Altogether now, scream: Ice Cream Day is July 21

Get it?

I scream / You scream / We all scream for ice cream: Sunday, July 21 is Ice Cream Day.

Don't care for ice cream? Teeth sensitive to cold? Well, Sunday is also National Junk Food Day.

And Sunday is Legal Drinking Age Day -- because it's the 21st, see?

Not enough? Sunday is considered Monkey Day by some of the Usual Suspects because it was on July 21, 1925 that the Scopes trial ended -- with a finding that high school teacher John Scopes had violated Tennessee law by teaching the theory of evolution to his students. Fortunately, we've progressed quite a bit (evolved, you might say) since then: We don't know of any state where it's actually illegal to teach evolution in the schools. Of course, there are more than a few states where the teaching of evolution appears to be frowned upon. A 2012 Gallup poll revealed that 46% of Americans believe that God created mankind in our present form -- and somewhere in the last 10,000 years to boot. Maybe we've not evolved as much as some of us would like to think.

And today, July 20, is Moon Day, commemorating mankind's first tentative steps on another world (our own Moon). As you saw from yesterday's post, we gave up on the Moon in 1972 -- haven't been back since. The American Space Shuttle program, which ferried astronauts to and from Low Earth Orbit, was itself abandoned on July 21, 2011, when the Shuttle Atlantis touched down in Florida at the end of STS-135.

Come to think of it, maybe we should reconsider this evolution thing. We seem to be going backwards....