Did you know?
We are starting off today with another mystery photo. This is a very common item that you can rest assured you have handled on multiple occasions. There is a very good chance you have this at home right now. You also likely have a digital version of it on your computer. Got it? Scroll for the reveal.
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It’s a standard deck of playing cards. This particular deck is one that I got as a promo for a newspaper that was sponsoring a show I went to. Aside from the games we play, playing cards are very interesting.
Did you know…
Playing cards, in general, date all the way back to before AD1000 in China. But the common 52 card deck we are all familiar with now didn’t come around until a few hundred years later.
That deck has some interesting trivia attached to it. It is said that the 52 cards represent the 52 weeks in the year. The four suits, the four seasons. And if you add up all the pips in the deck you’ll get 364. Then one Joker makes 365 days in the year. And the second Joker makes 366 for leap years. You can even look at the 13 cards for each suit as a representation of the lunar cycle.
Alternative theories posit that the suits represent different parts of society from the middle ages. Hearts are the church, spades are the military, clubs are agriculture, and diamonds are the merchants.
It’s aslo possible that the kings are intended to represent actual kings from history. King David (Spades), Alexander The Great (Clubs), Charlemagne (Hearts), and Julius Caesar (Diamonds).
If we want to go off the beaten path a bit, and you want to feel a little bit old, Microsoft Solitaire is now 30! It debuted on Windows 3.0 in 1990. And if you want to be depressed… analysis says that only 1 in 400 games of Solitaire is unsolvable. Yikes!
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