I see this showing up on people’s facebook statuses lately: “this year October has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and5 Sundays. This happens once every 823 years, this means money bags” followed by an admonition to copy and paste to one’s own status within X number of minutes, lest one miss out on the “luck.”
People sure are nitwits.
Yup. A quick reminder about 2004 should have them slapping their foreheads.
As consolation prize trivia, accounting for leap years, October starting on a Friday does at least happen the least often of any day of the week (tied with Sunday); exactly 56 times every 400 years. Tuesday and Wednesday happen 57 times, and the rest happen 58 times. But… this is markedly less interesting.
I’d bet money it won’t.
Srsly, “but I’ve heard it on the Internet!” has become such an excuse for stupidity (not to mention a “get out of research free” card). A corollary to this is “Aunt Edna told me this in an email! Why would she lie?”
:rolleyes:
I actually wish the above were true, so I’d have to wait 823 years for it to pop up again …
That was the part which made me laugh. What the hell happened to all that “luck” in the years before Facebook? Really, people.
Before Facebook, there were email chain letters, and before email, hard copy chain letters!
There were hard copy chain letters? Haha, shows how young I am. 
I think I’m too young for them, too, Larzipan. But they’ve come up in books written before the Golden Age of Internet. A character gets a chain letter in the mail and photocopies a bunch and sends them to her friends who tell her she can’t break the chain but get pissed when she wants to send them copies.
“Dear ATEP - Keep the luck flowing like the Blessed Nile at Flood Time. Make 5 copies of this papyrus and send them to your friends. Poor IMOWE of Aswan broke the chain and was eaten by a crocodile. Don’t let this happen to you!”
wobbles into the thread I did get hardcopy chain letters, more or less at about the time Spectrums were entering the market (look it up, you whippersnappers). Never sent one on, or the one that you were supposed to send back to someone who was five steps sooner than you in the pyramid/chain. This got me off people’s send lists pretty fast, as a big part of the charm was the collection of letters you got back. wobbles onward, planning on a pit stop some time in the near future, as one isn’t as resilent in her old age as one once used to be
Are you me?
Waddya mean “no”…? How do you know? You have any evidence? Anyone ever seen the two of us together in the same room…? 
I’d update my status to “This year October has 5 Fridays, 5 Saturdays and 5 Sundays. This happens once every 7 years, this means bupkis :p” but, alas, I don’t really do Facebook (yet another sign of geezerage*…)
Actually leap year throws a monkey wrench into the works, so we won’t see another triple-5 October until 2021. (Unless I wasn’t paying attention when I was goofing around with the perpetual calendar online.)
I remember as a teenager my grandparents getting a hardcopy Nigerian scam letter!
Averages out to every 7 years though - four times in 28 years, but at five, six or eleven-year intervals depending on the leap years. The math is left as an exercise for the student.
My dad was a trivia buff and at some point in my early life he made the statement, “The quickest that a day of the year can return to the same day of the week is 5 years and it will be either 5, 6, or their sum 11, unless the day of the year is Feb/29 which will take 28 years to come back to the same day of the week.”
Later on I did what it took to convince him that the rule he had been using was valid unless the record-keeping spanned one of those century years like 1700, 1800, 1900, 2100 where it’s not divisible by 400 and is thus not a leap year. Since 2000 is a leap year, the rule holds from 1901 through 2099. When you have to go from 1896 until 1904 for successive leap years, his rule fails.
ETA: Didn’t see Malacandra’s post before hitting submit. Same thing.