Weekend Economists' Triskaidekaphobia Festival August 13-15, 2010 [View All]

[Demeter]

It's hot. It's humid. I'm sick from the heat and didn't dare leave the house (bathroom) this afternoon for a job commitment. And rattlesnakes and grizzly bears have nothing on me for bad temper today.

Is it because it's the dreaded Friday the 13th? Or because autism affects the whole family, and it's been a hard week? Or just because my Central European genes simply can't take it any more?

I've got to think it's better in Poland. Probably. Oh, to live in a place that doesn't need air conditioning for the summer!

Anyway, to the matter at hand....

The market exhibited severe ambivalence today, the DOW ranging from 30 to the good, to 30 off, ending off 15 points. This pattern of endless seeking, no doubt the result of furious HFT to squeeze that last penny out of the beleaguered retail investors and the more rigidly defined mutual funds, has been ongoing for some time, and getting more frantic on those days when emotional despair doesn't drag the index to the Well of Despond, or the PPT doesn't drag it up to the skies on a super drug trip.

You know it cannot end well. It's like watching a car crash in slow motion. A perpetual Friday the 13th.

"Triskaidekaphobia (from Greek tris meaning "3," kai meaning "and," and deka meaning "10") is fear of the number 13; it is a superstition and related to a specific fear of Friday the 13th, called paraskevidekatriaphobia or friggatriskaidekaphobia.

The term was first used by I.H. Coriat in "Abnormal Psychology"

There is a common myth that the earliest reference to thirteen being unlucky or evil is from the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (circa 1780 BCE), where the thirteenth law is omitted. In fact, the original Code of Hammurabi has no numeration. The translation by L.W. King (1910), edited by Richard Hooker, omitted one article:

If the seller have gone to (his) fate (i. e., have died), the purchaser shall recover damages in said case fivefold from the estate of the seller.

Other translations of the Code of Hammurabi, for example the translation by Robert Francis Harper, include the 13th article.

Some Christian traditions have it that at the Last Supper, Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus, was the 13th to sit at the table. However, the number 13 is not uniformly bad in the Judeo-Christian tradition. For example, the 13 attributes of God (also called the thirteen attributes of mercy) are enumerated in the Torah (Exodus 34:6–7). Some modern Christian churches also use 13 attributes of God in sermons.

Triskaidekaphobia may have also affected the Vikings—it is believed that Loki in the Norse pantheon was the 13th god. More specifically, Loki was believed to have engineered the murder of Balder, and was the 13th guest to arrive at the funeral. This is perhaps related to the superstition that if thirteen people gather, one of them will die in the following year. Another Norse tradition involves the myth of Norna-Gest: when the uninvited norns showed up at his birthday celebration—thus increasing the number of guests from ten to thirteen—the norns cursed the infant by magically binding his lifespan to that of a mystic candle they presented to him.

Ancient Persians believed the twelve constellations in the Zodiac controlled the months of the year, and each ruled the earth for a thousand years at the end of which the sky and earth collapsed in chaos. Therefore, the thirteenth is identified with chaos and the reason Persians leave their houses to avoid bad luck on the thirteenth day of the Persian Calendar, a tradition called Sizdah Bedar.

In 1881, an influential group of New Yorkers led by U.S. Civil War veteran Captain William Fowler came together to put an end to this and other superstitions. They formed a dinner cabaret club, which they called the Thirteen Club. At the first meeting, on Friday 13 January 1881 at 8:13 p.m., 13 people sat down to dine in room 13 of the venue. The guests walked under a ladder to enter the room and were seated among piles of spilled salt. All of the guests survived. Thirteen Clubs sprang up all over North America for the next 40 years. Their activities were regularly reported in leading newspapers, and their numbers included five future U.S. presidents, from Chester A. Arthur to Theodore Roosevelt. Thirteen Clubs had various imitators, but they all gradually faded from interest as people became less superstitious.

On Friday 13 October 1307, the Knights Templar were ordered to be arrested by Philip IV of France. The theory has been suggested, in the book Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry by John J. Robinson, that the Templars went underground among masons in England and later developed into Freemasons. Because most of the founding fathers of the United States of America were Freemasons, it is possible the memory of the terror of that day is preserved in the Friday the 13th.

...In Romania, Greece and some areas of Spain and Latin America, Tuesday the 13th is considered unlucky."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triskaidekaphobia

Well, then. If you've had a rotten day--tell us all about it! And if you've been following the global economy, you know there is no such thing as a good day, anyway. Post what you've got!