So, I had a good thought on today’s post, a hypothesis on a topic that should have been somewhat interesting. Not ‘worthy of discussing at your coming BBQ’ level of interesting, but ‘consistent with my low expectations of Coan, especially before a holiday weekend when everyone is mailing it in’ kind of interesting. I just needed to go get, what I believed to be relatively straightforward, data to confirm or deny the hypothesis. Either way, there would be a path to 500 words of blather about the subject.
Can I just say that we, as an industry, have horrible data? Is the Supreme Court about to issue an opinion on THAT topic? We, and by that I mean me at the moment, need some action here.
Since it is a good topic worth exploring, I’ll table it and come back later, at a time when I am willing to do more work to get the information. But I already have stuff ready to go on the grill tonight (we are starting early), so ‘more work’ and ‘today’ don’t go together.
But leaving you with nothing – well that would not be nice. So, speaking of getting an early jump on Independence Day, here’s a little nugget for you, one you can share with the family and friends this weekend. That is, if you are OK being ‘that guy.’ Obviously, I am not just OK being ‘that guy,’ I am aiding and abetting other ‘that guy’ types.
Turns out our declaration of independence in 1776 ‘sort of’ happened on July 4th. It was actually July 2nd when 12 of the 13 colonies at the Continental Congress voted to approve the declaration. So, you can absolutely start early and pronounce yourself as both patriotic and historically accurate in the process. A couple extra days of beer and BBQ is not a bad idea.
If you are real overachiever – or glutton – you can stretch this out another month because most of the signers of the Declaration did not get around to putting pen to paper until August 2nd. There was a delay getting the language written neatly onto the parchment. Several did not get around to signing for even longer. Sounds like your physicians being a little slow closing their charts, huh?
So why the 4th?
After reaching agreement on the 2nd to declare independence, it took a couple of days to finalize the language (the documentation was going through coding review). On the 4th, Congress then voted again to make it official.
There you go. Use this trivia this weekend at your own risk.
We’ll be off next week, so no blog post. I might just re-read the Declaration while sitting by a mountain stream. Maybe you want to, as well. It is a pretty good document, after all.