Bad Poetry Day
Who among us doesn't have a memory of bad poetry? You may even have a bad poem you wrote hidden away in an old notebook. Or maybe someone wrote you a bad poem as a way to woo you. For others, their bad poetry memories stem from high-school English class.
What are classics to some are simply bad poetry to others. Wellcat encourages you to celebrate the holiday by mailing bad verse to your English teacher. Because poetry is so subjective, it can be impossible to recognize your own bad poetry.
Celebrate bad poetry day by
* digging out your own poems and posting them on PoetryPoem.
* writing a new bad poem to share with friends.
* host a bad poetry slam in a local cafe or at home. The worst poem wins.
* read Houston's Worst Poem 2011 on Aug. 18.
Soft Ice Cream Day
The best way to enjoy soft ice cream day is to order up a vanilla chocolate twist in a cone. The ice cream cone, which makes soft serve the ultimate, portable summer treat, may have been invented at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. A vendor was serving ice cream in a glass dishes. He could not clean the dishes fast enough to meet the demand. A wafer maker Ernest Hamwi helped out the ice cream vendor by rolling his wafers into cones according to "The Oxford Companion to Food."
The founders of Dairy Queen are credited with the origins of soft-serve ice cream when they served a "soft frozen dairy product" in 1938. Previously, making ice cream at home was commonplace and earliest American recipes date back to 1752, according to Foodtimeline.
Birth Control Pills Day
On Aug. 18, 1960, the G.D. Searle company sold the first oral contraceptives under the brand name Envoid. Endrocrinologist Gregory Pincus (1903-1967) researched female hormones and co-founded the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology. Although scientists in the 1920s had already discovered progesterone's ovulation-preventing properties, they did not have a way to make it available for use according to Discoveries in Medicine: "In the 1950s Pincus and his colleagues focused their efforts on developing a hormone combination that would fool the woman's body into thinking it was already pregnant, thus keeping any new ova (eggs) from being released."
Because contraception was illegal in Massachusetts at the time, the pill was tested as an infertility treatment. By 1960 the Federal Drug Administration approved the first contraceptive pill.
Aug. 18 commemorates the day the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, women's right to vote, was ratified in 1920.
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