}

Saturday, August 18, 2018

Another date meme

The meme above was all over social media this past week. It’s cute and clever enough—and irrelevant for this part of the world. Unusually, however, I was able to come up with some ways to adapt it for our reality—and, make it better, too.

Most of the special dates like this that the USA gets all excited about don’t work here because our date format is Day-Month-Year (as opposed to the USA’s Monday-Day-Year). The format used in New Zealand is common to the majority of the world’s countries, and the USA’s, well, it isn’t. However, the USA has always dominated the Internet and the media, so it’s pet memes are widely spread.

However, in this case I think this definitely works to our advantage. Instead of the someone awkward—and frankly inelegant—number sequences of 08/18/18 8:18, we have two far better alternatives.

First option: 18-08-18 at 18:08:18 (6:08:18 pm). That’s the one I personally like. Or, we could have 18-08-18 at 08:18:08 (8:18:08 am). Two chances in one day to have a date meme—top THAT USA!

Seriously, I’ve said many times that I like number sequences, and these are no different—and I really do like the versions for our part of the world much better than the USA’s. Naturally, I didn’t actually observe either.

I think I was awake at 8:18:08 am this morning, but I may not have gotten up then (I don’t pay any attention to that on weekends). At 6:08:18 pm I was watching the TV news. At neither time was I thinking about memes.

But since tomorrow is the 18th in the USA, it’s still important to get to say that—for once—we got the better date meme. Next time, maybe I’ll be able to make my own meme, too.

4 comments:

rogerogreen said...

I'll set my alarm NOW!

rogerogreen said...

I heard that today was the date with the most weddings in the US this year. how they know this, i have no idea,

Arthur Schenck (AmeriNZ) said...

I presume it's similar to here, where they look at marriage licenses issued, the number of places booked for ceremonies, that sort of thing. The USA certainly has more journalistic resources to do some surveying of relevant businesses, for example.

rogerogreen said...

I'm just surprised they can be so definitive. I suspect theknot.com is behind it.