November 12, 2013: I’m a pepperoni purist, so I will not be celebrating Pizza with the Works Except Anchovies Day. In my youth, I was a pizza cook at two different places. Only one of them offered anchovies, and I rarely had to put them on a pizza. But boy howdy, could you smell them for hours afterward. (That pizza place also offered shrimp as a topping, which was used even less.)

It’s also on this day back in 1955 when Marty McFly, thanks to Doc Brown’s ingenuity, scampered out from the Enchantment Under the Sea dance and harnessed 1.21 gigawatts of electricity from the bolt of lightning that struck the Hill Valley clock tower so that he could go Back to the Future (and yes, I knew all of those details without looking them up). (There are a ton of other dates considered “Back to the Future Day”, since there’s the day Marty went back to 1955, then the date he came back to 1985, plus also the dates he visited in the far-off future of 2015 and the far-distant past of 1885. I’m sticking with this one, because it’s the day he actually went “back” to “the future”, and because the sequels weren’t that great, so I’m going to pretend that the original Back to the Future is the only film that was actually made. I do the same with The Matrix.)

As an aside, I went as Marty McFly for a costume event back in the ’90s. The patterned shirt was the hardest part, but I actually found it.