February 13 - International Pancake Day Race

Posted on February 13, 2018

Women in two different nations, racing along the streets of two faraway towns...

Wearing kerchiefs on their heads and aprons tied around their waists...

Carrying a frying pan in one hand and a spatula in the other...

Flipping pancakes as they run!

...And all of this happening while amazing winter athletes from all over the world race each other over snow and ice at the Winter Olympics in South Korea!!

It sounds very unlikely, doesn't it?

But the International Pancake Race between Liberal, Kansas, and Olney, England, has been happening for more than 60 years (although it does not usually coincide with the even-more-international Olympics!!!). 

How does a two-nation pancake-flipping race get started?

Supposedly, way way way WAY back in 1445, more than 500 years ago, a woman was using up all her cooking fats by making pancakes. This was on Shrove Tuesday, the day before Lent, a period of 40 days before Easter during which certain things (like eating fatty and yummy foods like pancakes) were forbidden.

This woman was supposed to have heard the church bells ring, and she had so little time to get to church, she had no time to ditch her skillet or apron as she raced to get to the church.

And the story goes on to say that, in the next few years, the neighbors remembered this comical looking event by racing to church with their own skillets and pancakes and aprons - and so a custom got started.

The Pancake Day Race is so famous, Olney
has it featured on the town sign.

Flash forward more than 500 years, to 1950: someone in the town of Liberal, Kansas, was tickled by photos of the pancake race held annually in Olney. And this someone decided that the people of Liberal should get in on the act. But instead of doing the more normal thing of hosting their own, separate pancake race, the people of Liberal contacted the Olney folks and challenged them to race against each other by comparing times over equal courses.

And so every Shrove Tuesday, also known as Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday, Carnival, Pancake Day, or other names, women in the two towns run this unique race - and the time comparisons are made.

So far, the Liberal women are ahead, with 37 wins compared to Olney's 29. (The scores didn't count for two of the races because technical difficulties made the time comparisons unfair.)

Pancake-flipping-racers-in-training

Also on this date:

Anniversary of William and Mary's Co-Reign 

World Radio Day  

World Whale Day  

Anniversary of the discovery of a missing manuscript

Test pilot Chuck Yeager's birthday

Naturalist Joseph Banks's birthday

Anniversary of the Treaty of Lisbon

Artist Grant Wood's birthday

Extraterrestrial Culture Day

(Second Tuesday of February)








Discovery of a 500,000-year-old Spark Plug?








Mardi Gras






Carnival










Kanaval in Haiti

Pancake Day

Plan ahead:

Check out my Pinterest boards for:

• February holidays
• February birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in February

And here are my Pinterest boards for:

• March holidays
• March birthdays
• Historical anniversaries in March
  

February 12, 2013 - Kanaval in Haiti

 There are almost as many names and traditions for “Mardi Gras” or “Carnival” as there are nations! Whether people are participating in a pancake race, throwing oranges or beads to parade-watchers, eating way too many pastries, soaking others (and being soaked) with water, or creating elaborate floats and costumes and masks for the annual parades and balls and parties—well, this “last hurrah” before Lent can be colorful and fun and rowdy!

In Haiti, Carnival is often called Kanaval. It features many familiar themes, such as parades with floats, costumes, and masks. An important part of the festivities is musical concerts of zouk, Haitian rap, and other Haitian music. The crowds move and dance as they are urged with creole cries such as mete men nan le (put your hands in the air!) and sote (jump up!) – cries that have inspired English-speaking hip-hop artists. 

(A creole language is a language that developed from a mix of two or more languages.)

For more on Carnival around the world, check out this and this other earlier posts.

Extraterrestrial Culture Day in New Mexico

This is totally wild! A “memorial” (not law) passed in the New Mexico legislature in 2007, making the second Tuesday of February each year officially set aside “to celebrate and honor all past, present, and future extraterrestrial visitors in ways to enhance relationships among all citizens of the cosmos, known and unknown.”

Wow!

I am in total agreement that we should celebrate and honor extraterrestrial visitors in order to enhance our relationships with all the aliens in the universe...

...but I want to point out that there are zero known extraterrestrial visitors in Earth's past...

...and as of today, 2/12/2013, zero known extraterrestrial visitors in Earth's present.

So...that leaves the future!

If we ever do meet alien intelligences, it would be amazing to learn about their history and cultures and biology, of course! It would be useful to be able to compare with our own human history and culture and biology!

If you're interested in being a part of the search for extraterrestrials, check out this astrobiology course  and the SETI organization. 

By the way...

If you have heard and believe that extraterrestrials crashed at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947, you should check out this article by Kal Korff, which analyzes evidence and eyewitness testimonies about that incident and explains the true nature of the crash debris and the governmental cover-up. (Hint: the explanation is interesting, but entirely earthly.) 

These are just two of the fun
sights you can see in Roswell,
New Mexico, today!

Also on this date:

Pancake Day 

Paul Bunyan Day 

Darwin Day

Lincoln's birthday

Paleontologist Barnum Brown's birthday

February 21, 2012 - Mardi Gras

Other names for this celebration of food and fun include Shrove Tuesday, Fat Tuesday, Carnival, Fastnacht Day, Pancake Day, and Paczki Day. (Both fastnacht and paczki are names for delicious pastries.)

The origins of all these holidays is the Catholic practice of Lent, giving up pleasures or habits, with fasting and penitence, for 40 weekdays before Easter. I know it doesn't seem like a holiday of feasting should have anything to do with a long period of fasting—but today is the last hurrah, the day before Lent begins!

Many people these days celebrate Mardi Gras or Carnival separate from its origins. There are elaborate parades, sporting events, music and dance concerts, and (of course) joyful eating and drinking.

Match the holiday tradition with one of the places it is celebrated:

1. Fastnacht Day

Paczki

2. Mardi Gras

3. Paczki Day

4. Carnival

5. Pancake Day

A. Latin America

B. Poland

C. Switzerland 

D. New Orleans

E. England (U.K.)

Have some Mardi Gras fun!

• DLTK has some fun crafts, games, and coloring pages. 

• Activity Village is another website with ideas about celebrating Mardi Gras with kids. 

ANSWERS: 1.C – 2.D – 3.B – 4.A – 5.E

Did you know...?

• 
  In some towns in England, women do a special pancake race. They have to run to a church while holding a frying pan and flipping a pancake at least three times! The winner gets a “kiss of peace” from the church's bellringer!

• 
  In Belgium, hundreds of men wear colorful costumes with jingling bells and towering ostrich-plume hats and dance through the streets, hurling oranges at the watching crowds.
  
  

For more on Mardi Gras and Carnival, see this earlier post. 

Also on this date:

International Mother Language Day 

Anniversary of the first woman to receive a doctorate in dentistry 

February 16, 2010

Carnival (a.k.a. Mardi Gras)

This day is called many different things all over the world. Mardi Gras means “Fat Tuesday” in French. In English the day is commonly called Shrove Tuesday. In Christian traditions, this is a time of eating and dancing and parades before Ash Wednesday (tomorrow), which begins the time of Lent, a time for penitence and giving up meat or other tempting foods and activities.

In some places, the Carnival festivities take place over days or even weeks but culminate on this Tuesday. In other places, the only celebration is on the day or evening of Mardi Gras itself. Here are just a few of the colorful celebrations of Carnival:

• The city of Nice in France has a parade with floats covered in flowers.

• According to the Guinness Book of World Records, Salvador de Bahia's Carnaval is the largest street party in the world, with more than 2 million participants.

• In Panama, people get soaked with water trucks and hoses during the festivities.

• In Venice, Italy, masks are one of the most important features of the celebrations. You can see and buy extraordinary masks all through the year in Venice.

Also on this date...
First U.S. Esperanto club begins in Boston, in 1905

Esperanto is an “artificial language” especially developed to be easy to learn and politically neutral. A Jewish ophthalmologist from Bialystok (then part of the Russian empire) named Dr. Zamenhof developed it in the late 1800s in the hopes that it would add to international understanding and therefore peace.

Even though Esperanto is the most widely spoken “constructed international auxiliary language language," only 100,000 to 2 million people speak it worldwide, and it is the native or official language nowhere in the world. Natural languages such as Spanish, Mandarin, Hindi, French, and English have hundreds of millions of speakers and make better candidates, many would say, for true international languages (although of course they are not politically neutral!).

Zamenhof used root words from the Romance and Germanic languages as his starting point but used the sounds from the Slavic languages. Because it was carefully constructed by one person, the language has only one spelling for each sound and only one sound for each spelling.

Here are some words in Esperanto:

hello - saluton
yes - jes
no - ne
please - bonvolu
I love you - Mi amas vin

Which language is most international? That is, which language is most widely spoken? Here are the top three languages according to estimated numbers of people who speak them as either their native language or as a secondary language:

1. Mandarin Chinese – 1.12 billion
2. English – 489 million
3. Spanish – 320 million

Here are the top three languages according to how many countries use the language as either an official language or at least as a very important and influential language:

1.English – 115 countries
2.French – 35 countries
3.Arabic – 24 countries

And here are the top three most influential languages in the current world, considering all factors (number of speakers, number of countries, and number of fields), according to George Weber (in an article in Language Today, Vol. 2, December 1997):

1.English
2.French
3.Spanish

Making up languages

Tolkien made up several languages for his fictional land of Middle-earth (on the fictional world of Arda). Quenya is one of them. Tolkien made up alphabets, as well, such as Tengwar. Below is some text in Quenya written in first the Tengwar and then the Latin alphabet.


Most fictional languages have the least amount of vocabulary and grammatical rules possible—just enough exists to present a song or poem, for example, in the particular piece of fiction in which it appears. However, Quenya is a fully functional language, and lots of people take the time to learn how to read and write Quenya, although they usually use the familiar Latin alphabet.

Another fully functional language that was originally created for fiction is Star Trek's Klingon language. Here are a few of the many fictional languages (NOT fully functional) that have been created:

• D'ni for the Myst computer games
• the Na'vi language in Avatar
• Newspeak in George Orwell's 1984
• the Mandalorian language in Star Wars
• the Lapine language in Watership Down

Research these or other languages, or invent your own language!