Marxists, socialists, communists, etc. have celebrated May Day for ages. More specifically, they celebrate “International Workers Day” on May 1st because that was the beginning of the 1886 general strike that sought the eight-hour workday, and led to the Haymarket bombing a few days later.

The eight-hour day might be reasonable, but beware the motte-and-bailey: the comrades gloss over how poorly the international workers fared wherever the comrades took over. Genocide? Meh. Holodomor? As Walter Duranty once said about his commie pals, you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.

(Not that there were eggs, but you get the idea.)

Well, today’s May 1st, and I’d rather spend the month celebrating some folks who actually manage to feed people, even if those dirty filthy capitalist pigs make a little money doing so.

A few decades ago, the cattle industry began to celebrate May as “National Beef Month.” In 2017, Buona Beef announced that the fourth Saturday in May would henceforth mark “National Italian Beef Day.” A few years later, Portillo’s escalated matters further by declaring all of May “National Italian Beef Month.” Which, again, begins today. And by happy coincidence, these vastly superior celebrations originate from the same town as the aforementioned commie holiday.

I shall honor the holimonth and holiday with trips to as many Florida-based Portillo’ses as possible, where I shall feast on Italian roast beef sandwiches. Giardinera, gravy, mozzarella. As long as I’m there, I may throw in some Chicago-style dogs even though Hot Dog Month is July, which will warrant additional trips, and maybe a bite of the chocolate cake. Or a sip of the chocolate cake shake.

Driving 150-200 miles for an Italian beef sandwich and a single sip of a shake might strike some as wasteful, and maybe it is. But it’s not “secret police scour villages for hidden grain seeds so nobody illegally grows food during a famine” wasteful. Done ranting for now.

…

No, I’m not. Turns out the new Animal Farm movie– the one that completely inverts Orwell– comes out today, of all days. How genuinely revolting.

Can’t hurt to ask the League to do the logical thing and take advantage of the long weekend. It’s what Washington would have wanted.

Granted, certain years it’ll make for an awkwardly early romantic lunch, but we’ll see what Saint Nicholas can work out with fellow Saint Valentine.

Merry Christmas!

Today, the United States minted its last penny, at least for the foreseeable future.

This should probably have been done decades ago, given rising production costs and inflation. But then, what would we use to buy gumballs, or to flatten-and-stamp into souvenirs, or to toss into fountains and wishing wells? Nickels? Please.

I doubt anyone outside of numismatists and coin collectors would have noticed, except for the announcements. Pennies will still circulate for a good long while, and some cash places will round up, or round down, or keep pennies near the register for convenience’s sake.

You’ll still see prices and bills ending in $.01, or $.02, and so on, just like we have gasoline and property taxes priced to the mill– a thousandth of a dollar– despite not having a mill coin since… ever.

Of course, you’ll also occasionally run into cashiers or vendors claiming that since physical pennies aren’t being minted anymore, abstract pennies somehow don’t exist anymore, so we have to round everything up. And then you’ll point out that they could just as easily round everything down. And then you’ll remind them of gasoline and property taxes, and they’ll act confused– or maybe they’ll actually be confused. New rounding schemes and new rounding scams will emerge, and… we’ll get used to them.

Anyhow. It disturbs me to think that the penny is rolling faster down the way of the dodo. I suspect that’s a little bit of worry about inflation, and a whole lot of shaking my fist at the clouds. To think that the obverse of the 1943 steel penny once served as favicon and graced the background of this august journal.

…

I am reminded of an open letter I wrote many years ago to then-President-elect Obama, in hopes of winning a patronage job:

7. Announce that pennies now count as nickels, and then slowly take them out of circulation, replacing them with real nickels. Put Lincoln on new dollar coins the size of the old Ike dollars. Also, start printing $500 bills again. I am not a crackpot.

–Me, “Advice as promised.”

Inflationary? Yes. As inflationary as anything else the feds have done in the meantime? No. Self-serving, given the countless rolls of pennies I’ve stashed in caches and safehouses all over the country? Possibly.

Today marks twenty years since I started blogging. I bought viscariello.com in May of 2005 with the intention of making it a bit easier to keep in touch with friends and family after I moved to Chicago. In September, I decided to play around with the WordPress blogging software that came with a StartLogic site. Sitting at a small writing desk in my three-flat apartment in Wheaton, I tapped away on an old laptop, and produced the following:

Testing. Testing. This is my first attempt at a “web log,” or “blog,” as it were. Blog blog blog. Blog blog.

–Me, “First post,” September 1, 2005.

I look back on these last two decades of blogging– which was really ten years of blogging and ten years of occasionally remembering that I have a blog– and think:

…I forgot that “blog” was short for “web log.”

…it was so much trickier to run the website and blog back then. I would repeatedly accidentally erase everything by somehow screwing up the WordPress updates. I’d panic for a few hours, finally figure out how to restore it, make an ugly mess of the whole thing, add a “Part II” or “Part III” to the end of the blog title to indicate a restart before abandoning the practice because it technically didn’t make sense because it wasn’t an nth volume because all— not some— of my posts were still present, curse StartLogic and WordPress for not making the whole thing much easier, realize a few days later that they had, in fact, made it easier and I just hadn’t read the instructions closely enough, and then carry on writing. Then I just switched everything over to WordPress hosting and everything got much easier.

…I don’t write often enough to justify calling it a “journal,” which suggests something written daily, or at least more regularly than “whenever I feel like it.” Maybe a fifth or sixth name change is in order. Or maybe I should write more.

…the blog was a new and different way to connect with people. That way was quickly eclipsed by social media, messenger apps and groups, and real monetizable subscription platforms. Ah well.

…it once rekindled the embers of a long-lost love, but there’s been some upside, too. It opened dialogue with distant relatives the world over. It helped me get and keep in touch with old friends, colleagues, students, and so forth. And if Akismet and Jetpack are to be believed, I make hundreds, sometimes thousands of new bot-friends every day. They’ll come in handy post-singularity.

…it revealed, and reminds me, that what I find amusing is not the same as what others do, and that I don’t care.

…it is nothing profound, but it is fun.