Almanac: February 2004

February 2004
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February - The Facts

Our Rant for February

Download a Free Desktop Calendar for February

FEBRUARY - THE FACTS

It’s February.  If you’re serious about growing peas, you’d better be planting them pretty soon.

 This is also the peak time to buy or harvest citrus, potatoes, beets, carrots, turnips and radishes.  

February was invented sometime around 713 BC.  Prior to that, early Roman calendar years lasted 304 days, after which there were about 61 days of winter that were simply ignored, probably because it was assumed to be too cold to do anything worth recording anyway.

This was extremely convenient for forgetful people, because if they missed an appointment during what is now January or February, the non-existence of those months made an excellent excuse.

February was named after the Etruscan god of the dead and purification, Februus, the Italian equal of the Grecian Pluto.  Februus was the spiritual host of a holiday known as “Februationes” which was a cleaning celebration.

Februationes isn’t celebrated in modern days, probably because we now hire someone else to do the cleaning.

Instead, we have Valentine’s Day.  There are several different stories explaining the origin of Valentine’s Day.  Of them, we prefer this one:  under the rule of Claudius the Cruel, Rome became entangled in many bloody and unpopular wars, so that it became increasingly difficult to enlist soldiers.  Claudius couldn’t bring himself to believe that soldiers wouldn’t want to risk their lives to make him look good politically, so he decided that the problem was that the would-be warriors didn’t want to leave their wives and families. 

So he made marriage and engagement illegal.

Needless to say, that law was not widely respected and a priest who was to become St. Valentine began a practice of marrying people in secret. 

For this, he was apprehended and condemned to be beaten to death with clubs AND beheaded.  (Just like today, the government didn’t want to take any chances.)   February 14 was the date when this sentence was carried out.

The holiday seems to have arisen when the observance of St. Valentine’s martyrdom melded together with the Lupercalia feasts held in February in which the names of young women were drawn from a jar by young men for purposes best left to the imagination.

Unfortunately, free love does not enhance the prospects of a capitalistic society and things have tamed considerably over the last couple of thousand years so that modern Valentine’s Day is merely our second-most commercialized holiday.

OUR RANT FOR FEBRUARY

 Street Smart meets Horse Sense   by Neil Shelton

I guess that, like most people, I enjoy patting myself on the back every now and then, or maybe more often than that.  Also like most people, since I’m the one doing it, I don’t find much of anything wrong with that.

 On the other hand, I do think that this can be taken to unseemly extremes by folks who are not me, and a case in point, of which I am getting particularly bored, involves the use of the term “street smart”.

 If I may be allowed to pretend that you’ve been living in a cave for the last 20 years, let me explain that “street smart” is a label intended to describe someone who is particularly adept at taking care of him or herself in an urban setting, usually to the exclusion of everyone else, and despite a complete lack of any socially redeeming graces.

 Time and Newsweek absolutely LOVE to describe young delinquents as “street smart”.  It’s almost as if those writers secretly admire the astute business-sense and long-term planning of someone who would start dealing crack cocaine in the first place. 

To give a simple example, if Jimmy has three apples, Big Otis, the 280-lb., 15-year-old pimp, trigger-man and local mob representative, has 875 apples, and the creaky old lady down by the bus stop trying for dear life just to remain standing upright and, God willing, make it through one more long and painful day, has one apple, Jimmy gives Big Otis a wide berth and knocks over the old lady for HER apple. 

 This is “street smart”. 

 I guess what ticks me off is that the term is most often used to glorify the baser aspects of human existence; to celebrate “me-first” survival, over human decency. 

 If Jimmy had a clue as to who Mother Theresa was, he’d be sure to let you know that she was a dork.

 And incidentally, you don’t need to get the idea that this is my opinion simply because I am an Official Hayseed.  “Street smart” is just an urban twist of the old rural term, “horse sense”.

Like the word “awesome”, “horse sense” once meant something different, but today it frequently refers to someone like Earnest. 

Ernest may be a third-grade drop-out who lives in an old truck bed and beats his wife, who in turn beats their 11 sticky-dirty-snotty children (especially when in the check-out lane at Wal-Mart) but, among his peers, he is said to have “horse sense” because he never displays anything akin to generosity, sympathy, or open-mindedness.

The opposite of having “horse sense” is to be an “educated fool”.  The term “educated fool” is extremely popular among uneducated fools.  It describes someone, who, though literate, ambitious and well-schooled, does things with which the speaker disagrees.  Adlai Stevenson comes to mind.

The message is, if you’ve ever done anything for anyone else, ever voted in favor of anything, or ever given away anything, even something that you didn’t really want, then there’s something wrong with you.

Hmmm.  This all sounds kinda preachy doesn’t it?  Funny where things can go when I get wound up.  If I were more street smart, I’d probably trash it and write something else, but here it is after nine already, and that would be a lot of extra work.

The truth is, I got started on this line of thought the other day with a completely different idea in my head. 

I was out driving the tractor (where I do some a muh bes’ thinkin’) and I watched a hawk flying over.  Naturally, like any red-blooded American boy who grew up in the fifties, I immediately thought about the lyrics to Lorenz Hart’s theme from Oklahoma!:

“Every night my honey lamb and I
Sit alone and talk, and watch a hawk
Makin' lazy circles in the sky.”

I was thinking that while Hart may have been a big-time lyricist and probably used all the right forks etc., that he obviously didn’t have much horse sense (in the classic definition of simply knowing something commonplace.  Please ignore everything else I just wrote)

Never mind the difficulty one encounters in trying to watch anything, but bats, flying at night, I’m wagering that Hart never, ever, even once, sat with HIS honey lamb and watched a hawk similarly.

Hawks are birds of prey.  They don’t make lazy circles in the sky, they find a nice tree-top to perch in, and then they wait for an unsuspecting victim to show itself, at which time they swoop down and scoop up fuzzy Peter Cottontail or whomever. 

What follows involves much blood, hair and gristle.

Scientific tests have shown that baby chicks will go berserk when the silhouette of a hawk is held over their heads (as opposed to that of, say, a pigeon) so for a hawk to make lazy circles in the sky would be rather akin to an army proclaiming to all the world that they were about to attack another country.  It wouldn’t be prudent.

What poor clueless Lorenz Hart is referring to, is the buzzard or turkey vulture, who catches slow summer updrafts (in the heat of day) and rides them in a slow upward spiral in his search for tasty rotting meat.

Ergo, the proper song lyric SHOULD have been:

“Every DAY my honey lamb and I
Steep ourselves in culture, and watch a vulture
Makin' lazy circles in the sky.”

Thank you for your support.