Easter, The Masters, and HBO

It's a busy day for most people and Bloglines shows even less activity than on an ordinary Sunday, prompting the question, "Why bother with anything here at all today?"

Dunno.

The arrival of Easter each year is greeted with similar consternation, but the question is when, not why, as in, "Which Sunday is it this year?" Falling somewhere between March 22 and April 25, inclusive, this is by far the most mysterious of all holiday date determinations and naturally, Wikipedia provides more detail than one could ever reasonably expect.

The calculations for the date of Easter are somewhat complicated. See computus for a discussion covering both the traditional tabular methods and more exclusively mathematical algorithms such as the one developed by mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss.

In its simplest form, this appears to be how it is calculated:

The canonical rule is that Easter Day is the first Sunday after the 14th day of the lunar month (the nominal full moon) that falls on or after 21 March (nominally the day of the vernal equinox).

But, having quickly grown tired of reading through these pages in search of a synopsis, this could be completely wrong - canonical, ecclesiastical, ecumenical, economical - it's all very confusing.

The Masters on CBS

Tivo doesn't do much good while watching The Masters - they only have a couple minutes of commercials every hour and instead of quickly catching you back up with highlights of what happened during the commercial break, you have to sit and watch a lot of golfers talking to their caddies while looking at their putt or thinking about their next shot.

They seem to switch back and forth so quickly between golfers looking pensively at one thing or another that with one single 30-second advance you can become completely lost wondering what was missed, when actually the only thing that happened was a bunch of golfers were talking to their caddies.

Remember in 2003 when Martha Burke organized a protest at the tournament to draw attention the club's lack of female members? If memory serves, there was a big build-up in the months leading up to the event, but interest in their cause quickly faded due to some war that began just a few weeks before.

The Sopranos and Entourage

There is more than a little irony in HBO deciding on today's date for the final season premiere of The Sopranos and the third season premiere of Entourage. They aren't the most wholesome shows on TV ("it's not TV"), but they did build an entire advertising campaign around "HBO on Sunday".

It looks like Carmela is finally going to finish that spec house this year but she may be disappointed when she finally learns what happened to Adrianna. And little Anthony seems to be growing up so quickly, he may be about to develop an interest in the family business. We'll see.

Though Entourage lost its "coolest show for cameo appearances" title to Extras over the last year or so, Vincent and the boys are sure to have another good year. Victory!

ooo

Another double-shot of cartoons from The Economist: