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 culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture entered my life as Shirley Temple, who was exactly my age and wrote a letter in the newspapers telling how her mother fixed spinach for her, with lots of butter.... I was impressed by Shirley Temple as a little girl my age who had power: she could write a piece for the newspapers and have it printed in her own handwriting.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)