There are hundreds of them, from big media-led extravaganzas like Mother's Day, which repays women's bonded labour with the emotional purchase of a card each May, to more niche occasions, such as Telecommuter Awareness Week, which passes more or less unsung each February. If I cared, I would be outraged by the fact that Freelance Writers Appreciation Week, also in February, gets even less attention.
But I don't, so I was surprised last week to discover a Day that did not leave me cold: May 10 was the world's first-ever Pangea Day. Pangea is the name of the big undifferentiated landmass that scientists say existed on the Earth before tectonic forces split it up into continents and sent them floating across the oceans until they ended up in the positions we know as the world map.
Scientists love to say dubious things like "This wee bit of white crap is a shard of the earbone of a peaceable herbivorous creature that lived four hundred million years, four months and two days ago, stood sixty-one feet tall, had three heads, and ate nothing but baby corn," when they weren't even there; but the continents of the world all fit together so nicely that I have to admit that they're probably right about Pangea.
Pangea Day is the brainchild of documentary filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, who in 2006 won the yearly $100,000 TED Prize in Monterey, California. (For those of you who haven't heard of TED, look it up at www.ted.com.) TED prize winners are granted a wish, and can use the money to translate the wish into reality.
Noujaim's wish was "world peace", which, as she pointed out, sounds like a beauty pageant sound byte, but is really, actually, genuinely what she most wishes for, and hang the cynicism. And that's the thing about Pangea Day that gets me; it's not sentimental claptrap. It feels matter-of-fact, along the lines of:
"If we don't do this peace thing soon, we're going to self-destruct faster than you can say