When I grow too old to dream, I’ll have this blog to remember

This is the last day I will ever be 79 years old.

If I wake up tomorrow morning, I will be 80 years old, I will have been alive on planet Earth for 960 months. I will have been breathing air for 29,220 days.

I arrived at the latter figure by multiplying 80 by 365 (29,200) and then adding 20 more days for the 20 leap years through which I have lived, beginning with 1944. Your trivia fact for today is that no leap day is added in century years (1800 and 1900, for example), unless the century year is divisible by 400 (2000, for example), in which case a leap day is added. If I had been born in 1841 and today were 1921, I would have been alive for 29,219 days since 1900 did not have the extra day that 2000 did.

As my dad used to say, put that in your pipe and smoke it. I have no idea what that means.

In English we say, "I am eighty years old" but what the French say translates to "I have eighty years". I find that very interesting. I have [am in possession of] eighty years, or I have [accumulated] eighty years. The French counting system is unusual to English sensibilities. Everything matches until you get to 70. The French don't say 70, however. They say 60 10 (soixante-dix) instead, then 60 11 (soixante-onze) for 71, 60 12 (soixante-douze) for 72, and so forth up through 60 19 (soixante-dix-neuf) for 79. Eighty, my new identifier, is not 60 20 though, it's "four twenties" (quatre-vingts). So instead of saying "I am eighty years old" they say "I have four twenties years" (J'ai quatre-vingts ans) all the way up to 99 (quatre-vingts dix neuf, four twenties and nineteen). If you should be fortunate enough to live to be a hundred, things get simple again and you revert to a single syllable, cent.

Here endeth the French lesson for today.

Thanks be to God.

It is St. Patrick's Day today but I don't care.

I thought of another "moon" song. It completely slipped my mind when I made a list of moon songs a few posts back. I'm not going to tell you its name right now, though. I'm saving it for the first post of my 80th year.

In the meantime, here are 11 more unknown (except by me) Jeopardy! answers:

Who is Albrecht Dürer?
What is Grambling State University?
Who is Morticia Adams?
What are gophers?
What is Acapulco?
What is the House of Lancaster?
What are Quartets?
What is Earthrise?
What is Defender of the Faith?
Who is Henry Clay?
What is Carrara?

The last nine were in a single episode of the program (British, programme). Just so you won't think the contestants were complete idiots, Quartets was in reference to "Little Gidding" being a part of T.S. Eliot's "Four ________", not "what do you call four people singing together". The clue for Defender of the Faith, "a title conferred on Henry VIII by Pope Leo X", seemed fairly obvious to me, but one contestant who didn't know British history guessed Head of the Commonwealth.

Until next time, when I will have 80 years, au revoir, mes amis..