It's my birthday today, and I'd like to take a moment to thank you all for your expressions of best wishes and many happy returns, if only I'd received any. As you may know, I don't particularly like or appreciate birthdays as is well evidenced by this picture of me above taken at my joyous birthday celebration just last year.
How did the custom of observing birthdays begin anyhow? Unless you're under seven, birthdays are generally about as appealing as playing musical chairs with Clint Eastwood.
So I did a bit of research.
As it turns out, birthdays were invented in 1674 in England by a man named George Noisemacher, the Earl of Birthday. Prior to that time the duration of a person's life was measured by division into two discrete periods as follows:
Cute
Formerly Cute
This system had worked pretty well throughout all of recorded history except it required an arbiter to determine when each person was to graduate from Cute to Formerly Cute status. That arbiter was a shaman or high priest during the Bronze Age, an Imperial Tribunal during the Roman Empire, and a panel of annoying celebrity judges during the Middle Ages whose main function was to make fun of the goofier applicants while sniping away moronically at their fellow judges.
Over time the Cute/Formerly Cute System grew bloated and corrupt, however, with many a toothless old coot riddled with gout remaining Cute long after his time provided he was landed, or at least in a holding pattern by Flight Control waiting to be landed.
Over time the Cute/Formerly Cute System grew bloated and corrupt, however, with many a toothless old coot riddled with gout remaining Cute long after his time provided he was landed, or at least in a holding pattern by Flight Control waiting to be landed.
The Earl of Birthday
(Or maybe it's the Earl of Sandwich. Not sure.)
It fell to the Earl of Birthday to develop the alternative system of "birthdays" as follows:
First an accounting was made of the gross sum of the times the annual date on which the individual had been birthed had recurred throughout his or her lifetime. Then a specific number based on this accounting was rendered subject to annual updating according to Manual 10-A which, at least as of yesterday, has still not been issued!
The number derived was referred to as the person's "age" after Lord Birthday's daughter Aggie, who had oddly enough been graduated to Formerly Cute status almost from birth and had apparently urged her father rather strenuously to work up the new system ASAP!
Well, you can imagine just how scandalous all this was!
The number derived was referred to as the person's "age" after Lord Birthday's daughter Aggie, who had oddly enough been graduated to Formerly Cute status almost from birth and had apparently urged her father rather strenuously to work up the new system ASAP!
Well, you can imagine just how scandalous all this was!
The Church inveighed bitterly against the Birthday System, decrying that "No one shall ever give The Lord Jesus Christ a number and take away his Cute." Throughout Europe birthday partisans took to the streets and the cry "Happy Birthday to You, You Belong in a Zoo" echoed from Britain to Brandenburg and Paris to Prague. Finally, everything came to a head in London when over 335 people were brutally smeared with ice cream and cake during the so-called "Cha-Cha-Cha-Cha-Chance Riots of 1687."
Many then set out for the New World in the hopes of finding freedom to practice birthdays as they wished. The ship Bonholme Dick which sailed from Portsmouth to New England in 1694 with over 327 so-called birthdayers aboard was not atypical, including in its manifest "460 partye hattes, 80 balloones, and two clownes."
Aggie Birthday
Inspiration for the New System?
But all in all, thank you, George Noisemacher, Earl of Birthday, for the system you have bequeathed to us that has allowed me today to express my gratitude to all of you for your best wishes and many happy returns .... if only I'd received any.
Hey, what the hell's the matter with you guys?
Didn't any of you get Manual 10-A?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Cave painting from France depicting celebration
of tribal member's accession
to status of Formerly Cute
