Happy 11/11/11!
Allysen and I have been trying for a while to figure out how to celebrate 11/11/11. For about the last year, I've had a strange knack for glancing idly at a clock and discovering that the time was 11:11. (Again? This is weird.) I wasn't doing it intentionally at all, though after a while it became hard not to look at a clock and hope that it would be 11:11. Anyway, that gave me a special desire to celebrate November 11, 2011 (11/11/11), a truly cool date.
It turns out that where Allysen works, a lot of brainy, creative people had the same idea. She called me and said, "You have to come in and see it." I did. These people are amazing. They had decorative pillars arranged in pairs all over. They had placards spelling out 11.11.11 in a bunch of different languages, including binary and Morse code.
Among the special elevenses in the world:
- There have been 11 Doctor Whos.
- There have been 11 Star Trek movies.
- The Apollo 11 mission landed the first men on the Moon.
- In M-theory, there are 11 spatial dimensions.
- The sunspot cycle is 11 years.
- There are 11 thumb keys on a bassoon.
- The sports soccer, football, cricket, and field hockey all field 11 players to a team.
We're going to settle in for a movie and fish and chips, and plan on popping open a bottle of something fun at 11:11 p.m.
Labels: quirky, special days
posted by Jeffrey A. Carver @ 8:20 PM
5 comments
5 Comments:
The pic following "Urdu" (which looks like Arabic to me) is either Russian or Bulgarian. I do a lot of work with international versioning of Film & TV and still cannot tell them apart.
Thanks. I thought it might be Russian, but that was a completely uneducated guess. Nice to know it's hard to be sure even for a pro!
Urdu and Farsi both use a modified Arabic alphabet, which is why it looks like Arabic. Those are not the Arabic word for eleven, though, so I assume it is either Urdu or Farsi.
I cheated. I used Google Translate.
However, before doing so, I made the semi-educated guess that the second one was Persian (Farsi) and the third one was Serbian. [I realized that the third one couldn't be Russian or Bulgarian: neither of them use a "j" character in their Cyrillic, but Serbian does.]
The Google check confirmed that the second script was indeed Urdu, but the third was Serbian. So I'm at least half right. :-)
Ah HA! I'm totally making a note of the "j" use in Serbian Cyrillic! Thanks duncanmac, you might have just helped me earn a chunk of paycheck.
And to think I was mister-know-it-all enough to not run that through Google translate... I have humbly been taken to school.
Thanks!
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