Okay, the morning DJs in my market played The Deck of Cards this morning; the 1959 Wink Martindale version (not really sure why). I looked up the linked wikipedia article to explain it to my wife, who didn’t quite catch it.
I was struck by one of the explanations the soldier gave, in describing the deck as an almanac:
If one (ill-advisedly) considers the Jack, Queen, and King to be represented by the numbers 11, 12, and 13, respectively, and assigns the face cards those numbers of spots, one can reach 364 (13 X 14 / 2 = 91; 91 X 4 = 364). Otherwise, because I don’t assign spot numbers to face cards, it’s 220 (10 X 11 / 2 = 55; 55 X 4 = 220). How is the private supposed to be getting 365 days in a year?
Has anyone ever bothered explaining how the private gets 365? If his excuse is that it’s “close enough,” I just hope that he wasn’t an artilleryman tasked with aiming the mortars.
You’re undercounting the number of spots, I think. For instance, the ace of diamonds has three spots: one in the upper left, one in the lower right, and one in the middle. Similarly, if you look at the image of a face card, it generally has four spots (upper left, lower right, and an upper left + lower right inside the artwork portion of the card).
I don’t have anything to add to the 365 spots discussion, but I wanted to say that I’d never heard of this song before, and from the wiki link provided by the OP, it sounds absolutely dreadful.
As opposed to the Jokers accounting for the extra 1, how about the deck itself as a unit? Since 364 is so close, why not permit the 1 from somewhere? That is if you want some measure of logic to apply and still come up with 365.
Snopes has a page on this, and they say that there’s one version of the tale from 1865 that says something like “every almanac must have at least one mistake in it”.
