111222

 

The American style of numerical dates puts the month number first, followed by the day number and then the year, or more often the year’s last two digits, with a slash separating each piece from each adjacent piece. Today is therefore 11/12/22. But what’s a slash between friends? Eliminate the slashes and you get 111222, in which the arithmetician notes a pleasant pattern. Given the reality that we have just 12 months in our year, 111222 is the only such sequence we can derive from an American date. 22/23/33 would require at least 22 months in a year, and I haven’t heard any calls to expand beyond the current 12 months.

 

 

What does this arithmetico-calendrical rambling have to do with today’s photographs? Only that the pictures are making their debut here on 11/12/22. If you can come up with any other connection, let us know.

 

 

This post’s real title should be something like “Looking down at Sandstone Bluffs,” which as the two previous posts revealed, is in the El Malpais National Monument in west-central New Mexico. Not that “looking down” meant I flew over the bluffs; no, just by looking down at the ground from eye level I found many interesting designs, textures, and colors in the sandstone I was walking on or close to. I’ve interspersed four of them in this little disquisition on dates and numbers.

 

 

© 2022 Steven Schwartzman

 

 

 

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