January 13, take 2
Give me enough tries at something simple and I'm sure to get it right!
Yesterday it seems somebody clicked the wrong list item and published the wrong day’s post. I have no idea who it could have been, since the Happened newsletter requires a crew of dozens to compile and publish. Or at least it ought to. In any case, the sorry episode brought a festering question to the fore, months before anyone expected. The question is this: am I going to be able to keep this thing going after the first year? In other words, does any given date on the calendar include enough interesting, offbeat, or (audience applauds for this one) silly items to string together more than once? Or, at the end of a year, am I going to have to come up with a (shiver) new idea? Thanks to posting today’s episode yesterday (for which I’m blaming the intern), we have an unexpected opportunity to find out. So here, my dear readers, is a second attempt at January 13. Let me know whether it makes you think “yes, there’s at least another year in this approach,” or if, perhaps, you lean toward “start working on daily updates about BitCoin” or something like that.
I wonder if the main characteristic of January 13 is that number. Thirteen. It’s a number so often feared that there’s actually a word for it: triskaidekaphobia. If you suffer from triskaidekaphobia, you’re afraid of 13, even though you might not be able to say exactly why. In fact, 13 has often been considered an unlucky number, but whenever you try to figure out just where that idea came from, the reasons sort of …evaporate. For instance, one of the oldest ideas about bad luck associated with 13 comes from the Code of Hammurabi. It was a set of laws from Babylon around 1700 BCE, and the story goes that the 13th law was omitted. That’s exactly like a high-rise building nowadays skipping 13 and going right from the 12th to the 14th floor. Except…if you check the existing copies of the Code of Hammurabi — some really did survive — you’ll notice that the individual laws are not numbered. So the 13th one can’t be skipped, because there wasn’t any enumeration. So that can’t be it.
There are some other origin stories for triskaidekaphobia. For instance, the Knights Templar of the middle ages were all arrested on Friday the thirteenth of October, 1307. Okay, that may be true, but on the other hand, October is the tenth month, not the thirteenth. And then there’s the year. Sure, it stars with 13. But that means it’s the fourteenth century. And there’s that trailing 7, and what are you supposed to do with that? I mean, it would be an excellent origin story if there had been 13 Knights (nope), or if the charges against them, raised by King Philip IV of France, had something to do with the number. But no, the whole arrest affair was evidently a plan by Philip to get out from the rather large debt he owned the Knights. So this probably isn’t the source of triskaidekaphobia either.
If you’re scared of the number 13, there appears to be no reason for it at all.
In fact if you track down all the origin stories of triskaidekaphobia, not a single one seems to hold up. If you’re scared of the number 13, there appears to be no reason for it at all. Which, paradoxically, seems to make it all the more plausible, right?
But wait. For all the publicity 13 gets around representing bad luck, there are quite a few times, places, and people who have considered it to be good luck. In Italy, 13 was the traditional lucky number in the football betting pools. This was so pervasive that the phrase “fare tredici” means hitting the jackpot, even though its literal translation is “make thirteen.” Not only that, but 13 is (or at least used to be) considered a very luck number in France. And in the US, if you ask for a “baker’s dozen” donuts, you get not 12 but 13. And an extra donut, well, come on, what can be better luck than that? A free donut, for crying out loud!
If you want to venture into the realm of number theory (which I don’t recommend), you’ll find that 13 is an actual lucky number, number-theory-wise. That’s because in number theory, a lucky number is any natural number in a set that’s generated by a “sieve" similar to the Sieve of Eratosthenes, which…um, just never mind; this is the sort of thing that I think I could maybe explain, but it still wouldn’t make any sense. Just take it from me (and Wikipedia); 13 is a lucky number according to number theory, whatever that might be.
So leaving aside the esoterica of number theory and mythic origins of legends about 13, what has actually happened on January 13 that might indicate fortune tending to lean one direction or the other? There are certainly a couple of black marks in the date’s rap sheet. It was the day of the “Reichstag Bloodbath in 1920, when a labor movement demonstration in front of the Berlin Bbuilding housing the lower house of Parliament in Germany ended in a riot, gunfire, and some still-uncertain number of deaths.
Then in 1950, a real piece of bad luck — or at least bad seamanship — resulted in a fatal collision between a British submarine and an oil tanker. Sixty-four sailors lost their lives in that accident. It was even worse in 1840, when the steamship Lexington caught fire and sank off the cost of Long Island, New York. That mishap — or piece of bad fortune, if you will — cost 139 lives. The steamship’s engine had recently been converted from wood to coal, but the work wasn’t done properly. The engine overheated, set fire to the cargo, which was bales of cotton, and in the end there were only four survivors.
And yet…any really good conspiracy theory would list all the incidental connections to the number 13 in those incidents. Like the 1950 accident happening at 13 minutes after the hour, in 13 fathoms of water, and it being the 13th voyage of one ship or the other (or both!). But there aren’t any such omens. Maybe we just tend to count the connections that bolster our theories and ignore all the other things that don’t?
Anyway, there are some pairs of events on January 13 that seem to balance out the smiling and frowning faces of the number 13. In 1908, January 13 marked a fatal fire in the Rhoads Opera House in Pennsylvania. But just two years later on January 13, 1910, opera fans could enjoy the world’s first public radio broadcast, which was a performance of Pagliacci from the Metropolitan Opera. If the labor movement in Germany was set back by the January 13 riot in Berlin in 1920, well, it was the same date in 1893 that the labor movement was bolstered with the Independent Labor Party in the UK held its first meeting. And although James Joyce, the author of Ulysses, passed away on January 13, 1941, Michael Bond, author of Paddington Bear, was born on January 13, 1926.
So in the balance, it seems like January 13 is neither good nor bad; neither entirely fortunate nor altogether unlucky. Maybe that’s just the way it is. And just maybe, there might be more than a single year’s worth of stories in Happened. But don’t make me go back into number theory; I’ve developed an irrational fear of that stuff. I’m going to call it integermetophobia. Oh, and remind me to find an intern; I already have something to blame on them.
