Happy National Yo-Yo Day, celebrated every June 6 in honor of the birthday of Donald F. Duncan Sr., who made the toy a commercial success in the United States. He was not the first, however, to market the toy in this country. That distinction goes to Pedro Flores, a busboy at a Santa Monica, Calif. …read more.

April 15, a day dreaded by taxpayers around the nation, shares an annual frivolous counterpart: Take a Wild Guess Day. Motivational speaker Jim Barber figured to bring some relief to the laborious and stressful process of getting tax returns in the mail before the midnight deadline, being scrupulously careful not to make any mistakes. So …read more.

It happens millions of times every day in factories around the world. Chunks of graphite and clay are crushed in a rotating drum. Water is added and the mixture is blended, dried, hardened, ground into a fine powder, rehydrated into a paste, extruded into thin rods and baked at 1,800 degrees. Elsewhere in the factory, …read more.

March 25 was the date of the downfall of Sauron, Lord of the Rings. Since 2003, it has also been Tolkien Reading Day. Writer, poet, linguist and university professor John Ronald Reuel (J.R.R.) Tolkien was born in 1892 in South Africa to an English bank manager and his wife. Tolkien lost both his parents during …read more.

Happy birthday (March 20) to Fred McFeely Rogers, a remarkable man whose strength was his kindness and gentility; whose example was his serene, steadfast morality; and whose legacy was the unconditional love he personified and advocated throughout the nearly 75 years he graced this all-too-often heartless world. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Mister Rogers veered from …read more.

March 7 is National Cereal Day. The ancestor of today’s sugary, gimmicky, kid-targeted breakfast cereal actually started out as a treatment for sanitarium patients. The typical American breakfast in the mid-1800s offered less than a healthy start to the day. Morning staples included, almost exclusively, pork, beef, coffee and whiskey. As a result, gastrointestinal problems …read more.

It is probably only natural the strawberry, the first fruit to ripen every year (thus called “the taste of spring”), should be celebrated so early in the year. Every Feb. 27 the nation recognizes the nutrition-packed fruit, rated the third best antioxidant U.S. food. Strawberries are low calorie (one cup has only about 50 calories) …read more.

Celebrated every Feb. 22, World Thinking Day was instituted by the Girl Scouts and Girl Guides to inspire people to ponder other cultures and contemplate global concerns. This year’s theme is “Connect” and emphasizes three kinds of connections, according the website for the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts, www.wagggs.org: connect with me, …read more.

Sure, everyone talks about the weather, but every Feb. 5 we commemorate those who do it for a living. Weatherpersons Day, also known as Weatherman’s Day, is celebrated on the birthday of John Jeffries, one of the country’s first weather observers. Jeffries took detailed weather measurements in Boston every day from 1774 until his work …read more.

The Brady Bunch did it. So did Bugs Bunny and Bob the Builder. The Western American square dance, celebrated every Nov. 29, is the third most recognized dance form in the world, behind dances from China and India. American square dancing, affectionately dubbed “friendship set to music,” is a unique distillation of its British, French, …read more.

Who doesn’t remember visiting old friends, experiencing exciting adventures, traveling to new worlds — all courtesy of that glorious art form known as the comic book? First appearing in the United States in 1933, the comic book has remained a steadfast mainstay of literary entertainment for young and old alike. Every Sept. 25, we celebrate …read more.

From its mundane beginning as a wallpaper cleaner, the household compound now known as Play-Doh has come a long way. The product was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 1998 and five years later was recognized as one of the 100 most memorable and creative toys of the 20th century. Its patent …read more.

We call them goobers, monkey nuts and ground peas; we eat them by the millions of tons; and we devote every Sept. 13 to celebrating the versatile culinary ingredient that started as pig food. National Peanut Day rolls around again Sunday, Sept. 13, so it may be appropriate to take in a few nibbles of …read more.

We’ve all done it. We’ve put off until later something we could have — and probably should have — done now. Some of us may be more chronic about it than others, but procrastination is a universal trait among us fallible humans. Procrastination, from the Latin words meaning “to favor tomorrow,” is the target of …read more.

The U.S. Patent Office knows it, among other things, as “a helical spring having substantially no lateral force between turns in closed position when no external force is acting … and in which the spring cross section is of a shape which has essentially lower torsional stiffness of a given cross sectional area than a …read more.

They are indispensable to our food supply, live in highly organized societies and, according to Albert Einstein, if they leave us, mankind will be extinct within four years. Honeybees are honored annually on World Honey Bee Day, the third Saturday of August. Honeybees live in astoundingly organized colonies, with the typical hive consisting of 60,000 …read more.

For most of their history, lighthouses (celebrated nationally every Aug. 7) were not houses. At the very beginning, they weren’t even buildings. Nature periodically provided the first nighttime navigational landmarks in the form of glowing volcanoes. The first man-made lighthouse was the tallest ever built. The Pharos of Alexandria, Egypt, a 450-foot tower completed about …read more.

Even though sometimes on Rain Day (July 29 each year) we want to shake our fist at the sky and shout, “Enough, already!” the fact is we humans need rain to survive. We require not just stationary water (97 percent of the world’s supply is undrinkable salt water), but the whole hydrologic cycle, including evaporation, …read more.

Ever since Oog tripped and fell in the mud chasing that woolly mammoth, we fallible human creatures have been telling jokes — about each other, about ourselves, about family and religion and the universe as we know it. Jokes provide a laugh, a chuckle or a groan, but they carry may serious side-effects as well. …read more.

Dateline: 4:17 p.m. EDT, Friday, July 20, 1969, southwestern edge of the Sea of Tranquility, the moon. With the terse factual observation, “The Eagle has landed,” U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong announced an unprecedented human achievement, courtesy of the brightest minds on earth working with less computing power than exists in the average desktop computer. The …read more.

Chocolate comes from the tree called the Theobroma cacao — literally “food of the gods.” Few of the billions who indulge in the versatile treat (celebrated every July 7) would argue with that assessment. The cocoa bean is a complex food. It contains nearly 300 chemicals and exudes 400 separate aromas, and is brought to …read more.

The boys from Liverpool, the Fab Four, are feted worldwide every June 25 (commemorating the day in 1960 they formed as a group) on Global Beatles Day. From their first hit in the UK (“Love Me Do” in late 1962) through their last concert song (“Long Tall Sally” at Candlestick Park on Aug. 29, 1966), …read more.

The world’s favorite overweight, wisecracking, lasagna-loving feline turns 37 years old today (June 19). Garfield, the literary creation of Indiana native James Robert “Jim” Davis, is enjoyed daily by more than 300 million readers around the globe, earning it the Guinness World Record for the most syndicated comic strip. The orange tabby was born June …read more.

The history of the world’s most ubiquitous writing instrument is a rocky chronicle of manufacturing and design skips, smears and blotches. The great-granddaddy of the ballpoint pen was John Loud, a Harvard-trained attorney and inventor seeking an instrument for writing on leather products. The only available technology, the fountain pen, was inadequate for the task, …read more.

It was born in 1932 in Riverton, N.J. — 212 Thomas Ave., to be exact. After many months of labor, Richard Hollingshead, a movie devotee and sales manager for his father’s company, Whiz Auto Products, gave life to his idea of an open-air theater where patrons could watch movies from their automobiles. He brought his …read more.

Submitted for your approval: a national holiday, occurring May 11 of each year, commemorating the television series ranked fourth in TV Guide’s “The 60 Greatest Dramas of All Time.” For five seasons, 1959-1964, television viewers were greeted weekly with an opening narration by the show’s creator, Rod Serling: “There is a fifth dimension beyond that …read more.