Oolite Bulletins

Have a great day you superstitious recipients to my subliminal suggestions!


(Jason Voorhees like all Canadians plays street hockey with a machete..."CAR!!")

Paraskevidekatriaphobia! Run!

And it is Mrs SandJ's birthday.

Wow.. I hadn't even noticed it's that kind of day again.

As a query of interest, I'm aware that '13' is considered unlucky for some obscure reason (yes, I could look on the internet), but why is Friday unlucky? I mean.. end of working week, surely that's a good thing? If anything, -Monday- the 13th should be much worse??

Micha wrote:

Wow.. I hadn't even noticed it's that kind of day again.

As a query of interest, I'm aware that '13' is considered unlucky for some obscure reason (yes, I could look on the internet), but why is Friday unlucky? I mean.. end of working week, surely that's a good thing? If anything, -Monday- the 13th should be much worse??

The slaying of the Templar Nights by the Pope supposedly happened all around Europe on Friday the 13th.

13 is regarded as unlucky in Europe probably because of its pre-Christian associations with the moon and moon-worship (13 lunar months, more or less, make one calendar year): you also had 13 people at the Last Supper (12 disciples plus Jesus) – of course such numerologically significant numbers are in all likelihood applied retrospectively, i.e. Jesus had 12 disciples not because it's an accurate reflection of fact but because 12 is a magic number, and has been since at least the Babylonians ...

Friday is considered unlucky in the Christian tradition as it's supposedly the day of the week when Jesus was crucified – hence the no-meat thing (at least for Catholics, wangles about eating rabbits and muskrats notwithstanding).

According to a small Wikipedia search Friday the 13th as an unlucky day was entirely invented by one Thomas W. Lawson in a novel of that title in 1907. Before that nobody had ever heard of it.

Another wikipedia search – Friday the 13th – brings up the statement that

The earliest known documented reference in English occurs in Henry Sutherland Edwards' 1869 biography of Gioachino Rossini.

As far as I was aware, there's a lot of superstition around Friday in nautical circles.
It's meant to be really bad luck to begin a voyage on a Friday.

!m!

Obviously nothing conclusive here, and I suspect an identifiable origin does not exist.
See here under Arrests charges and dissolution, in the second paragraph for the Knights Templar version.

I think it's highly unlikely that there is any connection to the Templars. Very few people would care about the date on the arrest warrant for a bunch of bankers (assuming 13 October 1307 actually was a Friday – with all the various calendar conversions between then and now, it might have been another day entirely for people in Paris in 1307).

There's a lesson from history, to go alongside "never get involved in a land war in Asia": never lend huge sums of money to someone who has the Pope in his back pocket ...

I thought it was some kind of freemason/illuminati occult with numbers thing. Apparently they're majorly hung up with magic numbers. 13, like 666, is supposedly an evil number, thus why you'd be hard put to find a 13th floor in a skyscraper.

So what does that have to do with friday? Beats me. Maybe it's just a wrong date to get a weekend drunk on.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

thus why you'd be hard put to find a 13th floor in a skyscraper.

Which brings to mind the 13th Floor Elevators, an early psychedelic rock band.

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

thus why you'd be hard put to find a 13th floor in a skyscraper.

That is something what i never understood. When you don't want to live in the 13th floor and live on the 14th (or 12b) but there is no number 13, you do know you live on the 13th after all. If you don't want on the 13th, you should have problems with that floor no matter how it is called. So, there is no real reason for those stupid numbering.

I also heard of plains missing the 13th row of chairs. I wouldn't enter an air plain were the constructors forgot a whole row of chairs. They could have forgotten also some more important stuff.....

Eric Walch wrote:

Cmdr Wyvern wrote:

thus why you'd be hard put to find a 13th floor in a skyscraper.

That is something what I never understood.

That's because you're an intelligent person and the fear is a load of cobblers.

So, since the floors go:
- in the UK: Ground, 1st, 2nd, 3rd ... 12th, 14th, ...
- in the US: 1st, 2nd, 3rd ... 12th, 14th, ...

So which is the unlucky one? The 13th above ground level, or the 12th? And if there is a basement level, which is the unlucky floor? What about those where they dug down 3 levels of car park - is the 9th or 10th level above ground the unlucky one?

And as far as I recall, all the floors in the World Trade Center twin towers ended up in much the same state as all the others.

Remember the old movie "Towering Inferno"? It wasn't just the 13th floor that burned away.

It's just superstitious rubbish.

Besides: there are a number of peoples on Earth who consider the 13 a lucky number. And of course lots of peoples who find it completely neutral.

Apparently researches have gone through German car accident statistics and have (unsurprisingly) found no difference whatsoever in accident numbers between different random calendar days.