We all know that 10th March is Mario Day, right?
It started years ago when people noticed the way Teletext formatted the month and date. 4th February was displayed as FEB 04, which means that 10th March was displayed as MAR 10. MAR 10 looks just like Mario, and so Mario Day was born.
By the way, if you’d like a quick reminder of how good Teletext was, have a fumble around the Teletext Viewer by ZXGuesser: https://zxnet.co.uk/teletext/viewer/
So this got 51 year old me thinking… What other words could be made out of dates if the date format was MMMdd? I mean, just 5 days after MAR10 we have MAR15, which I think looks uncannily like Maris. Surely this has got to be a National Day already, hasn’t it? It turns out, no.
Why has nobody thought of this before? Am I the only one who thinks like this? I can’t be the only person on earth who continually comes up with all the ideas. Someone else, perhaps a farmer, MUST have seen MAR15 before and thought, “Well, that does kind of look like familiar,” surely? I’d have though a few other humans may have noticed a similarity there? But after a whole 20 minutes of searching the internet at a moderately less-than-bothered speed I was unable to find any mention or previous occurrence of MAR15 Day.
It’s like the time I came up with 5th May being “Revenge of the Fifth” Day. May the 4th is Star Wars Day (because May the 4th sounds quite like the first part of the iconic line from Star Wars “May the Force be with you”), and it baffled me that nobody had come up with the sequel the day after, despite Fifth sounding just like Sith, and the date being perfect for it. Yes, I came up with that. You’re welcome.
So, I have decided today (today being Sunday 16th March 2025) that the 15th March will henceforth be known as Maris Piper Day, the day when you eat potatoes.
Lets see how well this catches on…