Fun with numbers for this new year, A.D. 2025

It’s all in the numbers. Who doesn’t enjoy a date with a good number? Was your date a good number? That’s what we get next week with New Year’s Day, always a 1-1.

Christmas Day was a good number, 12-25-24, but a greater date will be 12-25-25.

On Christmas Day, we talked to friends visiting, who felt they had won a good date. They had found Christmas reservations for his 65th birthday at The Gasparilla Inn, and brought the family. They had great fun at his 60th, and wanted something special for 65. They had even won a slot for golf; he called the number for reservations few times and got a no, but then found a time in the morning.

Persistence can almost always change our numbers.

He was born on the 25th of December, as were a few others on this island. It is a special club, those December 25 people, as you get to share your birthday with the chosen one who changed the trajectory of the world, for billions, for eternity. 

We are in this “numbers” phase because The Gasparilla Inn, which drives much of the commerce cycle on the island, decided that it would fully open at 12 noon, on 12-12-24. The stating of a date, and number, made it memorable.

Put another few numbers in $$ on the City Ledger. Dad will pay up when it’s time to head north.

Some societies, the anthropologists remind us, are slaves to a mechanical or digital clock on base 12, and will tell us that is some sort of Western construct, this idea of being on time. That may be technically true, but when the sun comes out in a pre-industrial land, you HAVE to get up, or you don’t eat. Of course that set of numbers depends on a set of 12 different numbers.

Quote chapter and verse? That’s a number too. We’ve got God boxed in. In the Christian calendar, this day of publication, Dec. 27, is devoted to St. John the Evangelist, after the 26th, which celebrates St. Stephen. Us humans numbered every bit of the Bible. Some folks come up with those numbers quickly. Of course, our numbers are called Arabic numbers, but we took the concept and started our Christian era at year 0000, or, as most of us still call it Anno Domini, the year of our Lord, in the Gregorian calendar.

It is quite curious how much we all love numbers, even as we no longer memorize so many of them. Most of us can recall favorite telephone numbers from family and grandparents. Oh what it might be like if you could call those numbers again, and have someone we loved pick up the phone?

Here, at the Beacon, we fall into the 4-Digit Phone Book world, where we keep alive the tradition of the 964 exchange being something rather special, even though many on the island have dropped land lines. (Note that we are sold out of books til 2025.)

In 2024, we reported that Lumen, the parent company of our land line phone company Century Link, moved out of penny stock territory, and is now seeking to split off its consumer lines. The profits numbers for our old fashioned telephone service, which was first United Telephone, then Sprint Florida, then Embarq, then Century Link, are no longer useful in an AI world that just wants fiber optic lines. That’s reality, so often in our world. We are all a number. The essentials of life are a set of financial terms.

In 2025, the numbers may be going up for our water, and our bridge, too. Storms are expensive.

Some of us like to think we do not “play” the numbers, but that is not true. This editor recalls a last minute trip to the island on 01-01-00, which necessitated a flight for the family on 12-31-99. That was the dreaded Y2K, which turned out to be a boon to the IT industry. If you recall, they should have just given us four digits for the year, rather than two.

The bet that the world did not end won the family of four a $99 trip, total, to Florida, on an empty plane, as people thought all of them would somehow fall out of the sky on Y2K. Of course nothing of the sort happened. On 1-1-00, this editor’s family checked into the Innlet, where so many over the decades have enjoyed other 1-1s. It would not have been so cheap if it had been 1-1-2000.

The old telephone number for the hotel was WO-42295. Even here, most do not recall that the earliest version of telephone numbers were indicated by letters. Currently, in the four digit you call them at 4600 for the office, and 4610 for the Outlet restaurant. 

The properties of our life might be ruled now by the binary 01s of computer code. Anything written or electronic, even our great paintings and buildings, can be expressed in a series of zeros and ones. Some do not like to admit that life is binary these days.

For all of us, let the number and year A.D. 2025, be a blessed one for you, and a better one for all of us.

Garland Pollard is editor of the Boca Beacon. Email letters and comments to editor@bocabeacon.com.