Today is August 8th, 2008. As in 08/08/08. Which is a very cool date. I decided to forego my usual Themed Things Thursday list in favor a special 8-themed Friday list. (Actually, I wanted to do 8 lists of 8 8 things⁸, but I came down with an attack of temporary sanity, and decided I should get some sleep instead.)
8 8-related things
- octave: the musical interval between a note and one of half (or twice) its frequency in hertz. It’s divided into 8 tones to make a scale.
- octagon: a polyhedron with 8 sides. A red octagon is iconic as the stop sign.
- spiders: eight-legged arthropods. (You can visit my spider ThThTh list for lots of spiders.)
- the 8 ball: The black ball from the set of pool or billiards balls, emblazend with the number 8. There’s also the Magic 8 ball, a toy used to tell fortunes.
- crazy 8s: a card game (played with at least one other person) where the goal is to discard all your cards. 8s are “wild.”
- octopus. An 8-legged cephalopod. (I came so close to making an octopus list…)
- “8 Days a Week“: a song by the Beatles. (What should the 8th day be named? Maybe Pantsday?)
- “Figure 8“. The School House Rock song about the number 8:
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⁸ Here are 8 scraps from the various 8 lists I envisioned: 1) section 8 (a former military discharge for psychiatric reasons) , 2) The Eight (a book by Katharine Neville), 3) Eight Men Out (a 1988 directed by John Sayles), 4) Eight is Enough (a 1970s TV show), 5) 8-track tapes, 6) 2³=8, 7) V8 (a juice) and 8) After Eight (a candy).
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Image sources:
octopus: Chandler B. Beach, The New Student’s Reference Work for Teachers Students and Families (Chicago: F. E. Compton and Company, 1909), from etc.usf.edu.
music scale/piano keys: Kantner Book of Objects from etc.usf.edu.
cards, spider, stop sign: public domain images from wpclipart.com.
Magic 8 Ball: wikipedia
collecting tokens 
eight no stoppin’ you now…
hmmm… I am now trying to imagine an octopus in PANTS
I vote for Pantsday!
Oh yes, Pantsday. :)
“I was just going to say, ‘eight o’clock.'”
Here’s a fun fact:
You know how everybody says we use base-10 arithmetic because we have ten fingers? (Learned that from Schoolhouse Rock, too.)
Well, there are some cultures that actually use a base-8 arithmetic system, because they count the spaces in between the fingers, instead of the fingers themselves.
jenny-
I hadn’t realized that you were prone to puns…
Painted-
That would be an interesting sewing project. But I don’t sew.
azahar-
Your vote counts!
dragonfly-
Another vote counted!
Denguy-
I had to look that one up. Would you believe I’ve never seen Ghostbusters? (And did I get the source right?)
jwbates-
That is a fun fact. Cool.