Day: March 22, 2024

“You! You there!” he shouted to a boy on the street. “What day is this?”

The boy gave a puzzled look. “It’s Shatmas, sir.”

“Good! I haven’t missed it. Here, lad. There’s a big, juicy turkey of a Shatner movie in the bargain bin at Walmart. Buy it and deliver it to my house.”

There are those who, with apologies to pretenders like Alexander Graham Bell and the not-as-great Gretzky, call Bill Shatner the greatest of all Canadians. That’s nonsense. Why restrict his importance to a single frozen land with fewer than 40 million inhabitants? He is simply the greatest HUMAN, possibly excepting the anonymous inventor of the wheel, and of course Bobby Troup.

Today is his 93rd birthday, or as I call it, New Year’s Day. Different people reckon the start of the new year with different methods, and have varying ways to calculate how many there have been. At the end of September in our calendar, the Jewish community will welcome the year 5785. The Chinese just celebrated the beginning of 4721. In a site dedicated to crap, we have no choice but to count the birth of William Shatner as the beginning of time (or at least any time worth living in), so today is the beginning of the year 93 A.S. (Anno Shatner).

Referencing the great day to the common calendar, the day known to most of the world as March 22, 1931 was the greatest day in history, for it marked the birth of the promised one … the golden child … the chosen one. Know him. Embrace him. For as surely as crapped is the past tense of crap, Shat is the past tense of shit.

Like most of his followers, I celebrate by getting into costume and re-enacting one of his many career highlights. I normally choose this all-time classic:

During the pandemic I could not re-create that fight, since the scene requires two actors, which was inappropriate in the era of Coronavirus and social distancing, so that year I chose to re-enact the fight scene from White Comanche, since Shatner plays both parts.

This year: The Scoopy Players, my community theater company, will present a stage version of Incubus, Shat’s offbeat 1966 movie performed entirely in Esperanto.

I did not make that film up. The entire movie is below.

Other tidbits:

1. Shat once recorded a Christmas album. He sang such classics as Feliz Navidad and Rudolph.

2. There are some great comments on the Shatmas page from 2022.

From the proprietor of a site that worships crap, stay crappy, Bill. You have already lived long and prospered, so just keep up the … er … good work.