It’s my 23rd birthday.
Twenty-three is a prime number. It’s the jersey number once (or currently!) sported by Carlos Peña, LeBron James, Don Mattingly, current Leafs coach Randy Carlyle, former Leafs coach Pat Quinn, Paul Reinhart, Adrian Gonzalez, Michael Jordan, and my man the Eliminator, Martin Gélinas.
Julius Caesar was stabbed twenty-three times. Human sex cells have 23 chromosomes. John Forbes Nash (who inspired A Beautiful Mind) was obsessed with the number 23, and in Star Wars: Episode IV, Luke, Han and Chewy sneak into detention block AA23 to rescue Princess Leia.
The 23 enigma “refers to the belief that most incidents and events are directly connected to the number 23, some modification of the number 23, or a number related to the number 23″.
There’s even a film called The Number 23.
Besides being the day after the Ides of March, March 16 is also the birthday of Bernardo Bertolucci, Nancy Wilson, Curtis Granderson, Brian Wilson (the baseball one), John Darnielle, and Flavor Flav. (I’m wearing my little clock necklace in tribute.)
On this day in 1926, Robert Goddard launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in Auburn, Mass, and in 1995 Mississippi finally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment and became the last state to abolish slavery. (1995, guys. Official ratification was in 1865, two years before Canada became Canada).
22 was a pretty sweet year. Here’s to an even better one.
(thanks for all the cool trivia, Wikipedia)
Edit: My sister, ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah well I have purple hair.
…HAPPY BIRTHDAY!
You know, there’s a phone game called “1 to 50″, in which it scrambles up the numbers from 1 to 50 in a 5 x 5 grid and you try and touch them in order as fast as possible, and I came to the conclusion at some point that the key determining factor in whether I was going to have trouble in the latter and more difficult part of the round (usually the numbers between 25 and 40 are the most challenging, for some reason) was whether or not I could find 23 immediately. I’m not sure why, but it frequently was the first number to prove elusive. THE MORE YOU KNOW.