I’m sure you’ve heard it a bajillion times today. This is our last sextuple on the calendar for another century. 12:12:12 on 12/12/12. Yowza! (As you can probably tell, this event is making me very excited.)
I honestly don’t think it’s that big a deal. We’re in the year 2012 AD (Anno Domini) according to the Gregorian calendar. But what if we’re using the wrong calendar? What if the dates are wrong? Maybe someone messed up and this year is actually 2011, in which case we’ll have another sextuple coming up next December. According to the Hebrew calendar, it’s Year 5774, in which case we only have to wait a few decades before hitting another series of nifty dates that people make a big hubbub about.
And what about quintuples? Don’t people care about those anymore? We can use military time and people can get excited about 13:13:13 on 1/3/13! And then again in 2014! All the way to 2023! Yowza!
(On a side note, I’m glad the Internet hasn’t been blasted by people who live right next to the borders of time zones. “Hey, it’s 12:12:12 on 12/12/12! Now I’m gonna cross the street and wait for 59 minutes so I can celebrate the same thing all over again!”)
In case you’re wondering, I’m not bitter because I wasn’t looking at the clock when it scrolled past 12:12 this afternoon. It just seems really arbitrary to me. I suppose that could change over time. Hey, everyone who thinks I should be more excited today! How about you go away and stop bothering me, then find me again 100 years from now and see how I feel about the final sextuple? I bet if you hold a horn up to my mouth and I have the lung capacity to blow into it and make any noise… Yowza!
