Happy National Garlic Day. The National sort of suggests USA origins but if you call one of the other countries that populate our planet home, feel free to celebrate the stinking rose along with us.

I’m not sure why somebody picked the middle of April to celebrate garlic. Apparently neither do the organizers of the many garlic themed festivals, picking instead mid-summer for the every July Gilroy Garlic festival in Gilroy California where 140% of the world’s garlic crop is grown and smells like it, or mid-winter for the every February Delray Beach Garlic Fest in Delray Beach Florida where little garlic is grown outside of backyard gardens and it smells sort of like Florida.

While the uncertainty of when to celebrate garlic may lead to some organizational questions, at least garlic is something real. You can see it, taste it and smell it (sometimes far longer than you expected), and it is a part of modern life. Unlike, say, the velociraptor.

Yesterday was National Velociraptor Awareness Day. Again, there’s that “National” designation suggesting not all Americans are consumed with political-oriented lunacy and can go out on limbs of their own making. I guess anybody can celebrate anything, but do we really need to be “aware” of an animal that hasn’t taken a breath for roughly 70,000,000 years? (Spelled out that would be seventy million years.) If one felt the prehistoric bird has been slighted in film and fiction, maybe a Velociraptor Appreciation Day is called for. But awareness? I don’t think I need to be as aware of what a velociraptor might do to me or my environs as perhaps I should be of a cavalier attitude to continuing masking and social distancing. Now that’s something to be aware of. But I digress.

If you have an inordinate amount of free time (like I clearly do), you can search National Velociraptor Day and find no end of information about the apparently feathery dinosaur including its average height, weight, wingspan, stance, fight speed, running speed, habitat, and diet. There is a huge number of “facts” about this thing that disappeared over 69.5 million years before man showed up. But then the world is also gaga over the paleodiet and I don’t think anybody was writing cookbooks back then and that was a lot more recently than velociraptors flew over the earth. (Personally, given that the world was so waterlogged then, I think the typical paleodiet was likely lizards, snails, and little amphibians (perhaps as something akin to frog legs) and more likely resembled a high end (aka snooty) French restaurant.) But boy do I digress.

Although none of the National Velociraptor Awareness Day sites mention how its predator enjoyed this early bird at mealtime, there are several that note the velociraptor du jour did not resemble the flying dinosaur depicted in most movies featuring return to life prehistoric creatures, instead they more likely looked like big chickens. So go out on your own limb and celebrate both National Velociraptor Day (a day late) and National Garlic Day (right on time) with a robust chicken dinner smothered in garlic, perhaps the famous Chicken with Forty Cloves of Garlic recipe. Stick that in your search engine and you’ll come up with about 2-1/4 million results which is only about 250,000 less than if you searched for velociraptors. Sigh.