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From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl@KeithLynch.net>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.fandom,rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Happy "Dennis the Menace" Day
Date: Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:22:43 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: United Individualist
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Don_from_AZ <djatechNOSPAM@comcast.net.invalid> wrote:
> ted@loft.tnolan.com (Ted Nolan <tednolan>) writes:
>> Well, you can shave a tiny bit off the odds as that was a Monday, a
>> typical day for a strip debut.

Why should Monday be the most typical day on both sides of the Atlantic?

> And a tiny bit more off the odds, since if somebody wanted to write
> about a child who was a "menace" it would be obvious to call him
> "Dennis" for the rhyme.

True.  I checked the OED to see when "menace" first appeared.  It was
in 1300 with essentially the modern meaning.

I then checked Wikipedia's Dennis disambiguation page.  The earliest
person with a first name of Dennis it listed was from 1750.

What about daily comic strips with recurring characters?  Those seem
to have begun in 1894.  So that's when all three elements first came
together.  About 48,000 days ago.  Or about 7000 Mondays.  So for the
two strips to begin on the same Monday had about a 1 in 7000 chance.

Of course if it wasn't the same Monday, only one of them would have
survived, as the other would have successfully sued for trademark
infringement.  So there is some selection bias.

Similarly, the fact that life has thrived on Earth for long enough to
develop intelligence says nothing about the likelihood that it has
happened anywhere else.  It only proves that it's physically possible.
We could be alone in the universe.

Another similar coincidence is the two similarly-themed TV sitcoms
about monstrous or supernatural families, The Addams Family and The
Munsters.  They began just six days apart, so neither could have been
at all based on or inspired by the other.  (TAF was based on a comic
strip, and TM was based on Universal's monsters.)

If you're wondering about the similar shows Bewitched and I Dream of
Jeannie, the latter started a year after the former, so was probably
inspired by it.  Similarly with Lost in Space and Star Trek.
-- 
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.