Donyou remember the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland? He wore a signnon his giant hat: “In this style 10/6.” Because of that sign,n10/6 (October 6) is the Mad Hatter’s special day.
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nWhatndo people do to celebrate Mad Hatter Day? n
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nWencelebrate silliness! n
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nIt’snnot a day for tricks or pranks, like April Fool’s Day. This kinder,ngentler “fool’s day” is for being silly in a little-kid way.nListen to jokes, sing ridiculous songs, run around, do cartwheels andnsomersaults and silly dances! Or try to look at our world with yourntopsy-turvy “the whole world’s crazy” eyeglasses: n
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- Wen park on driveways and drive on parkways. (Thank you, George Carlin,n for pointing this out!)
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nIcelandn is pretty green (in the summer), but Greenland is covered with ice.
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nAn shrimp is a shelled animal, which means that it has a shell, untiln it is shelled by a chef—by which I mean the chef removes then shell. Now the shelled shrimp is ready to cook….So….”shelled”n means having a shell and not having a shell!
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nWhenn you dust a bookshelf, you remove the dust, but when you dustn a cake with sugar, you add the “dust” (sugar crystals).n
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nWen get the power to travel around by “taking the juice fromn hundred-million-year-old rotten dinosaur food and exploding it in an metal can.” (Thanks, Ari Rapkin, for this fresh look at our world!)
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nPlanesn landing on an aircraft carrier have to catch a heavy wire with an hook attached to the tail of the airplane in order to survive then landing. It’s incredibly difficult and dangerous, and when I touredn an aircraft carrier I wondered who would even come up with such an ridiculous concept! (I mean, it does work, but what made peoplen think for a moment that it would?)n
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nRabbitsn can’t digest enough of their food as it passes the first timen through their digestive system, so they have to eat their own poopn in order to get enough nutrients. (Well, technically speaking, theyn eat the softer, smellier cectropes, not their actual feces, whichn are small, round, and dry.)
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nIfnyou look at the familiar world as if you were a stranger in a strangenland, you will see some weird and wacky things. But remember that MadnHatter Day is mostly about funny and silly fun!
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nAlsonon this date:
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nInventor George Westinghouse’s birthday
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nEthnographer Thor Heyerdahl’s birthday
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