Historic Anniversaries

It seems like they used to recognize historic anniversaries much more than they do now. They would have news specials or whatever when those anniversaries were coming up. Maybe I'm just thinking about school and my teachers doing that to tie it into history lessons. I thought 2012 would be cool - 200th anniversary of the War of 1812. Nothing. 2011 - the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. Nothing. 1992 - The 500 year anniversary of Columbus discovering America. There were a couple of movies about Columbus that year, but they were politically correct movies that made Columbus to be a jerk. 

I've thought about that because I'm reading a book called Paris 1919. It's about the treaty at Versailles that ended World War I. I like it, but its a little tough getting through parts of it. A lot of decisions that came out of that time greatly effected the world up to the present day. They redrew boundary lines, decided who owed who what, and created whole new countries. For the most part it was just 4 people making those decisions - the heads of France, England, Italy, and USA (Woodrow Wilson). A few of the chapters were tough to plow through - big ole chapters on what they decided to do about Austria, Romania, Serbia, etc. I thought about giving up a couple times, but I would be racked with guilt about that. I'm about 75% through now and I'm going to make it. 

Its pretty serious the whole way, but there is a great story about how Hungary was trying to kiss up to France so they would vote how they wanted. To quote, "A leading Budapest restaurant named a dish in honor of Marshal Foch. (Unfortunately, in Hungarian it came out as 'diarrhea soup.')" Oops.