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Sep
5
2009

Twenty: the number of centuries gone by. Twenty hundred years since the retro-defined start of the Gregorian calendar. Pope Gregory XIII needed to fix the problem of a wandering Easter, and came up with an adjustment to the Julian calendar which was more in sync with the lunar calendar, thus establishing the Gregorian system of periodic leap-year ignorings to keep the calendar within a day of accuracy at all times. It proved accurate in four-hundred year cycles, so Rome declared that the calendar was to be the standard for timekeeping. If you'll remember your 6th grade mathematics, you'll know that an "X" means ten in Roman numerals, so "XX" is twenty - back when first made ten-dollar bills, the designers used an "X" rather than a ten to keep with the style. A sawbuck is a type of x-shaped sawhorse used for cutting logs so they won't roll away, and as a colloquialism, a ten-dollar bill was called a "sawbuck" in honor of its x-shaped sawhorse analog. The twenty, of course, became the "double sawbuck": two exes, two sawbucks.

So, you can see how, in my mind, I immediately understood what the hell Dos Equis beer was about. The logo for the beer consists of two exes, side by side, A sawbuck is a kind of sawhorse, two exes, two sawhorses, dos = two, equus = horse - it all makes sense! I could comfortably sit on the patio at Applebee's, sipping my Mexican beer, ready to tell the story of sawhorses and exes to anyone willing to listen. I could finally prove those other guys wrong.

The only problem is: "horse" in Spanish is caballo, from the secular Latin word "caballus," or a nag; they didn't bring along the Latin word for horse. Turns out, in Spanish, Dos Equis translates to...you ready?...Two Exes. The beer's original name was Siglo XX, or "twentieth century" - as a slang identifier for the bottle, whose label had two large exes on the front, people would just order, "give me one of those, with the two exes." Dos Equis. The exes don't stand for horses: they indicate twenty, the number of centuries since the start of the Gregorian calendar.

And this story, my friends, is what makes me The Most Interesting Person On The Internet. Stay thirsty, my friends.

You may ask, why twenty? The answer is: this is a continuation of MyMySpaceSpaceBlogBlog. I don't frequent MySpace much at all anymore; Facebook is where the cool kids hang out, or so I've heard. Facebook has a crappy, crappy blogging system (unsurprising, since they are so unbloglike), so I decided to move the numbers here: a fitting place, since this blog's name is pronounced "ones and zeroes" by those who love it. If you'd like to see the history of the numbers, look here:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

In other news: At Collector's Quest I find part of a Union and dos aguila, review a city of night, wish for money from Hell, and after the delay of new stamps due to the USPS price increase now there's stamps, stamps, stamps, and stamps. At the Double-Breasted DustJacket, I get dangerous and daring at Burger King, connect literature and music, find vampires at B Dalton's, learn about boats, trains, and trucks, and find a new type of bookend. At The Infomercantile there's indian chiefs and an invitation to a new old building. At Thingsville, US, they test lights, shred, crash wieners, and ride squirrels. At Kitschy Kitschy Coo, I shared a no-good dancing donkey and Obama art. And, at Metafilter, I posted about Google's trike, good honey, and subs on the Mississippi.

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