Friday Fun

I hope you don’t have triskaidekaphobia, for today is Friday the 13th. Friday the 13th is widely regarded in Western cultures as an unlucky or ill-omened day, a superstition that combines separate longstanding fears of the number 13 and the day Friday. There’s no single definitive origin—historians and folklorists describe it as a relatively modern mash-up of older beliefs, with the specific combo of “Friday the 13th” as especially unlucky only clearly documented in the 19th with the earliest examples of “Friday the 13th” as unlucky appearing in French literature and plays around the 1830.

Here are the main reasons and historical/cultural threads that explain why it’s seen this way:

• The number 13 has long been viewed as unlucky across many cultures:
  • In Norse mythology, a banquet for 12 gods in Valhalla was crashed by the uninvited trickster god Loki as the 13th guest. He tricked the blind god Höðr into killing the beloved god Balder with mistletoe, leading to chaos and death—making 13 a symbol of disruption and misfortune.
  • Christian tradition links it to the Last Supper, where Jesus ate with his 12 apostles (totaling 13 people). The 13th guest was Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus shortly after. This helped fuel the idea that 13 at a table courts death or bad luck.
  • More broadly, 12 is often seen as a number of completeness (12 months, 12 zodiac signs, 12 apostles, 12 hours on a clock face), so 13 feels like an awkward, disruptive extra—sometimes called an “unlucky” outlier in math, folklore, and even modern things like skipping the 13th floor in buildings.
• Friday has its own negative associations, especially in Christian-influenced cultures:
  • Jesus was crucified on a Friday (Good Friday), tying the day to sorrow, sacrifice, and death.
  • Other biblical or folk stories sometimes claim Friday as the day Eve tempted Adam with the apple or when Cain killed Abel.
  • In medieval and later European folklore, Friday was often avoided for starting new ventures, weddings, or journeys.

ANd leave it to the self-glossed pedant to ruin a fun thing. Anyway on to the usual faffery.

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Today’s musical selection is St. Paddy’ themed and comes to us from The Young Dubliners. The song, The Foggy Dew tells the tale of the 1916 Easter Rising. The original arrangement of this Irish folk lament written by Catholic Priest Fr. Charles O’Neill sometime in the late teens. It became one of the best known and most popular Rebel songs in Ireland.