Much gratitude to my morning paper alerting me to a significant holiday:

It may seem like just another Tuesday, but today — called 4:20 by those in the know — is a high holy day for North America’s dedicated pot smokers.

“It’s Pothead New Year’s. That’s what I like to call it, anyway,” said Abi Roach of Roach-O-Rama, a store in Toronto’s Kensington Market area that caters to marijuana users.

It’s also a time for political activism. The spirit of the annual commemoration is “everybody unite and show your true colours, come out of your grow closets and let everybody know that you smoke and not to be embarrassed of it,” said Ms. Roach, a pseudonym she has adopted to protect herself and her family from harassment.

Like other Canadian journalists, the reporter clearly likes reefers of the big fatty variety:

The federal government is considering a bill that would decriminalize the possession of 15 grams or less — about 15 to 20 joints – making the offence punishable by a fine of $150 for an adult or $100 for a youth.

The background on the significance of 4:20, though, is ditchweed at best:

Some say it is the number of a police call used in California during the 1960s.

But “the most believable that I’ve heard is that three guys that went to university in California would meet up at 4:20 for a joint between classes and that started a trend,” Ms. Roach said.

Far more potent is a riff by V. Sirin on the many uncanny aspects of the three-digit sequence: Quoting Salman Rushdie in Midnight’s Children , “420 has been, since time immemorial, the number associated with fraud, deception, and trickery.” 4:20a time of departure for Mark Twain and Vladimir Nabokov…

Note: In the course of revising this posting, I was honoured to learn that this site ranks #1 on a Google search on “masculine reefers”.