Around this time every year, Bonny, photographer par excellent, announces her Photography Calendar Pre-Sale.
It is both a fun and somewhat intense time that finds us culling through her year’s collection of outstanding photographs in order to pick the 24 that will make the final cut (she prints the calendars in both horizontal and vertical formats with different photos included on each.)
My job in all of this – other than trying to invent a calendar format that includes 1000 full size photos – is to decide what holidays to include on the horizontally formatted version.
The job is almost as daunting as narrowing down the photographs. One of the outcroppings that has resulted in the social media boom times is the gathering of like-minded folks with every far-flung interest one can imagine, and then more. Each group wants to celebrate its unique common interest by grabbing ahold of its own day, be it national or international.
Just so you know that I take my job seriously, today happens to be World Octopus Day. Knowing this fact, I set off on a brief and enriching romp around the internet to learn more.
- The
plural of Octopus is Octopuses - They belong to the class Cephalopoda (named from the Greek meaning ‘head-footed’)
- Octopuses are the shapeshifters of the sea. They can change color to camouflage themselves http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/wild/videos/the-day-octopus/, they can indeed, change shapes https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=5&v=aoCzZHcwKxI,
- It is suspected that they can use tools http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/06/150605-octopus-tools-animals-ocean-science/.
- Every octopus has three hearts and blue blood.
- Octopus fossils date back more than 300 million years.
- World Octopus Day has its own song appropriately named, The Octopus Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq9E5JFGOaM
- Why October 8th – 8 legs of course.
Bonny hasn’t come across any octopuses in her photographic wanderings so, alas, there will be no celebrity cephalopods gracing the pages of next year’s calendars but merely a mention on October 8th, 2016 so you won’t forget.
EDIT: Upon reading my last paragraph, Bonny yelled across the office, ‘I DO TOO HAVE A PICTURE OF AN OCTOPUS!!!’ And indeed she does – not just one but many pictures of octopuses. She took them on her great 2015 summer adventure.
So there you have it. Go grab a boiling pot and a bag full of live crabs and have yourselves a crab bake – which happens to be every octopuses favorite meal.