Lunar Observer records upcoming dates of interest: holidays, birthdays, best day to cut hair.
Christmas Day is this Sunday, but this column is limited to things that happen THIS week, and Sunday is the first day of NEXT week, even though it's part of THIS weekend. I can still talk about Christmas though, because Christmas is like Halloween — it's a season. And the spookiest night of the season is Christmas Eve, which is this Saturday. It's the night of Charles Dickens' immortal ghost story, A Christmas Carol.
In A Christmas Carol, Dickens' miserable protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, is visited by three ghosts. In order, with attributes, they are:
Ghost of Christmas Past: melancholy, eerie Ghost of Christmas Present: wow, eye-opener Ghost of Christmas Future: scary, yikes
These ghosts and ghouls terrify Scrooge by exposing him to one night of certain aspects of some of the bland horror he has willfully and legally wrought. After shocking him with a promise of an early grave, over which everyone either laughs or dances or both, we are led to believe that he finally changes his ways. Despite taking place on Christmas Eve, and being named "A Christmas Carol," A Christmas Carol is basically a secular book about human goodness as its own reward.
A standard format for writing on the internet is to examine a known trope or pop culture object and say "this is actually bad" for things perceived-as-good, and vice versa. This article will not do this. The book is good, and despite the fact that all of his actions are legal, and you could even say they are demanded by the cruel hand of the market, Scrooge is certainly bad. Anyone who argues otherwise is a bad person. In this article we will look at ghost inflation rates. How much should a Scrooge of today be expected to suffer this Christmas Eve?
Christmas Carol takes place in the 1840s, and there are three ghosts. Globally, the population has increased 610 percent since then. If ghost quantity is tied to global population, all Scrooges of 2016 are of equal Scrooge value, and the ratio of Scrooges to Bob Crachits remains the same, a Scrooge on Christmas Eve in 2016 could be expected to experience 18.3 distinct ghost levels. But on top of a massive population growth, income inequality has also spread tremendously since Dickens' time. While the difference was great between the original Scrooge and all original be-Scrooged characters, today's Scrooges boast far greater divides, and directly affect far more people. But also there is a greater segmentation of the Scrooge class itself — the blindly stampeding wealth of the wealthiest 1 percent of the population must be reflected in our assessment.
Any calculations involving ghosts are highly speculative. But using current statistics on wealth distribution as a guide, I estimate that many Scrooges in 2016 can expect an absolute minimum of nine separate ghosts; some Scrooges can expect 20 to 30 ghosts; and a small number of Scrooges can expect as many as 500 distinct consecutive visitations, each more terrifying than the last. For upper-echelon Scrooges, some of the ghosts may be ghosts of lesser Scrooges that have died unrepentant, who are still being actively haunted by yet more ghosts. This would cause the per-Scrooge ghost count to rise exponentially. No door can lock them out.
If you don't want to become lost to yourself in a blizzard of ghosts, each more terrifying than the last, I strongly recommend not being a Scrooge.
The best days to cut your hair this week, if you don't want it to grow, are the 21st and 22nd. If you want it to grow, wait until next week and cut it on the 29th.
Please bear in mind these figures are estimates, and that we have not accounted for the evilness of any given Scrooge or the method by which any ghost decides to haunt a shareholder of a Scrooge-like organization. If you are haunted by more or less ghosts than anticipated this Christmas Eve, please do not waste what little time you have left by writing to the authors of this website.
