Oh Happy Day!

Rainy days and Mondays may always get The Carpenters down, but for the rest of us, Mondays actually aren't the day we're at our most miserable.

Researchers have found that – contrary to popular belief – Wednesdays, not Mondays, are the most grim day of the week. That's because on Mondays, memories of the weekend are still fresh, says a study from the University of Vermont, according to the UK's Daily Mail.

"The weekends tend to be fairly happy and Wednesday turned out to be the saddest day," study co-author Christopher Danforth, an applied mathematician at the Univsity of Vermont’s advanced computing center, told the Mail.

Danforth and his co-author Peter Dodds measured collective happiness by analyzing people's blogs – 2.4 million of them written over the past four years, to be exact. They scanned some 10 million sentences, looking for those beginning with "I feel" or "I am feeling."

"We were able to make observations of people in a fairly natural environment at a magnitude higher than in previous happiness studies," Danforth told the UK’s Observer newspaper. "They think they are communicating with friends, but since blogs are public we’re just looking over their shoulders."

Danforth and Dodds gave each blog a score on a happiness scale of 1 to 9. The score was based on so-called "emotional" words – so words like "sex," "rainbow" and "paradise" would be near the top of the chart, while "trauma," "seasick" and "unfaithful" would score near the bottom. They published their results in the Journal of Happiness Studies.

Among their findings: Barack Obama's election day was the happiest day in four years in the US. Michael Jackson's death last month was one of the unhappiest, says the Observer. The age group in the best mood turned out to be those aged 45 to 60, while teenagers turned out to be the grumpiest.

Steer clear of your local high school on a Wednesday morning…