Tuesday, September 03, 2019

And Right Back Into It

     Okay, now that We-moved-it-from-May-To-September-hoping-you-wouldn't-spend-all-summer-shoving-wooden-shoes-in-the-gears* Day is over (and the Wobblies have, once again, not succeeded in inciting a general strike -- it's like they don't even care anymore), it's right back into the eternal battle with sloth and entropy!

     The older I get, the better sloth looks, but it doesn't pay well and the benefits are, face it, lousy.
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* Most of the world celebrates labor on 1 May, and events in the U.S. are at least part of the reason why: the 1886 Haymarket Affair in Chicago, a terrible, bloody mess that began over workers demand for an eight-hour day.  Somehow, commemorating a labor rally that ended when a bomb was thrown at police followed by police firing into the crowd was not a notion Congress could get behind.  All the more so when socialists, communists and that era's anarchists adopted May Day as their own -- so we got the first of September.  It's a better day for picnics anyway.

4 comments:

Jeffrey Smith said...

As a resident of Florida, I vote to move it back to May. After all, Labor Day is the only holiday (to the best of my knowledge) that's given its name to a hurricane. Besides, even without hurricanes, September is part of the rainy season. (We have two seasons here. The other one is tourist season.)

Roberta X said...

There have been at least three tornado outbreaks that came to be known as the Palm Sunday Tornado outbreak; the worst was in 1965.

Labor Day has never been on 1 May in the United States.

Chuck Pergiel said...

Shoving wooden shoes in the gears? What? Sounds like Dutch anarchists sabotaging windmills. Could it be?

Roberta X said...

"Sabot" is French for wooden shoes. The plausible-but-false origin of the word "sabotage" was that it came from shoving a wooden shoe into the works as a worker's protest. The actual origin? Stomping off to a strike or labor rally in your noisy wooden shoes! Yeah, that'll teach 'em not to install those punchcard looms....