December 31, 1969

February 21, 2003 5:54 PM

In 1969, Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" will be published on DVD.December 31, 1969 to be exact. If you don't believe me, check here too. apparently, 1969 was a good year, because it was also back then that Roman Polanski's "The Pianist" was released. Oh, and if you want to read a copy of "Montenegro: The Bradt Travel Guide," by Annalisa Rellie, you'll just have to wait. It won't be available until December 31, 1969. Other titles to be released on December 31, 1969 include "Giant," these movies and these books. Now all I need is a time machine!
posted by grumblebee (14 comments total)

So what's the deal? Is this what happens when you leave a date field blank in oracle or something?
posted by Mark Doner at 5:58 PM on February 21, 2003

time=-1L is interpreted as one millisecond before midnight Jan. 1, 1970 on UNIX (i.e. Dec 31, 1969 11:59:59.999)
posted by jamsterdam at 6:05 PM on February 21, 2003

It is a mystery.
posted by WolfDaddy at 6:05 PM on February 21, 2003

LISA: Come to Homer's BBBQ, the extra B is for BYOBB.
BART: What's that extra B for?
HOMER: That's a typo.
posted by planetkyoto at 6:20 PM on February 21, 2003

Amazon's Schindler's List page lists no release date, and asks for an e-mail address. But if I view it with my Amazon browser in Watson, it shows December 31, 1969. There has to be a better solution for them to than to leave that field blank and result in this incorrect date.
posted by benjh at 7:06 PM on February 21, 2003

I know at leat some of these sites (and Watson) use Amazon.com's webservices (AWS) to fetch their data. Apparently there is a bug in the AWS feed for availability on some items (out of stock or not yet released). It looks screwy on my AWS site as well (see here). Why 1969? I dunno.
posted by kokogiak at 8:00 PM on February 21, 2003

Cory Doctorow's novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was listed that way too, just weeks before its scheduled and widely announced publication. It's an odd slip for Amazon.
posted by Songdog at 8:24 PM on February 21, 2003

This reminds me of Kibo's Usenet post about trying to break online shopping carts: Add To Cart Until It Explodes.

Whenever I'm shopping on the Internet, I always wonder, "How much can
this Web site's imaginary shopping carts hold before they explode?"
posted by straight at 8:59 PM on February 21, 2003

"There has to be a better solution for them to than to leave that field blank and result in this incorrect date."

Database weenies will know that settting the field to blank is the solution. What they have done is set the field to an invalid value. Invalid values and blank (or NULL as we like to say in SQL) are very different things.
posted by bravada at 9:19 PM on February 21, 2003

Every once in a while you'll see a zero date listed as the EPOCH. The epoch to which they refer is, as jamsterdam points out, the beginning of UNIX time. So UNIX time is the number of seconds that have passed since the first second, GMT, of the year 1970. That's why Dec. 31, 1969 shows up.

Here's the wiki entry.

It's also the day Seth (or was it Munchie?) sold his VW bus. Far out!
posted by condour75 at 9:57 PM on February 21, 2003

That final link you posted, to the guy who built the replica of the 1960's time machine prop was just amazing. I wish I could do that kind of craftsmanship, I'd build me a TARDIS!!
posted by jonson at 12:21 AM on February 22, 2003

This whole thing is obviously some kind of government cover-up conspiracy-style deal.
posted by mokey at 2:47 AM on February 22, 2003

The nontechnical may find the prevalence of this date -- at Amazon and elsewhere -- to be peculiar, but the rest of us recognize this problem for what it is: the y2k38 disaster!

In a nutshell, the universe begins on Jan 1, 1970 and some time in 2038 it ends, the clock starting over at the last second of Dec 31, 1969. The universe is designed this way in order that we suffer through hirsuteness fads and disco whenever they are forgotten.
posted by majick at 6:59 AM on February 22, 2003

I wish I could do that kind of craftsmanship, I'd build me a TARDIS!!

But how would you make it bigger on the inside than on the outside? Seems to me like no amount of craftsmanship would help there.
posted by kindall at 10:52 AM on February 22, 2003