Home Fires questions

David Stockhoff · 17 Jan 2012, 01:57 · from 2012-January.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2012 20:57:35 -0500
Subject: (urth) Home Fires questions
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On 1/16/2012 5:22 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> On 1/16/2012 1:02 PM, Stephen Hoy wrote:
>> David Stockhoff added a few comments recently about the use of "hundred
>> day" in Home Fires, exploring the possibility that the calendar is
>> altered in some way that may illuminate the background of the story.
>> Like the dialects of certain characters, the colloquial use of "hundred
>> day"adds a distinct flavor to the story, but I haven't found any
>> indication the calendar has been changed. Home Fires seems to have a 24
>> hr clock, a 7 day week, and 365+ day year. Still, I keep wondering
>> whether we can eke out another layer of meaning.
>
> The US media often makes a special issue of covering a new president's 
> first 100 days in office. Maybe there's a media convergence on this 
> period that catches on, the way the arbitrary red state / blue state 
> designation did. This could suggest that the media-driven political 
> fixation of US society is much, much stronger, or at least much more 
> advanced.
>
>

I didn't catch any sense of that; rather, if anything, that politics as 
we know it had entirely died. The "system" seems to rule in Home Fires, 
whatever system that might be. Of course, in such a world, media 
idiocies like that 100-day period (arising from FDR's busy presidency) 
might well supplant rational discourse. But it's hard to imagine that 
habit coming to order people's lives, unless dictators routinely ruled 
for 100 days before they were shot by their guards and replaced. It 
would fit in some ways, but seems a stretch in others.

Rereading that post about the "rational" calendar, I think I didn't make 
a couple of things clear enough: (1) that the calendar we use today is 
almost identical to it (2) that the 91-day block of days in a quarter is 
virtually impossible to internalize the way humans normally process 
things. It would demand---no, scream for---a rounding out to any round 
number the human brain can latch on to. "100" is the only such number in 
sight in that scenario.

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