I recently saw a posting on Facebook pointing out that this July will have five Sundays, five Mondays and five Tuesdays, and that furthermore, this only happens every four-hundred years or something.
This reminded me of a calendar I had as a child. It was a calendar of that year (I'm figuring it would have been 1978) but a blurb at the top of the calendar pointed out that it would also work for the then distant year of 2006. Needless to say, this blew my preschooling mind. But the point is, I was introduced early on to the fact that there are only a limited number of possible calendars that keep getting re-used. If you think about it, it's only fourteen (it's either a leap-year or it isn't, and each of those two types of years can start on any one of the seven days of the week.)
My point is, the claim about this July being really exceptional is not true. For myself and most of my friends, it isn't even the first time in our lives that we've seen a July like that (dig out your 1984 calendars, guys.) Big deal, you say, something on the Internet wasn't true. Well, I've long been used to the idea that there are lots of dishonest people out there. What surprises me is what silly things they're being dishonest about. Oooh, you fooled people about the details of the Gregorian Calendar, you must really feel superior now.
Another great example comes from the video below. It was sent to me in an e-mail, but being loath to click on an e-mail link, I looked it up on YouTube instead, where the comments tipped me off to the inaccuracies.
It's entertaining, but like I say, those claims appearing in the video were not entirely accurate. It turns out it wasn't made with old farm equipment, and it didn't take 13,000+ hours to set up. And it wasn't actually build by the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory or the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa, nor is it on display at the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall. And it turns out none of those places actually exist. And neither does the machine in the video - it was all computer animation done by a company showing off its technology. Someone made up the story around it, added the graphics describing that made-up story, and uploaded it to YouTube, presumably starting the e-mail as well.
Why? To fool a bunch of people who have never been to Iowa into believing that a certain fictitious pair of schools exist, or that a grainy computer animation is real? Is there some psychological condition that makes people enjoy really mundane hoaxes? Convincing people that Paul is dead was impressive, but if you're going to start a lie this lame, you should really find a way to get money or political power out of it.
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