I kind of like the fact that there are two common ways to numerically display dates… Month/Day/Year and Day/Month/Year. (And yes, I know the American method is the more moronic of the two, but if you wanted to do it RIGHT, you’d do Year/Month/Day to go with Hour:Minute, but only total geeks and automated systems do that) …so most every ‘cool date’ can be celebrated twice!
Today, for example, in the United States of Moronica, this is the day that answers the classic childhood riddle “Why was Six afraid of Seven?”
The answer, of course, being “Because SEVEN ATE NINE!” And today is 07/08/09.
Of course, in the more civilized parts of the world, many of which are having Civil Wars, Coups and Human Rights Violations right now (while some others are not, I know), I won’t be able to say that until the Seventh of August. Which I will. Which is a good thing because there was something else funny about the date that I wanted to blog about that I can’t recall now that I am at the keyboard.
Obviously, that eleven day layoff has left me out of condition, but if I had written anything here during that time it probably would have been OUCHMYEYEOUCHMYEYEOUCHMYEYE, Or more likely OICJMTETEPUXHNYWYW or something else you’d type when you can’t see the keyboard and never bothered to learn touch typing. A mysterious and badly ouchy eye infection has been a big part of my being for over a week, letting up just after the 4th of July fireworks died down, and hitting me hardest after I had driven to L.A. to visit my aging father and help HIM out in various and sundry ways. Instead, he took care of me as the infection in my right eye inexplicably spread to other random parts of my body (what kind of eye infection causes diarrhea?). I was able to finally get his aging antenna TV working on the allegedly NEW IMPROVED digital system by throwing out the first converter box he bought (with the old reliable GE brand – now GE owns NBC; don’t they WANT people to be able to watch it? Or was it a sneaky trick to drag people to cable and watch MSNBC, USA, SyFy and Bravo?) and replacing it with a box with a brand name neither of us had ever heard of. And so there I was, laying on an inflatable spare-bed in his almost-as-small-as-mine apartment, blocking out all possible light to both eyes as I listened to one of my dad’s inexplicably favorite shows “Regis and Kelly”. Regis was out and Bryant Gumbel was filling in, but I have a personal rule about ALL TV talk show hosts, regardless of political party/race/religion/gender/hometown/social class etc. If one of them EVER says anything I solidly agree with, I have to rethink my own opinion. And on this morning, while chatting about the death of Michael Jackson (chatting about death… THAT’S television), Kelly Ripa and Bryant Gumbel agreed that “Off the Wall” was a better album than “Thriller”, an opinion I shared… up until the moment I realized who I shared it with. To me, that was the absolute low point of my last eleven days. How was yours?
, until I was going through my collection of shirts 
(not so much a collection as evidence of a severe addiction that I have recently gotten over cold turkey; I really should apologize to the t-shirt 
