The New Original Old Moron's Almanac
Vol. 3, Nr. 1 • June 1 - 8 • A Whole New Month | Freemasonry Rocks | Denmark's Day | Wrestling His Way to the Top | The Fickle Finger of Fame | And also much oxen. . .
Jun. 2 - Welcome to June.
June is the sixth month of the year and consists of thirty days. The ancient Romans gave it twenty-nine days until 46 BC, when Julius Caesar added the thirtieth for reasons known only to himself. The last day of the month is therefore referred to as its “Caesarian Section” by calendar insiders.
The month is believed to derive its name from either the Roman goddess Juno, patron goddess of marriage, or the Greek god Juniko, patron god of charcoal briquets.
June marks the transition from spring to summer in the northern hemisphere, and from fall to winter in the southern hemisphere. It is not a transitional month in other hemispheres.
June has traditionally been the most popular month for weddings but it's also one of the top twelve months for bathtub drownings and spontaneous human combustion.
June is traditionally considered the poet’s month because with the warming of the earth and the lengthening light of the fragrant evenings, thoughts inevitably turn to romance as hearts and passions swell. Also, June rhymes with a lot of words. For example: afternoon, aswoon, attune, baboon, balloon, bassoon, bestrewn, boon, buffoon, cartoon, cocoon, commune, croon, doubloon, dragoon, dune, entune, expugn, festoon, harpoon, hewn, honeymoon, immune, inopportune, impugn, jejune, lagoon, lampoon, loon, macaroon, maroon, monsoon, moon, noon, pantaloon, picayune, platoon, poltroon, pontoon, prune, raccoon, rune, saloon, soon, spittoon, spoon, strewn, swoon, tune, tycoon, typhoon, untune.
Why not write a poem now? Use it to impress that special someone, your colleagues at work, your pals at the bar, even the nurse at the methadone clinic.
Or have Suno do it for you, like this moron did.
On June 2, 1793, the “Rain of Terror” officially began in France. This was one of the worst meteorological events in French history and cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
Exactly 53 years previously, the Marquis de Sade was born—on June 2, 1740. His sexual proclivities made his name a noun. His sexual proclivities themselves have been preserved in a mason jar at the Louvre.
Freemasonry Rocks
The Freemasons were officially founded in London on June 4, 1717.
The Freemasons are not a secret society of assassins. They do not have Cesar Borgia’s head preserved in an urn. They were not responsible for the French Revolution. They did not kidnap Anastasia Romanov. They are not in control of the Hale-Bopp comet. They did not invent horseradish.
They were masters of masonry, however, and they ushered in a golden age of making things out of rocks.
Freemasons first appeared in England and Scotland in the 1300s, not long after the first appearance of the Loch Ness monster but well before the advent of crop circles. Most laborers of the era were villains and therefore prohibited from travel; since most stone masonry projects (such as cathedrals, churches, and big piles of rocks) required specialized training and large numbers of workers, however, stone masons were permitted to travel freely. They became known as freemasons; their curious lunchboxes came to be known as mason jars.
Whenever the freemasons arrived in town to start work on a new project, they set up a common area where they could meet one another, receive their pay, get food, train apprentices, rest, and get roaring drunk. These came to be known as lodges.
As the centuries passed, the freemasons did less and less work with rocks and more and more drinking at lodges. Today, the freemasons are a friendly social organization with a secret handshake, and are therefore believed to be responsible for selling out the governments of the world to an invading extraterrestrial army.
Denmark’s Day
June 5 is Constitution Day in Denmark. It may well be the only Danish holiday that doesn't spontaneously generate a Monday off when falling on a weekend.
Danmarks Riges Grundlov (“The Constitutional Act of the Kingdom of Denmark”) is 72 years old today. It was signed on June 5, 1953. It eliminated one house of the Danish parliament, removed all but ceremonial powers from the royal family, and established Legos as the national currency.
Wrestling His Way to the Top
Doroteo Arango was born to a family of share-cropping pheasants in Durango, Mexico, on June 5, 1878. One day when he was sixteen he came back from work in the pheasant fields to find that his sister had been raped by the owner of the hacienda, Don Agustin Negrete. Doreteo killed Don Agustin and fled into the hills.
In the hills he met and joined forces with a gang of cattle wrestlers. Doroteo was a good wrestler, a natural. He was sure he had found his career.
The leader of his new gang was a man named Francisco “Pancho” Villa. Pancho was passionate about cattle wrestling. He taught young Doroteo everything he knew. One day the gang was ambushed by a Mexican possum and Pancho was killed in the skirmish.
Young Doroteo changed his own name to Francisco “Pancho” Villa and became the gang’s new leader.
The new and improved Pancho gradually diversified the operations of the gang. They were still some of Mexico's most-feared cattle wrestlers, but they also branched out into banditry, railroad contracting, and relationship counseling.
When the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910, Pancho was recruited by the leader of the revolution. He was made a general and put in charge of conducting the war in northern Mexico. Everyone loved him except for the people he killed, who had mixed feelings, and the cattle, who welcomed the respite from wrestling but still hated their nemesis.
One day in 1916 a shipment of arms that Pancho had ordered from an American merchant didn't arrive. In retalitation Pancho raided the town of Columbus, New Mexico. During the raid he seized many American arms and a fair number of legs. This irritated the Americans, who preferred to minimize the distance between their limbs and their bodies, so General Pershing was sent to chase Pancho into Mexico.
Pershing chased Pancho throughout the Chihuahuas. It was a difficult chase, which comes as no surprise to anyone who's ever had to make their way through a herd of Chihuahuas, and consequently Pershing never found Villa. Eventually he had to issue the telegraph, “Villa is everywhere, but Villa is nowhere,” which made no sense and is therefore famous.
The war ended in 1920 and three years later Villa was killed by an unknown assassin while driving through Parral. His death marked the end of the golden age of cattle wrestling.
The Fickle Finger of Fame
On June 6, 1755, a boy was born in Coventry, Connecticut.
He grew up and went to Yale and then became a teacher.
He never distinguished himself in any way. He never wrote or said anything of note, never committed any famous or infamous deeds, never married or had children. He seemed destined to be swallowed whole by the omnivorous mouth of obscurity. He was therefore recruited by the United States Military as an intelligence agent, dispatched behind enemy lines in British-occupied Manhattan, and captured.
He was hanged by the British on September 22, 1776, a mere lad of 21.
Moments before his execution, he expressed regret that he couldn’t be hanged more than once. This remark catapulted him to posthumous fame (but only after his death), and Nathan Hale is revered to this day.
June 6, 1944, was D-Day, the day of the allied invasion of Normandy, which was called Operation Overlord. The military calls the date of every major operation D-Day, probably to confuse the enemy.
That the D in D-Day stands for Day is probably intended to confuse everyone else.
All of this would have been especially confusing in Normandy, which is in France, where D Day would have been Jour J and Germans would have been listening keenly to hear chatter about Tag X.
Tordesillas Remembered (and Forgotten)
On June 7, 1494, Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty of Tordesillas.
In the volatile, war-torn world in which we live, many historical documents have become required reading. Not this one. You will never be standing at a cocktail party where someone says, “It's all because of that damn Treaty of Tordesillas.” (See note.)
No one will ever blame the failures of the Middle East Peace Process or the brinkmanship in south Asia on the harsh conditions of the Treaty of Tordesillas. You'll never see your favorite pundit toss off the “Treaty of Tordesillas” in an ironic and off-handed way. You won't hear AOC or Bernie Sanders reference it awkwardly as a cause or effect of American imperialism.
It will never attract the directorial eye of Michael Moore or Oliver Stone.
You already know more about that treaty than most people alive today. You may now forget it ever existed. It has no relevance to your life.
NOTE
In response to the original mention of the Treaty of Tordesillas in the OG Moron’s Almanac, a friend wrote:
...I just read your Almanac entry and must respectfully disagree with your line: “You will never be standing at a cocktail party where someone says, ‘It's all because of that damn Treaty of Tordesillas.’ “
While I will concede that I have not actually uttered the exact words at a cocktail party, I have certainly thought the very words (or something close to them) a few times. Most memorably when I found myself at the University trying to read an article from a Brazilian scientific Journal. And the damn institute had only a Spanish-Danish dictionary. So I was trying to do the conversion from Portuguese to Spanish (since they are related kinda like Danish and Swedish) by guessing what a Spanish version of each word looked like and looking it up. This was before online translations reached the wonderful heights you demonstrated a few days ago. Needless to say, before long I happened to look out the window (The Niels Bohr Institute on Blegdamsvej is located right next to Fælledparken in Østerbro), saw that the weather was wonderful, and went outside to catch some rays and eat ice cream. I never did get to find out if the article might have been relevant to my thesis on distance determination for globular clusters and how that relates to the Age of the Universe. And it was all because of that damn Treaty of Tordesillas!
After all, when Spain and Portugal signed the Treaty, which specified how they were to divide the world between them, they assured that Brazil would end up speaking Portuguese and the rest of South and Central America would speak Spanish.
This division of labor between the two also ensured that a rising Spain did not have to fight it out with Portugal, but could get on with it and concentrate full bore on meeting the natives in the new world and introduce them to new and exotic diseases. While Montezuma probably never heard of the Treaty, had his dying words been “Damn the treaty of Tordesillas!” it would have been very appropriate.
I stood corrected and offered an immediate correction: You will never be standing at a cocktail party where someone says, “It's all because of that goddam distance determination for globular clusters!”
Ugo Buoncompagni was born on June 7, 1502. He became Pope Gregory III in 1572 and remained the Pope until 1585. He is best known for reforming the Julian calendar, which is why it's now Gregorian instead of Julian. Had he reformed the calendar before becoming Pope, it would be the Ugian Calendar. That would have been a calendar worth having.
June 7 is also Unionsopplosningen in Norway.
That's right—Unionsopplosingen, dammit!
Unionsopplosingen is the Norwegian celebration of the historic Treaty of Tordesillas, whose benefits to Norway hardly need explanation. (As the world's most renowned Norwegian intellectual has colorfully put it, “The floor was greased and the cat heard bells!”)
Other Nonsense
Ives W. McGaffey of Chicago patented his “sweeping machine,” the first suction vacuum cleaner, on June 8, 1869, suggesting that Chicago was famous for sucking long before the emergence of the Cubs.
On June 8, 632, Mohammed died. He was the founder of Islam, and his death was the first in a long chain of events that ultimately resulted in the Treaty of Tordesillas.
Birthdays
June 2
It's Jerry Mathers’s birthday (1948), so take it easy on the Beaver. Other birthday celebrants include Marvin Hamlisch (1944), Johnny Weissmuller (1904), Thomas Hardy (1840), the Marquis de Sade (1740), and King Henry VIII of England (1491).
June 3
Colleen Dewhurst (1926), Allen Ginsberg (1926), Tony Curtis (1925), Josephine Baker (1906), and Jefferson Davis (1808).
June 4
Dr. Ruth (1928), Dennis Weaver (1924) and England's King George III (1738).
June 5
Pancho Villa shares his June 5 birthday with Mark Wahlberg (1971), Ken Follett (1949), Bill Moyers (1934), and Samuel Adams (1722).
June 6
Bjorn Borg (1956), Sandra Bernhard (1955), Thomas Mann (1875), Alexander Pushkin (1799), the aforementioned Nathan Hale, and Pierre Corneille (1606).
June 7
Anna Kournikova turns 44 and shares her birthday with Prince (1958), Tom Jones (1940), Dean Martin (1917), Jessica Tandy (1909), Paul Gauguin (1848), and the aforementioned Ugo.
June 8
Boz Scaggs (1944), Nancy Sinatra (1940), Barbara Bush (1925), Frank Lloyd Wright (1867), R.A. Schumann (1810), and Sir Francis Crick (1916).
Celebrate Good Times
June 4 is Flag Day in Panama and Emancipation Day in Tonga.
(nb. The capital of Tonga, which enjoys one of the highest literacy rates in the world, is Nuku'alofa. It's interesting to speculate what a less literate people might have called their capital.)
June 5 is Apostles Day in the Czech Republic, Flag Day in Turkey, and World Environment Day in the United Nations.
June 6 is Flag Day in Sweden, probably because it's Bjorn Borg's birthday.
June 7 is Liberation Day in Chad, Prince Joachim's Birthday here in Denmark, Republic Day in Iceland, Riot Commemoration Day in Malta, and Unionsopplosningen in Norway. (But you knew that.)
Have a great week!
LOL, a blast from the past.
Interestingly, in a column that starts with Julius Caesar, goes on to mention Cesare Borgia and then goes to the Treaty of Tordesillas, it may be fun to note that the treaty, while created in 1494, was not ratified until 1506. And the man who ratified the treaty was the Battle Pope Julius II. Aside from having a wickedly cool papal moniker, Julius was suspected of selecting the name Julius not out of admiration for the uninteresting Pope Julius I, but instead out of regard for, you guessed it, Julius Caesar.
And who was the mortal enemy of Pope Julius II? Why, none other than Cesare Borgia, back before his head needed preservation. Of course, Cesare was a bastard son of a pope himself, another testament to how wacky popes used to be.
And we should maybe note that old Battle Pope was not averse to a bit of madcap hijinks, in that it was he who on a lark decided to grant a dispensation to King Henry VIII to marry his brother Arthur's widow Catherine of Aragon. Alas, Henry later soured on that alliance and then tried to get a later pope to annull Julius' dispensation, claiming that old Julius must clearly have been quite mad to grant Henry the dispensation in the first place. ("How dare he give in to my request, the knave!")
This novel argument failed to win much papal approval and from this the Anglican Church saw its origin.
Also, Julius II seems to have on some level been aware of Harry Lime's famous saying about Italy, the Borgias, the Renaissance and Swiss cuckoo clocks, because he decided that he needed a professional bodyguard and when you need armed men around you, it is vitally important that they be trustworthy and slightly dull and unimaginative. And so, making as big a contrast to the Borgias that he could, he inevitably created the Swiss Guard.