History of Waltz Day: 123,123
December 31, 2023, or 12/31/23, is Waltz Day. A day like this is unique, occurring only once a century. For many, this will be the only time in their life they see this kind of date.
Waltz Day – having nothing to do with the annual National Waltz Dance Day celebrated on March 4th – is so named because today’s date can be parsed as:
One-two-three,
One-two-three
… just like the timing of the waltz dance.
In California, which is usually a progressive state, the Mission priests banned the waltz until 1843 because of the “closed” dance position.
What’s In A Date?
This day is important not because of the music but because of the numerals of the date, 123123.
Much of the world, however, does not parse their dates as MM/DD/YY but as DD/MM/YY. They, regrettably, will be excluded from this holiday. It’s like the difference between soccer and football.
How is 123123 significant?
This is the 8th most commonly used password, according to NordPass.
It is the name of a star in the Hydra constellation (no relation to Godzilla‘s archenemy Ghidorah), according to the Henry Draper Catalog: π Hydra with an apparent visual magnitude of 3.3, visible with the naked eye.
The Las Vegas wedding industry predicts a record number of weddings on December 31 with a pop-up marriage license bureau at Harry Reid International Airport.
In Euclidian geometry, it is a projective configuration type, of which there are 229 different ones, where twelve points and twelve lines meet with three lines through each of the points and three points on each of the lines.
In the Roman Catholic liturgical calendar, it is the Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
2000 TD5 is asteroid number 123123. It was discovered by LINEAR, Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research from Lincoln Laboratory, Socorro on 10/1/2000.
It is not a prime number, a Friedman number, a Fibonacci number, a Bell number, a palindromic number, a pentagonal number, or a perfect number.
What Should You Do on 12/31/23?
You might check your watch at 01:02:03. You are allowed to do that twice today.
Bill Petro, your friendly neighborhood historian
billpetro.com
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