4:20 4/20 four twenty

How weird is this? I’m chillaxing in my bed late, it’s storming outside and I’m not able to get my mind to quit racing with the latest idea I’m dreaming up. My brains annoying like that sometimes. So I’m flipping through my itunes randomly picking tracks and as I go to listen to Ice Cube’s amazing “It Was a Good Day” I notice that it is exactly 4:20 in length. I’m pretty sure I never noticed before, which makes sense because when I used to listen to that song a lot was way back before I made my way over to the States and therefore I never knew that 4:20 is a special number. It might have caught on a little more these days, globally that is, but when I was a kid we knew nothing about it. So I thought hmmm I wonder if that’s a coincidence, and then I thought no way, and then I looked it up and sure enough there’s a mention of it on the songs wikipedia page, and whilst they don’t mention any specifics as to this being done by design Ice Cube does talk about smoking weed on the track so I’m sure it’s a pretty safe bet.

So I get a little kick out of discovering that and it adds another dimension to the song, the fact that I never knew about in the twenty or so years since I first heard it, the whole time it was there and I was clueless, and now suddenly I know, it’s a minor detail but nevertheless puts a smile on my face. So then I think to myself, as anyone in my situation would, that I better make sure I listen to that song at 4:20 on 4/20. And I think yeah I’ll even post the video to facebook at exactly 4:20 on 4/20. And I play out that scene for a bit before I start thinking logistics and actually try to think when April 20th is. Then it sort of hits me – it’s today! Or was it yesterday? No it’s actually today. It really is. WTF crazy coincidence right? Like I said, how weird is that?

So yeah I dunno, I think I’m only writing this cos I’m curious to see what sort of rankings I can generate in google with these keywords, to blast the url with the number, and the page title and header tags, plus sprinkling it out throughout the page. 4:20 4/20 four twenty. Like that see. I’ve been thinking about search engine rankings a lot lately.

So anyways. Everyone’s tried to find out the origins of 4:20 for the longest time and there was always myths and urban legends – was it the police code for a marijuana arrest? Or the passage in the bible where god talks about giving us the herb? And many others that always sounded pretty convincing but were then always proved false. So no one ever really knew.

Well I guess we do now. There’s a wikipedia entry that claims to have the official story. Some high-schoolers in early seventies California used to meet at that time after school everyday, I guess it was the exact time detention hour was over or whatever. The story goes that they’d meet there to look for some abandoned cannabis crop they’d learned about. I doubt it. They were just hanging to smoke some reefer I bet. Whatever, the legend is always greater than the reality. What is amazing is you continue to read the wikipedia entry and it’s evolved into this worldwide phenomenon where people gather in cities across all continents at that exact date and time to celebrate. It’s so modern pagan it’s beautiful. The way that masses globally congregate to celebrate and perhaps even worship what was originally some dropout stoners random slang. I’m not dissing it in any way, in fact it’s quite obviously fucking awesome. I just find it all so fascinating.

Crap it’s late. Should I post this at 4:20 AM or PM?