Let the good times roll

Bon temps roulez mes amis. It's Mardi Gras (Fat Tuesday) folks. So everybody shake your groove thing.




Today is also know as Shrove Tuesday or Pancake Day, which heralds the beginning of fasting in Lent. On this day (so the historians say) there were feasts of pancakes to use up the supplies of fat, butter and eggs... foods that were forbidden during austere Lent.

In England there arc several celebrations on this day but perhaps the best known one is the Pancake Day Race at Olney in Buckinghamshire which has been held since 1445. The race came about when a woman cooking pancakes heard the shriving bell summoning her to confession. She ran to church wearing her apron and still holding her frying pan, and thus without knowing it, started a tradition that has lasted for over five hundred years.

Keep them pancakes coming


English: It is funny language-

1) There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor
pine in pineapple.
2) English muffins weren't invented in England nor French fries in
France.
3) Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are
meat.
4) We find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and
a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
5) Ask yourself this question - why is it that writers write but
fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?
6) If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth?
7) One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, two meese? One index, two indices?
8) Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend.
9) If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of
them, what do you call it?
10) If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?

Today is Liberation Day in San Marino. Americans remain woefully misinformed about San Marino.

(American remain woefully misinformed about most countries that aren't located between Canada and Mexico, but today is only Liberation Day in San Marino and I'm not going to get off-topic.)

About seventeen-hundred years go, during an epic game of hide and seek, Marinus the Stonemason ran up Mount Titano in Italy to hide from the Roman Emperor Diocletian. It was a good hiding spot and he was never found. He started his own country to pass the time, and the Republic of San Marino survives to this day, an island of foreign nationals in the middle of Italy.

Citizens of San Marino are not San Mariners. They are Sammarinese.

The population of San Marino is about 25,000. The population of San Marino, California, is about 13,000.

The California town was named in 1878 by James de Barth Shorb, who had built his home there and didn't think people would go for Shorbtown. Instead, he named it after the Maryland town in which he'd been born.

That was reportedly San Marino, Maryland, which the California town's website claims to have been named "for the tiny European republic."

There is no Maryland town named San Marino. (If there is, they haven't yet made their presence felt on Google.) Foul play is obviously afoot. Proceed with caution.


And so it goes.