. Another explanation for the name comes from  Captain Johnathan Carver, an 18th-century explorer, who wrote that the Worm Moon refers to a different sort of “worm” — beetle larvae — that begin to emerge from the thawing bark of trees and other winter hideouts this time of year.

There are a number of names for the March Moon that refer to the transition from winter to spring. Some reference the appearance/reappearance of certain animals, such as the Goose Moon, Eagle Moon and Crow Comes Back Moon. Some refer to signs of the season, like the Sugar Moon, Wind Strong Moon, and the Sore Eyes Moon. Apparently that name comes from the blinding rays of sunlight that reflect off the melting snow of late winter.

The March full Moon plays a role in religion, too. If the March Moon is the last full Moon of the winter season, meaning it occurs before the spring equinox, it is known as the Lenten Moon. This year, because it is the first full Moon occurring after the spring equinox, it will be the Paschal Full Moon. This means that it’s date determines the date of Easter — this year on April 4.

So get out and enjoy the full Moon tomorrow night — and think about what Buddha said, “Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.”
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Happy Vernal Equinox — the first day of astrological spring. It’s also supposedly a magical day. According to some people today is the day you can stand a raw egg on its end. And a lot of those same people believe that during the equinox brooms will stand by themselves — straight up. 

Now that broom thing sounds pretty cool… too bad, it’s not true. Both faithful readers know this because keeping up with this blog makes you a well-informed person. But if you’re not one of the faithful and are interested, I invite you to look to the right and find the archive list. Check the entries for  March 20, 2017 and April 4, 2017. You will note that the entry on March 20 detailed my scientific experiment (complete with pictures) to prove that a broom could “stand alone.” You can read my excitement in my writing. However, following the best scientific methods, I tried the experiment again on April 4 — a non equinox day. The broom will still “stand alone.” 

So — following the science, like I always do, I can tell you that “the broom stands alone” is a hoax — maybe one of the greatest conspiracies ever conceived. 
But no matter, today is still the Vernal Equinox and our grass is beginning to get green….
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Today is Friday… it’s also Lent. Even though (because of our age) we’re “exempt” from the rule to abstain from eating meat on each Friday of Lent, we usually don’t have meat on those Fridays.

But, in addition to being Friday, today (March 19) is also St. Joseph Day. The feast of St. Joseph is celebrated annually on March 19th in honor of St. Joseph, the husband of Mary and stepfather of Jesus. The holiday takes place during Lent. 

St. Joseph’s feast day is a “solemnity,” the highest order of liturgical feast — meaning that Catholics are to observe it similar to a Sunday. But what happens when a feast day lands on Friday during Lent?

According to the Code of Canon Law, “Abstinence from meat… is to be observed on all Fridays, unless a solemnity should fall on a Friday.” St. Joseph Day is a day of celebration, meaning any type of fasting or abstinence from meat is temporarily lifted on that day. 

I’m not sure what we’re having tonight, but whether we have meat or not, we’ll observe the “spirit” of the law and celebrate the life of St. Joseph.
Happy St. Joseph Day.
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Today is St. Patrick’s Day and time for my annual St. Patrick’s Day blog. Obviously I’ll probably wind up repeating stuff from past years, because there’s only so much one can know, or not know, about a day that is celebrated annually. But if you’re like me and don’t remember what i wrote last year, it won’t matter….

I though this year we’d focus on some of the things that are not true about St. Patrick’s Day, such as….
St. Patrick wasn’t Irish — even though he’s the patron saint of Ireland, he was born in Scotland. His real name was Palladius. He was kidnapped and sold into slavery in Ireland when he was a teenager. Later he escaped, went back to Scotland and joined a monastery. He returned to Ireland as a missionary, where he lived for 40 years.

A saint’s feast day marks the day that they died — not their birthday. 2021 is the 1,560th anniversary of St. Patrick’s death.

Even though green is the color most associated with Ireland, it’s not St. Patrick’s color. Members of the Order of St. Patrick used blue as their symbolic color.

Many St. Patrick’s Day traditions that we assume are traditionally Irish actually originated in the United States. The first St. Patrick’s Day parade occurred in New York City in 1782 — it became an annual event in 1848. It wasn’t until 1931 that Ireland held an official St. Patrick’s Day parade. And the drinking… alcohol consumption was not a staple of the holiday in Ireland. In fact, until the 1960s, pubs in Ireland were closed on March 17, in observance of the religious holiday.

Legend has it that St. Patrick gave a rousing sermon that sent all of Ireland’s snakes slithering off into the ocean. Most historians think Ireland owes its lack of snakes to the Ice Age and geography, not St. Patrick. The slipping glaciers of the last Ice Age left Ireland  surrounded by water, making it impossible for snakes to reach it. Before then, the land that would become Ireland was far too cold for the cold-blooded creatures to survive.

St. Patrick’s Day is a feast day for a Catholic saint — best known for converting native Irish people to Christianity. Until the 1700s, it was a day on the Catholic calendar in observance of a saint important to, and popular in Ireland — and not much anywhere else. In Ireland, Catholics honored St. Patrick with prayer and quiet reflection. St. Patrick’s Day, as we know it today, started in America in the late 19th and early 20th century, when the large numbers of newly arrived Irish immigrants began using the day as a way to celebrate their Irish heritage.

The process of officially canonizing saints didn’t become common practice in the Church until long after St. Patrick’s death. During his lifetime, “saint” was not an official title bestowed only on those whom the Pope deemed worthy. It was more of a general title that would be assigned to people who lived especially holy lives or performed acts of martyrdom.

Even though he gets credit for it, it’s unlikely that St. Patrick introduced Christianity to Ireland. In the fifth century AD, the Pope sent Palladius to Ireland with the mission of preaching to “the Irish believing in Christ.” So he didn’t introduce Christianity to Ireland — he really just helped it along. As far as St. Patrick using the shamrock as a symbol to demonstrate Christianity…. he may well have used it to represent the Holy Trinity, but the shamrock already had symbolic significance in pagan traditions. Green was an important color to paganism because it represented rebirth, and the number three was as much a staple of paganism as it is of Christianity — many pagan religions have three primary gods.

There is really no relationship between St. Patrick’s Day and leprechauns, except they’re both Irish. However, more people don red beards and green hats on St. Patrick’s Day than on any other day of the year. Leprechauns didn’t become a staple of Irish literature until many years after St. Patrick’s death. And even though many decorations around St. Patrick’s Day show female leprechauns, traditional leprechauns are only male. 

But none of this “fake news” about the day detracts from the celebration…. my favorite Irish saying is still, “I’m Irish! When I feel well I feel better than anyone, when I am in pain, I yell at the top of my lungs, and when I am dead I shall be deader than anybody.”
Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!
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Well, today’s that day again — the Ides of March, a day with a sinister reputation that’s probably undeserved. 

We all remember that before Caesar’s time in Roman history, there were ten months and the first month of the year was March. (Back then it was called Martius, after Mars, the war god.)  Ides means “split” as the lunar month was split into three parts, the ides being in the middle of the month. 

And of course, we all know the saying “Beware the Ides of March,” is not meant to imply that the Ides of March itself is sinister. This was just a normal day in the Roman calendar and even though the word is plural it denotes a single day that falls in the middle of the month. 
To be clear, the Ides weren’t anything — just a name given to a division of the month and every month had its Ides. 

However, because Shakespeare incorporated the words into his play Julius Caesar, the Ides became associated with bad luck. A seer called Spurinna warned Caesar about the Ides of March a month before his death and later on the morning of his death. The place where he was assassinated was cursed and left vacant for a while and later it was converted into a public latrine. 

So depending on your viewpoint, you can blame or credit Shakespeare for the Ides reputation. in all likelihood, today will probably feel like any other day of the month to you….
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If you got up early to celebrate Pi Day, I hope you didn’t miss it, because….
It’s that “time” again. At 2:00 a.m. this morning everyone got out of bed and set their clocks ahead one hour…. then went back to bed knowing that they’d just lost an hour of sleep. These spring and fall clock changes continue a long tradition started by Benjamin Franklin to (supposedly) conserve energy.

Historically, daylight saving time (DST) has begun in the summer months and ended right before winter — but the rules have changed over the years. In 2007, the rules for DST changed for the first time in more than 20 years. The changes were enacted by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, and extended the length of DST in the interest of reducing energy consumption. 

The rules increased the duration of DST by about a month. DST is now in effect for 238 days, or about 65% of the year. When the policy act was passed, Congress retained the right to revert to the prior law should the change prove unpopular or if energy savings were not significant. 
Even though any energy saving is questionable, the new policy remains in effect:
DST begins at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday of March
DST ends at 2:00 a.m/ on the first Sunday in November

Most people that I’ve talked to lately, think it should be done away with, but despite the complaints, DST isn’t all bad news. One benefit seems to be a decrease in crime. One study found that the start of DST in the spring was associated with a drop in robberies. 

But for now, like it or not, we’re into Day Saving Time — if it’s confusing to you, just think about the guy that asked, “daylight saving time — why are they saving it, and where do they keep it?”
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Tomorrow, March 14 (3/14) is Pi Day. I blog about Pi Day every year because I like Pi Day. I know a lot of people use it as an excuse to eat pie and lately I notice most of the Pizza places run Pi Day specials on their “pies.” But of course everyone knows by now that Pi Day isn’t about pies.

Like all days that repeat every year, I’ll probably repeat some details about Pi again this year, but hopefully I’ll touch on some new stuff. There wasn’t always a Pi Day. In 1988, physicist Larry Shaw launched the pi-partying day at the Exploration Science Museum in San Francisco. Every year, on March 14 (2/14) staff and visitors walk a circular parade (the diameter of the circle is like Pi times its circumference) each holding one of the infinite numbers of Pi. It didn’t become a national event until 2009, when the House of Representatives passed Resolution 224 with the goal being to increase interest in math and science.

The ancient Babylonians knew of pi’s existence nearly 4,000 years ago. A Babylonian tablet from between 1900 B.C and 1680 B.C calculates pi as 3.125, and the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus of 1650 B.C, a famous Egyptian mathematical document, lists a value of 3.1605. The King James Bible (I Kings 7:23) gives an approximation of pi in cubits — a unit of length, corresponding to the length of the forearm from the elbow to the middle finger tip (estimated at about 18 inches or 46 centimeters.)
The Greek mathematician Archimedes (287-212 B.C.) approximated pi using the Pythagorean theorem — a geometric relationship between the length of a triangle’s sides and the area of the polygons inside and outside circles. 

To back up a bit, Pi (π) is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter. Because it is irrational, it can’t be written as a fraction — it is an infinitely long, non repeating number. The record for the most digits of pi memorized belongs to Rajveer Meena of India, who recited 70,000 decimal places in 2015. 

Because pi is an infinite number, humans will, by definition, never determine every single digit of pi. However, the number of decimal places calculated has grown exponentially since pi’s first use. The Babylonians thought the fraction 3 ⅛ was good enough in 2000 B.C., the ancient Chinese and the writers of the Old Testament seemed perfectly happy to use the integer 3. By 1665, Sir Issac Newton had calculated pi to 16 decimal places. The advent of computers radically improved humans’ knowledge of pi. Between 1949 and 1967, the number of known decimal places of pi skyrocketed from 2,037 on the ENiAC computer to 500,000 on the CDC 6600 computer in Paris. Late last year, a Swiss company used a multithreaded computer program to calculate 22,459,157,718,361 digits of pi over the course of 105 days.

I mentioned last year that there is a resistance movement growing…. some argue that pi is a derived quantity, and that the value tau (equal to twice pi) is a more intuitive irrational number. Tau directly relates the circumference to the radius, which is a more mathematically consequential value. Tau also works better in trigonometric calculations — tau/4 radians corresponds to an angle that sweeps a quarter of a circle, for instance.

So if you’re interested in joining the resistance movement, or you’re just looking for another day to celebrate, meet me back here on Tau day — June 28.
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