In which Matthew celebrates Reevesday

A Most Excellent Reevesday to one and all! Today is the annual day, across the world (and various realities, but particularly in Beirut, Toronto, LA, my own private Idaho, and Minnesota), when devotees gather to celebrate the life and work of an international superstar. Once a year, you might say the whole earth stands still.

The day involves a range of cultural activities including readings and dramatizations from Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, cocaine-addled pub crawls and high-speed bus chases. Enthusiasts often dress in black leather and Oakleys to celebrate Reevesday, and they hold Dogstar sing-a-longs in overstuffed phone booths. Hard-core devotees have even been known to attempt marathon readings of the entirety of The Matrix, The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, The Animatrix, Enter the Matrix, The Matrix: Path of Neo, The Matrix Online, The Matrix Comics Vol. I, The Matrix Comics Vol. II, and The Lake House, while Laurence Fishburne rolls his eyes in dismay.

The first celebration took place in 1964, and a major five-month-long festival (A Most Excellent Feeling Minnesota 2004) took place in St. Paul between 1 April and 31 August 2004. On the Sunday in 2004 before the 40th birthday of their hero, after a night of ice hockey and demon rides, 10,000 people in St. Louis meditated in a postmodern pseudo-Buddhist trance on whether the sound "whoa" (their equivalent of "om") really does sound like a cool breeze over the mountains, then swallowed fistfuls of red-dyed pills and died suddenly.