Cycles

We were driving from the hotel in Ifrane to our riad in Fes, asking our driver, Abdel about daily fasting and Ramadan. He said it wasn’t hard for him, except for the smoking. Ramadan, he noted, was actually coming up soon, in late March.

Heather mentioned the other time we were in Morocco (2017) was during Ramadan, but that was in June and how unlike Christmas, which is the same day every year, or Easter and Passover, which are always in the spring, Ramadan seems to move around the calendar.

Abdel said it was because Islam uses a lunar calendar, and its year is roughly 11 days shorter than the solar (Gregorian) one. He told us every 33 years (33 *11 = 363), Ramadan cycles around the solar calendar and begins at the same time it did in the prior cycle.

I thought of the German TV show Dark, the premise of which was that a time-travel wormhole opened up near a nuclear reactor, but the characters could only go forward or backwards in time in increments of 33 years to the same stage of the cycle during which eerily similar events to the present had transpired. I imagine the confluence of lunar and solar calendars must have been what inspired the show’s creators too.

Then I remembered this:

Joe Theismann broke his right tibia and fibula on Nov. 18, 1985 in a game in Washington that ended 23-21. The only three-time Defensive Player of the Year Lawrence Taylor was involved in the injury, which occurred around the 40-yard line. Theismann’s Pro Bowl left tackle, Joe Jacoby, wasn’t on the field due to injury.

Alex Smith broke his right tibia and fibula on Nov. 18, 2018 in a game in Washington that ended 23-21. The only other three-time Defensive Player of the Year J.J. Watt was involved in the injury, which occurred around the 40-yard line. Smith’s Pro Bowl left tackle, Trent Williams, wasn’t on the field due to injury.

Two of the worst injuries in NFL history occurred exactly 33 years apart to the same leg bones, belonging to the quarterback of the same team, in the same stadium, at the same part of the field, in a game with the same final score, involving the only three-time defensive players of the year winners in NFL history to that point (Aaron Donald has since won the award three times himself.)

My next thought was whoever is playing quarterback for Washington on November 18, 2051 might want to sit that game out, but I checked, and Eddie LeBaron, the Washington QB in 1952, neither played on November 18, nor got injured during the closest (November 16th) game. So I don’t know.

But I thought it was worth noting.