A Case of a Missing Holiday Was Reported
Whodunit
Hey, I’m Bonnie and welcome to my Friday newsletter. Each week I share insight into the art of being photogenic, including how to pose, what to wear—fashionable style, makeup—and a lot of whatnot that may benefit your photo. Why, because you can do all that with a phone camera.
It was half past two before Holmes arrived. He has been the moving spirit behind the June Fourteenth investigation of Flag Day from the beginning.
Clue No. 1—. In which a mysterious written account that contains revealing information kept the story of Flag Day from public knowledge.
“There is no great mystery in this matter,” Holmes said, taking the cup of tea I poured out for him, “the facts appear to admit only one explanation.”
“Whoa, you solved it already?”
“Well, no, I have discovered a clue is all. It is, however, a very suggestive clue. The details are still to be added. I just have found, on consulting the back files of a late-20th century law, on holidays.”
“I may be very obtuse, Holmes, but I fail to see what this suggests.”
“No? You surprise me. Look at it this way, then, June Fourteenth. The four disappears. Juneteenth is the only holiday you could celebrate during the standard workweek. July Fourth receives a valuable day off, which is repeated from year to year and now culminates in the color of the Stars and Stripes which The Star-Spangled Banner describes as a forebear. What wrong can it refer except its flagging observation?”
“But what a strange work-around day labor and how strangely compensated! Why, too, should spun yarn from Flag Day converted into a busman’s holiday find Web users spinning over the information superhighway in muddy streams. Again, the coda speaks of a payoff. There is no other injustice in the case that I know of.”
“There are difficulties, there are certain difficulties,” said Sherlock Holmes pensively, “but our expedition of today will solve them all. Ah, here is the four-wheeler with a coachman in it. Are you all ready? Then we had better go down, for it is a little past the hour.”
Clue No. 2—. This. This is the scene of a kickoff for the holiday weekend.
I grabbed a beach towel and cooler and observed that Holmes had the camera and slipped a revolver in his pocket. It was clear that he thought our workday would end with a shot one way or the other. We arrived to the lakeshore. Holmes took a look-see around for a lifeguard, “personnel frequently offer tips or clues to new developments,” he said, “alas, coast’s clear, no sign of life at all at the beach.”
“This is weird” I said. And Reader, I thought Mother Nature’s display of temper was uncalled for, that bright sunshiny Friday afternoon notwithstanding. C’mon, show me a record June with a chilly, windy, cold, damp and miserable day on average.
Ah, the joys of being cold and alone on a desert island. There’s nothing like it.
Clue No. 3—. In which the underworld is triumphant.
Politicians talk about economy out of one side of their mouths while voting for pork out the other. So it is not surprising that some would see us lost in a bureaucratic jungle of double-talk and evasions intent to hush the story of Flag Day up. This all is so, but what else,” I implored Holmes to continue. “Advertising. A search for Google images of “flag day” returned another possible clue from a remote site linked thereto, where apparently a kind of development hell exists that turned international economy into a jungle”
Clue No. 4—. In which our protagonists unlock the mystery to crack the case.
Holmes and I chatted the nightlong about the matter used to key an advertisement, and how the British flag day, or “tag day” as they say, is a day on which contributions are solicited and small tags are given in return. By the dawn’s early light, we had a breakthrough.
Holmes looked at the evidence in front of him, deducing that the committee held the purse-string power to enforce the holiday act. Then he instantly deduced the victim, perpetrator, and cause!
"Elementary," Holmes mumbled to himself, since Watson had the day off.
As Sherlock examined the cause closer, however, he deduced that social and economic forces had conspired to encourage the holder of the purse strings, and thus full blame could not be laid upon one person or even a congress of people. In point of fact, the whole of society was culpable.
So he arrested society?
No, he kept deducing!
On second-thought, Holmes deduced that society was nothing more than a tacit expression of what its members agreed was acceptable or at least tolerable and so deduced that EVERYONE was guiltily complicit in the cause in the standard for Flag Day they had allowed said society to uproot.
Luckily, Sherlock lived in literary times where things were way worse than they are on social media, literally, children worked in coal mines. So, his devastating conclusions did not apply to us, the readers!
Oh, phew.
Part II: Stagecraft
Suppose you go online before your Flag Day photoshoot to get some aesthetic inspo. You visit Pinterest of course only to find the site of a ghost town.
Welp, no one’s got ahead following suit and falling in line with everyone else. The vantage is all yours to pioneer a new look. Be a frontiersman, if you will. Blaze a new path for future generations to follow. No pressure. Think single player, open-world RPG, as distinguishable from a multiuser aesthetic that always ends in a tie. Which is why nobody really likes tic-tac-toe.
As You Like It. “All the world’s a stage” which is to say like World of Warcraft on stage. So, inbuilt fright instead of ogres, keep the trolls tho.
Anxiety
Dress Code
Row 1, Seat 1
Look Ma, No Edits!