Happy National Pie Day!

For whatever it’s worth, the American Pie Council (www . piecouncil . org/) has declared every January 23 National Pie Day. Although the APC seems to focus mainly on eating pies rather than, you know, we think this new holiday is a peach of an idea (peach pie — yum!) and encourages MBers of all lands to embrace it wholeheartedly. Those who can’t will get another chance when Pi Day rolls around on March 14.

Pie stories, anyone?

Happy 119th Birthday, J. R. R. Tolkien!

As hobbits might put it, Professor Tolkien would have been eleventy-nine years old today.

The world was young, the mountains green,
No stain yet on the Moon was seen,
No words were laid on stream or stone,
When Tolkien woke and walked alone.
He named the nameless hills and dells;
He drank from yet untasted wells;
He stooped and looked in Mirrormere,
And saw a crown of stars appear,
As gems upon a silver thread,
Above the shadow of his head.

The world was fair, the mountains tall,
In Elder Days before the fall
Of mighty kings in Nargothrond
And Gondolin, who now beyond
The Western Seas have passed away:
The world was fair in Tolkien‘s Day.

Happy Hagfish Day!

Talk Like a Pirate Day 2010 may be just a happy memory, but you salty sea dogs still have an excuse to party. The conservation group Whale Times has declared today (October 20) “Hagfish Day” to celebrate all weird and/or ugly denizens of the sea. The group’s website (at www . whaletimes . org/HagfishDay . htm) features a gallery of underwater grotesques and directions for hagfish-related activities, some of them involving copious quantities of slime (a hagfish hallmark). Altogether Muserly, we deem.