11/11/11

Photo: Nigel Tufnel, This Is Spinal Tap.  From http://movies.yahoo.com/blogs/movie-talk/11-11-11-nigel-tufnel-day-185526454.html.  Amp it to 11, people. 
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So, okay, the alignment of numbers like this won't happen again, of course, until February 2, 2022--only about 11 years away, I hesitatingly add--though that sounds like a sci-fi date if I ever heard one.  But before you schedule a wedding for that date, as tons of people have because of today's date, I remind everyone that today's date really isn't today's date--somewhere in the 1300s or so, maybe 1400s, I don't remember, we suddenly gained 14 years between one day and the next, because we followed a new calendar.  And Day One was based on Jesus's birth, which is still under debate.  The most recent evidence suggests Jesus was born in the year 3 BC, or, three years before our calendar said he was born; this realization caused historians and scholars to create the designation BCE--Before the Common Era--to displace the now erroneous BC, which is their way of saying that, the whole time, we'd been three years off the date we thought we kept time with, which itself was wrong to begin with. And no one really kept day or time a few thousand years ago, except for the astrologers, and about that time there wasn't complete agreement about what a "day" even was.  Or a "year," as the sun was thought to revolve around the earth, and not vice-versa.  Plus, no one really cared.  And time as we measure it is only a man-made construct, anyway, and doesn't really even exist outside of the space-time continuum, which is in of itself used mainly for measuring huge distances, not for scheduling appointments or programming DVRs.  Our concept of time is  just our minor and flawed attempt to create order out of chaos, to stave off nothingness for a little while.

Don't mean to be Debbie Downer here, but let's have a dose of reality, okay?  Mankind is sooooo homocentric.  (That is, the belief that everything revolves around human beings, before you hate on me.)

You think frogs care exactly what day it is?

I'm just sayin'.