Alternative Holiday of the Day
And Now For Something Completely Different
There are a number of particularly nerdy things currently associated with today, November 11th, 2011. For example, above you have a gamer dad making sure his gamer daughter has plenty of time to play Skyrim. Below, you have the ad hoc Whovian holiday of 11/11/11 celebrating, as if you couldn’t guess…
The eleventh and current Doctor, played by Matt Smith.
November 11th is also the birthday of the late Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.; great American author of fiction and science fiction, who had this to say about what else November 11th has come to mean in Breakfast of Champions.
I will come to a time in my backwards trip when November eleventh, accidentally my birthday, was a sacred day called Armistice Day. When I was a boy, and when Dwayne Hoover was a boy, all the people of all the nations which had fought in the First World War were silent during the eleventh minute of the eleventh hour of Armistice Day, which was the eleventh day of the eleventh month.
It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.
Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not.
So I will throw Veterans’ Day over my shoulder. Armistice Day I will keep. I don’t want to throw away any sacred things.
What else is sacred? Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance.
And all music is.
And if I could embed a video of The Tale of Iroh here or a few choice pages from Batwoman: Elegy, I would.
(Skyrim letter via Lazygamer.net, Who picture via Nuclear Fish.)
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