Happy Robbie Burns Day!

If you’re anything like me, you’re witty, sexy, baffled by Six Chix, and have no damn idea what Robbie Burns Day is about.

So here are some facts (you won’t BELIEVE #4)!

1. Today is the birthday of Robert Burns, who is regarded as the national poet of Scotland.
2. In 2009, STV viewers chose Burns as “Greatest Scot,” beating out William Wallace, and Sir Alexander Fleming (the Nobel Prize-winning doctor who discovered penicillin, saving millions of lives).  So yeah, he’s a big deal.
3. He wrote Auld Lang Syne.
4. Haggis, a traditional Burns Day food, can flush away 17lbs of belly fat per day. Burns called it his “One Wee Trick” for shredded abs. Doctors HATED him.

   

5. That last one is made up. I hope you didn’t believe it.
6. The idea of a Robbie Burns Day came a few years after his death in 1796, when friends decided to have a dinner to celebrate his life. The tradition spread throughout Scotland, and across the Scottish disapora, which is why it’s become a worldwide-ish event.
7. By the time of his death at age 37, he had already been branded a pioneer of the Romantic movement and an inspiration for liberalism and socialism.
8. By the time I was 37, I had had a poem published in my grade school yearbook. It was about chickens.

Happy Robbie Burns Day!