Belly Billboard

That poor girl. She better jump in my bed so I can protect her from all that bad luck.

It appears that it’s Friday the 13th.  I had no idea.  To be quite honest, I wasn’t paying attention and it snuck up on me somehow.  If it weren’t for EVERY SINGLE NEWS SITE posting articles about it, I would have never known.

Thank god these people were on top of things:

The International Business Times:  Friday the 13th: Facts about the infamous day  (infamous?  Like Jesse James and Billy the Kid?  Woohoo!  It’s cowboy time!)

ABC News via Yahoo!:  Fear of Friday, the 13th (Paraskevidekatriaphobia) and Other Unpronounceable Phobias  (if you can’t pronounce it, can you suffer from it?  I mean, unless your fear is one of not being able to pronounce obscure phobia names)

Deleware Online:  Friday the 13th times three  (These folks want you to know that there’s gonna be 3 Fridays the 13th, within 13 weeks of each other.  Holy shit!  You know what else there’s gonna be within 13 weeks of each other?  3 Thursdays the 12th!  Get the voodoo priests!)

I’m going to stop here with the links, if you want to find more, just Google it.  Or better yet, just click this link:  Google News Search for Friday the 13th

In my attempts to mock the stupid and point out their failings, let’s discover exactly why people have a fear of Friday the 13th, shall we?  According to Wikipedia, a source known for integrity and truth, it’s said that “according to folklorists, there is no evidence for a Friday the 13th superstition prior to the 19th century”.  Well shit.  So this is a fairly new fear of something for the sake of being afraid of something.  Either that, or they had the word paraskevidekatriaphobia just laying around and needed to use it up.  With all those letters, it would be kind of wasteful not to put it into popular usage.

So, reading a little further, I learned that there are several theories proposed about the origin of this superstition:

• In numerology (numerology is dumb, keep that in mind) the number twelve is considered the number of completeness, as reflected in things that are grouped in 12.  13, however, is a bakers dozen and when it comes to donuts, everyone knows you’re not unlucky with an extra donut.
• In Spanish speaking countries (Spain, Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and most of the United States) Tuesday the 13th is considered a day of bad luck.  I posit that this is because in Spanish, Tuesday is “Martes” and Friday is “Viernes”.  Viernes, looks like it might sound a lot like “Vern” and if anyone remembers Ernest P. Worrell, we all know that Vern isn’t a bad guy, just has unfortunate luck in picking neighbors.  So when it was translated over to American, being ignorant of others language, we saw Vern 13th, and thought “Holy shit, that’s got to be the unluckiest neighbor in the world, Friday the 13th is bound to be evil!”