I like to sneak in a bit of Russian culture whenever I can, especially things that give my kids some bragging rights. And so it is that this Friday, March 9, we will be celebrating Yuri Gagarin's birthday. My kids love learning about space, and have been planning (plotting?) for a trip to the Kennedy Space Center for the last six months.

Gagarin, who would have been 73 this Friday, became the world's first astronaut on April 12, 1961. That was one month ahead of the first American to go into space, Alan B. Shepard Jr. But the then Soviet Union had already rubbed America's nose in the space race four years earlier, when it launched the Sputnik satellite on Oct. 4, 1957. (Gagarin did not, for the record, make the remarks that have been so widely attributed to him about not seeing any God in space. That bit of rhetoric was from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who took every opportunity to needle Washington.)

Gagarin, as you might have imagined, got all sorts of honors while alive. His birthday became a national holiday and there was a statue of him erected in nearly every town. A village near his birthplace was renamed Gagarin and the cosmonauts training center in Star City-- the Russian equivalent of the Kennedy Space Center--was named after him after he died in a plane crash in 1968. I turned up a lovely reminiscence by a South African astronaut, Mark Shuttleworth, of being in Star City on an anniversary of Gagarin's birthday and celebrating it there.

I don't really know how big a deal Gagarin's birthday is in Russia any more. It doesn't appear on the list of official Russian holidays that I downloaded through Google Calendar. This year the birthday will be eclipsed perhaps by celebrations of what would have been the 100th birthday of the man who made Gagarin's feat possible, Soviet space program chief Sergei Korolyov.

But this is where I truly love the Internet. It turns out that the anniversary of Gagarin's flight is a really big deal with space buffs. Which begins to explain how I landed on the Web page for Yuri's Night celebrations. It seems that every year, space fans around the globe remember the historic event, which they say "is like St. Patrick's Day or Cinco de Mayo for space". This year, the festivities will take in "53 parties in 16 countries over 5 continents on two planets", the Web site says. Alas, I can only deal with parties on this planet, and none of the parties planned in America (scroll down this page) are close to home.

But Richard Branson, if you are reading, my little guy should be ready for your space adventures in twenty years or so.