A long, long time ago, I had the idea to hold a sesquiannual party. I never set one up. It would just be too hard to remember when the next one is supposed to happen in 18 months.

Apparently Randall Munroe agrees. Today’s xkcd refers to an inconvenient sesquiannual meeting:

A Sesquiannual meeting

Since that time I’ve used sesqui* for all sorts of things. My deviantArt user name is sesquicentennial. I use derivatives of sesqui for user names all over the place. My stamp collection includes pictorial postmarks celebrating sesquicentennials.

So, I was not very happy when I got this message on wikipedia today: “Please do not add content or create pages that attack, threaten, or disparage their subject. Attack pages and files are not tolerated by Wikipedia and are speedily deleted. Users who create or add such material will be blocked from editing Wikipedia. Thank you.”

The offensive material was added by an IP: if it was you, please don’t do it again; if it was friends, please discourage them; if it was just random vandalism, never mind, but please keep an eye on your user page in case the vandal returns.” [edit: The bad content was old. Maybe someone was doing me a favor and reported it].

I know that xkcd is really popular. I like it too, but it may have its share of trolls, like anywhere. One of the consequences of Munroe’s popularity it is that when he mentions a page, it gets inundated with traffic. He can refer to a video and it receives a huge number of hits pretty quickly.

He has a secondary project “What If?” Often, when you try to visit a link that he’s referenced, it’s gone. I think the load from the interested traffic causes hosts to delete the pages. He is that popular…

I thought it was funny last night when I saw the sesquiannual xkcd post. I thought I hadn’t used it anywhere to demo that I came up with it first, but there it is on wikipedia.