12 January 2020

12 January 2020


 12 January 12020 is Marzipan Day, and, from what I can gather from various readily-accessible internet sources, Prosecutor General’s Day (Russia), Zanzibar Revolution Day (Tanzania), Berber New Year (Algeria), Memorial Day (Turkmenistan), and National Youth Day (India). It’s Jack London’s birthday, as well as Glenn Yarbrough’s and Christiane Amanpour’s.
I can’t tell what, if anything, is going on in the world at large, what with all the news being behind paywalls and only Ben Shapiro deigning to enlighten me with his views. Setting aside the Iranian crisis and the American election the pickings are slim to none. Still, no news is good news I suppose….
Mercury is in conjunction with both Saturn and Pluto today as it passes through Capricorn, which gives me a rather queasy feeling. (That could be the tamales I had earlier, though.) And Venus is entering Pisces, unsettling any romantic expectations for the moment. It might be a good day to stay in bed and meditate or something. What with Jupiter being in Capricorn as well it’s probably best to keep expectations low at any rate. Focus on the tasks at hand.
On this day in 1888 some 235 people, many of them children, froze to death when a blizzard unexpectedly hit the Great Plains in North America. Timing was critical here. The weather had actually been warming a bit before the cold front came in, and it did so while students were at school. Those who stayed had a better chance of survival than those who attempted to make it home, from the looks of things. I’ve always supposed that this was the model for the fictional snowstorm in Mark Twain’s “Schoolhouse Hill” fragment, but I don’t have my books at hand to check on the details, so for this entry it remains an unsubstantiated guess.

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