August 8, 2008
Cleveland, Ohio
Dear friends:
I am planning to throw a large party on Friday, November 11, 2011,
(that's 11-11-11) for all of my friends, family, and associates who
are able to make it. Family member and children will be welcome.
This is a little more than three years from today. It should be fun,
please plan to attend. You cannot forget the date (11/11/11).
Everyone is invited. You have no excuse for missing this party since
you have been given plenty of time to plan ahead. I have not
finalized the exactly location of the party but think Cleveland for
now. Here is my current address:
-Corbin Covault
2200 Bellfield Avenue
Cleveland Heights OH 44106
Email: corbin.covault@cwru.edu
P.S. If you have no idea what this is about, let me apologize for
cluttering your mailbox/browser. If you do nothing, this message
will bother you at most but once per year for three more years.
P.P.S. This is no joke. I've been planning this party for over 30
years. Don't forget. Plan ahead. Look for detailed
information coming your way in the year 2010 -- check out
http://www.phys.cwru.edu/~covault/11-11-11.html for updates
and to confirm your plans (see below).
P.P.P.S In the past, I usually broadcast this message once a year on
November 11th. But I have not done this for several years.
See below for an explanation of this and for an update of
the details of the party.
P.P.P.P.S Coming soon: web-based registration for for the party.
Dear Friends,
So a word of explanation. Those of you who have known me for a rather long time have been aware of my long-standing plans to hold a party on 11-11-11.
This is all a by-product of some seminal event when I was about 10 years old and I was mentally playing around with the ways numerical dates are represented. 11-11-11 is the only date that can be represented by six identical digits and it only comes around once every thousand years. Since this date happened to fall within my projected lifetime, I decided as a 10-year-old kid that it would be neat to start inviting my friends to a party so far in advance, and yet on a date so distinct that there was no forgetting about it.
For some reason, this idea persisted during my teen years and young adulthood. Once a year I would go around issuing invitations to this party many years into the future. It was a "quirky and somewhat idiosyncratic" thing to do on occasion -- something not quite weird and not quite cool, fitting nicely with what I would say would be my best imagined self-image.
With the advent of the internet, email, and the web in the 1990's, my ability to spread this peculiarity to an even wider net blossomed. I sported an "11-11-11" web page, put out a weekly email (spam-blast) to at least a hundred "friends, family, and associates" and looked forward to the annual responses. All of this went on through the 1990's with me sending out the 11-11-11 email once a year every year through 1998.
Then I missed 1999. I had a good excuse: A new baby was in the house, I was on the academic job hunt again, and super busy with a new research project.
Then I missed 2000. Why compete with the millennium craziness, I told myself.
Then I missed 2001. Another baby, a new job, etc.
You get the picture. By 2004, I was getting some pretty regular incoming email every November 11th asking me "What's up with the party? Missed your email somehow...." I was feeling pretty bad about it. For three years in a row I wrote a detailed draft of the next 11-11-11 email and web page, only to watch the date go past without being sent. Something was not happening here.
I finally took some time to reflect on all of this. I realized that the key point was this: Once we got into the region of time where the party was only a "single digits" of time away, the whole 11-11-11 thing needed to start changing from being only about the invitation to actually also being about the party itself. It was time to really start planning; location, venue, etc. And all of this comes up against a basic difficult fact: I really do not enjoy large parties. I've never enjoyed large parties. Too many people, too much noise, to much organization. Given the choice, I would much rather spend a quiet evening with a few friends eating out or playing games. I don't like attending big parties and the idea of hosting one was even worse.
So once I realized this, I spoke to my wife, Dianne, and told her how next year I was going to write an 11-11-11 email explaining how I was very sorry, but the whole thing would be canceled, thank you very much. I was looking forward to the idea of not being held hostage to the crazy ideas of a 10-year old boy.
Wisely, however, Dianne's response was to not let me off the hook.
So after a few months of pondering, we have decided to hold the party after all. Yes, the 11-11-11 party is definitely on. Exact place TBD but almost certainly it will be in Cleveland. So plan ahead.
The key idea here will be to take general approach of physics and apply it to the 11-11-11 party problem. We will take the one complex Large Party and we will break it down into a series of connected Small Parties. Each Small Party will have a theme which will give that party structure beyond the simple idea of getting many people together in the same place for some artificial reason.
So I am now working on Small Party Themes. Here are some ideas:
These are just some ideas. I am very open to suggestion at this point. The idea is to have something where a smaller group of people could participate in a activity of common interest. Of course every person would be welcome to attend any party and to move from party to party at will, but we will try to set up things so that everyone has something interesting to do.
By the way, when I was about 12 years old I saw a rather terrible movie called The Outer Space Connection which was in the family of pseudo-science documentaries like In Search of Ancient Astronauts which were quite the fad in the 70's. Narrated by Rod Sterling, one central and rather dubious claim in the movie is a reported "decoding" of the ancient Mayan calender indicating that the Aliens would return to reclaim authority over the Earth on precisely the date December 24, 2011. So this idea of having a party roughly a month before seemed all the more justified at the time.
========================================================================== Corbin E. Covault, Department of Physics, Case Western Reserve University Mailing Address: 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland OH 44106-7079 Office: Room 207 Rockefeller Physics Bldg. Phone: (216)-368-4006 Secy: Lori Rotar Morton: (216)-368-4257 Fax: (216)-368-4671 Home Phone: (216)-707-1618 Mobile: (216)-496-2077 Lab: Room 11 A.W. Smith Building Lab Phone: (216)-368-3632 Email: corbin.covault@cwru.edu Web: http://hea.cwru.edu Research: Experimental Physics -- Ground-based High Energy Astrophysics ==========================================================================
