First of all, I want to stress this is a systemic issue, nothing to do with anybody in particular…
I’ve been getting a lot of Synchronicity submissions lately. A lot. And since they’re by far the most time-consuming submissions, I just can’t keep up and most of them sit unread for far too long, which isn’t fair to everybody sending them in.
So… I’m not going to ask people not to send them anymore, merely to confine them to the truly extraordinary: same-day similarities that defy logic.
It remains open season for everything else, and I thank you for all your support.
Comics I Don't Understand 
The “March Forth Memo”!
http://comicskingdom.com/mutts/2019-03-04
Thanks, Andréa! I wanted that “Mutts” to appear as an “OY” on the correct date, but waiting until 2020 would be too long:
Speaking of asynchronicity, Frazz just topped Mutts, but since it didn’t appear until today (March 5th), it doesn’t count:
We still have Pi Day coming up.
But the March Pi Day is only in the U.S.
Don’t forget about Mario day (MAR10).
Even the US Pi Day should happen only once in a century (3/14/16).
Super pi day was celebrated on 3/14/15 at 9:26.
Note two U.S. conventions: order of the date, and no zero for the time.
@ Arthur – Over here we celebrated that event in the proper order on April 31st.
Kilby: it won’t be celebrated in the proper order until the second century of the 4th millennium…
@ larK – I didn’t think anyone was going to take that April 31st date seriously.
*is my face red*
Zing! You got me but good! In my rush to be pedantically clever, I totally failed to see your subtle humor…
Over there you could celebrate Pi Day in the proper order on Quattuorember 3rd.
@ larK – Just a few days ago there was a report in news about the German police stopping a driver with a Polish license. They discovered that his license was forged after they noticed a date that said “August 32nd”.
P.S. During my first year in Germany, I had trouble convincing one set of bureaucrats that the birthdate on my American license was correct. They had never heard of the bass-ackwards order of U.S. dates, and insisted that it was wrong, because it did not agree with my passport (which had the month in letters, not numbers).
I was good and confused — I must have been 6 or 7 at the time — when I first saw my father’s passport and it sermed to say he was born September 6 when I KNEW his birthday was June 9.
(Of course I quickly forgot about this when I also saw his birthplace listed as “Vienna, Germany.”)
Dude, was your father Bill, or Ted?
A long time ago there was a story about the Irish police having problems with a Polish driver named Prawo Jazdy who committed more than 50 infractions. Eventually they put out a warrant for his arrest, but (a) he seemed to have changed addresses often, as his address was different on every arrest record, and (b) nobody by that name could be found.
If you search for an image of a Polish driver’s license you’ll see what the problem is. Or I can just tell you: “Prawo Jazdy” is Polish for “Driver’s License.”
“Dude, was your father Bill, or Ted?”
To whom was this intended?
To you, Bill, as a Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure reference, what with your father’s birthday being 69 in some form or another; but now I see that with you being “Bill”, there might have been some confusion…
Having been born in Europe, his June 9 birthday was listed as 9/6.
@ Bill – I’ve never seen a slash in a European date, but when I looked it up, I discovered that they are used in Spain, Portugal, and parts of France. Other than that most European counties use periods to separate dates.
P.S. I remember being very puzzled by a date on a picture by M.C. escher, he used Roman numerals for the month.
Honestly, Kilby, I could be wrong about the slash: this was the early days of the Kennedy Administration, and at the time I was more concerned with how my father’s birthday got changed and why the Vienna was in the wrong country.
“Prawo Jazdy” is Polish for “Driver’s License.”
Reminds me of a news story I read during the Munich Olympics about tourists reporting their cars missing because they weren’t on the streets where they remembered parking them: not realizing the street name they’d written down was German for “one-way street.”
Was he born during WWII? Austria was part of the German Reich at that time.
“one-way street.” Yup. The Germans mash words together, so “Einbahnstraße” looks like a real street name.
But to be fair, if you don’t speak English, what differentiates “One Way Street” from “Sesame Street”?
The extra space?
Because, larK, only one street has a sign that says “Sesame Street,” while a million streets have signs that say “One Way Street.”
The “one way” (and “Einbahnstraße“) signs both have a prominent arrow on them, and look much different from all the other street name signs. It helps a little bit if the tourist bothers to look at the signs on more than one corner.
P.S. A friend of mine was seeing her husband off at the airport when her preschool son pointed out to the tarmac and said, “Look mom, one-way!” After a few minutes of searching and increasing frustration, she finally said that she couldn’t find the “one-way” sign, to which the kid replied, “No mom, ahrr, ooo, enn, double-ooo, ay, why: runway!”
Kilby: I’ve never seen a French date without slashes, like this: dd/mm/yyyy. I never paid attention to it abroad, but these periods you speak of never caught my eye.
I was using Wikipedia as a source, but I just checked with another French native. If you say that “/” is normal for you, then it really does appear to be a regional variation, with “.” as the other option.
Just imagine how much fun it is to live on Way Street and read your address over the phone.
Kilby: I’ve checked a few documents in my wallet; my ID card (2019) has the dots, my driver’s license (1999) has the slashes, like my car’s certificate (2013) or my social security card (2001) and my credit cards. Train tickets have slashes as well. My passport (2013) just has spaces. It looks like some trend based on the printing apparatus used by different administrations. On the internet, I’m always asked to type my birth date with slashes, though.
@ Olivier – I find the variations across the French bureaucracy highly amusing. Germans are so standardized that it seems almost “shocking”, but that just shows how long I’ve been away from the States, where “standardization” is almost a dirty word.
P.S. @ Mitch4 – The Internet doesn’t really count, because some system react to the internationalization settings on the client system (in other words, the language set in the browser).