Bloomsday

I do not pretend to be a James Joyce fan and I certainly do not pretend to have read his Ulysses. But I do know that today is Bloomsday because Joyce set Ulysses on a single day (June 16, 1904) and the protagonist of the novel is named Leopold Bloom. If you are a James Joyce fan, you can easily find a Bloomsday celebration in your locality. Recitations from the novel are a staple at these events.

Middlebrow that I am, I prefer reciting instead from the collected works of Allan Sherman. You may recall this line from Hello Mudduh, Hello Fadduh:

And the head coach

Wants no sissies

So he reads to us from

Something called Ulysses

Hallmark suggests that today is Fudge Day, but this has to do with the confection and not whether you can bluff the local literati into believing you got through the roughly 265,000 words in Ulysses.