The World... Explained #7: The Number 13
Project Brainstorm is a rational being, as are the six voodoo priests it pays in used chicken feathers to fend off evil spirit levels. However, in these uncertain times, it is often tempting to fall back on the mythical rather than the logical. We are of course talking about superstitions. Stitions are the mystical belief than completely ordinary things will happen if you do something similarly mundane. For instance, a famous stition is that putting a piece of bread in the toaster on Tuesday will make a lady take her dog out for a walk by the canal. This is obviously nonsense, as canals have been extinct for many years.
A superstition, then, is a mystical belief that extraordinary things will happen if something unusual happens first. The extraordinary thing is often linked to the idea of luck: a broken mirror is seven years' bad luck, as is a black cat crossing your path, especially if you happen to be driving along the motorway, and the black cat is in a tractor. People often associate good luck with symbols such as a rabbit's foot. This is especially lucky for the rabbit, who becomes eligible for disability benefits. Bad luck is often simply a state of mind. People who say they have bad luck often ignore all the good things that happen to them because they are too busy trying to track down the new owners of their old house that their ex-wife has just sold so she had enough money to pay for the kids to study abroad.
One superstition that appears all over the place is that of a certain number, the number thirteen. The problem with it is that we are scared of almost any reference to it, thinking that its mere existence in whatever we're doing dooms us to failure and misery. For instance, this sentence is the thirteenth of the article, and I am distinctly nervous as I type it that the keyboard will have a tragic malfunction and swallow my fingers under the escape key, so I'm going to do what most people do with the number 13: miss it out completely. Thus, the last sentence was the fourteenth, having skipped the thirteenth, and so this is the fifteenth.
Moving onto the sixteenth, the irrational fear of the number 13 (called atelophobia) manifests itself in many ways. Buildings often skip floor 13, having a floor 12a, floor 14 minus 1 or just a layer of strawberry sponge. Similarly, aeroplane companies build planes that don't have a thirteenth row. Obviously, with tall buildings and aircraft, people are keen to avoid anything that could give them bad luck and lead to them flying into a mountain (especially bad luck for someone in a building). NASA would have done well to follow the same lesson: their Apollo 13 mission was a disaster, leading to the famous quote, "Houston, we're stuck in six miles of tailbacks, I told you we shouldn't have gone on a Bank Holiday".
Other lesser events, though seemingly less deadly, also carry the fear of the number 13. Every Friday 13th is noted as a particularly unlucky day. On average, seventeen people die in some form of calendar related incident on Friday 13th. The most tragic of these was when three generations of the Sutton family in East Kent were killed after a buffet lunch, when the kitchen staff mistook the calendar for some luncheon meat and put in on all the sandwiches, uncooked. There have been many explanations for the origin of these superstitions. Some people claim that it is the uncertainty of the unknown that caused it to be considered unlucky: 13 is the first number than can't be counted on ten fingers and two feet: back in olden times, people had no toes, only stumps.
There are also religious connections. The thirteenth disciple, who left before the other twelve got famous, is a notoriously unlucky individual. Not only did his solo disciple career go badly, leading to the famous declaration: "Does anyone need following tonight?" but his later work as a member of a the followers of the Prophet Cliff was derided as being highly derivative, as the miracle of the Starving of the Six Thousand attests to. In the Jewish faith too, reaching the age of thirteen signifies the coming of age for a male boy. This has often been considered unlucky, as Jewish boys of twelve years old or younger were usually overlooked for receiving thousands of years of religious persecution and racial stereotyping, and also hadn't yet developed such a large nose.
This completes our study of the mystical number 13. If you or your family has been affected by the number 13, or you would like to talk about someone of the issues presented today, please call 45 Gibberbank Close, Thicham, West Dorset, and ask for the telephone number.
A superstition, then, is a mystical belief that extraordinary things will happen if something unusual happens first. The extraordinary thing is often linked to the idea of luck: a broken mirror is seven years' bad luck, as is a black cat crossing your path, especially if you happen to be driving along the motorway, and the black cat is in a tractor. People often associate good luck with symbols such as a rabbit's foot. This is especially lucky for the rabbit, who becomes eligible for disability benefits. Bad luck is often simply a state of mind. People who say they have bad luck often ignore all the good things that happen to them because they are too busy trying to track down the new owners of their old house that their ex-wife has just sold so she had enough money to pay for the kids to study abroad.
One superstition that appears all over the place is that of a certain number, the number thirteen. The problem with it is that we are scared of almost any reference to it, thinking that its mere existence in whatever we're doing dooms us to failure and misery. For instance, this sentence is the thirteenth of the article, and I am distinctly nervous as I type it that the keyboard will have a tragic malfunction and swallow my fingers under the escape key, so I'm going to do what most people do with the number 13: miss it out completely. Thus, the last sentence was the fourteenth, having skipped the thirteenth, and so this is the fifteenth.
Moving onto the sixteenth, the irrational fear of the number 13 (called atelophobia) manifests itself in many ways. Buildings often skip floor 13, having a floor 12a, floor 14 minus 1 or just a layer of strawberry sponge. Similarly, aeroplane companies build planes that don't have a thirteenth row. Obviously, with tall buildings and aircraft, people are keen to avoid anything that could give them bad luck and lead to them flying into a mountain (especially bad luck for someone in a building). NASA would have done well to follow the same lesson: their Apollo 13 mission was a disaster, leading to the famous quote, "Houston, we're stuck in six miles of tailbacks, I told you we shouldn't have gone on a Bank Holiday".
Other lesser events, though seemingly less deadly, also carry the fear of the number 13. Every Friday 13th is noted as a particularly unlucky day. On average, seventeen people die in some form of calendar related incident on Friday 13th. The most tragic of these was when three generations of the Sutton family in East Kent were killed after a buffet lunch, when the kitchen staff mistook the calendar for some luncheon meat and put in on all the sandwiches, uncooked. There have been many explanations for the origin of these superstitions. Some people claim that it is the uncertainty of the unknown that caused it to be considered unlucky: 13 is the first number than can't be counted on ten fingers and two feet: back in olden times, people had no toes, only stumps.
There are also religious connections. The thirteenth disciple, who left before the other twelve got famous, is a notoriously unlucky individual. Not only did his solo disciple career go badly, leading to the famous declaration: "Does anyone need following tonight?" but his later work as a member of a the followers of the Prophet Cliff was derided as being highly derivative, as the miracle of the Starving of the Six Thousand attests to. In the Jewish faith too, reaching the age of thirteen signifies the coming of age for a male boy. This has often been considered unlucky, as Jewish boys of twelve years old or younger were usually overlooked for receiving thousands of years of religious persecution and racial stereotyping, and also hadn't yet developed such a large nose.
This completes our study of the mystical number 13. If you or your family has been affected by the number 13, or you would like to talk about someone of the issues presented today, please call 45 Gibberbank Close, Thicham, West Dorset, and ask for the telephone number.
