every day's a holiday!

St. Urho's Day

Nestor — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 07:49:55 +0000

March 16

St. Urho statue, Menahga, Minnesota

St. Patrick is world-famous for driving the snakes out of Ireland, but the day before St. Patrick’s Day we celebrate an oft-overlooked saint named Urho, who is said to have performed the equally admirable feat of ridding his Finnish homeland of hungry grasshoppers, thus saving Finland’s all-important grape crop, and the Finns themselves, from devastation.

Plaques proclaim St. Urho’s glory, including one in Minnesota that describes the annual ceremony in his honor:

At sunrise on March 16, Finnish women and children dressed in royal purple and nile green gather around the shores of the many lakes in Finland and chant what St. Urho chanted many years ago: “Heinäsirkka, heinäsirkka, mene täältä hiiteen” (Grasshopper, grasshopper, go away!”

Urho’s deeds are recalled in poems like The Legend of Saint Urho, by Linda Johnson. Statues have been erected in his honor. His feast day is celebrated with relish by Finnish communities throughout Minnesota.

But before you go impressing your Finnish friends with all your knowledge about their culture, you should know that, while St. Urho is a symbol of pride for many Finnish-Americans, sadly the Finns themselves are all but ignorant of their great national hero. (Or of the notion that grapes grew there.)

This is because St. Urho is a completely made-up saint. He was conjured up and popularized by Finnish-Americans (most-likely intoxicated) in Minnesota in the mid-1950’s.

Envious of the attention paid to Ireland’s patron saint on May 17, Finnish Minnesotans, created their own hero, possibly inspired by the name of then Finnish Prime Minister Urho Kekkonen. There is some debate over who is to blame—I mean, who is responsible for inventing the now world-famous saint.

Richard Mattson, a department store manager in Virginia, Minnesota, explained,

“[Gene] McCavic, a co-worker at Ketola’s Department Store, chided me in 1953 that the Finns did not have saints like St. Patrick. I told her the Irish aren’t the only ones with great saints. She asked me to name one for the Finns. So I fabricated a story and thought of St. Eero (Eric), St. Jussi (John), and St. Urho. Urho, a common Finnish name, had a more commanding sound.”

– “St. Urho Creator, Richard Matteson, Dies“, Mesabi Daily News, (June 7, 2001), Linda Tyssen Williams; ”Well, Here We Are: The Hansons and the Becks” by J. Robert Beck

Mattson’s original St. Urho rid Finland of its frogs, not grasshoppers, a tradition that changed over time.

Soon, the employees of Ketola’s came to respect the Finnish saint, or at least their manager’s Finnish dry humor, and began throwing “St. Urho’s Day” parties as an inside joke for their beloved manager.

The story of St. Urho was reported in the Mesabi Daily News in 1956. That may be where Sulo Havumaki, a school district psychologist in Benmidji, Minnesota got wind of it.

“Sulo was a devout Catholic and, feeling left out because there weren’t any Finnish saints, made one up with tongue in cheek: St. Urho (Maybe he adopted Mattson’s…)” — William Reid

Sulo’s devotion to the obscure saint was well-known in the town. One story goes that when a neighbor’s family took a trip to Finland, they played a rather unusual practical joke on Sulo. They took some very old bones and wood with them and arriving in Finland, found a recent obituary in a Finnish newspaper. From Finland they shipped the wood and bones to Sulo along with a fictitious letter, in the name of the recently deceased…

“Sulo received the letter, which said something like “Dear Prof. Havumaki: I am the keeper of the last relics of St. Urho. News of your faith and dedication to St. Urho have reached me across the ocean. I am dying, and commend to you those last relics because I know you will protect and revere them, and pass them to the next custodian when the time is right…”

William Reid – http://www.sainturho.com/havumaki.htm

Sulo took the saint and ran with it, codifying much of the lore and the rites of the festival that is St. Urho’s Day.

Regardless of the saint’s origin, St. Urho’s Day is a very real reason (excuse) for Finnish-Americans to throw parties and drink beer in his honor.

For these true-believers, St. Patrick’s Day is merely “Hangover Day.”

from sainturho.com

Ode to Saint Urho
by Gene McGavin

Ooksi kooksi coolama vee
Santia Urho is ta poy for me!
He sase out ta hoppers as pig as pirds.
Neffer peefor haff I hurd tose words!…

…So let’s give a cheer in hower pest vay
On Sixteenth of March, St. Urho’s Tay.

Origin of St. Urho

Bug Girl’s Blog

http://www.brownielocks.com/urho.html

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Beware the Ides of Hungarian National Day

Nestor — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 12:40:44 +0000

March 15

March 15 is synonymous with betrayal, treachery, back-stabbing and front-stabbing. It’s the anniversary of the assassination of Julius Caesar by Brutus and the Roman Senate in 44 B.C.

But in Hungary, March 15 is synonymous with freedom and independence, so whip out your cockades and join the Hungarians as they sing their National Song today.

Turns out the Hungarians celebrate March 15, 1848, not 44 BC.

In 1848, as the fervor of revolution swept through Europe…

Nowhere else did the crowd assume such an emblematic character as in Hungary. The Chartists crowds of London might have been larger, the fighting on the barricades of Paris, Prague, Vienna and Dresden more intense, but Budapest instigated the only total revolution in 1848-1849, and Hungary’s crowds were the last holdouts.

Alice Freifeld, Crowd Politics in the Hungarian Revolution

March 15 marked the day that news reached rebellious students and intellectuals in Budapest that revolution had broken out in Vienna, the center of the Hapsburg’s empire. The rebel movement’s leaders had planned a protest march to take place on March 19, but when news hit Budapest, they spontaneously decided to demonstrate in celebration.

And it’s a good thing. The government had gotten wind of the demonstration, and had planned to arrest the movement’s leaders on March 18.

Students marched from Pest to Buda—the two cities that make up the aptly named Budapest—to protest the Hapsburg-dominated monarchy in Austria. Along the way, massive crowds joined the demonstration, spurred on by news from Vienna and the songs of a 25 year-old poet named Sandor Petofi.

Petofi recites National Song, March 15, 1848; by Mihaly Zicky

Petofi had been chosen to put the movement’s demands to paper. Deemed the “Twelve Points,” they were:

1. Freedom of the press, the abolition of censorship.
2. A responsible Ministry in Buda and Pest.
3. An annual parliamentary session in Pest.
4. Civil and religious equality before the law.
5. A National Guard.
6. A joint sharing of tax burdens.
7. The cessation of socage.
8. Juries and representation on an equal basis.
9. A national bank
10. The army to swear to support the constitution, our soldiers not be dispatched abroad, and foreign soldiers removed from our soil.
11.The freeing of political prisoners.
12. Reunion with Transylvania.

On the steps of the National Library Petofi led the crowds in the singing of his famous poem “Nemzeti Dal”, which to this day symbolizes Hungarian self-determination and freedom:

Rise up, Magyar, the country calls!
It’s ‘now or never’ what fate befalls…
Shall we live as slaves or free men?
That’s the question – choose your `Amen’!
God of Hungarians,
we swear unto Thee,
We swear unto Thee – that slaves we shall
no longer be!

from “Nemzeti Dal” (National Song)

Unprepared for the rebellions of March 13 in Vienna and March 15 in Budapest, the court was forced to acquiesce to the demands of the Hungarian National Assembly. Hungary became the first (and only) country during the revolutions of 1848 to undergo a peaceful transition.

+ + +

Peace was temporary phenomenon. Later that year the Austrian empire recovered from the shock and set about to reconquer Hungary. With the Russian Czar’s help, the Hungarian army was decimated. The Austrian army executed 14 Hungarian leaders, including the new Prime Minister.

Petofi is believed to have been killed at the Battle of Segesvar in Transylvania on July 31, 1849. He was 26 years old. By that time, the soldier-writer-revolutionary had written 10 volumes of Hungarian poems.

Throughout the past century and a half, March 15 has remained a symbol of the Hungarian struggle for liberty and self-determination.

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Pi Day & Albert Einstein

Nestor — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:07:24 +0000

“I am ashamed to tell you to how many places of figures I carried these computations, having no other business at the time”.

– Isaac Newton, original ‘computer’ nerd, getting high on ∏

Pi Pie at Delft University

I have to admit I’m a Pi holiday snob. I don’t celebrate Pi Day on March 14; I prefer its more accurate European equivalent, Pi Approximation Day, celebrated on July 22 (22/7).

It’s been said the only real Pi Day was March 14, 1592. (3.14 1592) and of course even that was only accurate to 7 digits. At that time, Pi wasn’t known as Pi but as “that funny circumference-over-the-diameter number that goes on forever and ever and ever, and I’ll stop calculating it as soon as I find the pattern.” Fortunately, Welsh mathematician William Jones shortened it to just ∏ in 1705. Pi was the first letter of the Greek words for periphery and perimeter.

March 14 is not only easy to remember, it has the added bonus of being the birthday of Albert Einstein, born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany.

Albert Einstein

At age 26, the clerk at a Swiss patent office unleashed three scientific papers on the world, the least of which would have assured his place in history. The greatest of which changed history. That was the Theory of Special Relativity, or the “Strangers on a Train Traveling Close to the Speed of Light” Theory. Either way, Einstein didn’t like the word “relativity” at all. He preferred “invariance theory,” referring to the consistent nature of light regardless of the motion and positions of its observers.

Einstein next turned his attention to gravity. He spent much of the following decade aligning his theory of relativity with Newtonian physics. In 1915, he knocked it out of the park again, with his special relativity follow-up: the Theory of General Relativity.

If ever a sequel was better than the original, this was it.

Had Einstein not developed the Theory of Special Relativity in 1905, someone else would have. In a few years, maybe even a few months.

But it’s been said that had there been no Einstein, had he not conceived of the Theory of General Relativity in 1915, the world would have waited generations to unlock it.

General Relativity explained the inexplicable by affirming the impossible. That among other things, both light and time could (and must) bend in relation to mass.

Albert Einstein, age 14

Einstein had comparatively little astronomical data to go on back in 1915. But this was a guy who managed to deduce Nobel-prize winning theories by observing pollen grains in water.

One of Einstein’s clues was that the orbit of Mercury didn’t behave as Newton’s theory had predicted it would. Other physicists chalked this up to the possible existence of yet unobserved planetary bodies in our solar system. What Einstein proposed was the astrophysical equivalent of tearing down a house and rebuilding it because the door didn’t fit. He said that the way scientists since Newton had assumed the universe worked was fundamentally unsound.

Even with his past successes, the theory was so out of conformity with the day’s scientific knowledge that Einstein could have been laughed off the world stage.

But on May 29, 1919 the scientific community had an unprecedented opportunity to put an abstract theory as big as the universe to a visible, practical test.

The Newton vs. Einstein Showdown – May 29, 1919

Astronomers predicted that on May 29, 1919, parts of South America and sub-Saharan Africa would experience an incredibly long 6-minute total solar eclipse, during which time the sun would be right in way of Earth’s view of the constellation Hyades.

Scientist-adventurers led expeditions to remote areas of the southern continents to make precise astronomical records during the darkness of the eclipse. If Einstein was correct, the stars of the cluster Hyades would appear to shift from their normal positions because of gravity’s effect on the starlight as it passed by the Sun.

The expeditions confirmed Einstein’s theory, and in the darkness of a 6-minute eclipse, the Newtonian world gave way to an Einsteinian one.

For his contributions to science, Einstein deserves his own holiday for sure, even though he would be the first to forget it (He wasn’t good with birthdays) and the last to acknowledge any beneficial value in it.

Because Pi Day coincides with Einstein’s birthday, many treat March 14 as a celebration of science and mathematics in general. I’ve noticed a dearth of these festivals. Religious and political holidays fill each day of the calendar several times over while mathematicians and scientists find themselves forced to rally around a handful of dates like “Square Root Day” (3/3/09…) and “Mole Day” (June 2 at 10:23). Not to mention our beloved Pi Day. [http://threesixty360.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/things-that-equal-pi/]

Darwin’s birthday, February 12, is shared with and often dominated by that of his contemporary Abraham Lincoln. Both men were born on February 12, 1809.

And Isaac Newton’s birthday…well, it’s overshadowed just a teensy bit by a religious luminary named Jesus. Yep, Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642 (OS).

Still, many geeks celebrate Newton’s birthday as “Grav-Mass” by singing popular carols such as “The Ten Days of Newton.” (props to Olivia Judson)

On the tenth day of Newton,
My true love gave to me,
Ten drops of genius,
Nine silver co-oins,
Eight circling planets,
Seven shades of li-ight,
Six counterfeiters,
Cal-Cu-Lus!
Four telescopes,
Three Laws of Motion,
Two awful feuds,
And the discovery of gravity!

It’s fitting that we celebrate the two great pinnacles of physics on March 14 and December 25.

In ancient Roman times, March 14 was the eve of the Ides of the March. The Roman political and agrarian calendar began on or around March 15 — when farmers planted crops and elected officials took office. And ended with the December festival known as Saturnalia, from December 17 to December 25.

Newton’s birthday falls in the season of Christmas, Yalda, and Yule, which bid farewell to the old year and hello to longer days. And though they didn’t know it, our ancestors were really paying homage to gravity — the Sun’s pull on the Earth. Einstein’s birthday meanwhile comes amid spring festivals like Holi, Nowruz, Purim, and Easter, which celebrate rebirth and the circle of life, as well as the life-giving power of sunlight.

We live in a world where the more we learn, the less we know. And where the darkest eclipse sheds the most brilliant light. As one quote popularized by Einstein* explains…

“The wider the diameter of light,
the larger the circumference of darkness.”

What can we say? The guy knew his ∏.

Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world. — Albert Einstein

The Eclipse That Changed the Universe

http://www.westegg.com/einstein/

* Einstein didn’t invent the quote:

“It has been well said, that the more we enlarge the diameter or sphere of light, the more, too, do we enlarge the circumambient darkness — so that with a wider field of light on which to expatiate, we shall have a more extended border of unexplored territory than ever.”

– Institutes of Theology from the Post-humous Works of Rev. Thomas Chalmers (1849) by Chalmers and his son-in-law biographer William Hanna.

A half-century later, Alexander Whyte retells how Chalmers explained the concept to students in Skirling, Scotland.

When Dr. Chalmers was out at Skirling on one occasion he went to the village school and gave the children an elementary lesson in optical science. Taking the blackboard and a piece of chalk he drew a long diameter on the board, and then he ran a large circumference around the diameter. And then turning to the wondering children he said to them in his own imaginative and eloquent way, ‘You must all see that the longer the diameter of light the larger is the surrounding circumference of darkness.”

– Thirteen Appreciations, by Alexander Whyte (1900)

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every day's a holiday!

St. Urho's Day

Ode to Saint Urho by Gene McGavin

Beware the Ides of Hungarian National Day

Pi Day & Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein

The Newton vs. Einstein Showdown – May 29, 1919

Ode to Saint Urho
by Gene McGavin