Many of you may have been aware that Alabama and Mississippi combined “Lee Day” with MLK day, but I was not, and it’s depressing to learn.
Virginia too. I don’t know if it is still a combined holiday, but when I lived there (till ca. 1991) it was King-Lee-Jackson Day.
My ex father-in-law used to refer to MLK Day as “James Earl Ray Day.”
A classy gent, clearly.
January 20 is also the birthday of Joel Rifkin, so we can celebrate that too.
SF author Lois McMaster Bujold thought this through. If you simply freeze a person, the ice formed will damage the cells. To cryo-preserve a person you have to first replace all the blood with “cryo-fluid” and to revive a person you have to repeat the process in reverse. Bujold envisioned an entire planet of frozen people warehouses in the future: in CryoBurn there are hundreds of billions of person-sicles who’ve been abandoned because nobody is coming back for them… there’s a great sadness to that novel. Comes complete with power outages, naturally.
When I die, let me just return my elements to the Earth the old-fashioned way. Please.
Amazon return policy?
Drop her off at Whole Foods and they’ll take care of the rest. 
Virginia decoupled Lee-Jackson day from Martin Luther King Day in 2000. Virginia’s Lee-Jackson day was canceled in 2020 (shame that it took so long).
I’ve read it; it’s a great book, as are all of the Vorkosigan books. Note that even there, hundreds of years in the future, when cryo-preservation is routine, there’s still a chance of failed revival and long-term brain damage - a major plot point in Mirror Dance and subsequent volumes.
Ill have to read it. Really enjoyed the Vorkosigan books. My wife met her several times years ago when she was involved in publishing.
Bujold also has two series of books set in fantasy worlds (the Sharing Knife; the World of the Five Gods), equally good reads.
Thanks for the update, Johanna. It’s been many years since I’ve lived there. If I recall correctly, prior to decoupling the holidays Virginia used to rotate the name by which they called it. One year: King-Lee-Jackson Day, then next year, Lee-Jackson-King Day, etc.
I could be misremembering, but either way the whole concept of that shared holiday boggles the imagination.
Something for everyone
A comedy tonight!
Next thing you know, Broadway will be reviving “Springtime for Hitler” as a historical drama.
Not precisely “in the news” but I caught a small bit of Chuck Todd blathering on a local NPR show today, saying Biden’s pardons justified Trump’s. He also started to yap about “Biden’s whole failed presidency” and that’s when I bailed on the show. What a stupid asshole!
When did he clapton out?
I wonder if this is because Chuck Todd has been fading into obscurity since he was a disaster at his last couple of jobs (one could call him a “failed moderator” at Meet the Press) and he wanted someone to pay attention to him again.
I think that ship has sailed for the embarrassing relative Sweeney won’t talk about.
LOL, good one.
To their credit, the hosts of the show immediately pushed back on Biden’s whole presidency being a failure and Chuck back-pedaled fast to, well, maybe not all of it, but pardons! Afghanistan! and that’s when I switched to another channel.