Writer's Block: In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue

[campylobacter]

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I wanna visit FIRST NATIONS DAY, bitch.

Get in a boat, land on an island, deny that it's not the "New World" but India you landed on, abduct some locals to use as slaves back home, and leave behind deadly diseases that wipe out a significant portion of the population AND GET A HOLIDAY NAMED AFTER YOU & CREDIT FOR DISCOVERING AMERICA 500 years after Leif Ericson established L'Anse aux Meadows.

Just... What even? Cristoforo Columbo Colombo doesn't deserve a US holiday named after him.

Comments

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

Heh! The real irony is that Spain, Italy, the Bahamas, & Cuba don't commemorate Christopher Columbus, and he'd actually BEEN to those places. He never set foot on the continental US, so I'm confounded as to why we have a holiday named after him.

John Wayne might've lived longer if he hadn't smoked 6 packs of cigarettes a day.

[thothmes.livejournal.com]

Amen to the dangers of smoking! In fairness, though, my mom (who is 73 this year) remembers reading information (diguised as medical advice) that smoking was good for your T-zone (basically the throat and windpipes). Wayne might have genuinely believed he was starting a healthy habit, and it's much harder to quit than to start.

We have a holiday named after him because the Knights of Columbus saw what St. Patrick's day did for Irish Americans, and they used the campaign to get the Federal holiday as an exercise in showing the voting clout and importance of Italian Americans in the politics of the time, in a day when many politicians tended to be focussed almost exclusively on the WASP vote.

[campylobacter.livejournal.com]

Mr. Campy smoked a pack-and-a-half per day until 8 years ago. He promised when we met to quit; it took him 5 years. Yep, I know second hand how hard it is to quit the tobacco habit. The old 1950s ads touting the "benefits" of cigarettes (http://www.health.com/health/gallery/0,,20307049,00.html) are ridiculously frightening.

We have a holiday named after him because the Knights of Columbus saw what St. Patrick's day did for Irish Americans, and they used the campaign to get the Federal holiday as an exercise in showing the voting clout and importance of Italian Americans in the politics of the time, in a day when many politicians tended to be focussed almost exclusively on the WASP vote.
That's astounding, and a cogent argument to discontinue the name of the holiday.

[thothmes.livejournal.com]

Of my kid's grandparents, 3 smoked when they were young (my father, my mother, my father-in-law). All three of them were able to quit, my mother in her very early 20's, my father-in-law in his late twenties, and my dad went from a pipe daily to a cigar perhaps 5 or 6 times a year for special occasions, before quitting in his 30's. My mom was saved by the economics of it, because when she was in college and I was little she chose to feed me rather than buy cigarettes when we didn't have enough money to eat properly. My father-in-law decided it was an addiction, and he didn't like that, so he made himself chew gum (an activity he loathed) every time he wanted a smoke, and never got through the first pack of gum. My dad didn't like what it did to his endurance (he's a committed runner), and so he cut way back before reluctantly stopping because he didn't like the health risks. By some fluke, given that addictive personalities run rampant on all sides of our families, they all had a relatively easy time of it, but I have known people for whom it has been a long, terrible, and ultimately futile battle.

It takes grit, courage, and determination to quit, and so Mr. Campy gets major hero points from me for his success.