Today is 10/11/12 – a rare sequential date?

Numerologists say sequential dates and times hold special significance. Now that we are more than a decade safely beyond Y2K and secure in our knowledge that the big calendar switch didn’t incite the collapse of the modern world, we can relax a bit and enjoy some of the cooler quirks that come along with living in the infant stages of a new millennium.

This Saturday, November 10, 2012, is a special day, numerically speaking. For, it reads 10/11/12 – a classic sequential date – and, it becomes more interesting here, at 14 past one in the afternoon, the time-and-date sequence will read: 10/11/12 @ 13:14 hours. It could also do a bit of the same at nine minutes past eight in the morning on the day: 08:09 @ 10/11/12. If you start with the time of 12:34:56:7.89 (you’ll need a very precise clock) you get the golden sequence of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12. Wow!

While that could be with any 10 November (not necessarily 10 November 2012), there are a couple of dozen patterns (yes, that is 24 patterns in all) recorded for Saturday, 10 November 2012. You can check all of them here.

Worldwide, numerologists suggest that sequential dates and times hold special significance, which explains why there is a sudden rush of wedding parties and birth deliveries on such special dates, and some even try to zero-in on the rarest of rare special times on those days.

Whether or not marriages conducted on special days last any longer or shorter than others that are conducted on ‘regular’ days may be a matter of further research, but one thing is for sure – if you do get married on a numerically significant date such as today or perhaps 12/12/12, it’ll be pretty hard to forget one’s anniversary.

basirhat.com

Dot com is generally associated with virtual sites. The domain names, inter alia, end with .com. During my recent visit to Basirhat in West Bengal, I came across a banner with “Basirhat Dot Com” displayed on it. It’s not a website, but a club of local boys displaying banner for their Kali puja (worship of the Goddess Kali) and it has got no connection with cyberspace.

The banner was displayed just across our house. I thought first that there is some cyber cafe there and they have named it like that. But, on my enquiry I found that there is nothing virtual or any connection to that. It’s a club of local boys and they have just named their club – basirhat.com.

The kids nowadays have become so much used to dot com that they named their club with dot com. If it goes like this, then we may find people keeping their surnames as dot com!

Mickey Mouse on Mercury!

The image below is probably familiar to everyone. This particular Mickey Mouse impression, however, has been caught on planet Mercury by NASA’s Messenger spacecraft.

This particular crater configuration is in Mercury’s south, near a crater named Magritte. “The shadowing helps define the striking ‘Mickey Mouse’ resemblance, created by the accumulation of craters over Mercury’s long geologic history,” says NASA in the photo description on Flickr.

Messenger is the first spacecraft to orbit the planet Mercury. During its one-year primary mission, Messenger acquired 88,746 images and other data sets. The spacecraft is currently in a yearlong extended mission, with plans to acquire more than 80,000 additional images of Mercury.

Was the Titanic destined to disaster?

Fourteen years before the unsinkable ship went down a novelist, Morgan Robertson, wrote a book called Futility. This fictitious story revolved around a huge (at that time) imaginary vessel hitting an iceberg in the Atlantic Ocean on a cold April night. The massive ship in the storyline was named Titan and the real ship Titanic, which had not even been built then, were eerily similar in design and their ends as grisly.

Although the novel was written before RMS Titanic had even been designed, there are some remarkable similarities between the fictional and real-life counterparts. Like the Titanic, the fictional ship sank in April in the North Atlantic, and there were not enough lifeboats for the passengers. There are also similarities between the size (800 ft long for Titan versus 882 ft 9 in long for the Titanic, speed (25 knots for Titan, 21 knots for Titanic) and life-saving equipment. The Titanic struck an iceberg on the starboard side on the night of April 14, 1912 in the North Atlantic 400 miles away from Newfoundland. And on an April night, in the North Atlantic 400 miles from Newfoundland (Terranova), the Titan hit an iceberg also on the starboard side.

Truth is stranger than fiction, in deed!

Elderly woman injured in hospital told to call ambulance!

A hospital would seem the safest place to get hurt, but that assumption proved false for 82-year-old Doreen Wallace of Niagara Falls, Ontario.

When Wallace fell and broke her hip earlier this month in the lobby of the Greater Niagara General Hospital, she assumed she would be quickly taken care of, but that was not the case, according to the The Star. Instead, she was told to call an ambulance.

Wallace had been leaving the hospital after visiting her ailing husband when she fell. As she lay face down on a metal grate with a cut arm and broken hip, two nurses from the emergency room reportedly refused to help until paramedics arrived. Wallace spent almost 30 minutes on the ground before a passing surgeon moved her into a wheelchair to await help.

The hospital said the situation was the result of a communication problem among staff members and possibly an old rule that required an ambulance to be called, according to the Star.

Wallace is now recovering and waiting for an apology from the hospital.

Unusual umbrella!

A 26-foot sculpture of Marilyn Monroe in her most famous pose was installed on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile. Passers-by wasted little time positioning themselves under her billowing skirt to get a subway-grate view of Monroe in the same stance as she appeared in the 1955 film “The Seven Year Itch.”

Statue of Marilyn Monroe on Chicago’s Magnificent Mile – Pedestrians taking shelter from the rain under the skirt!

The Marilyn Monroe statue will stand here though spring 2012.

The world’s biggest family

The man with 39 wives, 94 children and 33 grandchildren. They live in a 100-room, four storey house set amidst the hills of Baktwang village in the Indian state of Mizoram, where the wives sleep in giant communal dormitories.

One evening meal can see them pluck 30 chickens, peel 132lb of potatoes and boil up to 220lb of rice.

Coincidentally, Mr Chana is also head of a sect that allows members to take as many wives as he wants. He even married ten women in one year, when he was at his most prolific, and enjoys his own double bed while his wives have to make do with communal dormitories.

Breast-touching festival in China

I just read about the breast-touching festival and I really find it so laughable that in our modern world, such superstitions still exist.

The Chinese have entered the seventh month of the Lunar calendar, known as the Hungry Ghost month, which began July 31. This period is considered unlucky for many Chinese as they believe that the ghosts are allowed to return to the human realm as the Hell Gate opens throughout the month. While the Buddhists and Taoists prepare offerings for the homeless ghosts, a minority tribe in China have their own interesting celebration. This eventually turned into a festival called Monai Jie (Breast-Touching Festival), where the men of the town are allowed to touch the breasts of single women!

The Yi people in Ejia town of Yunnan province, those who are still single, will head to the streets for Breast-Touching Festival on the 14th, 15th and 16th days of the month. On these days, the men are welcome to touch the women’s breasts. This festival has been around for 1500 years!

The festival began because of a local legend during the Sui Dynasty (AD 581 – 619) when most of the male teenagers of the town were forced into the army and died in wars. The people then carried out prayers to commemorate the dead, and it happened that the ceremony was held in the seventh month. According to the Taoist wizards, the dead could not rest because they had not touched a woman before dying. What’s more, they wanted 10 “pure and untouched” women to accompany them into the afterworld. To prevent them from being chosen, single women – aged 15 and above – then asked the men of their village to touch their breasts, and the custom has been passed down for generations.

During the festival, men enjoy touching breasts, and women gladly accept their touch as the gesture – called “touching milk” – is considered good luck for both. And yes, foreigners have begun visiting this town for festivities and are received warmly by the single women.

Elderly woman uses AIDS threat to rob Colorado bank

A woman robbed a Colorado bank by passing a note saying she would infect a teller with AIDS if the clerk didn’t hand over money, police said on Friday. The woman walked into a Wells Fargo bank inside a Safeway grocery store on Thursday night and handed a note to a teller. The woman coughed frequently into a blue bandana during the robbery, and fled with an undisclosed amount of cash.

Police and the FBI released still photographs of the robbery and are reviewing additional photographs and surveillance video from the bank’s parking lot to try and identify the suspect. No weapon was displayed during the robbery and no one was injured, police said.

Despite so much AIDS awareness campaign to remove the myths about AIDS, people are so scared of it that a lady robbed a bank by just passing a note that she would infect a teller if the cash is not handed over to her!

Source: Reuters

Now the new doomsday date – October 21, 2011?

The evangelical Christian broadcaster whose much-ballyhooed Judgment Day prophecy went conspicuously unfulfilled on Saturday, May 21, 2011 has a simple explanation for what went wrong — he miscalculated. Instead of the world physically coming to an end on May 21 with a great, cataclysmic earthquake, as he had predicted, Harold Camping, said he now believes his forecast is playing out “spiritually,” with the actual apocalypse set to occur five months later, on October 21.

He has now insisted that October 21 has always been the end-point of his own End Times chronology, or at least, his latest chronology. Is anybody believing him?