Happy Easter!

The Funnies - The End of Lent (1919)

 April 1919, Life Magazine

Happy Easter Everyone!

What does Easter Sunday make you think of? Chicken sidecar races! Or at least chicks riding in egg-shell sidecars attached to a bunny. Or maybe...oh to hell with it, happy Easter.

Happy April Fool's Day!

Happy April Fool's Day from the dancing cats and Fedora the Flounder!

Quote for April

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

- Mark Twain

Happy Arbor Day!

Happy Arbor Day everyone!

Happy National Administrative Professionals Day!

The second world war changed a lot of things in America, one of which being the number of people who made their living in the field we would call "administrative personnel". Back then they were known as secretaries, typists, or in forward-thinking offices executive assistants. The growth of the field gave birth to the National Secretaries Association, an organization formed with the stated goal of bringing recognition to the contributions secretaries and other administrative personnel make to the US economy. In 1981 the association changed its name to Professional Secretaries International and again in 1998 to the International Association of Administrative Professionals (IAAP).

Back in the 1950's, when this IBM electric typewriter ad ran, it seems like the male dominated world of the office could only conceive of women as secretaries and believed all they wanted out of their work life was an "easy" job and they promised to deliver it with their electric typewriter.

The first practical powered typewriter was introduced by Kansas City, MO native James Fields Smathers in 1914, but World War I got in the way of his efforts and he wouldn't complete development of his invention until 1920. The idea of electrically-driven typewriters bounced around for a little over a decade, with the company which had purchased Smathers' prototype being bought by General Motors, its typewriter division spinning off as a solo concern, and in 1933 the current owner (Electromatic Typewriters) became a division of IBM.

So on National Administrative Professionals day why not do your admin a favor, buy them a new typewriter ribbon and a scuttle of coal for the fire. There's a good Scrooge.

Happy Earth Day

Environmental Cartoon from 1938 issue of the Rotarian

Sometimes I get a kick out of what we think of as new. Take Earth Day as an example. The Earth Day Network marks April 22, 1970 as the beginning of the movement, stating "Earth Day 1970 capitalized on the emerging consciousness, channeling the energy of the anti-war protest movement and putting environmental concerns front and center." It all sounds good, I mean more and more of us don't actually remember the 70's so we're prone to take the word of 'official' sources to tell us what happened and to read that information as historic rather than the opinion (informed or otherwise) it really is. The problem happens when the facts get in the way. 

June 1948 saw the first piece of legislation to lay down federal regulation of water quality, the Federal Water Pollution Control Act, passed by Congress.  The years between 1948 and 1970 would see the government playing a larger role, imposing regulations to control automotive emissions, protect endangered species, and Environmental Impact Statements for Federal legislation. But even the landmark FWPCA wasn’t the beginning of awareness of the value and importance of nature. 

As early as 1864 California was setting aside park land in the Yosemite Valley. This action came, in part, as a response to Frederick Law Olmstead’s suppressed manifesto calling for greater protection of Yosemite and the growing realization that America’s wild spaces were an asset worth protecting. In 1872 Ulysses S. Grant signed a bill creating Yellowstone as the country’s first national park and by 1890 Yosemite would join Yellowstone in lands set aside as protected natural spaces. 

Surely, none of these facts change the dire state of the planet we’re facing today. To survive, we must give up the convenient ignorance that makes the damage we do on a daily basis acceptable. By becoming more educated about the environment and how we can improve it and that not only applies to understanding how our habits and choices impact the planet, it also means understanding our whole history. It means avoiding seeing the generations which preceded ours as all bad or all good and merely seeing them as all human. 

Happy Earth Day to everyone. Go out and help the planet, do a good deed, and learn something that will change your life and the lives of all those who will come after you. It’s the least you can do.

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter everyone, hope you enjoy your marshmallow bunnies, chicks, and jelly beans!

Quote for April

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

- Mark Twain

Poem for April

April's Charms

by William Henry Davies

When April scatters charms of primrose gold
Among the copper leaves in thickets old,
And singing skylarks from the meadows rise,
To twinkle like black stars in sunny skies;

When I can hear the small woodpecker ring
Time on a tree for all the birds that sing;
And hear the pleasant cuckoo, loud and long --
The simple bird that thinks two notes a song;

When I can hear the woodland brook, that could
Not drown a babe, with all his threatening mood;
Upon these banks the violets make their home,
And let a few small strawberry blossoms come:

When I go forth on such a pleasant day,
One breath outdoors takes all my cares away;
It goes like heavy smoke, when flames take hold
Of wood that's green and fill a grate with gold.

The Full Pink Moon

The name of April’s full moon comes from a plant that many Midwesterners are familiar with, creeping phlox. The pink flowers of phlox are a call to gardeners across the region, a bugle blaring out “spring has come” and signaling time to till the soil and plant anything hearty enough to survive the fickle springtime weather and frost. A historical note on the origins of creeping phlox comes from the website for Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello:

“This ornamental phlox is native to the eastern and central United States and was introduced into cultivation by the late 1700s. John Bartram first cited this species when he wrote to Peter Collinson on December 1745 as it became one of the first "low-growing" species to enter Great Britain. In his The American Flower Garden Directory (1839) Philadelphia nurseryman and florist Robert Buist included the following description of this phlox: "In the spring of 1831, an eminent British collector (Thomas Drummond) exclaimed, on seeing a patch of P. subulata in one of the pine barrens of New Jersey, “The beauty of that alone is worth coming to America to see, it is so splendid.” Pink, white, and red garden varieties were known by 1850.”

One of the first flowers I began growing when I had a piece of property with a little ground was creeping phlox. I’d taken on caretaking my grandparents’ house and in the front yard was a little, raised garden with a birdbath at its center with a healthy crop of creeping phlox growing around its base. They flowered in April, little pinwheels of pink and white defying the cold. Since then I’ve been partial to the plant, even though its show of flowers ends early and leaves a scraggly blue-green mass of sprawling foliage.

Here’s a little more about the Full Pink Moon:

Happy Earth Day

Not really an Earth Day poster, but earthy none the less! Happy Earth Day everyone, dig for victory now!

Happy Tax Day!

On our day of national discontent, otherwise known as tax day, I give to you a big bottle of Pabst Tonic. This supposed cure-all would calm nerves, aid in digestion, focus the mind, restore health, and nip just about anything ailing the turn-of-the-century sucker…I mean patient.  I’m sure the marketers at Pabst would be proclaiming their marvelous extract would garner extra deductions if the FDA hadn’t finally put an end to dubious medical products of its sort.

This ad ran in Popular Mechanics in April of 1913, probably the reason that Pabst decided to use the phrase "tax upon mental, physical and nervous forces". I see the serial comma was fighting an uphill battle even back in 1913. That is unless physical and nervous forces are inseparable. Not being a malt extract expert, I really can't speak on these matters!

Anyway, all kidding aside, here’s hoping the government doesn’t take too big a bite this year. May your debits be small and your returns great!

The Funnies - April Showers (1927)

Life magazine, December 1927

Happy April Fool's Day!