Small Business Saturday, Celebrate Your Unique Talent Day

Small Business Saturday asks you to step away from the computer, forget about the mall, and patronize the merchants on Main Street instead.

Celebrate Your Unique Talent Day is fairly self explanatory. If your unique talent involves playing tunes by squeezing your arm pits, we suggest that you celebrate in private.

Our crack research staff has also asked us to point out the proprietress of Usual Suspect brownielocks.com has declared today to be her own personal microminiholidayette.

The Blog of Days is pleased to recommend Brownielocks Day for your celebrating enjoyment today.

Others may wish to observe today as Evolution Day. It was on this day, in 1859, that Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.

It was also on this day in 1971 that D.B. Cooper may have earned his own Darwin Award. He hijacked an airplane en route from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, Washington. He allowed the plane to land but demanded a $200,000 ransom before releasing the passengers. He directed the crew to take the plane back up and head toward Mexico City. Cooper bailed out somewhere along the way, using a parachute provided along with the money. When the plane landed at Reno, Cooper and the money were gone. Cooper has never been found -- and the FBI has long insisted that Cooper probably didn't survive the jump. He may have jumped into a thunderstorm somewhere in the vicinity of Mt. St. Helens. Both the linked Wikipedia article and This Day in History note that $5,800 of the ransom money was found in 1980 "in the sands along the north bank of the Columbia River, five miles from Vancouver, Washington." The Wikipedia article suggests that the way in which the money had deteriorated was consistent with the money having floated there a current, as opposed to being intentionally buried at the location where the discovery was made.