ONES UPON A TIME

Jan 31, 2011 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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“This year we will experience four unusual dates… 1/1/11, 1/11/11, 11/1/11, 11/11/11 … NOW go figure this out…. take the last 2 digits of the year you were born plus the age you will be this year and it WILL EQUAL … 111.”  I got this from one of my many colleagues, friends and family who regale and sometimes swamp me with stuff that they feel will appeal to my insatiable curiosity and unbreakable funny bone.
In the old days in Trinidad, the Chinese celebrated “double ten” or October 10- the National Day of the Republic of China.  This is not the People’s Republic of China or what we know as “China” but the country of Taiwan.  Now that China rules the world and Taiwan is not formally recognized by the United Nations, “double ten” no longer has the same high profile it previously did in Trinidad and elsewhere.
If it had, last year (2010) would have been even bigger than all those “ones” and “elevens” that so fascinated my friend because it was the year of “triple ten” – 10/10/10.  In fact, this year, at exactly eleven minutes past eight on the twentieth of November, we will have something even more remarkable – 2011/2011/2011.
Is that good or bad?  If you add the digits in 2011 you get the number 4.  Growing up in Trinidad, like all my friends and neighbours I played the local variation of an illegal numbers game called “Whe-Whe”.  The number “4” stood for “dead man”.  For the Chinese, Koreans and even Japanese, this is the unluckiest number of all.  Wikipedia says that “4” (pidgin or pinyin sǐ) sounds like the Chinese word for death and because of that “many numbered product lines skip the “4”: e.g. Nokia cell phones (there is no series beginning with a 4), Palm PDAs, Canon Power Shot G series (after G3 it goes to G5), etc.
In East Asia, some buildings do not have a 4th floor… In Hong Kong some high-rise residential buildings literally miss all floor numbers with “4”, e.g. 4, 14, 24, 34 and all 40–49 floors, in addition to not having a 13th floor. As a result, a building whose highest floor is number 50 may actually have only 35 physical floors.”  Is that enough to floor you or what?
But wait.  Since 2011 is a four, we are in a bad year.  But 2011/2011/2011 add up to 12 which is a three (3) and since three is regarded as lucky because it sounds like the Chinese word for “birth”, the combination is extremely lucky and if you plan on having a baby make sure that it is either conceived or born on 2011/2011/2011.  It would help if you sing or make love to the Frank Sinatra version of “Luck Be My Lady Tonight”.
Other lucky numbers are 2, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and (believe it or not) 13.  Of the lucky numbers, 8 (“lion” in whe-whe) is the biggie.  The more eights you have in a number, the luckier you are.  It is not accidental that the Petronius Twin Towers in Malaysia each has 88 floors.  A man in the city of Hangzhou placed an Internet ad offering to sell his plate of A88888 for 1.12 million yuan.
A telephone number with all digits being eights was sold for US$270,723 in Chengdu, China.  The price paid, if you notice, were all lucky numbers as well.  It would be ironic if the first call was from a telemarketer or a heavy breather saying, “I got your number baby.”
But what about my number?  I was born on the tenth of August (10/8) and so I have one lucky number in the 8 but what about 10?  Has it proven lucky for the Taiwanese?  Even so, how does it stand in terms of Western numerology and superstitions?  We already have the case where the Chinese consider “13” as lucky even though it is a “four” (when you add it up) while Westerners consider the same number as extremely unlucky.
The Taiwanese “double ten” commemorates the day a bomb blew up in the city of Hankow in 1911 and started an internal revolution that toppled the Manchu dynasty.  On the 10/10/10 a lot of people in China got married.  In India, they compounded it by holding the ceremonies under tents and some of the grooms were tense.
What I find significant about the number 10 is its frequency. Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, the British Prime Minister lives at 10 Downing Street, Dr. Eric Williams speaking about the Federation declared “1 from 10 leaves zero”, and most lists like David Letterman’s feature the top ten.
Looking through my “Book of Bizarre Lists” most of the lists – Bizarre Births, Bizarre Birth Defects, Bizarre Apocalypse Scenarios, Weird Jobs from History, Incredibly Bizarre Sex Practices – are all in groups of ten.  The grandfather collection of them all – The Book of Lists – also has a lot of 10s e.g. 10 People with the Most Square Miles of the Earth’s Surface Named After Them, 10 Really Unusual Medical Conditions, 10 Worst Dictators Currently Deposed, Average Penis Length for 10 Species, and 10 Good Things That Happened on Friday the Thirteenth.
I figure that because we have ten toes and ten fingers, scoring everything in tens including female pulchritude, sins of commission and countdowns for launching rockets, is natural to us.  Then I read a “Ten Year Study on Luck”.  It found that lucky and unlucky people tend to describe the same event in different ways. A lucky person might marvel that she had escaped an automobile accident without serious injury; an unlucky person might say it was bad luck that she was in an accident at all.
Lucky people are more likely to say they had a good marriage or relationship and that they enjoyed their jobs.  It also discovered that we make our own luck.  In other words, luck is not a numbers game so much as a way of looking at the world.
This story illustrates it.  A woman’s husband had been slipping in and out of a coma for several months, yet she stayed by his bedside every single day. When he came to, he motioned for her to come nearer.  As she sat by him, he said, “You know what? You have been with me all through the bad times. When I got fired, you were there to support me. When my business failed, you were there. When I got shot, you were by my side. When we lost the house, you gave me support. When my health started failing, you were still by my side… You know what?”  “What dear?” She asked gently.  “I think you bring me bad luck.”
*Tony Deyal was last seen repeating one of comedian Henny Youngman’ 10 favourite one-liners, “My wife Sadie just had plastic surgery – I cut up her credit cards.”

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