The Dog Day is Over

        This may be a little late in arrival, but, hey, better late than never! After all, dog biscuits don’t expire. Why mention dog biscuits? Well, this past Wednesday was Dog Biscuit Appreciation Day…

            Ah, glorious (at least in a canine's opinion) dog biscuits, they, unlike normal biscuits, come in many forms: Milkbones, Iams, Purina, or even Giant. Yes, these biscuits can be in any imaginable shape or size, and even serve as forms of advertisement for political organizations.

Because dogs can vote?

            There’s also the option of making your own biscuits, which are much more like cookies (the British for which is actually, “biscuit”) and can actually be consumed. Well, they’re technically made from the same kinds of ingredients as regular biscuits, but generally with lower quality ingredients and additive meat flavorings. You can eat one, but it will probably trigger a gag reflex. These recipes lead to even more kinds of biscuits, including ones with fruit (dog food a la Martha Stewart).

            So, yes, dog biscuits can be appreciated for the ingenuity that is used in creating them, but, even more so, they can be admired for how they cheer up man’s best friend. Feeding your beloved pet a biscuit is a greater way of showing affection than rubbing his tummy, scratching his head, or even playing with him. These treats can also be used as rewards when training dogs, via operant conditioning.

        

    It shouldn’t be hard, then, to guess what I did in honor of this holiday. Dog treats are readily available at any given grocery store, and they can be eaten by humans, so… I did not eat one. That would just be gross. Instead I fondly regarded a picture of my own two dogs at home (Fabi and Dora) and decided that it would be a much, much better idea to feed them some biscuits over spring break. After all, the holiday was in their honor, not mine. Plus, regular biscuits taste better.

C0MPUT3R L0V3

      Ah, February 14^th. Valentine’s Day. The day of all kinds of love: true love, teenage love, animal love, and even computer love. Granted, computer love does not mean that someone should have relations with his or her laptop. Rather, it’s just good to show your computer some loving sometimes, like on Clean Out Your Computer Day.

            Day after day, a computer chugs through all of the tasks it’s given. It plays music and videos, processes essays and emails, and maintains save files on video games. After a while, it starts to get “tired” and clogged with unnecessary files that slow it down. My own computer was a bit of a mess at the start of the day. It had been running slowly for a while, and I hadn’t organized my files for weeks. Needless to say, my desktop wasn’t very attractive.

But, in honor of the day, all of that changed. It was time to show this laptop some tough love.  

    I put my laptop through defragmentation and virus scans (with no less than three separate programs), cleared up my desktop, and updated all of my programs. Then came my internet browser. Fun fact: if your browser is running very slowly, then it’s probably because there are too many cookies (not chocolate chip, but bits of data or text) stored on your computer. It’s a good idea to delete your browsing and download history along with all of those saved cookies (amounting to many, many bakers dozens) from time to time in order to make things run faster. As a matter of fact, that’s exactly what I did!

            Finally, to wrap it all up, there was the polishing and dusting of the laptop itself. A lot of things can get caught between keyboard keys (such as tidbits of Lucky Charms marshmallows) and jam them. It won’t do you any good if your “e” key stops working, it will just leave with with som- r-ally strang- typos.

            So, all in all, don’t neglect your computer! It needs maintenance every now and then to keep things running smoothly and quickly. I mean, you don’t want it to catch the blue plague, do you? 

Lost in Candyland

            Ah, parting is such sweet sorrow. Actually, the parting in this case literally is “sweet” sorrow. Today will be a day without sweets, to make up for the fact (at least in my mind) that I ate sugary goods all of yesterday in the “hopes” of getting a toothache. Why? Because yesterday was National Toothache Day, of course!

            Now, toothaches are a hard thing to appreciate. After all, they cause a lot of pain (hence “ache”) in a very sensitive part of the human body, a part of the human body that is used on nearly an hourly basis. After all, people need mouths to eat (except in rare, hospitalized cases). The thing is, though, when a person has a really bad toothache, he can’t eat anything without wincing, and even that influx of serotonin (i.e. the “happy hormone”) from the brain won’t make him feel better. But here’s the plus side to toothaches: there isn’t one.

            I’m not going to try and come up with some idealistic reason behind this holiday, because toothaches are not things to be commemorated; they’re just pains. This holiday literally makes no sense, but, then again, was Tuesday’s Kite Flying Day sensible? Who in their right mind (and in a non-tropical climate) would fly a kite in the middle of winter? Toothache Day is a prime example of why these are obscure holidays. It makes sense that no one would celebrate it, and so it would never become as mainstream as Christmas or Valentine’s Day. But, even with this black sheep of holidays, I made it my goal to celebrate one a week, and by George did I party it up.

            My Toothache Day consisted of trying to get what everyone else avoids; a toothache. I needed to show this ailment some love, and I decided that the best way to get one was by playing an all-day, interactive game of Candyland. Breakfast consisted of a peanut butter sandwich. Lunch? A nutella crepe. Dinner? A burger and fries (but there’s a lot more sugar in there than anyone would want to know). Dessert required a trip to NDulge, quite possibly the only cupcake store in the entire world that puts as much cream cheese in one cupcake as is needed to make five cheesecakes. Oh, and then I may or may not have decimated a bag of sour gummy worms. Needless to say, sugar was a recurring theme.

As of now, I’m not feeling any cavities (just stomach pains),  but I’ll see how things turn out. Who knows, toothaches might actually have their day… a week late.

Nugroho, Agus. "The Story of My Root Canal (*auch!*)." The Bloginning. 

15 Aug. 2004. Web. 10 Feb. 2011. <http://bloginning.blogspot.com/>.

Bye Bye, Miss American Pie

            This week’s holiday is a little more somber than those in the past, because today was the Day the Music Died. Well, music itself isn’t actually dead (sadly in the case of Ke$ha and Miley Cyrus), but today commemorated the deaths of Buddy Holly, the Big Bopper, and Richie Valens, three of America’s greatest rock stars. 51 years ago, on February 3^rd, these three musicians were involved in an airplane crash and did not survive, taking their talent with them to the grave.

            So, in memory of these three musicians, I wore black all day long (at the risk of seeming slightly Goth) and listened to a playlist of their songs. Another song I listened to on repeat was “American Pie,” by Don McLean, mainly because its chorus matches the event, “the day the music died.” Or rather, the holiday has a title that matches the song, since McLean composed it in honor of Buddy Holly and company.

            The ironic thing about the day, though, is that the music didn’t die. Literally. If you go on iTunes, you’ll find all three musicians’ songs in the store, in multiple collections. The music lives on, because people still listen to it. Buddy, Richie, and Big’s lives were based on music, and the emotions and spirit they put into their performances carry the songs through the decades. When so much of your soul is put into something, it can never perish.

This may seem clichéd, but as a musician myself (Penn State a cappella, all the way), I can vouch for this statement. I may not be professional, or even close to having the talent to go pro, but I know that I feel truly alive when I sing. I pour every ounce of energy into doing a song, and people can tell the difference between people who sing on a whim or people who sing because they need to. Again, this may seem clichéd, but it is true, and my own life would be much more forlorn without music.

            So today may have been the day that the musicians died, and it would do everyone good to remember them (Buddy Holly is really good, just listen to “Everyday”). However, today is not the day that the music died. Today, and every day, their music persists and adds to the lives of others in so many ways.