On this day (20 December) in 1937, J.R.R.Tolkien wrote in a letter to C.A.Furth of Allen and Unwin:
"I have written the first chapter of a new story about Hobbits - 'A long expected party'. A merry Christmas."

This was the start of The Lord of the Rings.

Posted by: @coracle

This was the start of The Lord of the Rings.

A tale that grew in the telling...   I had no idea he started writing it so soon after The Hobbit was published! I'm looking forward to reading more of the works published by Christopher that show how his father's writings developed, but I'll finish The Silmarillion first...

Today is Groundhog Day (cue the movie 😉 ). In these parts, the groundhog's worst-case scenario (6 more weeks of winter) would be considered a bargain - that takes us to about the spring equinox, and if spring came then we'd be amazed. We often get snow in April and occasionally even in May.

It marks Imbolc, the old cross-quarter day that marks the (roughly) halfway point between the winter solstice and the spring equinox. It is also Candlemas (in the Catholic Church) and St. Brigid's Day.

64 years ago today (February 3, 1959), 3 musicians (Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and "The Big Bopper" JP Richardson, along with their pilot), died in a plane crash after performing at a "Winter Dance Party" at the Surf Ballroom in northern Iowa. Don McLean later called this "the day the music died" in his 1971 hit "American Pie."

Trivia notes: the Surf still exists and has "Winter Dance Party" fundraising events each year on February 3. It's located in the small town of Clear Lake, about a half-hour drive from where I grew up.

@stargazer Thanks for this reminder. That was well before "my" time, but La Bamba was one of my favourite songs when I was little (in the 1980s!) — it wasn't until many years later that I learned about the singer, Ritchie Valens, and how it was quite radical and exciting at the time for a young non-Hispanic singer to be able to bring that style of music into American popular culture. I had heard before about what "the day the music died" referred to in Don McLean's song, but didn't know the full story of the three singers and their tragic deaths until I watched a documentary on them, which was shown on Australian TV — it must have been for the 40th anniversary of their deaths, in 1999, as I remember realising as I was watching that I was only slightly younger than Ritchie (the youngest of them) was when he died. It was very moving and I'm glad to hear the same venue still holds a fundraising event in their memory.

6 February (today here) is New Zealand's national day,  celebrating the treaty signed 183 years ago between NZ original residents ('Maori') and British settlers. 

Here's a page from the "now I feel really old" file:

It was 44 years ago today (February 26, 1979) that I saw totality for the first time, as the moon's shadow swept across the northwest US through Manitoba and Hudson Bay.

With a college friend (now Ryadian's father), I watched it from a truck stop parking lot near Brandon, Manitoba, along with hundreds or thousands of others (despite it being deep in winter). It's unbelievably spectacular and highly recommended for everyone if you get a chance to watch.

On the way home we mused about the next one we were likely to travel to, far in the future, in 2017. Now that one's in the rear-view mirror and we're looking forward to the next one, less than 14 months from now.