Tuesday, January 24, 2006
On This Day in History...Phil Was Not Impressed
Hello free world! Happy 2006 and happy resolution breaking! By the way, does anyone actually make new year's resolutions anymore? I don't think they do. I think television news people talk about it and make a tired joke every year about how quickly people will break their resolutions...But I'm convinced that these days the resolution making business is not profiting. I don't make resolutions, my friends and co-workers don't make resolutions and my family doesn't appear to be playing that game. Instead of making a new year's resolution, I actually tend to make a new week's resolution. "This week I'll start jogging everyday. This week I'll get my oil changed." I find there's more joy in breaking my resolutions every seven days rather than just annually.
But I digress. The blog is back in print and apparently many of you will be happy about that. I'm amazed at what transpires when I ignore the blog for awhile. Comments start trickling in from family members about how I'm not writing anything new and I even heard that my friend's boss in Hawaii is now on board with the Philthy action. I'm impressed people, I really am. Keep that good feedback up and maybe I'll actually grace you with my presence more often than my current lazy trend of once every month or so. In fact, this week I resolve to write more...
But the reason we're here today is that I'd like to tackle the strange world of "This Day in History." Yes, we've all heard those "amazing" tidbits of information on morning radio or cable news: "On this day in history in 1963, our nation's youngest elected President, John F. Kennedy, was assassinated."
I loved Kennedy as a president and as a humanitarian. I'm genuinely very sad that we had to lose a great thinker and peacemaker, and lose him in such an horrific way. But guess what, EVERY November 22nd for the rest of time will be that anniversary. Don't you think it will begin to lose a LITTLE significance? A lot of other shit happened on that day and will continue to happen! We only have 365 days every year for things to occur (I'm excluding leap year crap because it's complicated). Think about it though, only 365 original things can happen before everything begins to repeat and fall on the same day. And believe me, recorded history dates back a LONG time. Bear with me for a bit of history and mathematics (momma Elkins will be so proud).
The oldest form of human writing dates back to 4000 BC. I mean that's older than Dick Clark! Barely. But basically our span of recorded history goes almost 5,500 years back. So from that number let us multiply by 365 to find out how many days have been involved in recorded history:
5,500 x 365 = 2,007,500 days.
I'm no historian, but that seems to be a lot of days. Now lets try to put a general number to how many "events" actually happen in a single day. This is extremely arbitrary, but I'll take CNN.com and count how many new stories were reported today. That number is 37. Of course, this only includes the stories posted on the FRONT of their site, and excludes each section's top stories. So lets tack on:
12 x 5 = 60
(12 being the number of sections of news on CNN.com, 5 being the average number of stories per section):
60 + 37 = 97
Let's just round that number to an even 100 and keep in mind that we have only chosen stories covered by CNN so we're probably missing most of the top sports stories of the day, celebrity events, and in depth international happenings. So lets hike that number up to 200. I'd have to assume we're still really low-balling that figure but let's stick with our 200. So, 200 events per day multiplied by 2,007,500 days in recorded history and we get:
200 x 2,007,500 = 401,500,000 "events" in recorded history.
I don't know about you, but that number looks gigantic. We're not quite through yet, though. Lets take the number of events that have happened on our planet since history was recorded (or at least our bad estimate) and divide by 365 to find out how many average "events in history" can be spread out between 365 days each year:
401,500,000 / 365 = 1,100,000.
In other words, if we use our figures (which, granted, are probably quite a bit off but ok to prove a point), any random day selected in a year has 1,100,000 events that have happened on that day sometime in our history. Now are you still impressed at those "This Day in History" items? I realize that we haven't defined how big an event has to be to be considered newsworthy, and I also realize the world's population wasn't always this large, but generally speaking, a whole lot of shit has happened on Mother Earth since the beginning.
And don't even get me started on birthdays. It is no longer interesting to me that I share a birthday with Mike Ditka, Chuck Berry and.... Lee Harvey Oswald? Wow. It appears we've come full circle with our previous mention of JFK's assassination. Except Lee Harvey Oswald didn't kill the president. Hell no. But that's an entirely different story...
The point is, tons and tons of people are born each day and have been born since the beginning of time. We only have 365 unique days to spread out between all of those people. It simply doesn't impress me to find out that a few people might have the same birthday. Come on folks! There are plenty of other things to be amazed by: the miracle of life, technological advancements, the fact that William Shatner has a singing career.
Before we adjourn for the day, here are a few small things I've been pondering:
I love working during the day and having weekends off now. I can't believe there was actually a recent and extensive period in my life where I got home from work around midnight every night and worked every weekend. I'm finding a whole new world out there that lives between the hours of 7 pm and midnight. It's great! And don't even get me started on the weekends...You all didn't tell me those Saturday and Sunday afternoons were so cool! I'm impressed and I'm not leaving.
Why did Americans have to settle where they did all those years ago? Couldn't they have found a nice new plot of land closer to the equator to set up Plymouth Rock so that I could enjoy 85 degree weather YEAR-ROUND? I mean really, the east coast is nice, but it would be a whole lot nicer if it existed in the North Pacific. I was able to spend a week on the big island of Hawaii in mid-December and let me tell you, if my family and a lager portion of civilization existed on that island, I'd never leave. Fuck the mainland, I'm going snorkeling in January bitches.
For the Maryland fans out there, basketball player Chris McCray recently was disqualified for the remainder of the year due to academics. That's right, he couldn't keep his GPA above the NCAA requirement of 1.90. Do you even fathom how pathetic that is? I'm pretty sure that Geico lizard could keep a better GPA and I don't even think he knows how to use a computer. It gets better when I find out McCray was quoted as saying something to the effect of wanting to focus on his degree in criminal law. You know what, if our current system of law depends on students like Chris McCray, I'm moving to Canada.
Stay Tuned for More Philthy. We'll be Right Back.
