Symbolism and patterns combined really get to me. I’d already noted that March 11 was exactly 2 1/2 years after September 11, but when the front page of the paper this morning said it was also exactly 911 days after 911, I almost decided to stay put in quiet Bergen (preferably with my head under my doona) for the rest of my life.
Luckily I’m a web-surfing fact-checking blogger at heart and it didn’t take long before I realised that most papers aren’t reporting this. Some that Google say report it no longer do by the time you follow the link. I guess they quietly deleted their errors. We had a leap year. So it was 912 days. I even double checked that with a calculator.
Insanely enough this makes me feel a lot safer.
Elin
I feel the opposite – isn’t it safer if the dates are predictable? If it was 911 days, then at least we could do some math and work out the future patterns of 9/11. If it is random, then how do we know when to stay home under our doonas…
Francois Lachance
Jill,
Looking for numerological patterns on the civil calendar is one thing. There are other calendars to consider (or not).
Jill
Your reasoning doubtlessly makes more sense, Elin, but symbols and numerology scares me more than randomly freakish stuff.
Actually more and more newspapers are reporting the 911 days nonsense. It’s obviously been spread by Associated Press. Silly things.
Jill
Other calendars, Francois? The Islamic calendar? The days would still be the same though.
I think I’m completely missing your point…
Jill
Actually, I suppose if we’re more exact, it was something like 911 days and 17 hours.
Right. That’s it. ’nuff of all this. Music, dancing, bed.
Jason
Have you ever read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho? It has me all weirded out by signs and such.
joseph
Maybe they don’t count the extra day on leap year! Back to 911 days!
Francois Lachance
Jill and Joseph are coming close to what I was hinting at (less a point and more a pause).
Let us take the example of the Armistice – November 11 at 11 o’clock. A occasion marked according to local time. It becomes possible through the technologies of presence to imagine the marking of a world experience through a series of 12 before and 12 after. Television is alleged to have reduced attention spans. The Internet, expanded? Folded in each hour is a day. Ditto for the minute. Ditto for the second. A calendar is like a map. And just as maps have insets, calendars in the 21st century mihgt have “moments” expressed in local time and “windows” expressed in global time.
The punctual is given duration in memory.
It is easy to recall Jill awake in Norway and Elouise awake in the U.S.A. at the same moment but in a different window. This is not new. The time at the Greewich Meridian has served as the window marker. What may become renewed is the habit to quote local time and standard time in exchanges.
This may not wean anyone off numerological speculation. But it serves other purposes. Blogging itself can be seen as psychologically attractive because of its potential to give duration to the punctual. It was not just the appearance of software that helped blogging catch on (it was possible to upload and update sites daily before blogware came on the scene). The global village wanted to reinstitute the vigil as a practice of relay.
Annelogue
Good to Know…
jill/txt: patterns thankfully disrupted…
Rhosgobel: Radagast's Home
911 or 912 days?
There has been a decent amount of discussion on some blogs regarding the observation that the Madrid bombings occurred 912 days after the 9/11/01 attacks in the US …