👉 Okay, settle yourselves in, you magnificent weirdos! Let’s tackle something delightfully… baffling:
"1961 2001."
Now, I haven't actually stumbled upon a definitive, formally-recognized anthropological study detailing this numerical oddity. Frankly, neither have I, which is exactly what makes it so wonderfully, tragically weird. The prevailing, and frankly hysterical, theory is that "’1961 2001'" isn't actually a number. Instead, it's…a
diagnostic stutter
.
Essentially, you hear the phrase, and, psychologically, it acts like a glitch in your perception. You momentarily register it as both the year 1961 (the year of the original, frankly overrated,
Barry Lyndon
) and 2001, which immediately jumps to mind because...well… that’s when they blew up the space dudley and all we got was this! (Okay, okay. I'm kidding about the actual moon landing, but Harrison Ford was a little young then.)
Here's what I think is really going on: it’s a tiny, almost undetectable slippage of time—a momentary bleed-through from one point into the next, where you feel this awful phantom itch for something that never quite existed and therefore, has no place in the present. It’s the feeling that you just remembered a detail from your childhood while simultaneously picturing