We won’t be able to play this game much longer, having already reached #1500 — perhaps a few days at most. I also don’t want to fall into UID higher-lower pissing contests, because those are No Fun.
By hovering my cursor over my user name I can see in the browser status bar that my UID# is 1079. (Bah! Missed a three-digit number by that much.) A handy place to start is Wikipedia, which in turn handily has a webpage devoted to the significant happenings for every year. The URL for that is en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[number], where you substitute your UID for the number. So in my case I’m going to check out http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1079….
So, let’s see … a couple interesting things happened in AD1079:
- Omar Khayyam computed the length of the solar year to its most accurate figure in pre-modern times, 365.24219858156 days. (I also recall reading some pretty cool poetry by him, something about a book of verse, a jug of wine, a loaf of broad, and thou….);
- William the Conqueror set aside the New Forest in England for his own hunting pleasures, thereby marrying hunting interests with conservation centuries before Teddy Roosevelt;
- Abbess Hildegarde of St Ruprechtsburg (not to be confused with abbess/mystic/composer Hildegarde von Bingen) “makes the first surviving reference to the use of hops in brewing.” mmmmm…beer….;
- and well-known Scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard was born. A couple decades later he was quite literally emasculated (in RFK Jr’s phrase) for diddling with the daughter of a well-born family. Decades after that he raised some hell with the Church authorities by asking uncomfortable questions about the Meaning of Life and giving away the answers in his magnum opus, Sic et Non.
So … what happened in the year of your UID number? Bonus points for alternate calendar systems, e.g. Arabic or Mayan!
UPDATE: 2005-06-14, 21:08 EDT: Well, my thanks to all who played! It’s a shame a number of comments were lost due to yestereve’s glitch; I enjoyed reading twenty-some comments last night, and the few added this morning. In the future, I may begin a “This Day in History” or (if that becomes too tedious) “This Week in History” series of diaries. Just ‘coz.