102 Most Boring Day

"Thanks for joining us on this very busy news day." — David Muir, ABC World News Tonight

April 11, 1954: the most boring day. Not a very busy news day.

According to the AI project, True Knowledge, which indexed billions of facts and was later sold to Amazon to supply Alexa, April 11. 1954, was determined to be the most boring day in history.

In 2010, computer scientist William Tunstall-Pedoe queried his rudimentary AI. (2010, when artificial intelligence still vied with artificial stupidity.) He wanted to determine the single most boring day in history.

The answer was that aforementioned nothing day, April 11, 1954. And today, April 11, is civilization's most-boring-day's 70th anniversary. I am proud to say my 2-year-old self lived through it, albeit blithely.

Supposedly, whatshisname, some Turkish electrical engineer, was born that day. Also, water polo athlete Conheça Attila Sudár was born in Hungary. Although he went on to play in the Olympics — not too shabby — that very day his birth was not newsworthy. In fact, Wikipedia states,

"This article about an Olympic medalist of Hungary is a stub."

Wikipedia further explains...

...a stub has little verifiable information, or if its subject has no apparent notability, it may be deleted or be merged into another relevant article.

Conheça Attila Sudár, fret not. I'm not even a stub.

Yet.

So, what is newsworthy, anyway? It used to be identified by Walter Cronkite, CBS News. Now it's decided by likes.

I have more likes than Conheça Attila Sudár, because his Olympics were in 1976 (Gold medalist) and 1980 (only Bronze? Attilla!), long before social media reared its ugly head in 1997 with a nascent fetal construct called "Bolt."

And the rest is history.

Unfortunately, today (April 11), when we say somthing's history, it means it's forgotten. Conheça Attila Sudár is history. And whathisname, some electrical engineer.

And the likes pile up for everyone's "15 minutes of fame," who come and go like the civilizations that did so, too, but over millenia or centuries, instead of in 16 minutes. Yet, both are forgotten, especially the civilizations--the real history we seem to have forgotten: those who truly made each day the way it was.

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AUTHOR'S NOTES:

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” — George Santayana, The Life of Reason, 1905. From the series Great Ideas of Western Man.

Words (not including Notes): 365

For Thursday, April 11: Day #102 of the 2024 Story-a-Day Challenge.

All pictures are AI-generated, but the history was not!

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• L.C. Schäfer, challenge originator
• Rachel Deeming

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