Paraskevidekatriaphobia

It is perhaps disappointing to traditionalist to learn that the superstition that Friday the Thirteenth is unlucky is not ancient at all. No verifiable instance of it can be found in any written form prior to the nineteenth century, and although superstitions are notoriously handed down in oral tradition, the idea that such a fear of Friday the Thirteenth pre-existed the nineteenth century is on weak grounds. Lots of people say it is because of something that happened on some Friday the Thirteenth in the past (the arrest of all the Knights Templar in France on Friday, October 13, 1307 is one popular suggestion), but there is no evidence that the date was considered unlucky in the centuries afterward until it shows up in the 1800s and with no explicit connection with the Templars. (The Templars, pious knights that they were, have become a major marketable source of foolishness in recent years following the success of Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code. Sorry, folks, but getting mentioned in a popular novel whose historical basis has been shown to be hogwash does not a fact make, no matter how many silly "documentaries" about it appear on cable.)

So, happy Friday the Thirteenth! Apparently it is just another hot day.

The title of this post, of course, is the term for "fear of Friday the thirteenth", in case you ever need to drop it into casual conversation.

Evolution

June 1846


August 2010

Costa Rica takes a step

Soggy Sunday [With Update]

Woke to thunderstorms and rain. Tom says the rain will be ending, in which case we may go to Portage for a sidewalk sale and to get some cartridges for my printer. (There is no office supply place in Wisconsin Dells, unless you count Walmart.) We'll see.

Meanwhile, I am doing some cleaning. I have a box full of old computer disks and stuff, and I am throwing out items that no longer work or that I don't expect to use ever again. The box includes a lot of old floppy disks that my computer doesn't even have as lot for. (My last two or three, in fact, have not had slots for them.) Tom, fortunately, has a computer old enough to still have a working a: drive. Tomorrow while he is busy at the railroad, I will look through my floppies to see if there is anything I want to transfer to a memory stick. I don't think there will be, to tell the truth. At any rate, it will be out with the old floppies one way or another.

I also have a stack of old program CDs that are worth nothing to me. I gave Tom the cases from those and will give the CDs to Kris at the library. She will most likely figure out some way to use them in one of the monthly craft projects she does with patrons, young and old. The library supplies everything necessary for these projects, and we like to be able to do one that doesn't require us to purchase anything. This month she is making some remarkable pins out of old bottle caps and holiday photos. They are just like some items I saw in one of the galleries in Mineral Point, so we are quite with the trend -- at least, the trend in south central Wisconsin.

UPDATE: We went to Portage, but for the second time recently, we discovered that an event that had been advertised as Saturday and Sunday in a local events calendar turned out to have been Friday and Saturday. No great loss, but it would have given us something more to do. We did stop and get my ink for the printer, and that was good.

On the way back we went by a parish festival (that had been listed in the calendar as LAST Sunday) and discovered it consisted almost exclusively of a Polka Mass, a beer tent and a couple of game wheels. Hardly a parish festival by my standards! But it is a small country parish, and I guess they enjoyed themselves.

The highlight of the day turned out to be lots and lots of sand hill cranes that we saw in field after field along the way. They are not rare, but I still love to see them picking their way through the fields or wandering across a lawn. They are not the tallest crane (in the States, that would be the whooping crane), but they can have a six foot (1.8 m) wing spread.