Monday, April 12, 2010

To the Mystery Machine

I've got a mystery and I need YOUR help to figure it out. I was reading "Exile" a week ago and got to page 100 or so and found something interesting. A receipt was in the book.


I thought to myself, "Now that is funny. Someone wanted some pastry while reading this book so they had to stop at the 7-11." I looked down at the receipt and at the bottom was the transaction date.

08/12/03

Thinking about this, the dates in the story were more in line with 2006-2007 so I decided to look at the publication date of the book and I found...dun dun duuuuunnnnnn....It was a first edition hardback that was published in 2007.

What does this mean? Why would someone hold on to a receipt for at least 4 years and then put it in a library book? Why this book specifically? Was it a bookmark? If so they didn't finish the novel or maybe they did and just left it in after. But again I am left wondering why?

I have a few theories. The first is that the 7-11 reciepts use a different date distiction and this is actually from 12-03-2008. If that is the case then the date is not as odd and the rest is pretty simple. I am going to go to this 7-11 since it isn't far from me and see if I can verify this.

Any other thoughts? Come on Velma! Grab Fred and Daphne and lets figure this out!

That is all,

Newt

4 Ripples in the pond:

Carrie said...

Hahaha. And I thought I was the only person who'd speculate over crazy things like this.

(Finding left-behind-things in library books is always my favorite part.)

Crazy Newt said...

This reminds me of a time, way back when, when a NY blogger's last post just happened to be on Sept 11th, 2001. For months, people were mourning his loss... until he got back from his vacation.

The last post just happened to say "hey, guys, going on vacation, will be back in january". But of course, no one actually READ the post.

Because, hey, It's fun to attach stories to random things!

Simon Butler said...

I used to use pretty well whatever came to hand as a bookmark, particularly with reference books, where I might be bookmarking a dozen or more places at a time. When I no longer needed the bookmarks in those books, I didn't generally throw them away, but moved them on. While five years may sound like a long time to continue using the same bookmark to you, it doesn't sound that surprising to me.

Nevertheless, your idea of the different date convention does sound more likely. The (YY)YY-MM-DD format is being more widely used, not least because it avoids confusion between the US date format (MM-DD-YY) and that used by most other countries (DD-MM-YY).

Kitty Deschanel said...

LOL. I just found your blog and am enjoying browsing through all your posts. Congrats on the baby and, yes, moving IS a pain! That's why hubby and I have agreed to NEVER MOVE AGAIN! Job transfer? Too bad!

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