HAPPY NEW YEAR…PSYCH!

"This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three-hundred and sixty-four."-Mark Twain

I would have never realized how lame the origin of April Fool's Day was unless I read it for myself. I always pictured April Fool's to have started because of some kind of crazy act, like the British aristocracy releasing plagued rats into a peasant's house as a lark or a French King maybe inviting a peasant to dine with his royalty only to send him to the guillotine. You know, something lighthearted. But sadly my findings just brought me back to the Christian church, the calendar and that damn vernal equinox. Oh yeah...and let us not forget…the French.

Basically, Julius Caesar's calendar (the Julian Calendar) had a few flaws to it that screwed up the timing of Easter and the vernal equinox. So in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a new calendar cleverly titling it, the Gregorian Calendar. This is the calendar that we know and live by today. Pope G's decree was that New Year's Day would be celebrated on Jan. 1st, not April 1st. (Technically it was March 25 but the celebration lasted from then until the beginning of April. They knew how to party back then.) In France, apparently not everyone got the memo and this led to some confusion and people celebrating New Year's on the wrong day. (insert laugh track here) The ones who made the mistake were laughed at by their peers and had dead fish sneakily placed on their backs. Seriously. The French can be so cruel!!

IN YOUR EOSTRE BONNET

I've tried to figure it out but you pretty much have to be an astrophysicist to be able to understand when exactly Easter is going to take place. It can fall anywhere between March 22 and April 25 and may or may not have something to do with the moons. The system was set up in 325 AD by men much smarter than myself, and as long as they keep doing their job I will not have a problem figuring out when to paint my easter eggs for the easter bunny.



If you're a sane person at all you might have wondered what do easter eggs and rabbits have to do with the resurrection of Christ? Well the short answer is nothing. The long answer is that it was a great way for the Christian church to get those damn Pagans to fall into line and convert. All that Christianity had to do was to absorb some Pagan practices and symbols.

Paganism can broadly refer to any religion outside of Judaism, the big C and Islam. If you've read The DaVinci Code you know that some Pagans believed in the balance of nature, and all that earth, wind and fire jazz. They were the original hippies. And if there is one thing hippies love, it is their equinoxes, especially the Spring equinox when fertility and the birth of life is celebrated. So the Christians smoothly changed the Spring equinox party into a resurrection celebration and named it Easter.

Wait there's more.

Easter comes from the ancient pagan goddess of the spring named Eostre and according to popular folklore, Eostre once saved a bird whose wings had frozen during the winter by turning it into a rabbit. Because the rabbit had once been a bird, it could still lay eggs, and that rabbit grew up to be the Easter Bunny. The Germans added to this delusion by saying that only good children received gifts of colored eggs in the nests that they made in their caps and bonnets before Easter.

And if you couldn't swallow that pill here is another reason we have egg laying rabbits. Eggs and rabbits were important to the Pagans because they were symbols of fertility. Eggs sure, but rabbits? You know that saying "to breed like bunnies," well its there for a good reason. Female rabbits can conceive a second litter of offspring while still pregnant with the first. That's one slutty rabbit. So the Christians took those two symbols slapped some color on the eggs and made a holiday of it.

NOW LET US PLAY,
CAN YOU SPOT THE PAGAN?
choose wisely

KISS ME, I'M IRISH

I always thought of St. Patrick as the Christian version of the Greek's Bacchus, God of wine and intoxication, but instead of laying around drinking wine all day in a toga, St. Patrick had a pint of Guinness and a shot of Jameson in hand, dressed in a green skirt looking for the next pub brawl. Well, like most visions I have of history, I usually come to find out that i'm pretty off the mark, this vision included.

In short, St. Patrick was born in Britain, captured by Irish raiders, taken as a slave to Ireland, escaped, entered the church, became a deacon, then a bishop, to only return to Ireland as a Christian missionary. Interestingly, it is believed that he used the shamrock, aka the 3-leaf clover, to explain the holy trinity. I'm not really sure how the two relate but he must have made an appealling argument because he was a CCM, Christian Converting Machine. St. Patrick was also believed to have banished all snakes from Ireland, that not being too difficult since there were never any there to begin with, but good job nonetheless.

So while you are out there wearing green, drunk, puking in alleyways, and making fun of all those men wearing skirts, just remember St. Patrick's day has nothing to do with any of that. In fact, St. Patrick's color was blue not green, and kilts are Scottish not Irish, you drunkard. FORE SHAME.

WHO WILL WIN???

YOU DECIDE!!!

ET TU, BRUTE?

Of all the classic literature that I was forced to read in high school I probably enjoyed Charles Dickens the most, but even with his stories I would opt to read the abridged versions. (A man that gets paid by the word usually writes one too many of them.) Shakespeare, on the other hand, I never cared for. There is something in my brain that doesn't allow me to understand a sonnet or a couplet, or even a couple of sonnets, and forget about me ever appreciating the nuances of the iambic pentameter. And if it wasn't for Shakespeare, I probably would never have developed my fear of soothsayers. Gypsies, you know, small hands, smell like cabbage.

In the age Before Christ, Julius Caesar was the leader of the Roman World, created the 365 day calendar and was luvah to Cleopatra, but was he assassinated because he suffered from diarrhea one day?

During Caesar's reign as dictator over the Roman World he was given every title imaginable, from "Father of the Fatherland" to "Dictator for Life," to even "Naughtious Maximus," (but that one usually in private with Cleo). At one particular senate meeting, Caesar was told he was going to be awarded a new honor but did not stand for the news. Some supporters of Caesar say this was due to a sudden attack of diarrhea, some historians say epilepsy, and some say it was because of his ego. Either way, he didn't stand and he didn't approve of the title and as a result the assassination plot was ago.



On March 15, 44 BC, in an attempt to return Rome to a normal Republic, the Senators got together and killed Caesar stabbing him 23 times. (Lost fans take that to mean what you will) Ironically though his death lead to a Roman civil war which ultimately led to the establishment of a permanent autocracy by Caesar's adopted heir, Gaius Octavianus. Oops. As for Brutus…well he later committed suicide.

Before all of this, Ides was just a Roman term to mark the middle of the month, nothing creepy at all about it. But because of Shakespeare's love for foreshadowing and George McFly's tragic alternate 1985 death, the Ides of March will forever be engraved in our minds as a metaphor for impending doom.