March Madness

Not the college basketball bracket bender, but the spate of days during this part of the month with special significance.

It begins today with PI day - 3.14. If you really want to mire in mathematical minutia, you should have celebrated at 26 seconds after 1:59 AM. That's 3.1415926 - pi to the sixth decimal. Today is also the birthday of Albert Einstein - auspicious and arithmetically serendipitous.

March 15 is a good day for a toga dinner party. What else would I be wearing whilst bewaring the Ides of March? One course of course would be Caesar salad. But what to serve with it?  I recommend a delicious spicy Cajun stew. The recipe borrowed from Popeye's arch-nemesis: etouffee Brutus.* As Edgar Allan Poe said, "The goodness of a true pun is in a direct ratio to its intolerability."

March 16 is not a special day except for those with a knowledge of Roman history. This day began Bacchanalia. A wild, two-day festival with excessive drinking and debauchery celebrating Bacchus, the god of wine . Do you think I could get a special rate on my toga if I rent it for three days?

The madness that is March climaxes on St. Paddy's Day. This has become a Bacchanalia of sorts, but started as a religious holiday of fasting and prayer. In my Fells Point neighborhood, we pray that the drunken idiots leave without dousing our stoops with green urine.

Notice it's Paddy's not Patty's. The masculine diminutive is Paddy based on the Irish Padraig. This is one of my pet peeves of which there are many -as ever BB

* In the Popeye comic strip the nemesis's name was Bluto. When they created the cartoons to be shown in theaters, the movie company thought Bluto was copyrighted, so they change it to Brutus. It change back to Bluto when Hanna-Barbera took over the cartoon in 1978.

"March is the month of expectation,/The things we do not know,/The Persons of Prognostication/Are coming now." - Emily Dickinson

Say What?

At 2 am this Sunday, we set our clocks ahead one hour. Blame for the biannual changing of the timepieces usually falls on farmers unless you ask one.

As daylight saving draws nigh, I think back to my time in Iowa. The week before the clock change, area TV stations would parade out the most Grant Wood looking farmer they could find. This old-timer would rant about how politicians were the ones messing with the clocks. Farmers are up and out before the sun no matter what time the grandfather clock shows -thus spake the curmudgeon Hawkeyes.

That memory turned the rusty cogs of this ol'cranium. Many things accepted as common knowledge are fallacious. Today's chapter: Inaccurate quotes.

This week marks the 131st anniversary of the publication in Strand Magazine of the first Sherlock Holmes' story, A Study in Scarlet. Despite it's mention in films and just about everything else Holmesian, in none of Arthur Conan Doyle's tales did the scientific sleuth utter the words, "Elementary, my dear Watson."

Another that has always nagged me is "far from the maddening crowd". Originally written by Thomas Gray's, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the phrase is "far from the madding crowd" which is also the title of a Thomas Hardy novel. It's mostly used incorrectly.

The ninth most quoted person in Bartlett's is Alfred, Lord Tennyson. As a child, I read Charge of the Light Brigade over and over. Many are familiar with the words, "Ours is not the reason why; ours is but to do or die." (insert loud buzzer here) Wrong! The quote is: "Theirs not to reason why/Theirs but to do and die"

Now onto the movies and one of my favorite actors, Humphrey Bogart. Bogie impersonators' ubiquitous line is "Play it again, Sam." However, those words were not uttered in Casablanca. Rick says, "Play it for me. If she can stand to listen to it, I can. Play it."

Another Bogart classic, The Treasure of Sierra Madre, contains a classic misquote. Never does the bandit say the words, "We don't need no stinkin' badges." The actual lines are "We don't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you no stinking badges!"

There are many more examples. Why the misquotes? That question tickles my curiosity. In some cases, I believe, it's brevity. Take my Bogie examples. Both reduce several lines of script down to a few words. As for the literary examples, I blame that on people being lazy and quoting what they hear without knowing the actual work. As Mark Twain said, "A classic is something everyone wants to have read, but nobody wants to read."

An even more intriguing question is why do these misquotes bother me so. Is it a harmless eccentricity or a debilitating obsession? Eccentrics are happy with their behavior and don't want to change. Obsessives hate their behavior, but can't change it. I figure what, me worry! So I must be eccentric - as ever BB

"The answer is never the answer. What's really interesting is the mystery. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer." - Ken Kesey