Popular Culture References
In the Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures series, it was revealed that the Eighth Doctor's enemies, Faction Paradox, a cult of time-travelling voodooists who worship paradox, have established a base in the eleven days that were missing from the calendar after the change-over, the Faction exploiting their manipulation of perception and contradiction to take the days that everyone believed were missing and make them 'real'.
The lost days feature in the plot of Robert Rankin's book The Brentford Chainstore Massacre, where a monk from the borough of Brentford made such a protest about the lost days after the change-over that the Church eventually decided to award Brentford two extra days a year if they were really wanted. The scrolls containing this proclamation were subsequently hidden for centuries until they were discovered by the protagonists of Jim Pooley and John Omally, the two men using the extra days that Brentford has accumulated over the years in order to celebrate the Millennium two years ahead of schedule, allowing the mysterious Professor Slocombe to perform a ritual that will bring about peace on Earth if the appropriate celebrations take place at that time.
The lost days are also the subject of conversation in Episode 19 of Thomas Pynchon's novel, Mason & Dixon.
Read more about this topic: Calendar (New Style) Act 1750
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)