January 28 is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day and National Kazoo Day

You can't get much more frivolous than this -- Monday is Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day and National Kazoo Day.

Everybody loves to pop bubble wrap -- whether or not they admit it -- and most people like goofing around with a kazoo.

Unfortunately, these are activities that tend to be more appreciated in private than in public. If you and your mates break out kazoos tonight at your local and hummmmmm out Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," chances are you won't get halfway through your performance without getting beat up or thrown out. Maybe both. (The Blog of Days takes no responsibility for anyone silly enough to try and prove this prediction wrong.)

But all is not frivolity on January 28. On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded shortly after liftoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard, including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. President Ronald Reagan, speaking to a stunned nation that night, quoted a poem, "High Flight," by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., "We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of Earth' to 'touch the face of God.'"