I start my days pretty much the same way. I sit down at my desk, and the first thing I do is pull a page off my Far Side desk calendar. Today's comic had a bunch of dogs about to compete in the 100-meter freestyle swimming race, and the dog announcer said that he expected all the competitors to use the dog paddle. Classic Gary Larson. But something other than Larson's wit caught my attention today. I noticed that the date is August 8 — or 8-8 — and that stuck out to me because I remembered that this is a lucky number in Chinese culture. I have a weird ability to not just retain useless info, but also remember where I got that useless info from. Ironically, that information is even more useless than the original useless information. I remembered this tidbit about the number 8 from when I watched the Opening Ceremony of the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, which occurred on August 8, 2008, because Matt Lauer (don't hear much from him these days) mentioned the significance of the date. This means that the Opening Ceremony was 17 years ago, and if there's one thing that everyone remembers from it, it was the way it started (also, everyone remembers the little girl who lip-synced the national anthem while the other little girl who wasn't as cute sat backstage and did the real singing). They got 2,008 people and had them all play on these light-up drums, and it shattered everyone's brains into 2,008 pieces. Cool? Oh yeah, absolutely. As cool as people thought it was in 2008? That's debatable. I don't know if you remember this, but I recall everyone talking about this for weeks afterward. In fact, I started seventh grade a few weeks after this drumming display. I still remember several teachers and some of my school chums bringing it up. "Did you see the drumming at the Olympics? It was amazing because there were so many of them… drums, I mean." Maybe it's how disposable everything is now. I mean, two weeks ago, all we did was talk about the CEO of the data company Astronomer getting caught with his HR exec sidepiece at a Coldplay concert. There's a fairly decent chance you forgot about that until I just mentioned it. So, I wonder if 2,025 dudes wailing on drums at the same time would move the needle as much as 2,008 drummers did in 2008. Sure, it's seventeen more drummers, but we're so inundated with information today that a Sydney Sweeney jeans ad or a video of a waterskiing raccoon would've supplanted it within hours. That would lead me to say it's not as cool as it was back in 2008, but, hey, what is?