The Gaming Den

I'm feeling pretty chipper right now. See, next Tuesday is Fat Tuesday--the culmination of Carnival.

Around here, Mardi Gras is a big enough holiday that they don't bother to hold classes and businesses are closed for the day--and maybe the Monday before.

While I'm not big on the parades themselves--a little too much chaos for me--I appreciate the days off.

So, anyone have any eccentric local holidays where they live?

Samhain and Beltane. Mildly, but observed. I also make it a point to destroy my liver on St. Patrick's Day; it's cultural.

Being neck deep in Baptists and fundamentalist BibleBeltians, that's damn exotic.
I mentioned the solstice observance once in public school and a kid was convinced that I was a satanist.

They have a lot of autumn festivals throughout the region in my area. Although I don't think that's very unique to our region.

Regionally, Groundhog Day is big around here. Especially so this year.


For obscure neo hippy cult rituals, that would confound Babtists, a couple of folks I game with are involved in this.

Derby (The Kentucky Derby if you're not local). It's a freakin' month-long party here in Lousiville. We've got glowing balloons, racing riverboats, big, colorful explosions, the Golden Antlers, the Great Bed Races, the Chuckwagon...

Talisman wrote:Derby (The Kentucky Derby if you're not local). It's a freakin' month-long party here in Lousiville. We've got glowing balloons, racing riverboats, big, colorful explosions, the Golden Antlers, the Great Bed Races, the Chuckwagon...

Fancier than my local "farm fairs" with farm animals, tractor pulls, small-scale military demonstrations, and of course.. food. Seriously, that's about it.

We do have Pirate's Day in Baltimore, but with so many fat, drunken Gen-X-ers it wasn't as pleasant as expected.

We just had Tet a while back which is both the lunar new year and a holiday for crushing the American people's appetite for war.

Oh yeah and a weird super sticking rice cake that's quite nice fried.

For reasons not quite clear,August 25th is a day of celebration in this neck of the woods

Frank should come in here and tell us about crazy Czech holidays, like Spanking Day or whatever it's called. It probably wins the "Seriously, what the fuck?" category.

The ones that really confuse me at 'Columbus Day' - why is this a holiday? And why we don't get off Flag Day but we do take off Veteran's Day (Armistice Day)

-Crissa

Oh, of some note is that here in Australia, we not only get Good Friday off (for those watching at home, that's Messiah-Onna-Stick day, when they actually crucified him), we also get Easter Monday off.

Want to know why that is? It's because Easter Sunday (Zombie Messiah Day) is a Sunday (duh), and it's no fun to have a public holiday on a weekend, so it carries forward to Monday.

Because, as Australians, we have a reputation of laziness to uphold.

Koumei that's true of statutory holidays in most of the developed world. If christmas falls on a weekend you get the monday or friday off

Koumei wrote:Because, as Australians, we have a reputation of laziness to uphold.

Like most of the great Australian persona, that is a lie.

Modern Australians are overworked and take fewer holidays than they should (and fewer than other developed nation's workforces do).

We also work stupid amounts of overtime, paid and unpaid.

Well, I say "we", but I'm basically self employed so I don't have to deal with bosses demanding 10 hours unpaid over time a week (anymore). Suckers.

I understand that December 6th is completely crazy in Austria. Like people you don't know who are dressed like the devil will whip you for no apparent reason.

Koumei wrote:Frank should come in here and tell us about crazy Czech holidays, like Spanking Day or whatever it's called. It probably wins the "Seriously, what the fuck?" category.

That's the Monday after Easter. It is traditional to get these braided birch sticks with ribbons on them, and then wander around spanking pretty women on the butt with them. Also there is a fair in Old Town Square (and probably most other cities), where you can get special Easter sausages and of course the braided birch flogs. Women are supposed to take getting spanked on the butt by strange men as a compliment, as it means that they are beautiful. Also they are traditionally supposed to respond with either a smile, a water fight, or an axe depending on how much they like the young man in question. Throwing water on you is a sign that they don't want you to spank them again, while giving someone the axe of togetherness is supposed to signify that you want to go have babies. The smile and accompanying bawdy comments are the middle ground. In modern days, this tradition is largely dying out as the axe of togetherness is too weird even for Czechs, and they have replaced it with gifts of chocolate.

Then there is Mikuláš day. That's Saint Nicholas Day to everyone else. It's on Decmber 5th. The deal is that children go out in trios, where one of them is dressed like a devil, one is dressed like an angel, and the third is dressed up like Santa. Then they run around and shake people down for church donations. The children also get rewarded with candy or tangerines. The church takes all the money that the kids earn. It's child labor, but it is adorable.

Then there's Czechoslovak Independence Day on the 28th of October. Apparently what they do for this is have Soviet style military parades in which they flex the muscles of the Czech Republic (note: not the same country even in name as the nation whose independence we are celebrating) by driving tanks down the street and marching soldiers around. There's a bunch of tents set up in Devicka where they show off all the Czech Republic's military toys. It's a weird mix of NATO and Soviet castoffs, so you kind of wonder who they are trying to intimidate and how they think that's going to work.

And of course we celebrate the 1st of May. With a celebratory riot, because that day is sacred to the commies, and the fascists, and the unions, and the anarchists, and basically every other extremist group you can name - often for wildly different reasons. Communists get into street fights with neo-Nazis and everyone gets the day off of work. Remember: it's Labor Day, and the Soviets introduced it as a major holiday. So people still celebrate it, but you also have irate right wing assholes running around trying to get you to stop having fun because International Workers' Day is a commie affair. Even though it actually commemorates an event in the United States.

We also celebrate the End of World War II on the 8th of May. The astute will note that this is in fact Victory Europe Day, and not the end of World War II at all (it actually ended August 15th). But in Central Europe they could seriously give a crap if 50 million people died in Asia and Japanese and Chinese people were still killing each other - the fall of Nazi Germany is the end of the War as far as Czechs know or care.

And of course, there's November 17th. It's officially called "Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Day" and it celebrates the start of the Velvet Revolution. Which was itself started to commemorate the day in 1939 when the Nazis shut down all the Czech universities and sent all the students to concentration camps.

-Username17

I forgot to mention: Around here, Carnival has sub-holidays.

Today--the Sunday before Fat Tuesday--is Joe Cain Day. The guy it's named after lived during Reconstruction...saw how down people were, having gotten their asses kicked in a war and all, and decided to raise some hell.

So he stole a coal cart, dressed up as a Native American chieftain, called himself Slacobamorinico, and rode through town raising hell with his drunken friends.

Cool guy. I've visited his grave.

http://images-cdn01.associatedcontent.c ... 193069.jpg

PhoneLobster wrote: Well, I say "we", but I'm basically self employed so I don't have to deal with bosses demanding 10 hours unpaid over time a week (anymore). Suckers.

Damn you.

Hey shut up Lobster, we have a reputation to uphold! :p

Many of those sound awesome, Frank. I wouldn't mind the odd military parade with tanks rolling down the street. And as for Spanking Day... are girls allowed to go around birching other girls if so inclined?

Incidentally, what season is that in Czech? Because I get the feeling it's cold weather, so people wear a lot. Even a single pear of jeans will basically provide immunity to the birch, so I can see it being very odd still, but not actually painful. If, as you implied in your InsaneJournal, we get equal pay over there then that's an awesome exchange.

PhoneLobster wrote:

Koumei wrote:Because, as Australians, we have a reputation of laziness to uphold.

Like most of the great Australian persona, that is a lie.

Modern Australians are overworked and take fewer holidays than they should (and fewer than other developed nation's workforces do).

We also work stupid amounts of overtime, paid and unpaid.

Well, I say "we", but I'm basically self employed so I don't have to deal with bosses demanding 10 hours unpaid over time a week (anymore). Suckers.

Stop your bitching, America wins when it comes to most hours worked, fewest days vacation, and general employer asshattery. If you get ANY vacation, you have it better than most Americans.

FrankTrollman wrote:Also they are traditionally supposed to respond with either a smile, a water fight, or an axe depending on how much they like the young man in question. ...giving someone the axe of togetherness is supposed to signify that you want to go have babies.

I absolutely love "the axe of togetherness." My first thought (before I read what the axe was about) was, "If I see a woman hauling an axe around, I'm probably not spanking her with a birch rod."

Koumei wrote:Hey shut up Lobster, we have a reputation to uphold.

I like that canberra has a holiday for a race that occurs in an entirely different state, because the state government wanted to thumb its nose at the federal government.

Count_Arioch_the_28th wrote:Stop your bitching, America wins when it comes to most hours worked, fewest days vacation, and general employer asshattery. If you get ANY vacation, you have it better than most Americans.

Really because back in 2002 the ACTU had this to say about our working hours...

"Australia is the second longest working time country in the developed world. Only workers in Korea work longer hours than workers in Australia. That means that Australians on average are working longer than workers in Japan, than workers in Singapore, than workers in Mexico. And already there are some statistics where Australia is leading the world. Australia has, for example, the greatest proportion of its workforce working in excess of 50 hours a week of any country within the OECD."

You know I used to be a highly trained specialist in an obscure professional field that claimed to have a shortage of skilled workers.

I once attended a job interview for a particular position. I was one of only three prospective employees meeting the required qualifications who's names had been given to the employer by a specialist employment agency (scam artists, but I digress).

It was the second attempt at filling the position because when they originally advertised it no one answered the ad.

They rejected one applicant without an interview. Because while myself and the other guy only had degrees and she had done post graduate studies specialising in the particular field apparently only our several years of actual work place experience in the field counted.

And I was told flat to my face that I would need to work up to ten hours unpaid overtime a week and be paid only at unskilled graduate rates.

And that wasn't an exceptional case, pretty much all the conditions matched every other position I'd gone to interview for.

That's in a "good" industry with a shortage of workers when there are only two names in the hat and you meet the requested qualifications requiring a degree and years of highly specialised experience.

I can't imagine what it must be like for say, a career as a regular office worker.

PhoneLobster wrote:Like most of the great Australian persona, that is a lie.

It is an amusing fiction though. If people are to be believed they don't do any work. You'll get people in the middle of deploying hardware claiming they don't have much on.

Koumei wrote:And as for Spanking Day... are girls allowed to go around birching other girls if so inclined?

Balls to that, the real question is can guys/girls go around birching guys?

United States is the only advanced nation that does not guaranty sick leave.

CEPR, 2007 wrote:This report also includes a comparative appendix with information on paid leave and holiday laws in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.

So indeed, stop your bitching. Actually better still, keep bitching. Because the fact that people in another country have it worse than you has no influence over whether you personally have it good enough. Other people being slaves does not mean that you don't deserve better working conditions. That's the kind of false dilemma argument that The Man uses to keep you down.

-Username17

Draco wrote:Balls to that, the real question is can guys/girls go around birching guys?

I'm not really sure. But I think that would be fairly well received. At least if it was girls birching guys. Guys birching guys would probably be interpreted as "You're a pretty lady" which would be insulting to someone who did not consider themselves to be a lady in the first place.

But on Saturday I was dancing with a couple of Slovakian women, and one of them kept punching me softly in the chest in order to get me to tickle her. Also the other one seriously did a flying knee-thrust into the back of my knees in order to try to trip me. I was told that it was "Very sexy" that I managed to stay standing.

Considering that this is considered normal public behavior on a non-holiday, I can only imagine that a woman on Easter Monday would have no problem getting a dude into bed by just running up and birching the butt of some guys she fancied. My estimate is that with no more than half a dozen swats, an attractive young woman could get herself a serious date.

-Username17