Random Facts

[Artemis]

I feel like this should rightfully go in the 'things that suck' thread, but I don't want to seem like I'm making light of actual real-life suckiness, so here we are. With an intro like that, you know it's gonna be a good one - on this day, in 1986, the second Ewok movie, 'Battle for Endor' was released. I have absolutely no memory of it, but I do have a memory of the original one, 'Caravan of Courage' - that memory is going back to the car at the parking lot in, I think, Bondi Junction, after seeing it. Of the movie itself... some dim recollection of a kind of scrubby plains/hillside landscape, that didn't look at all like the forests of Endor? Looking back on it, the idea of a planet that isn't a single biome actually seems a bit of a step forward, but after it being called "the forest moon of Endor" it maybe wasn't the right place for the concept.

I did like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi itself, I should say. Maybe their comedy undercuts the seriousness of the battle a bit at times, sure, but that scene where the two Ewoks get hit by the blaster fire, and one of them gets up and tried to get the other one up, and just slumps when he/she realises the other one's not moving, that does pull at the old heartstrings. (Doesn't change the fact that, home ground advantage or no, the Empire should have massacred the little furballs, but that specific scene did work.)

[Artemis]

Eeek, I missed a day - in my defence, summer is arriving here, so the weather's getting hot, when it gets hot I get lethargic... is 'laziness' a defence? Never mind - let's do Saturday and Sunday together, and pit them against one another, Thunderdome-style.

Saturday's champion shall be the late Ricardo Montalban, whose birthday it was, and to me (to nobody's surprise) will always be Khan. Star Trek 2 isn't quite my favourite film - it's 6 - but even I'll admit that as cool as Klingon Christopher Plummer quoting Shakespeare is, Khan is the best baddie Star Trek's ever done. Pretty much every. single. line. he says in the film is immensely quotable.

So that's a pretty high bar, but I think I'm going to have to give it to Sunday - on this day in 2011, an Atlas V rocket was launched carrying the Mars Science Laboratory, which among other activities deployed Curiosity, a 3m rover designed to operate for two years - it landed in 2012, and it still going (currently having a look around Mount Sharp). Maybe not quite as much dramatic flair as Khan, but definitely just as cool - and pushing Curiosity over the line, it's got a Lego set, which sadly Star Trek cannot claim. Sunday wins!

[Artemis]

Okay, today's trawl through relevant events led to a fact that's pretty darned random. It's Lancashire Day today, celebrating the day on which Lancashire first sent representatives to Parliament - that was back in 1295, but nobody thought to make an occasion of it until 1996, when the Friends of Real Lancashire started making a fuss about it; their main activity is trying to get everyone to recognise the 'historic boundaries' of Lancashire, as opposed to the administrative areas set up in the 70s, by which a bunch of Lancashire ended up in Liverpool, Manchester, Barrow-in-Furness (I love place names like that), and so on. But that bit that's amusing me today is that it's customary there to loyally toast the Duke of Lancaster, who is just whoever happens to be on the throne at any given time - but despite that being the Queen, she's still the Duke of Lancaster, not the Duchess.

[Artemis]

Today is Albanian Flag Day (they declared independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1912) - which reminds me of something that drives me crazy every once in a while when I remember it: I'm certain that many, many years ago there was a tv show that had a running gag of Schubert's March Militaire being mistaken for the Albanian National Anthem, but as yet I've been unable to confirm this via google no matter what permutation of any of those bits of info I use. Perhaps I'm getting the country wrong, or the music, which doesn't help since typing random countries and classic music into google is quite a bit of effort. Luckily my mum also vaguely remembers something along those lines, or I'd have started to suspect I'd imagined the whole thing.

[Artemis]

December 1 - aka 'start opening the advent calendar day', although I have to confess I'd have no idea what an advent calendar was (or advent itself, for that matter) if Lego didn't make a Star Wars one every year. So now I've got a teensy little Lego model of the Ghost, from Rebels, which I'm choosing to interpret as a sly joke, as the Ghost of Christmas Past (since it all happens 'a long time ago', after all). Come to think of it, do they have Advent in Star Wars? In the lead-up to Life Day maybe?

The main image on the box is kind of bizarre in its cheerfulness, since it's set on Jakku - you know, the inhospitable wasteland full of old wrecked starships, which someone's draped tinsel over now - with Starkiller Base looming over it in the sky, with Christmas trees on its snowy surface, and the colossal main cannon shooting presents out into the galaxy. That's... not what the cannon did in the movie, I wonder if there are any Star Wars fans so into their in-universe lore that they find that tasteless?

[Artemis]

Well, summer has properly started in Sydney - by which I mean, it's raining bucketloads. Had an interesting experience today - on the ferry on the way back to Circular Quay, we had to stop for twenty minutes or so because some idiot in an expensive-looking cruiser had driven it through a marker line and snagged it on his engine, and harbour control evidently decided it was the ferry's job to hang around nearby in case he couldn't get started again before the tide pushed him into the rocks (he did, as it turned out). That's something buses don't have to deal with.

It's National Fritters Day today, if you're hungry, and today's advent thing was a minifig of Sabine Wren (one I didn't have in fact, as for some reason Lego just doesn't seem to think Australia's at all interested in Rebels sets, so they're difficult to find).

[Artemis]

A bit of Australian history today - on this day in 1854 the Battle of the Eureka Stockade took place, in which miners in the Victorian gold rush whose objections to the cost of mining licenses ended up with them cobbling together a crude fort got soundly defeated. It ended up with 27 dead, out of a few hundred participating, ultimately did lead to the expansion of democracy in Victoria due to public sympathy being with the surviving miners during their trials, and you may have seen the Eureka flag now and then (white southern cross on blue). So in terms of rebellions and revolutions, it doesn't really stack up to the big ones the rest of the world has managed, but it's what we've got so our history books tend to make a big deal of it. (I remember studying it at school, but the only thing I clearly remember about the whole gold rush era in general was the bit (a couple of years later) about Lola Montez stopping by for a visit and a dance - well, look her up, you'll see why.)

[Artemis]

More history today (National Cookie Day) - on this day in 1872 the crew of the Dei Gratia happened upon the Mary Celeste, finding it deserted and spawning all manner of theories a full hundred and twenty years before The X Files was around to take advantage of it. Explanations range from various permutations of murder, piracy, insurance fraud (she was eventually wrecked, on purpose, in another fraud attempt), giant squid attack, the Bermuda Triangle (which it was nowhere near), seaquake, alcohol fumes, and/or aliens. Even the Doctor can't make up his/her mind, having encountered the ship once in a televised story (the crew jumped ship due to Daleks - one of the Daleks got pushed overboard too, and while old school Daleks tended to get wrecked all manner of ways, the current canon portraying them as much more indestructible would suggest it's trundling along the bottom of the Atlantic somewhere, intent on letting out a lot of pent-up annoyance on whoever it sees once it finally reaches land), and several more times in novels and suchlike; the wiki lists the whole thing as 'not a fixed point in time', which if you haven't watched Doctor Who basically means that it's a free-for-all.

[Artemis]

Learned something new today - December 5 is the Day of the Ninja, the counterpoint to Talk Like A Pirate Day in the everlasting pirates vs ninja feud. Wish I'd known that beforehand, I didn't have time to come up with a skit where Silent Tara and the Red Ghost stalk each other across the rooftops (lounge room furniture) to attempt to catch each other unawares in a duel of tickle-fu. (To be honest I'm not really that up on ninja pop culture tropes in general, so that probably would've been the gist of it, just with more words.) It's also National Sachertorte Day in Austria, although for some reason that isn't listed on wikipedia's 'list of food days' page - maybe it's a secret (albeit one with its own page, so not as hidden as all that, really)?

And speaking of cake, someone who's entitled to some today if she wants any is Amy Acker, whose birthday it is, and who I just found out looking her up now is in The Gifted, the latest X-Men tv show. There's just getting to be too many of these things to keep track of, I've barely got going on Punisher (which I had no idea had a guest appearance from Shohreh Aghdashloo, swoon) and haven't even started Flash yet.

And speaking of Flash (I swear I didn't do that on purpose, I was just rambling in typed form) today is also the day, in 1980, when the Flash Gordon film made its debut.

[Artemis]

Today (the day Star Trek IV premiered in 1991, my favourite) is, I discovered on wikipedia, the Day of the Ministry of Communications and Information Technologies of Azerbaijan (maybe because they'd probably be the ones responsible for maintaining the wikipedia page for their own national days). But they don't get a day off unfortunately. The Azerbaijanis also have non-holiday days for their customs (although the page doesn't specify whether that's border-type customs or culture-type customs - I suppose the day is a custom of the latter sort either way - and there are enough of both sorts on the list to muddy the waters further, maybe nobody knows for sure?), revenue, Ministry of the Environment, civil aviation, the gas sector, the diplomatic service, the railway, prosecutors, oil workers, and the Ministry of Emergency Situations. They get a whole five days off in a row in March for the Spring Festival though, so that's pretty cool.

[Artemis]

Birthday today - Michael Dorn, best known as Worf from Star Trek. And since this is the random facts thread, here's some random facts: Dorn has appeared in Star Trek more often than any other actor, with seven seasons of Next Generation, four seasons of Deep Space Nine, the four Next Generation films, and an appearance in Star Trek VI as Colonel Worf, the grandfather of TNG Worf. Naturally he's also voiced Worf for various video games as well, alongside other voice work (helps when you have a distinctive voice and nerds love you) including krogan jerk Gatatog Uvenk in Mass Effect.

He is outpaced by one performer though, if you include non-physical 'appearances' - in addition to playing Christine Chapel in the original series (and Number One in the original series pilot, which got reworked into flashback footage in 'The Menagerie') and Lwaxana Troi in both TNG and DS9, plus voicing M'Ress and various guest characters in the animated series, Majel Barrett-Roddenberry (the first lady of Star Trek) also provided the standard Federation computer voice, which as you can imagine turns up a lot.

[Artemis]

Historical birthday today, and rather an appropriate one to be posting on an online forum - today's the birthday of Ada Lovelace (née Byron - yes, as in Lord Byron), who was the first person ever to contemplate this newfangled analytical engine her good friend and colleague Charles Babbage wouldn't shut up about and say "Y'know Charlie, I think there might be more to this than just doing maths in a hurry," and went on to write the world's first computer program.

[Artemis]

Today (when according to the good ol' food list you have a choice of 'noodle rings' - which I googled and got images of variously little rings, or giant cake-sized toruses made out of compacted noodles, so both of those are appropriate - or having a bagel - exact words, it's Have A Bagel Day) it's International Mountain Day, established by the UN in 2003 to promote sustainable development in mountainous regions. So if you dig up a mountain today, be sure to be environmentally conscious and plant a small hillock or tor in its place. (Yes obviously the UN's actually being serious - had a quick glance at their page, and was enlightened that almost a billion people live in mountain areas, and half the world relies on mountains for water, food and power, and like every other ecosystem we're doing a nasty number on mountains which will be really bad for us all in turn - but I have to be honest, my first thought was all those times in Minecraft when I've built a house somewhere hilly and then decided I wanted a view and broke out the dynamite.)

[Artemis]

A happy birthday today to Jennifer Connelly, my first actor crush owing to Labyrinth, and then The Rocketeer, and Dark City - and even if, naturally, a certain Tara later popped up to prove that, actually, Jennifer Connelly isn't the most gorgeous person in the world, looking back it's kind of funny how in my first W/T fic (Shadows) Tara's role, while technically the Margo Lane character, was very heavily inspired by Emma-Anna's singing in Dark City. Since she's now 'Karen' in Spider-Man, I'm really hoping she follows her husband's lead and graduates from AI voice to physical superhero in a few movies' time (or if Liv Tyler's busy, she could reprise Betty Ross next time Hulk's on Earth).

[Artemis]

Science history - on this day in 1972 Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt went for a walk, which was significant because they were on the Moon at the time. This was the final EVA on Apollo 17, and to date the last time a human has walked on the Moon, or anywhere else apart from where we started (not counting Apollo 18, which is a pretty cheesy sci-fi thriller that's actually quite worth watching for fun, and also not a bad effort at recreating the look and feel of NASA footage, even as the usual liberties are taken with how much coverage they'd actually get; the fictional Apollo 18 was apparently 80% video cameras by weight).

[Artemis]

Turns out today is Chocolate-Covered Anything Day, so...

"Turns out today is Chocolate-Covered Anything Day, so..." Willow explained, lifting her head up slightly from the pillow she'd placed on the kitchen counter. Tara laughed out loud, then subsided to a sultry chuckle as her initial amazement was overtaken by serious contemplation of the sight of her wife stretched out on the counter, quite naked, and if not entirely covered then certainly liberally drizzled with chocolate ice cream topping.

"You know," she said, nearing, "that chocolate's supposed to go solid when it gets cold, so this is never going to work." She leaned down to quickly lick at Willow's stomach, then breathed: "You're just way too hot..." Willow trembled.

"Do you think," she wondered huskily, "a tongue bath would do anything to cool me down?"

"I think it'd run a serious risk of making the heating problem even worse," Tara said, shaking her head, inadvertently letting her hair trail across Willow's skin and get chocolate on it too, which when she noticed she mentally filed under 'excuse for a shared shower'. She stood up straight just long enough to pull her slip off over her head, then got up on the counter and straddled Willow's thighs, looking down at her with a mischievous gleam in her eyes. "But our line of work makes risks inevitable, Agent Adorabunny."

"Certainly does, Agent Shy Bunny," Willow replied.



(That wasn't planned, I just saw the entry in the list of food days and started typing. And don't worry about the counter, everything in a Ministry agent's home is built with the assumption they'll make out on it.)

[Artemis]

Well today's Maple Syrup Day, but no need to do the same bit twice in a row - for one thing, Red Dwarf already did it years ago when Mellie (alternate universe Holly) suggested it to 'Ace' Rimmer (and rightly so; what a guy). And speaking of having already done a joke, on this day in 1989 The Simpsons made its debut.

Today's also a moment in Australian folklore, which those of you overseas may not have heard of - today in 1967 Harold Holt, our Prime Minister at the time, went for a swim and was never heard from again. Despite the most likely explanation being that the poor man just drowned, there were (and still are) various conspiracy theories, including that he was killed by the North Vietnamese and/or the CIA, of that he'd been a Chinese spy all along and they'd picked him up in a submarine; as tinfoil-hat material goes it's not quite the JFK assassination, but it's the best we've got so far, and we're a little bit proud that we managed to misplace a Prime Minister anyway. There's a swimming centre named after him, which tells you everything you need to know about the Australian sense of humour (although it's not quite that bad, he was a keen swimmer generally). (The US Navy also named a frigate after him, which I'm sure was appreciated, although after it was decommissioned after twenty years' service it was eventually sunk, which, awkward...)

[Laragh]

And don't worry about the counter, everything in a Ministry agent's home is built with the assumption they'll make out on it.)

That ficlet made my whole week!

[Artemis]

Thanks (Just between us, and anyone else reading, the Smut Bunnies may be making a comeback sometime next year, but I want to have it all finished before I start posting so it'll take some time.)

So today's Brazilian National Muffin Day, continuing the trend of these food days seeming like they're trying to be smutty, but I'm sure nobody's complaining. It's also Casper Van Dien's birthday - would you like to know more? - which yeah, I mainly noted so I could do that, and also Queen Christina, of being-played-by-Greta-Garbo fame.

[Artemis]

Another snippet of Australian politics today, which... well to be honest misplacing Holt was the high point so far as interest goes. But anyway, on this day in 1900 Australia would have had its first Prime Minister, except nobody liked the guy, so all the other leading politicians of the day just flat-out refused. What happened was that Australia was due to get its Federation on first thing January, but federal elections weren't due until March (nice planning there), so the Governor-General had to appoint a Prime Minister in the meantime, and managed to choose the least popular candidate available (who was in charge of New South Wales at the time, and that's a tradition we're still kind of upholding unfortunately). The ill-fated Sir William Lyne couldn't talk anybody into being in a government with him, and eventually had to resign, which is why everybody now knows Edmund Barton as our first PM (or just doesn't know at all, that's a popular option as well). The whole episode became known as the Hopetoun Blunder after the GG (Earl of Hopetoun), and since then we've worked out how to avoid that sort of thing happening again: nowadays our politicians will happily follow anyone who'll get them a seat.

[Artemis]

Today's National Date Nut Bread Day... I'm imagining a scene where Tara reads that on a noticeboard and turns around to see Willow wearing a bread loaf costume, and when Tara asks what about the nut she says "I mean I'm standing here hoping you'll go on a date with me because I'm dressed up as a loaf of bread, so pretty clearly I'm the nut, right?" and Tara does that smile she does. Happy Date Nut Bread Day.

So there's an opportunity today to fulfil the actual purpose of this thread, being random facts about us (not counting my usual work-around of 'this is a random fact I thought was interesting enough to put on the sign in the store') - I mentioned the above political kerfuffle involving NSW premiers to my mum, and she (being into genealogy) mentioned that an ancestor of mine was premier for a short while: James Nixon Brunker, who held the seat of East Maitland in the NSW assembly for 24 years, was acting premier of the colony while George Reid visited London for a jubilee or something (and being that this was before 747s, that visit took a while). Further fun fact, based on all the photos of him (there are a bunch, of various ancestors, around the house, besides the one that's also on the wikipedia page) I look a lot like him, minus the epic whiskers. We're not really in a mutton chop era, although I have to admit a couple of times I've thought "Y'know, maybe..."

[Artemis]

Well, it's the night before the night before Christmas, and that means it's the Night of the Radishes - no, seriously. And not to be outdone, the Ukraine is celebrating its Day Of All Level Operational Control Structures Servicemen; maybe it rolls off the tongue better in Ukrainian. If you're a fan of Seinfeld it's Festivus (I don't think I've ever actually seen an episode, I just used to switch over in time for the thirty second stand-up bits over the closing credits), and the good folk of Mousehole in Cornwall are celebrating Tom Bawcock's Eve, named after a legendary (which is to say, nobody knows if he ever existed) fisherman who went out and caught a whole bunch of fish during a raging storm to save the village from starvation. If that sounds oddly familiar, yeah, basically it's Aquaman.

[Artemis]

December 24 - Eggnog Day, appropriately enough. And on a related note, the anniversary of the Eggnot Riot in 1826 at the US military academy, which for some reason has got an extensive timeline of events on its wikipedia page, despite the whole thing just boiling down to 'cadets snuck in alcohol for their eggnot, cadets got drunk, cadets smashed the place up a bit'. It's also the final day of Advent, the Christian celebration of Lego making a Lego Star Wars Advent Calendar full of adorable itty-bitty models of vehicles and stuff, plus a bunch of figures including (this year) a Snowtrooper pushing a snowblower, and BB-8 with a Santa hat on and riding a snowboard. Happy Life Day everyone

[Artemis]

Merry Christmas (and apparently Pumpkin Pie Day) kittens! And those of you with Christmas trees up may be interested to know that the tradition was popularised in England in 1841, when Prince Albert (the consort to Queen Vicky, not the piercing) had one hauled over to Windsor Castle to celebrate as was customary in his native Germany, and naturally everyone had to copy what the royals were doing.

Less well-known is that the inaugural Royal Christmas Tree Gala was very nearly scuppered before it could get off the ground, by the villainous Countess Faith, who'd always been jealous of Vicky getting the throne, and conspired to steal the tree from its boat as it crossed the channel under cover of darkness to embarrass her highness in front of everyone. Who could foil such a nefarious scheme? Faced with such a crisis Victoria could call on no other than her most faithful agent Lady Tara MacLae, protectress of the honour of the Empire (although her exploits were known to only a chosen few, as she preferred the quiet life of painting, horseriding, and fencing on her Scottish estate). Having crossed paths with Countess Faith many a time before, Lady Tara at once understood her scheme, and sought out the edge she would need to prevail, in the person of eccentrically brilliant and/or brilliantly eccentric inventor Willow Rosenberg, who had just devised an ingenious stealth bathyscape, with which the pair surprised their foe mid-treenapping and spirited away the Christmas Conifer, leaving Faith empty-handed and gnashing her teeth, the Queen most pleased, and Lady Tara and Miss Willow rewarded with a royal proclamation that if they wanted to get married (and after working together to foil Faith's scheme, and specifically being cooped up in the cramped confined of the bathyscape en route to the scene of the would-be crime for some time, they'd got very close) they darned well could, because what's the point of trying to be historically accurate at this late stage? Huzzah and three cheers for the happy couple

(Turns out the Parramatta River ferry service doesn't run on Christmas day, so I had a walk to the bus stop instead and my mind started wandering.)

[Artemis]

Happy Boxing Day everyone - for the benefit of those of you outside the Commonwealth who don't know what Boxing Day means, well, neither do we for sure (it's one of those 'there are several theories' ones) but who turns up their nose at a holiday? There's sales, cricket, the Sydney to Hobart yachts set out (nearly ramming each other this year) and everybody watches them go out of the heads, but by the time they reach Tasmania only the die hard fans are still keeping track, and most recently that best of post-Christmas traditions, the cinema showing of the Doctor Who Christmas Special. It's just the episode a few hours before it's on tv, plus a couple of behind-the-scenes thingies to pad it out to something like movie-length, but it's fun, and they're really getting good at making the most of a few seconds of the new Doctor, I adore her already.

[Artemis]

Well what do you know, the yachts are in a hurry this year - the leaders are already drag-racing up the Derwent river (looks like Wild Oats XI might edge out Comanche) so there goes the race record again; we may have to move Tasmania a bit further south in future to stretch things out. But since us in Sydney are contractually obligated to only be interested in the race at the start, let's have a sciencey random fact for today: on this day in 2004 Earth got a visit from the radiation originating from SGR 1806-20 having a very dramatic starquake which threw off as much energy in one tenth of a second as our sun does in 150,000 years; luckily SGR etc. is 50,000 light years away, giving time for the blast to thin out en route, because if one of those things went off inside 10 light years it'd strip our ozone layer clean off, and not be great news for the rest of the planet either (the nearest of these things - magnetars - is 9000 light years away, so that's at least one potential catastrophe we don't have to keep an eye on). So that's all pretty nifty in a space-is-amazing kind of way, and also props to the scientific community for not being stuffy and inventing some more boring term to use instead of 'starquake'.

[Artemis]

Smooth segue time - just yesterday in the MKF thread I was informing our favourite adorable ball of fur about a sci-fi creature's birthday, and now today it's the birthday of a favourite sci-fi adorable ball of fur creature. On this day back in 1967 (or in 2268 from their point of view) the starship Enterprise arrived at Deep Space Station K-7 to guard the grain supplies stored there from Klingon agents trying to cause a famine on a nearby Federation world, and in the midst of that encountered the Tribbles for the first time, cute little fuzzballs that purr adorably, and incidentally reproduce at astronomical rates the moment they're fed, quickly swamping the ship. They've had occasional cameos in films and episodes ever since (most notably on DS9, when the crew time-travelled back to that same episode to stop an older version of the same Klingon agent from killing Kirk to undo his own disgrace for failing in his original mission) - Captain Lorca on Discovery even has a pet tribble on his office desk. Right next to his dinner plate in one scene - I cannot adequately express how much I wanted there to be two tribbles in the next scene, but sadly they don't seem to be doing the 'avalanche of tribbles' joke just yet.

[Artemis]

It's New Year's Eve Eve, and apparently that's Bicarbonate of Soda Day, which... does that count as a 'food', though? I don't feel like that really counts. It's also Eliza Dushku's birthday - besides the obvious, does everyone remember her in True Lies, all adorable and baby Faith? And then later on Tru Calling, which okay, I'll be honest, the only thing I remember was the intro sequence of her running along... I suppose I can't make fun of Baywatch fans. (I just looked it up on wikipedia, and wow, I really did remember nothing of what was going on, she could rewind time?) And speaking of things I just found out from wikipedia, she was the voice of She-Hulk in 'Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H.'

[Artemis]

Very nearly 2018, but for the moment it's December 31st (or January 0 - didn't make that up, it's in wikipedia and everything), Champagne Day, when a lot of people will be having parties and such - although probably most of them won't be quite as weird as the one in London in 1853 inside a life-size model iguanadon, because Victorians were just that determined to be eccentric (the iguanadon in question was part of the Crystal Park Dinosaurs display, they're still around). As usual we're blowing up the sky above the harbour, and this year will feature a rainbow 'waterfall' off the bridge to celebrate legalising same-sex marriage - about 50 minutes to go until the midnight fireworks, so that'll be something to watch out for. Happy new year, kittens

[Artemis]

New year, new list - I figure we've all probably had enough of trying to extract comedy from weird food days (actually that probably happened months ago, but thanks for sticking with me), so I went looking on wikipedia for a new list. And it turns out there's not only so many lists there has to be a page listing all the lists, there's also so many of them that there's a list of lists of lists. Wow. So after some clicking I arrived at Polar Bear Swim Day, where people in a number of countries (specifically Canada, the Netherlands ("Nieuwjaarsduik"), the UK, and USA on the page - including a helpful note that UK swimmers have "more than likely lost a bet," it's nice to see wikipedia not taking itself too seriously) take a dip in chilly waters to see in the new year. It's also Euro Day, which I just mention because I still think the mixed metal coins are pretty cool.

It's also Jennifer Hale's birthday - if you're into video games or cartoons there's a fair chance you've seen or played something that she's done voice work for, but if you're into Mass Effect it's a bit more of an occasion, because she voices the female incarnation of Commander Shepard, the most badass hero in the galaxy.