Big Block of Cheese Day

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Big Block of Cheese Day is a fictional workday on the television program The West Wing. On Big Block of Cheese Day, the White House Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, encourages his staff to take meetings with fringe special interest groups that normally would not get attention from the White House. Big Block of Cheese Day is "celebrated" in episodes 105 and 216.

White House Communications Director Toby Ziegler refers to it as "Throw Open Our Office Doors To People Who Want To Discuss Things That We Could Care Less About" Day, and Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman refers to it as "Total Crackpot Day".

Big Block of Cheese Day is not a regular event, but periodic, at Leo's discretion, possibly as a way to keep West Wing staffers alert. Leo has a standard speech that begins, "President Andrew Jackson, in the main foyer of his White House, had a big block of cheese." In episode 216, Leo is interrupted several times by staffers walking into the meeting late, and once by Josh adding, "And a Wheat Thin the size of Lake Tahoe."

1 Real-life inspiration
2 Issues
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Real-life inspiration

Although there has never been a real-life Big Block of Cheese Day, the inspiration for the day in the West Wing universe (as recounted by the character of McGarry) is that America's seventh president, Andrew Jackson, had a two-ton block of cheese in the White House foyer that everyone was welcome to eat from.

The book Real Life at the White House (ISBN 0-415-92320-4), by John Whitcomb and Claire Whitcomb, confirms that this story does draw on actual events. Andrew Jackson did once receive a 1,400 pound, four foot in diameter, two foot thick (635 kg, 1.2 m diameter, 60 cm thick) block of cheese as a gift.^[1] After two years of aging, he held a public "cheese tasting". The event was heavily attended and the cheese was consumed in two hours.

[edit] Issues

The Peters map is also called the Gall-Peters projection.

In episode 105, The Crackpots and These Women, C.J. Cregg meets with a group that would like to build a highway for wolves and Sam Seaborn meets with a citizen concerned about UFOs.

In episode 216, Somebody's Going to Emergency, Somebody's Going to Jail, Toby Ziegler meets with the fictional group "World Policies Studies," which objects to the World Trade Organization, and C.J. Cregg meets with "The Organization of Cartographers for Social Equality", which would like legislature to support a specific map projection. The ficitional cartographic organization prefers the equal-area Peters World Map or Gall-Peters projection to the more common Mercator projection (in reality, the Gall-Peters projection has the same problems of distortion as the Mercator projection, and neither is used by any serious cartographic organization).