Yeah, I’m not talking about the famous Lemmings level, unfortunately (anyone know a good Flash implement of that btw?), but the tendency for certain dates to be kickass.

By kickass, I mean:

Kickass (n) (cic-aze). A sequence of date and time digits of spurious yet substantial numerological significance.

A great one happened a few weeks ago, on the 10th October, better known to you and me as:

10/10/2010

Or, if you get really anal and look at the time as well:

10/10/10 10:10:10

I think I’ve always collected these most excellent dates since I noticed 6/7/89 as a kid. Obviously 09:09 on 9/9/89 was a date of seminal excitement to me (not shared by my junior-school teacher, unfortunately), and at the same time on 9/9/99 I went completely wild. 01:01 on 1/1/2001 sadly passed me by as I was busy drunkenly drying my bricklike mobile phone off with a hairdryer, having fallen into a pool soon after midnight.

Being born on the 11th December, I’m particularly looking forward to a quarter-past two on my birthday in 2013, and both 11/11/11 11:11:11 and 2012/3/4 05:06:07 should be special too, as will 3/14/15 09:26 (using US dates) and 2/7/18 02:08. I’ll probably end up missing 22/2/2222 2:22 though…

Why?

Being ever-so-slightly OCD, I am more excited by these numbers than is possibly healthy, but from experience most people have a bit of a soft spot for these dates, the study of which is known as numerology, and is especially popular in China, apparently. Whole organizations have based mass-action days around them.

Without wanting to cod-psychoanalyze too deeply (I’ll save that for the pub) I wonder if the (fairly) modern obsession with significant date combinations has anything to do with our need to mark the passing of time in a relentlessly-changing world. ‘Never mind that you can’t even remember what you had for tea yesterday,’ this argument runs, ‘at least you had that tea on a date of cosmic significance.’

The fact that said dates are measured from the (arbitrarily-defined) birthday of a largely fictionalized individual in Judea 2000+ solar orbits ago is immaterial. Perhaps this need to mark the passing of significant chunks of our life is primal; we’re not so different from our Stonehenge-building, mushroom-eating proto-hippie ancestors after all…