Eye drops on 113/3/20

On March 20, Bruce Charlton posted "Why should I care if a mouse has hay fever?" -- a short, whimsical reaction to seeing Murine brand eye drops for sale at a pharmacist's. (If you didn't know that murine means "of or pertaining to mice," don't feel like the Lone Ranger. No less a literary light than George Bernard Shaw apparently thought the adjectival form of mouse was musque, as can be seen in the Lamarckian essay that serves as the preface to Back to Methuselah.) I smiled and thought no further of it.

On the same day, March 20, William Wright posted "The Pi-ed Piper," which begins with the sentence, "Two nights ago I had a dream about a mouse." He later noted the sync with Bruce's post and posted about it the next day in "Children as Mice, and rescuing the Lost."

I read all these posts with mild interest but didn't think they had anything to do with my own sync stream until my lunch break today, when I finished eating and then got out the eye drops I'm supposed to use after meals and before going to bed. In Taiwan, prescription medication is always given in a little plastic bag with the patient's name and the date written on it. The date caught my eye:

I got these eye drops on March 20, the same day Bruce posted about eye drops for mice and William posted about mice. I almost never have problems with my eyes and hadn't seen an ophthalmologist in well over a decade. One of my eyes has been red for several days -- no itching or discomfort, just red -- and my wife had been bugging me to see a doctor about it. March 20 just happened to be the day I finally got around to doing so.

Taiwan -- and only Taiwan -- uses the Gregorian calendar for months and days but counts years from the founding of the Republic of China in 1912. Thus the date is written as 民國113年3月20日 -- the 20th day of the 3rd month of the 113th year of the Republic.

The number 113 was introduced into the sync stream by Debbie in her comments on "Skeletor, hieroglyphic-bearing arthropods, and the Judgement" in what were the early hours of March 21 here in Taiwan but still March 20 in Ohio, where she lives. The second part of her comment begins thus:

Today (March 20) when I read that the totality will start in Wilmington at 3:11, again, that sparked my interest because of information I found in 2015 including info about the company Pixar and the number 113 (see link)

She explicitly draws attention to the fact that it's March 20 and then goes on to talk about the number 113. The comment was addressed to me in Taiwan, where -- unbeknownst to Debbie, I'm sure -- it is currently the year 113.