A More Detailed Analysis of the Step by Step Opening Than You Ever Wanted

From the Wikipedia page, of course:

The amusement park seen in the opening credits is depicted as being located along the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin. (No amusement park exists that is located on the shores of this lake in Wisconsin.) The amusement park used is actually Six Flags Magic Mountain in Valencia, California, located many miles inland from the Pacific Ocean. The body of water depicted in the opening and closing credit sequences — located next to the roller coaster at the park, which is digitally inserted into that particular excerpt — is placed over what in actuality is the parking lot at Six Flags Magic Mountain. The body of water is seen to have large waves on a seemingly calm day, which are much too large for Lake Michigan in the absence of a storm.

And yep, here is that mysteriously stormy body of water in the Magic Mountain parking lot. Would it not be incredibly unsafe to build a roller coaster directly on the sand, just yards from the crashing waves? Those Lambert-Fosters are lucky to be alive.

It’s almost as mysterious as the way the show blinked Patrika Darbo and Peggy Rea into the cornfield after the first season.

"I've Been Reading a Lot of Scripts Lately. You Know, It's a Lot Cheaper Than Going to the Movies."

Whereas a lot of people like to point out Wikipedia's shortcomings, I will praise it for a quality that many of you may have overlooked: its ridiculously detailed synopses of movies you should never bother watching. It takes all of two minutes to glean all the highlights, and best of all, these scenes will look better -- sexier, gorier, better choreographed, what have you -- in your imagination than they ever would if you actually watched them, given the films' limited special effects budgets and the technological limits of 1977, which was a great year for terrible movies you shouldn't watch. (Case in point: the Jaws rip-off Tintorera, which I can't imagine being better in movie form than it is in paragraph form.) More than that, however, the synopses have been shaped by the inscrutable impulses of the weirdos who edit Wikipedia, and sometimes the specificity of detail that these people chose to go into is just baffling.

There's almost an art to this, and if you pull single paragraphs out of these, they work as surreal flash fiction -- no point, no pay-off, just weirdness for weirdness's sake, in a way that makes me secretly glad that these words exist together, in this order, as a result of people collaborating across space and time and then deciding, "Yeah, that's good enough."

Here's a good example:

Back in her own apartment, Kim discovers her sink is full of cockroaches; she frantically sprays insecticide on them. She settles down on the kitchen table to eat dinner and flips open the book Fima loaned her. The page she randomly arrives at is titled "The Spiral: Symbol of Women's Power". Kim glances at her plate of noodles and notices that they are arranged in a vague spiral. She spies another roach crawling out of a loaf of bread. Using the book, she bats at it. In the process, her spaghetti dish crashes to the floor. Leaving it on the floor, she leaves to spend Christmas Eve with Hank's family.

Here's the film, if you really must know, but please, no questions about what possessed me to read the synopsis in the first place. And yes, this game works for works of literature, too, but I have a theory that there are more bad movies than bad books. Prove me wrong, world.

Ha. "Fima."

Tryouts for the Human Race

Wikipedia articles of note:

“Cheese curds” — Way more interesting than it sounds. Did you know that these dairy products squeak when bitten into? The New York Times describes the sound as “like balloons trying to neck.”

“Hannibal the swan” — perhaps the only waterfowl to be included in Wikipedia’s “serial killers” category. A quote: “After each attack, Hannibal would bring his son to view the aftermath while holding his wings up in celebration.”

“Sigrid the Haughty” — nothing ground-shaking here, but notable nonetheless for proving that a real-life, historical personage could be stuck with a name that makes her sound like a Hagar the Horrible character.

“The Obsorne Bull” — a sherry mascot that became the unofficial symbol of Spain.

“Foreign branding” — a listing of companies that either name products to sound foreign (and therefore better) or non-foreign companies that use English-style names.

“Handbra” — which apparently happens often enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry.

“Yvonne Hudson” — technically the first African-American woman to perform on Saturday Night Live, though she was never given anything notable to do and never acted again after being fired from the show in 1984.

“Whistle register” — what’s happening when Minnie Ripperton hits that high, high note in “Loving You.”

The Moon’s Lamppost

Not sure which Wikipedia article I found most eerie and unsettling. First, there was the one on Crybaby Bridge, the urban legend trope of a bridge from which passersby can hear the crying of a phantom baby. From that page, I ended up on two that freaked me out even more. First, there was the one on melon heads, bulbous-noggined humanoids who supposedly lurk on certainly rural roads, waiting to assault normals. Actual quote from the article: “According to local lore, the melon heads were originally orphans under the watch of a mysterious figure known as Dr. Crow (sometimes spelled Crowe, Trubaino, Krohe or Kroh or known as Dr. Melonhead).” And then there was the one about Helltown, a town in Ohio allegedly beset with a haunted cemetery, a moving tree, satanist, the Ku Klux Klan, mutants (including a supersized python) and a highway that leads to Hell.

Sometimes Wikipedia is strange.

The Truth About Kelly Kapoor

The following is one sentence from the Wikipedia page for Office character Kelly Kapoor, complete with footnotes.

Although there are a few major alterations between them,¹ her closest counterpart on the original UK series is Donna.²

1. For instance the race of each character is different. Donna is vaguely related to her boss, while Kelly is not.
2. They are both sales reps, they have relationships with their office temp and are both vain.

I just want to point out how funny it is that some crazed Mindy Kaling fans not only posted this information about the character but chose to do so using the words they did — and in footnote form, no less. Fools, when I click a Wikipedia footnote, I expect links and sources and grand, scholarly elaboration the likes of which simply couldn’t fit the general text. This footnotes did not meet my standards. “The characters aren’t exactly the same because one of them has brown skin” is not worth bringing up anywhere, much less in a footnote. To you, I say this: You may know about Kelly Kapoor, but you much to learn about academic citation.

No Periods, Just Conversational Ellipses

Springboarding off that reference in the previous post to Judge Forcer Crater, I stumbled onto Wikipedia’s list of people who disappeared mysteriously. It’s a good read. Of particular note: people who disappeared centuries ago and the fact that child actor Joe Pichler — who played James Van Der Beek’s religion-obsessed little brother in Varsity Blues — has been missing since 2006.

Also: Judge Force Carter. To think it wasn’t his awesome name that would make him memorable.

Handshakefulness

Tonight marked the first rerun of the 30 Rock episode “Retreat to Move Forward.” Aside from being a thoroughly funny episode, it is also notably the one whose plot involves the Wikipedia profile for Janis Joplin being edited to include such misinformation as that her legs bent the wrong way, she speedwalked everywhere, she ate cats, she feared toilets, and that she had a signature cocktail made from cherry juice, buttermilk, and tequila, all in an effort to make Jane Krakowski’s character appear stupid.

The last first time the episode aired, Joplin’s actual Wikipedia page had to be locked to protect it from vandalism inspired the show. Tonight, the Wikipedia nerds are on high alert since they realized that the episode was airing again. This in itself strikes me a damn hilarious, but one particular discussion on the article’s take page took the cake.

Oh, coprophobia, when will you stop being relevant?

Alternate title for this post: “Robot Penis.”

Brazen Bull Benefiting from Bowdlerization

From Wikipedia, on the subject of the Brazen Bull, a certain instrument of torture, but made more accessible by me with the addition of God-blessed ellipses and bracketed insertions:

An execution device designed in ancient Greece. Perillos of Athens, a brass-founder, proposed… the invention of a new means for executing criminals; accordingly, he cast a bull, made entirely of brass, hollow, with a door in the side. The condemned were shut in the bull and a fire was set under it, heating the metal until it became “yellow hot” and causing the person inside to roast to death. [Furthermore] the bull [was] designed in such a way that its smoke rose in spicy clouds of incense [and so that] tubes and stops [converted] the prisoner's screams [into] sounds like the bellowing of an infuriated bull.

An illustration, if even my truncated explanation of the monstrosity wasn’t enough:


Read the above link if you like, but believe me that I provided the best bits here. Thank the ellipses and brackets.

Awful things, elsewhere:

• The slasher movies of Greek mythology
• What now remains of unhappy Signora Psyche Zenobia
• Do bears come in the woods?
• Gilles de Rais, onion of evil
• Naked broomrape is a thing, unfortunately
• Appropriate punishment for saucy children
• Fried enema
• Someone will pack your knives for you

Hungry Hungry Hippos, No Holds Barred

Two possible lessons to be learned here: Either you should not underestimate Wikipedia, or, if you do, you should do so quickly because its failings may be soon edited into nonexistence. One or possibly both of these get to be the moral of story that began with my visit to the Wikipedia page on the children’s board game Hungry Hungry Hippos.

Go there now, if you like, but you won’t find anything all that strange — aside from, perhaps, the information that all four hippos have names and that, in some versions, the purple hippo is replaced with a fifth, pink hippo. But that that little factoid appears on the page really shouldn’t surprise anyone who has ever had reason to look up a toy or TV show or song that he or she enjoyed in their youth.

Until a few days ago, however, the page included a section marked “Tactics” that read as follows:

Tactics for the game vary by players but these are some of the most common strategies.

Mashing: when a player constantly hits the lever to scoop up as many balls as he can. Commonly used by younger children.

Sniping: when a player stalks a ball and waits until it is in his range to hit the lever and scoop it up.

Cheating: when a player does anything not explained in the rulebook; i.e. harming another player, harming the gameboard or picking up the balls with his hands.

Yes, it’s the third tactic that I mean to draw your attention toward.

If it’s not enough that the person who wrote this would have not only done so without questioning whether cheating constituted a tactic, this person’s concept of cheating also includes physically harming other players or damaging the equipment used to play the game itself. Which makes me thing my own Hungry Hungry Hippos days were rather tame. And, also, that I’m happy I didn’t every play it with this particular Wikipedia user.

Why English Steals

A good read if you have the time: The Wikipedia article for untranslatability. Far better written than your average Wikipedia article, a full of food for thought... about words. Perhaps the best thing I took away from it was Wikipedia's best guess for "most untranslatable word," ilunga, or Congolese term that purportedly best translates to English as "a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time."

[ Source: Prance Closer ]

Taxonomy and Ursula the Sea Witch

In what can only be the spiritual follow-up to the post expressing my marvelation at Wikipedia's logic in centaur classification, I'm writing this to note that the official term for a half-human, half octopus creature — an entity most would just term "octo-mermaid," I'd imagine — is "Cecaelia." Sucks for girls named "Cecilia," I suppose, but good to know that the term exists, in case I ever need to identify one for a news article. Thankfully, Wikipedia as of now lacks the page "List of notable Cecaelia," but rest assured someone, somewhere is working on it.

Remember: It's not "octo-mermaid." It's "Cecaelia." Even when it's a boy, apparently. "Cecil"?

See Them at Your Local Natural History Museum!

Boredom leads me to such wonderful discoveries sometimes. Today's: The Wikipedia category for centaurs is has a subcategory for "fictional centaurs," meaning that Wikipedia is tacitly vouching for the existence of real centaurs.

Remembering Mother Winslow

As a result of a Wikipedia chain too long to remember, I ended up on the page for Rosetta Lenoire, the actress who played Mother Winslow on Family Matters. I think that I actually began the series with trying to find out what habit the various C-levels appearing on VH1's Celebrity Rehab are trying to kick. In her profile, I found a great example of why Wikipedia should allow editing by a smaller chunk of the population than does now.

As a young girl, LeNoire suffered from rickets, which her godfather Bill "Bojangles" Robinson helped her overcome by teaching her to dance. LeNoire made her acting debut in a 1939 production of The Hot Mikado, starring Robinson (wherein she played a Japanese!).

If you caught the sentence that seems like it was written by a person who has never read an encyclopedia, then you just might be smart enough to edit the Wikipedia. Let's focus on this for a moment: Not only does the parenthetical sentence chunk use an exclamation point, it also both uses the unfortunate phrasing of "a Japanese" and includes a pronoun with no clear antecedent. Well, it's actually clear that the "she" is Rosetta, but the sentence sets the "she" up so that it seems like it refers to Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. Which is just funny.


Oh, Mother Winslow, as long as I can see your reassuring face, all is right in the world.

Suddenly Sister

While looking up the Wikipedia page for Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer,” I saw a link to a page for The Kransky Sisters, an Australian comedy-cover band trio. KrisDina and I saw the Kranskys’ show at the Sydney Opera House, and were much better off in life for having done so.

A signed CD of the girls' first show. (we saw the second show, heard it on the wireless, but i much prefer the title of the first show, we don't have husbands.)

However, when I arrived back in California and tried to research them, I found they lacked any mention on the Wikipedia. Things change, and the Wikipedia grows, Blob-like, absorbing more and more pop culture until the point at which it explodes in a gooey confetti shower of useless facts (and opinions). But how startled was I to find that the youngest and arguably best Kransky — the portly, mute, tuba-playing Arva Krasnky — had since dropped out of the group. (Although I think the girls liked Arva best, I actually preferred the loopy Eve, who, as I mentioned in an earlier post, looks remarkably like Stephnie “No, That’s Not a Typo” Weir and who deigned to speak to me after the show and was insistent on enunciating her last name, which, as I also wrote in the earlier post, I found strange since I had clearly just bought tickets to and attended her show, in which her last name is billed. Memories.) From the Kranskysite:

Due to the mysterious disappearance of tuba playing, Arva Kransky, who was last seen exchanging sheet music with a member of the Hornbell Military Marching Band, the Kransky Sisters have enlisted the assistance of their rarely visited, reclusive sister, Dawn Kransky, who has taken leave of her job as trolley librarian at the Esk Hospital to be with her Sisters.

Me being the strange obsessive I am, I can’t help but note the strangeness of the fact that Eve and big sister Mourne replaced their now-missing sister with a fourth, never-before-mentioned sister, Dawn Kransky. To me and the rest of the planet’s population who find themselves in the awkward position of having to explain to people why Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a good show, the fact that the blinked-into-existence sister is named “Dawn” is especially notable since the show’s fifth season introduced Buffy’s little sister, Dawn, who previously didn’t exist. (It was eventually explained. The short answer: magic.) And this Dawn was played by Michelle Trachtenberg, which meant that Harriet the Spy got to meet Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Anyway, I thought it was relevant. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again, dammit.

An Empty Sarcophagus

In an effort to answer a question about the nature of Santa Barbara, the soap opera, that arose in a meeting today, I looked at the show's Wikipedia page, on which I found the following utterly delightful paragraph:

The series began on an uneven foot, but creators and executive producers Jerome Dobson and Bridget Dobson proceeded to kill off most of the show's actors via natural disaster and a serial killer storyline. When a major earthquake hit Santa Barbara, core character Danny Andrade slept through the entire thing. Minx Lockridge (Dame Judith Anderson) was unfazed, saying that the 1984 Santa Barbara earthquake was nothing like 1925. She was later locked into an empty sarcophagus. Luckily, her grandchildren were around to let her out and she escaped with merely a bruised ego.

I don't know what's better: the fact that such an apparently terrible show starred one Dame Judith Anderson, that her character's name was Minx Lockridge, or that she's emerged unscathed from imprisonment in an empty sarcophagus, which, of course, we have in abundance here in Santa Barbara.

Beware the Tintorera

Best synopsis of a movie ever:

Two playboys in the coast of Mexico — Steven, an American millionaire and Miguel, a local swimming instructor — are competing to win the heart of beautiful Patricia. After they fight, Patricia gets eaten by the Tintorera. To cheer themselves up, they become friends and go to a brothel, having fun with two girls. They bring Gabriella, a British girl, with them, and go fishing for sharks and mantas, where Miguel gets eaten by the Tintorera. Gabriella, being shocked, returns to England. Steven, saddened by losing his friend, decides to cheer himself up by going to a brothel again. He throws a party with friends, and invites them to come to his yacht by swimming. Alas, they get eaten by the Tintorera. Steven, being fed up of this predator who goes eating all his friends, decides to eliminate it. He sets up a dragnet and destroys the shark with an explosive capsule.

From the Wikipedia page for Tintorera, a 1977 Jaws rip-off.

EDIT: Damn it, you'd think I would have spelled the name of the movie right the first time: Tintorera, not Tintotera.

Pulling My Mahogany

From Spencer comes the tale of a Wikipedia, which, in turn, tells the tale of Harvey Stanley Hyde Blackburn, who earned every one of his four names by tricking doctors, friends and the entire Australian army by hiding the fact that he only had one leg.


After his left foot was crushed in a railroad accident, Blackburn was fitted with a wooden prosthetic from the knee down. Having already been enlisted at the time of the accident, Blackburn did not tell his superiors that he was now an amputee because he still wanted to serve. He then fooled his doctor with what he later called a "one-in-a-million ruse" — after telling the examiner that he was "shy," he took his pants off only his right leg. After his still-intact leg was given a once-over, Blackburn distracted the doctor with questions long enough that he could present the good leg again. The doctor didn't notice and Blackburn was told he was fit for service. Eventually, the medical staff realized the trick, but Blackburn protested to the point where the doctors agreed he could serve. He did so throughout World War I.

Stories like this amuse, especially when the come with good epilogues. Blackburn applied again for service in World War II, but was rejected. He lived to be 90 years old. His leg now at the Australian War Museum in Canberra.

As it should be.

[ More: Blackburn's Wikipedia page ]

To Buffalo

This morning, the righteous Dina sent me a link to the Wikipedia page for a certain linguistic parlor trick. “I'm sure you've seen this and probably blogged about it, but it makes
me happy, and I would like to share,” she said. In fact I had not heard of this, but Dina nailed it on the head when she decided it was something worth sharing.

Generally credited to William J. Rapaport, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo, the following sentence is grammatically correct, at least in a technical sense.

“Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

Technically correct, of course, is the best kind of correct. It describes the social hierarchy of buffalos at the Buffalo Zoo in Buffalo, New York. It employs three definitions for the word “buffalo”: the animal, the place and the verb meaning “to intimidate.” (Also, I should note that this is one verb I neglected to list in the post regarding animal name verbs, “Don’t Make Me Platypus All Over You.”) Translated into easier words, the sentence is trying to relate the fact that some buffaloes from the Buffalo Zoo that other buffaloes intimidate themselves also like to intimidate a third group of buffaloes in the zoo. Initially the sentence was problematic to me, even with the explanation. I kept feeling that any way I read it, the sentence omitted a crucial “that” whose presence grammar demanded.

In my mind, the sentence should have either read

Buffalo buffalo that buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

or

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo that buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

Then i realized I was leaving out one "buffalo." Furthermore, neither of these interpretations really express what the sentence should, however, and I had to read the Wikipedia’s explanation of it several times in order to get it. Even still, the correct interpretation fades out of my head the instant I avert my attention to anything else, kind of like how you can work to see the alternate interpretation in an optical illusion, but then revert back to the initial image if you stop concentrating and then have to work back to the secondary one. A major clue is which words are capitalized, as you can tell those words have to be the city, excluding the first one, of course.

To explain, I’m going to employ so font modifications. In the below sentence the bold buffalo represents the city name, the italicized buffalo represents the animal and the plain one represents the verb.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

This, to me, is the easiest way to parse the sentence. Think of every "Buffalo buffalo," with the capitalized one followed by the lower-case one, as "a group of buffalos from the city Buffalo." With that, you have

Various buffalo at the Buffalo zoo that other buffalo at the same zoo tend to intimidate in turn go and treat this third group of buffalo at the zoo in a similar way.

or

[One group of] Buffalo buffalo [that other] Buffalo buffalo [tend to] buffalo [themselves] buffalo [other] Buffalo buffalo.

or

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

It's like making algebra out of grammar, which you'd think I hate but apparently don't. Still, I can't believe I've typed the word "buffalo" this many times. Likely, more than a lot of people have in their lives, rather than Buffalo Bill. I can no longer even look at the word "buffalo" without thinking that it now looks wrong, just by virtue of me having stared at it for so long and noticing how weird it is.

The Wikipedia article also suggest others, including "Badgers badgers badger badger badgers." but I don't even want to attempt delving into those today. All of them, however, are what is known as "garden path sentences" — that is, a sentence you can't correctly understand without doubling back and re-reading. "The horse raced past the barn fell," for another example, in case your head doesn't hurt like mine.

And it's with no small sense of humor that I note "buffalo" can also mean "to confuse." Seriously, who thought "buffalo" was suitable to being a real word, anyway?

[ link: Wikipedia on "garden path sentences" ]

A Wild Butterfly

I'm shocked — shocked — to know that the 80s hit "Obsession" is not, in fact, by Human League, as I've long thought. The song was actually song by the band Animotion, whose lead singer, Michael Des Barres, later had a son who started what was once my favorite publication: Diehard Gamefan.

Weird what Wikipedia teaches you.

At Least You're Not Born on Hairy Vetchling Day

In the spirit of the great Egyptian king Ankhenaten — the ruler who switched the empire’s political capitol to Amarna and overhauled the national religion to worship a solar disc in lieu of Ra, the longstanding deity primo — and other such botched attempts at renovation, I present to you something that I only recently learned of: the French Revolutionary calendar. See, Ankhenaten’s new religion failed, and immediately upon his death, his successor moved the capital back to Thebes and the solar disc was abolished, despite all the king’s efforts.

I enjoy this, the idea that no matter how hard you work for something, it can be undone easily the moment you leave town.

As I understand it, the French Revolutionary calendar was the result of the revolutionaries’ desire to burn the establishment to the ground and start over. Apparently, the rebellion included the the destruction of the seven-day week. The changes included the following:

• Twelve new months, each divided into three ten-day weeks
• The ten days were called “Primidi,” “Duodi,” and so forth in a numerical fashion
• A period called the “Franciade” that occurred at the end of the twelve-month schedule, to make up for the extra days that would otherwise force the calendar off-schedule
• A wacky base-ten invention called “decimal time” to replace our base-six clock

The months were divided into seasonal units, as follows, beginning in the calendar start at the autumnal equinox. As the Wikipedia explains it:

1. Vendémiaire (from Latin vindemia, “vintage”)
2. Brumaire (from French brume, “mist”)
3. Frimaire (From French frimas, “frost”)
4. Nivôse (from Latin nivosus, “snowy”)
5. Pluviôse (from Latin pluviosus, “rainy”)
6. Ventôse (from Latin ventosus, “windy”)
7. Germinal (from Latin germen, “seed”)
8. Floréal (from Latin flos, “flower”)
9. Prairial (from French prairie, “meadow”)
10. Messidor (from Latin messis, “harvest”)
11. Thermidor (from Greek thermos, “hot”)
12. Fructidor (from Latin fructus, “fruit”)

(Wikipedia also notes that Britons mocked the months by calling them Wheezy, Sneezy and Freezy; Slippy, Drippy and Nippy; Showery, Flowery and Bowery; Wheaty, Heaty and Sweety. Ha.)

Even better, in lieu of the Catholic calendar of saints, the French Revolutionary Calendar attached everyday objects to the days of the year. Every tenth day was named in honor of a household object, while every fifth days (excluding multiples of ten) was named for an animal. The remaining ones were plants and minerals. This is where is gets fun. For example, my birthday is June 4. On the FRC, this would correspond to the 16th day of Prairial, or "Oeillet," Carnation Day.

Happy Carnation Day, me!

Conversely, other holidays on the Gregorian calendar are worse off. Christmas, for example, is the 5th day of Nivôse, “Chien” — Dog Day. So decorate your Dog Day tree. Halloween would be the 10th day of Brumaire, Plough Day, which sounds just as fun as the holiday currently celebrated on that day. Don’t get drunk on St. Patrick’s Day, because that’s now Ventôse 27th, Forest Day. And our friends in Mexico can join us in celebration of the 17th day of Floréal instead of Cinco de Mayo. And we’ll all call it “Pimprenelle” — or Salad Burnet Day!

The program was abandoned by Napoleon in 1806, though it still crops in randomly — for example, in the name of the dish Lobster Thermidor. I think the whole thing is funny, really. Come on, French people. The whole Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday thing is not worth rebelling against. Norse gods are not the man. It’s still good for a laugh, however. So I encourage everyone to go see what lame mascot they get affixed to their birthday by checking out this handy-dandy table.

And please, have a great Shallot Day!

[ source: Prance Closer ]

EDIT: As Nate and Spence have now both pointed out to me, my day is, in fact, Carnation Day — not Quail Day. The correction has been made above. It turns out I'm bad at reading the French Revolutionary Calendar. But as I said before, at least I'm not born on Hairy Vetchling Day.