It’s also Super Bowl Sunday and Groundhog Day.
November 11, 2011 caused a major stir, when the clock struck 11:11:11 on 11/11/11. It was the only double-figure palindromic date and will not come round again for 100 years, in 2111.
However, it is not as perfect as 02/02/2020, because using the full year, 2011, ruins the symmetry.
Las Vegas chapels were bursting at the seams with couples wanting to tie the knot on 11/11/11, with “queen of nightlife” Tiffany Masters holding what she billed as the world’s largest reception.
Verizon Wireless launched its Droid Razr at 11:11 on 11/11/11 and there was even a movie “11-11-11,” about an American author plagued by strange happenings and constant sightings of the number 11.
Human brains are naturally inclined to look for patterns, and many consider such dates lucky. Daniel Hardt, president of Life Path Numerology Center in Indianapolis, called it a “powerful day.”
In
September, there was a week of palindrome dates using the US format, if you removed the 20- in the year. There was 9/10/19, 9/11/19 and so on, through to 9/19/19. But of course, these only worked with the US format of MM/DD/YYY.
There had been one of these every year since 2011, but that was the last of the century.
A palindrome is any word, phrase or sequence of numbers that reads the same whether you read it forward or backward, such as “mom,” “race car” or “tacocat.” Author James Joyce invented “tattarrattat,” which is supposed to be the sound of a knock on the door and the longest single-word palindrome in the
Oxford English Dictionary.
Famous palindromes include “rats live on no evil star,” “never odd or even” and “a man, a plan, a canal, Panama.” The phrase “A Toyota’s a Toyota” can continue as a palindrome forever, as in, “A Toyota’s a Toyota’s a Toyota…”