Sunday 11 April 2021

no news day

According to our elvish friends over at Quite Interesting, a meta-analysis of facts and figures reveal that that this day (also a Sunday) in 1954 was the most boring single one of the past century, even withstanding that another day in April a couple decades earlier earned the unique distinction from BBC news anchors that there was in fact no news to report. One would think a dearth of information or memory would be duller than a surfeit of events, which include a general election in Belgium that makes Achille Van Acker—credited with creating the country’s social safety net Prime Minister and reforming public spending, pensions, housing, education and employment—the cycling classic Paris-Roubaix was won by another Belgian called Raymond Impanis and it was the opening day of the All-Ireland Senior Hurling (iomรกint) Championship, by this pronouncement by programmer and computer science professor William Tustall-Pedoe, backed up by computer data, cannot be contradicted. That’s OK as we can handle dull and no excitement very well from time to time.  Such quests and inquires, though now may be less of an ordeal thanks to an internet connection, recalls this, fictive I suspect but don’t know for sure, Institute for the Study of 15:32, 10 April, 1954 that we encountered just ahead of April Fools and dismissed as a hoax but addresses the fullness of the day before—or another errand short story I read once years ago in a science fiction anthology about an individual obsessed with chronicling every event globally that took place on a single day and was still sending off requests to newspaper archives called “The Man Who Collected the First of September 1973” by Tor ร…ge Bringsvรฆrd.