23 Skidoo and the FA Cup

Here are 23 selected ties from the Second Qualifying Round of the FA Cup.  As far as I am aware at the moment, they are all due to be played a week on Saturday.  They are the only 23 home teams in the competition that I have not yet visited.  My blogpost about one of them will be published on the 23rd of September.

Let me say right at the start that I don't believe any of this numerology nonsense.  They are just numbers, and it is fun to play with them.   

So this week will be all about the number 23.  I have associated each match with a letter of the alphabet.  They are the 23 most common letters in the English language (both in words in general and for the initial letters of words).  Therefore Q, X and Z are omitted for now and may come back to haunt me later in the week.

1	Ashton United	v	Marine	A
2	Bamber Bridge	v	Guiseley AFC	B
3	Bishop Auckland	v	AFC Fylde	C
4	Buckland	v	Bath City	D
5	Carlton	v	New Mills	E
6	Chorley	v	Frickley Athletic	F
7	Dereham Town	v	Chasetown	G
8	Fareham Town	v	Blackfield & Langley	H
9	Frome Town	v	Weston Super Mare	I
10	Gillingham Town	v	Sholing	J
11	Gosport Borough	v	Bideford	K
12	Grays Athletic	v	Maidstone United	L
13	Merthyr	v	Hungerford Town	M
14	Newport (IoW)	v	Salisbury City	N
15	Nuneaton Griff	v	Hednesford Town	O
16	Salford City	v	FC United Of Manchester	P
17	Shildon	v	Altrincham	R
18	South Park	v	Harefield United	S
19	Tadcaster Albion	v	Skelmersdale United	T
20	Trafford	v	Spennymoor Town	U
21	West Auckland Town	v	Harrogate Town	V
22	Whitby Town	v	Droylsden	W
23	Yate Town	v	Oxford City	Y

So, I am looking out for signs of 23ness this weekend.  It may be a player or a team scoring in the 23rd minute - perhaps a player wearing the number 23, or playing for a team that is 23rd in the table.  It may be some connection with a story that my friends on Facebook and Twitter tell me about their own links with the number 23.  If the 23ness is associated with a particular person, then the first letter of their surname will be used to make the link.  Please tell me if you see anything.  If I find more than one sign of 23ness, then I will cross that bridge when I come to it.  Perhaps one of the matches will have many more signs of 23ness than the others.  If the 23ness is associated with a particular person, then the first letter of their surname will be used to make the link.  I have no idea where this will end up ... but it will be one of these places.  Surely this must be more reliable than the birds in the garden (see earlier blogposts for explanation).

What I know so far about the number 23 ...

1  It's a prime number - it has no factors other than itself and 1.

2  It is the minimum number of people that you need in a group before there is a better than even chance (50.7%, to one decimal place) that two or more of them will share the same birthday.  In the particular case of classes in school, where everyone is in the same "year group" it is the minimum number you need to have to have a better than even chance that two or more pupils in the class were born on the same day.

3  There is a film called "The Number 23" starring Jim Carrey and Virgina Madsen, directed by Joel Schumacher.  Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, who is a man obsessed with the number 23 and ends up after a lot of 23ness discovering chapter 23 of a book he had written and forgotten behind the wallpaper of room 23 in a hotel.

4  The "23 enigma", the belief that everything is somehow connected to the number 23, has been attributed to author William Burroughs.  He claimed to know a ship's captain called Clark who had his first accident in 23 years on the same day that an aircraft, flight number 23 and also captained by a man called Clark, crashed.  Throbbing Gristle wrote a song about it.  Burroughs himself wrote a short story called "23 Skidoo" - the phrase means something like "time to go while the going is good" but there are many conflicting stories about how the phrase originated.

5  The 23rd ground on my lifetime groundhopper chronological list was The Valley, where I saw Charlton Athletic beat West Brom 2-1 in January 1994.

As I write, other suggestions and links from friends are beginning to stream in, so I will collate these and update this post on Sunday.  In the meantime, I have a trip to Truro City tomorrow.  Thanks for your interest!